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4. Hothouse

OVERSHADOWING PERHAPS OTHER FACTORS impacting the music was the change in the music itself, that is, the arrival of the still fecund music known as “bebop,”¹ a form that created rifts among musicians and audiences alike. It featured a fast tempo, complex chord progressions, syncopation, intricate melodies, and rapid changes. Still, this musical turn was not greeted with unanimous approval. When Dizzy Gillespie, born in 1917, and Charlie Parker played in Los Angeles in the early 1940s, they were treated like lepers, and even worse: “Communist lepers” according to critic Leonard Feather during a visit to the old “Billy Berg’s Club” on Vine Street. Their music was either laughed at or violently attacked, and one radio station officially banned it.²

Thus, in Los Angeles within the ranks of the Negro newspapers, the left-leaning California Eagle was supportive of this turn in the music, while the less progressive Sentinel was not.³ Tellingly, the latter has survived, and the former went out of business decades ago.

The forces that helped to ignite the decline of big bands then facilitated the rise of smaller combos suitable for the new turn in the new music. As will be seen, attacks on dancing also facilitated the bebop turn toward listening. The desire to escape the heavy hand of white supremacy as it purloined the work of Negro musicians in turn facilitated the ascension of bebop, which was more difficult to copy by pale imitators, for example, the appropriately named Paul Whiteman.

In any case, conditions had matured for a new musical paradigm to emerge in that according to producer John Hammond the recording industry was “absolutely broke” in the 1930s. Columbia Records, for example, was plunged into bankruptcy and “there was no money for jazz at all,” creating a wide opening for experimentation.⁴

The bard of Harlem, Langston Hughes, who had reason to know, says the evocative descriptor bebop stemmed from the 1943 rebellion in Harlem, symbolizing in onomatopoeia the sound made by police clubs on Negro heads. This assertion also underscores the revolt of this music, buoyed by contemporaneous events in Harlem.⁵ The dislocation delivered in the early 1940s by war not only served to generate bebop but emboldened U.S. Negroes to become more steadfast in confronting white supremacy in its various permutations. During the previous decade, a hallmark was the control of musicians exhibited by mob figures. A counterreaction was signaled in 1939 when the musician Shadow Wilson, born in 1919, was among those appearing in the Negro gangster musical Paradise in Harlem.⁶

That is, what emerged was symbolized by how Negro baseball league mogul William Augustus “Gus” Greenlee, an imperial force in Pittsburgh because of holdings in the numbers, boxing, and nightclubs, not to mention hijacking of beer trucks, came to play an increasing role in the music, including connecting Duke Ellington’s muse, Billy Strayhorn, to the bandleader and composer. Strayhorn, born in 1914, had similar ties, having played at a Pittsburgh club with whispered mob connections. He was also a Francophile, which facilitated the foreign ventures of Ellington’s band (Ellington said that Strayhorn spoke French “very well”). He was politically aware, backing the New Deal and later becoming close to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was fond of alcoholic beverages, making him (unfortunately) typical.⁷ According to pianist Cedar Walton he was also victimized by homophobic attitudes because of his sexual orientation.⁸

Though a focus on harder drugs understandably has marked most comment on the new music in the 1940s, alcohol continued to plague, and Strayhorn was not singular. Fats Waller, just before he passed away in 1943, was told by an associate, “Last night I came away from Philadelphia with a heavy heart. I had seen you in such terrible condition from drink that your performance suffered frightfully—you announced to your audience that you knew you were drunk—and your memory was so bad you had to be reminded that you had drawn money earlier in the evening…. Your drinking is undermining your health, your artistry and giving you a reputation which will interfere with your bookings and earning capacity.”⁹ Weeks later, Waller was found dead on a train heading east from California, discovered (ironically) in Kansas City.¹⁰

Strayhorn was not alone in his fondness for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. On the evening the president died in April 1945, Ben Webster—saxophonist born in Kansas City in 1909—singlehandedly closed down West 52nd Street in Manhattan, where bebop ascended. “Get off the stand,” he growled, “nobody’s gonna play tonight. Roosevelt’s dead.”¹¹

In brief, the progressive atmosphere symbolized by FDR, reflected in his still remarkable perorations in 1944¹² combined with the continuing dissoluteness of the conditions in which artists were forced to toil, created a symbiosis contributing to a new departure in a music that ever involved a search for creativity and truth.

Neither Strayhorn nor Webster were atypical in terms of political predilections. There was much reason for discontent, including the simple point alleged by yet another writer, Claude McKay, who contended that “even the most famous jazz bands such as Duke Ellington’s, Claude Hopkins’, Fats Waller’s, Count Basie’s, Lucky Millinder’s, Cab Calloway’s, Jimmy Lunceford’s, and Louis Armstrong’s receive a remuneration on a lower scale than white jazz bands.”¹³ Then there were the other rich income streams that Black artists often were denied. “The payola game was hot and heavy,” according to bandleader Charlie Barnet. “Either by direct payment for playing a tune on the air or by payment for a special arrangement of the tune”: this “had begun long before with vaudeville,” he said, but with the advent of radio in particular, “the money flew in all directions”¹⁴—except to some of the more creative bands devoid of the complexions and connections to guarantee otherwise.

THE RISE OF BEBOP ALSO OCCURRED as another new trend was emerging in the 1940s: the transition from dancing to the music to listening. This was hardly accidental, spurred in part by Jim Crow, which frowned upon heterosexual dancing across the color line, which was becoming normative north of the Mason-Dixon Line and was inflaming sentiments nationally. The pianist Randy Weston observed that during the war the “government put a 20 percent tax on dancehalls, which had the effect of killing off a lot of great dancehalls like the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, the Brooklyn Palace and the Sonia Ballroom. They all closed down.”¹⁵ This inflicted significant impact on the music. As club owner and producer George Wein argued, “Dancing is a very big thing…. It’s a social music” that accompanied it. “When it ceased to be a social music, that’s when it ceased to draw blacks,” he asserted.¹⁶

Also related to Jim Crow was the desire of Negro musicians to delve more deeply into the complexities of the music, driven in part by the imperative to flummox non-Negro copycats. Horn man Buddy De Franco, born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1923, said that pianist Bud Powell, “really resented George Shearing,” a peer. “Bud would play some line or something and the next set … George would play that line. And he would get furious”; “Poor George” may have been “intimidated,” but insufficiently to change.¹⁷ There was “so much thievery going on,” cried drummer Chico Hamilton, referring to the pilfering of his musical ideas. “I got a friend of mine to be my manager,” in response, he said, but that backfired when he “took a whole year of tax money of mine and never paid it and when the government came out, they were going to take my house,” yet another steep price being paid for being creative.¹⁸

According to pianist Mary Lou Williams, her fellow keyboardist Thelonius Monk formed a band “to challenge the practice of downtown musicians coming uptown and ‘stealing’ the music.” Said Monk, “We are going to get a band started. We’re going to create something that they can’t steal because they can’t play it.” Nonetheless, a Columbia University student during this time taped live performances of the brilliant pianist that were then released without obtaining his permission, a not infrequent occurrence.¹⁹

The critic Ralph Gleason of San Francisco recalled that even in this supposed “cosmopolitan” town, the “color line” was drawn “strictly,” separating musicians of various ancestries, often forcing them to develop on separate tracks. Then again, said Gleason, he noticed that “white” musicians “literally copied King Oliver’s numbers and issued them as their own.” This grand theft would not be as easy with bebop, which presupposed an exalted technical mastery of the instrument, difficult to emulate without much practice.²⁰

Thus, when Charlie Parker reputedly said that there were “no bop roots in jazz,”²¹ he was announcing the birth of a pristine new form, far distant from the grimily exploitative practices of the recent past. Parker’s comrade, Max Roach, complained that some of the music of George Gershwin—for example, “Rhapsody in Blue”—was “lifted, the introduction is lifted, and the theme is lifted from Eubie Blake …. The introduction to ‘Memories of You’ is what this guy lifted for his ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and used that theme and made a symphony out of it.” As for “Benny Goodman’s music—that’s Fletcher Henderson’s.”²²

The critic Nat Hentoff wrote that New Orleans trumpeter Freddie Keppard rejected a 1916 invitation to make the first of all phonograph records for this new form called jazz because he was afraid that his music would then be easier to steal if it were ubiquitously available. Hence, the overwhelmingly Euro-American Original Dixieland Jazz Band is today seen as “the first … group to record” in this genre.²³ Tellingly, by 1941, as the bebop trend was being hatched, a visitor to, New Orleans, Charles Rossi, found that the city given credit as the birthplace of the new music “today boasts a quality of white jazz as good as you’d find anywhere. I say white because with one exception, I found no colored jazz being played during my short stay.”²⁴

Quick to capitalize were two men: Ralph Watkins who was then jobless but was a onetime owner of Kelly Stables on West 52nd Street in Manhattan and other clubs, and Morris Levy, a man of questionable ethics, which no doubt made him qualified to control a nightspot. As partners, they took over the floundering Topsy’s Chicken Coop on Broadway, in the heart of New York City. Their marketing included catering to younger patrons—prone to adopt rebellious practices in music distinguishing them from their elders—willing to place orders for ice cream, dairy dishes, and milk drinks. At the newly christened Royal Roost there arose what was called the first soda fountain in nightclub history, which reportedly grossed far more profit nightly than the strong drink counterpart. It was here that bebop was honed—some say born. A basement strip joint up the street called The Clique was renamed Birdland and quickly became yet another birthplace for the latest trends in the music. Not coincidentally, the partners owned a music publishing company, allowing for added exploitation of beleaguered musicians.²⁵

Levy was not held in high regard by musician and businessman John Levy (no relation nor common ancestry), recounting that he began by running hatcheck and bathroom concessions at nightclubs and was part of the cabal that “coerced” artists “into giving away their publishing rights.” Yes, he administered Birdland, but it was “really gangster dominated. You could always see these guys sitting around.”²⁶ “’Publishing is where it’s at,’” said Morris Levy. “All I want is to own 20, 000 copyrights that pay two dollars a quarter from record sales—that’s $160, 000 a year,” that is, an “incredible business.” Eventually, the wealthy Morris Levy came to befriend the rising musician and entrepreneur Quincy Jones, who at times stayed with Levy during his Manhattan sojourns.²⁷

Morris Levy, who served as Chairman Emeritus of the United Jewish Appeal, according to U.S authorities, came to be under the “control” of Vincent Gigante, a leading racketeer. Ultimately, it was said, Gigante “developed a stranglehold on Morris Levy’s recording industry enterprise, in effect turning Levy into a source of ready cash for the [Vito] Genovese LCN [La Cosa Nostra] family and its leaders.” In contrast, Levy described himself as an “entrepreneur” with a net worth of “in excess of a million and under a billion,” with holdings that included more than ninety companies employing 900 people. Reportedly, Levy’s tie to Genovese began when he owned Birdland. Levy’s brother was mistakenly killed at the club by mobsters who were attempting to murder Levy himself, who fled hurriedly to Israel for several years.²⁸

Of course, Levy’s reputed involvement in the heroin trade proved to be quite useful in “hooking” musicians, inducing them to work for less.²⁹ Coincidentally, Basie borrowed substantial sums from Levy and ended up working many weeks at Birdland for peanuts.³⁰ Music pioneer Jerry Lieber called Levy “the most mobbed-up guy in the music biz,” hardly an exaggeration. Among his specialties was that he “bootlegged 78s and shipped ‘cutouts’ from the back doors of pressing plants. He shook down songwriters who were easy prey, forcing his name on song credits,” a practice mastered by Irving Mills. His own wife was once rushed to a hospital after he beat her senseless in a telephone booth.³¹ “He looked and talked like a Hollywood thug,” says critic Gene Santoro, which was unsurprising since “most jazz clubs in New York dealt with the Mafia. They had to.”³²

Santoro may have had bandleader Charlie Barnet in mind. “We knew a lot of racket people,” he said, “like Charlie ‘Lucky’ Luciano. When I came home one day, there was a guy who I’ll call ‘Joe’ in the apartment with a gunshot wound in his leg. He had just stuck up a factory payroll and there had been a shoot-out. He had the money with him and he said he’d give some if I needed it. I thanked him and declined the offer,” just another day in the life of a musician familiar with “racket people.”³³

IN SHORT, THIS MUSIC, BEBOP, symbolized by the innovations of Kansas City’s Charlie Parker, was propelled by various forces. Thus, it was in 1944 in San Francisco that the musicians’ union refused to allow the manager of a Sunday session of artists to hire “white” performers to play alongside a noted Negro trumpeter, Willie Gary “Bunk” Johnson, who then was compelled, said an observer, to hire a “small colored combo.” The compromised Johnson then felt obligated to make ends meet by doing longshoreman’s work,³⁴ facilitated by the anti-racist International Longshore and Warehousemen’s Union, led by presumed Communist Harry Bridges.³⁵

Bridges, said producer John Hammond, was a devotee of the new music.³⁶ and anti-racist to the point that he once called James Petrillo, leader of the morally compromised musicians’ union, and threatened to organize a competitor union if no speedy reform was forthcoming.³⁷ In sum, despite the best efforts of those like Bridges and Johnson, Negro musicians were being driven together by Jim Crow, meaning the most creative and competent artists were forced into a hothouse of innovation, leading to a new turn in the new music.

Fortunately, it was not just Bridges and his powerful union that objected to Jim Crow in the music business. In 1942 Walter White of the NAACP issued a “vigorous protest,” reprimanding James Petrillo, the union boss, reproving “the practice of Chicago and other places … requiring radio stations to sign contracts to use only white musicians.”³⁸ Petrillo denied the allegation and replied unconvincingly that “the situation is entirely satisfactory to the colored membership.”³⁹ White would have been wise not to take the union boss’s words too seriously since it was well known that Petrillo was a comrade of Sidney Korshak, a key fixer for racketeers; Petrillo’s rise to union leadership was littered with stories of clubs that were firebombed and stink-bombed for using musicians not represented by Petrillo. His first job was as a union muscleman, and with the backing of mobsters, this man, known, insensitively, as Little Caesar and the Mussolini of Music, was able to lead the often fractious American Federation of Musicians local in Chicago for four decades and the entire union for another eighteen years, with its 250,000 members.⁴⁰

THE BIAS THAT LED TO BRIDGES’ protest in San Francisco and White’s objection to goings-on in Chicago were hardly sui generis. Lester Young discovered during this time that prestigious hotels in midtown Manhattan were reluctant to hire Black bands, for fear of upsetting racist customers, or at least that was the argument offered.⁴¹ The club owner Max Gordon, who initiated the prominent Village Vanguard in Manhattan, not only had to deal with police officers hassling him about a liquor license, but, he said, “in 1943 you had to think twice before bringing a black woman to the smart Upper East Side of Manhattan.”⁴²

Walter White of the NAACP, who happened to be quite light-skinned, could have added chapter and verse. In early 1943, in the midst of complaining to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, he reminded the portly politico that “there are a great many colored people who look … white” and thus could—theoretically—be barred from various clubs on spurious grounds. It is “possible,” he insisted, “that Mrs. White and I while patronizing the Savoy, as we have done on many occasions could be thought by some policemen” that a “white man and colored woman were dancing,” inducing harassment. Police thought that if the Savoy closed, “it would keep white people from coming to Harlem,” which he thought was a noxious policy goal. “Some five hundred thousand people were patrons of the Savoy during 1942,” he said, and it was the “favorite dancing place of many defense workers.” Yet these workers often were harassed by police who chose “to follow each patron after they leave.” If the Savoy were closed, the “alternative would be for the colored patrons of the Savoy to dance in downtown places,” which was also unacceptable. Those under eighteen years of age were also being barred.⁴³

The age bar helped to generate vibrant youthful protest and consciousness, while the dancing bar contributed to a trend of the new music’s shift from dancing to listening. Interestingly, the Savoy was owned by Moses and Charles Galewski, of Polish Jewish ancestry, who changed their name to Gale. It had opened in 1926 and was “fronted” by Charlie Buchanan, Negro.⁴⁴

The bunching of Negro musicians uptown was hardly happenstance. Beating one slave can keep the entire plantation in line.⁴⁵ Nonetheless, this putrid prejudice was not merely a Gotham matter; in Los Angeles there was a similar attempt to ban “mixed dancing,” with “white girl hostesses” choosing to “refuse to dance with Negro servicemen” at a local canteen.⁴⁶ The crackdown facilitated the rise in listening, laying the groundwork for the new music known as bebop.

However, there was gnawing sentiment hostile to White’s ideas. An otherwise unidentified “white woman” told him bluntly that it was “about time this cesspool for miscegenation between degenerate white prostitutes and Negroes was shut down…. I know that your race feels that sharp sense of sweet revenge,” she proclaimed, “whenever you see a Negro breaking down the white blood race by having a Negro intermarry with a white woman.”⁴⁷ The Savoy was instructed that “if the management refused to admit white people, it could remain open.” Thus, it was stated, Harlem would be akin to the “Jewish quarters in Germany.” Of late, “some 75% of the dancers seemed to be boys and girls ranging from 12 to 16 years of age,” an age range that fueled outrage.⁴⁸ Joining the fray was Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians—“on behalf of its twenty-one thousand members.”⁴⁹

Across the continent in Los Angeles, a film studio objected to the presence of the youthful guitarist Barney Kessel, born in 1923, a “white musician in an otherwise black cast,”⁵⁰ as it was put by an observer. Dimly recognized at the time was that such barriers were hampering the development of these “white” musicians, isolating them not only from those with talent but those on the cusp of developing new musical forms that would prove to be dominant for some time to come. Billie Holiday asserted that once in Detroit she was told she was too light-skinned to play with Basie since “somebody might think I was white if the light didn’t hit me just right. So they got special dark grease paint and told me to put it on.”⁵¹ Apartheid barriers ironically helped to create a greenhouse of creativity among exceedingly talented Negro musicians.

Drummer Roy Porter, born in Colorado in 1923, was in Los Angeles then and told of “the man who ran the Say When,” a popular club, “a racist called Dutch. He’d hire you, man, make it clear what he thought of you”—not much. “Billie Holliday worked for Dutch once during this time. He treated her like she was a dog,” no doubt hastening her precipitous decline and premature death. Porter, who described himself as a “mixture of black, Mongolian and English,” was a regular visitor to Central Avenue in Los Angeles in the 1940s and noticed that the cops there tended to “harass black musicians and the black pimps that had white whores or any black men with white women.” Beyond this venue, there was a “club named Diane’s on 8th or 9th Street near Alvarado in the Westlake District … supposedly owned by [mobster] Bugsy Siegel and was operated by the Virginia Hill” routinely referred to as a “gun moll.” There he worked alongside Benny Carter.⁵² The massive influx of African Americans during the war, joining a preexisting progressive movement,⁵³ allowed some musicians to undermine the rancid bias foisted upon them.⁵⁴

Still, the fact remained that Negroes were barred from certain clubs, even if Negro musicians were performing there.⁵⁵ This was notably the case in Los Angeles, thought to be immune from such pestilences, as when during the war a Negro fan was denied entrance to a club where Benny Carter was performing, and Jimmy Lunceford abandoned a gig because of likeminded bias.⁵⁶

Carter felt that because he had neither a Glaser nor a Mills behind him (an exploiter with the heft to enhance a musician’s popularity), his historical impact was lessened. By 1943, he found “no blacks in the studio orchestras” in Hollywood, “other than Lee Young,” drummer and singer born in 1914. By 1944, he sought to move to a neighborhood where restrictive covenants barred those of his ancestry: “We decided to fight … we won it,” he said triumphantly. “There were many blacks who didn’t want … desegregation” of the union locals, a battle he took on nonetheless, delivering mixed results.⁵⁷

Musician Buster Smith, whose alto style influenced Charlie Parker,⁵⁸ contends that Hollywood was not unusual in seeking to erect firm Jim Crow barriers. In Dixie, where this Texan frequently performed, “90 percent” of the audiences were “white” and there they did not play the new music: “No, not too much of it. The only time we played much of that jazz was around the colored places.” The question then becomes: To what extent did this bifurcated system and the fact that those like Smith played often before non-Negro audiences retard the music’s evolution? Bassist Milt Hinton once told him of a gig and “there was this little room underneath the bandstand. And they got locked in there. And they heard all these guys outside who were talking about setting fire to the building.”⁵⁹

Smith, born in Texas in 1904, was not just a mentor to Parker, perhaps Kansas City’s chief musical contributor, but he also endured experiences emblematic of what Negro artists endured. He confirms that he and others played differently among “white” audiences. “The only time we played much of that jazz,” he said subsequently, “was around the colored places.” Thus, “in some of the western town[s], way out in West Texas out there, some cowboys would come in there and they didn’t want to let us quit playing. You got to play til they say ‘stop.’” Since they were packing pistols, their words were even more convincing. Another time in Oklahoma, part of the circuit traversed by Kansas City performers, yet another boisterous Euro-American—he “looked like a big prizefighter” when “he pulled off his shirt,” followed quickly by drunkenness, said, “I’m going whup every one of you when you come out, one by one.” Then a fellow musician grabbed a music stand, built with steel, then “folded it up” and “rolled that thing and batted that guy right in the back of the neck … batted him clean down the steps with that thing, right down into the street,” then “we all got in the car and flew!” Another time, in Palestine, Texas, a sheriff with “two big pistols on wouldn’t let nobody dance but himself!” Besides, he “didn’t want nothing but ‘Turkey in the Straw’” to be performed—“all the time. And we had to play it,” if they wanted to escape unscathed. This dangerous farce “went on for the whole night.” On another occasion, “cowboys came into the place and shot all the lights out,” and then the stunned musicians “one by one 12 or 13 guys slip[ped] out, leaving [the] piano player last,” at which point he suddenly stopped and ran and jumped in the waiting vehicle too, as they sped away.⁶⁰

These chilling confrontations unavoidably shaped the musicians. Early in his career in the 1940s, the trumpeter Miles Davis, born in 1926, was playing with the band of Billy Eckstine in Boston. “All of a sudden,” says his son, Gregory Davis, “a white woman sitting at one of the front tables, yells out at him, ‘Sing it, Blackie. I love that ‘Ol’ Man River’ voice. Sing your song, chocolate drop.” The insulted singer stopped singing and confronted the woman—and “all the white folks went crazy. It was like a KKK convention … fists flew,” and since the band “had with them every kind of innovative street weapon available … switchblades, brass knuckles, picks, blackjacks—you name it,” they gave as good as they got.⁶¹

It was also Hinton who recalled that there were those who “came and paid their money just to heckle the Negro bands, like some people like to tease an animal and we had no recourse.”⁶² This was particularly grating for Hinton, a man of multiple talents of whom, it was announced in 1954, that “if a poll were to be taken among jazzmen of all styles to determine the most versatile musician,” the winner would be this creative bassist.⁶³

There was a related problem. “There was a whole [lot] of black music,” said Danny Barker, the musician, “that wasn’t played on white jukeboxes, radio stations” and “Hollywood movies. This was done purposely through racism—prejudice.” Thus, there were “millions of jukeboxes around the country,” and “many did not spin black artists.” There was also the companion unsavory practice of abasement of these often proud artists: “You had to sing a river song,” Barker said angrily, “the ‘Robert E. Lee’ or ‘Swanee’—or you didn’t sing at all. That was the racist custom down South,” up North, too. Some indignities were comparably harsher. “All black show people having emergencies” of a urological nature were often “hitting the bushes on the highways and byways, because the segregation laws did not allow black backsides to sit on the same toilet as white backsides,” leading to “much trouble with many bands and troupes getting into hassles about using toilets that had signs above saying” blaringly, “FOR WHITES ONLY.”⁶⁴

Once in 1944, the Ellington band had to appear on stage famished since they couldn’t find a place that would serve them in St. Louis.⁶⁵ Presumably, and tauntingly ironic, there were toilets available for them to use.

Marshall Royal, born in Oklahoma in 1912, best known for his horn virtuosity with Basie, lamented that “some of the things that a black musician had to experience when I was out on the road … was pretty rough to stomach. You would have to get off a bus when you come into town, three o’clock in the morning, and go around and start knocking on people’s doors trying to find a place to stay because you couldn’t stay in a white hotel and there wasn’t any black hotels in the towns.” Like others so persecuted, he spoke longingly of exile: “You had to go into another country to even be able to be treated like a man if you were in a black band,” since “jazz in every country except the United States is put on a pedestal.”⁶⁶

The vicissitudes of travel were a constant complaint among black musicians.⁶⁷ It was in July 1942 that Cab Calloway and NAACP leader Walter White sought to improve the parlous travel options. “Because of Jim Crow rulings it was reported, train service is not available to … colored bands south of the Mason and Dixon line.” This was no minor matter since the “average colored band spends at least eight months of the year on the road.”⁶⁸ Calloway had good reason to investigate transport options since he often had occasion to flee. Such was the case in Memphis when he and his band performed before a packed house, but, as one writer put it, he and his cohorts “drew more feminine attention than white southern male egos thought proper.” A fight ensued, and Calloway and his band were ordered out of town. After this incident, Black bands playing for Euro-American audiences were discouraged by City Hall from playing in public places.⁶⁹

By August 1942, bus travel was eliminated because of fuel rationing, leading to the opinion that the “situation for colored bands is nothing short of desperate.” Many did not have vehicles of any type and were hampered by Jim Crow train travel. Even “white bands” found the situation to be “tough.”⁷⁰ Assuredly, what one journal denoted as the “race segregation problem” hampered Negro bands, forcing them into layoffs, despite their apparent popularity.⁷¹

Trombonist “Trummy” Young moaned that buses “used to break down all the time,” leaving passengers stranded and upset. Baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, born in Boston in 1912, “would drive 12 hours and then go on stage and play,” inexorably impacting his performances. “You play a job and you’re riding and you’re tired,” which was “very dangerous.” Hence, “several guys got killed, like Chu Berry,” the saxophonist, born in 1908 and perishing in 1941. It was after work and the driver-trumpeter, Charlie Shavers, as he recalled, was tired.

Travel difficulties influenced the music. Young said, “I left [Jimmy] Lunceford [and his band] because he did too many one nighters … it would kill you almost”—and being paid $10 nightly. He signed on with the affluent Charlie Barnet, who also happened to be Euro-American. Barnet did “pay … well,” said Young. “He didn’t have a lot of hit records or anything but I made more money” there than “[I] ever made with Lunceford … perhaps $50 a week” or “more.” Then there was the problem that the haggardness of excessive travel could cause horn men in particular to strain unnecessarily, meaning one “blew too hard,” that is, “overblew,” and destroyed their lips.⁷² (The unique Barnet contrasts with a fellow bandleader, of whom Leonard Feather said: “The first man I ever heard using the word ‘nigger’ was Glenn Miller.”)⁷³ Even “Hot Lips” Page, trumpeter, known for his vigorous playing, “used to complain about his lip getting sore,” according to Buster Smith, giving his nickname renewed meaning.⁷⁴

Bassist “Red” Callender had a different problem. “When you play the bass with a big band,” he said, “you maybe have to change shirts or undershirts a couple of times a night. So this is how [Jimmy] Blanton first contracted TB,” combined with “improper care.” He continued, “You’re wringing wet and you go hang out with somebody … all night and then you get wiped out.” This could be damaging for one like Blanton, who “was very frail” in any case.

Trumpeter Herman Autrey, born in the heart of darkness that was Alabama in 1904, averred that the spouse of Fats Waller once told him, “I wish I knew my husband as well as you do,” a forced association forged by incessant travel. The “rough” treatment accorded the travelers often drove musicians closer together and compelled a solidarity and familiarity that could be translated into sterling performances. With the Claude Hopkins band in Dixie, “We had to go knock on doors and say, ‘Pardon me, Madam … do you happen to have a room’.” Exacerbating an already parlous experience was the hassle of seeking fair payment for work done: he once had to threaten to “lower the boom” on Hopkins after his fee was shorted. Instead, he just grabbed him and lifted him skyward. Unfortunately, the rise of bebop harmed his career: “Yes it did. It did,” he insisted. It “affected everybody” when the music turned as even “your children say” with a Bronx cheer, “Pop, that’s old … they don’t play that anymore,” and “you can’t tell them that they’re wrong.” Fortunately, he was still appreciated in Europe, and, as so often happened, that helped him closer to home. “Toronto,” he insisted, reigned as “the greatest jazz town in North America. The people there really go for jazz and they really enjoy it.” But Autrey, like others overtaken by the advent of bebop, was resentful, which even hurt when he was forced by the traditional bandleader Lester Lanin to audition, which this veteran found insulting. “I walked the hell out … I cursed him out” before acceding, then storming out again yelling “to hell with you.”⁷⁵

THERE WERE OTHER SIGNS OF DISSATISFACTION among Negro artists, which primed the pump for an artistic breakthrough. Jelly Roll Morton, a putative inventor of the new music, died in 1941 as this new era of bebop was hatching. But a few years later an interview with him was published that captured the zeitgeist. He was “bitter” about his experience in New York City. “He hadn’t been successful there,” and “he blamed the gangs. He said the gangs ran the bands in New York. He had no … connection with the gangs there so he had never made any money or gained any prominence.” This lack of connection also meant “his tunes had been stolen from him and sold in Tin Pan Alley.” Thus “Grandpa’s Spells” had become “Glad Rag Doll,” meaning he had been cheated of a fortune—or so he thought.⁷⁶ Circumventing racketeers was a preoccupation of musicians. Ironically, wrote instrumentalist Rex Stewart, “King” Oliver spent a lot time playing in Capone’s Chicago, avoiding New York City because of the influence of the “syndicate.”⁷⁷

Danny Barker has asserted that Morton was “forever beefing about and against ASCAP,” since “he signed his songs over to some publishers and they became wealthy, but Jelly received no royalties as the composer.”⁷⁸

Also effectively blocking African American musicians from opportunity was the “white” union. Art Farmer, trumpeter, recalled that during the war a “lot of guys were in the army and big bands could still get jobs,” which theoretically meant more jobs for those like himself. When bandleader Horace Henderson came to his high school to recruit, Farmer was ready: “I remember going to school hungry a lot of times,” he recalled. So, then, in Arizona, “we went over there to the headquarters of the musicians’ union in Phoenix but they had no black members. We said we want to join the union and they said no. Then we wrote letters back to the headquarters of the union and to the president saying we want to join the union and they’re telling us we can’t join.” He moved on to Los Angeles then being transformed by a simultaneous internment of Japanese-Americans and arrival of African Americans. There, he recounted, “the black local was 767, the white local was 47,” with the former sited on Central Avenue and 17th Street: “The house next door was the house of [the] Young family. Lester’s house.” The saxophonist had relocated from Kansas City. “Downstairs was where the offices were, upstairs was just for rehearsals.” But like San Francisco to the north, Los Angeles, he said, was a “very restrictive town as far as police were concerned. They really bothered us…. They used to stop us … just for one joint you could get 90 days.” But the Negro local of musicians proved helpful, further bonding these artists with spillover effects on the music. “It was unheard of to be a musician and not to be a member of the union,” said Farmer, speaking in 1995, “like it is now.” This earlier situation was due in no small part to the solidarity musicians desired in the face of Jim Crow, which in turn fostered fruitful musical exchanges.⁷⁹

Yet Barney Bigard, who had been thought to be otherwise, was said in late 1943 to be “not a Negro” and was now seeking to join Local 47; musicians of Mexican and Filipino ancestry who had attempted to join Local 767 were forced to join 47 instead, even though some preferred to belong to the Negro local. At this point, only two locals of the American Federation of Musicians—in New York City and Detroit—were said to admit Negroes to full membership; of the 673 locals in the American Federation of Musicians, 631 were limited to those defined as “white” and a few dozen or so were limited to Negroes.⁸⁰

This attempt to bar other minorities from joining the Negroes was not just an attempt to forestall a “colored” alliance against white supremacy; it was also an indication of the ongoing attempt to isolate and persecute African Americans as a result of fighting against the slaveholders’ republic and a Jim Crow regime and allying with U.S. antagonists in doing so.⁸¹ By early 1944, it was reported that Bigard was “rejected for membership in [the] white union.”⁸² Yet by May 1945, it was reported that “though Barney gained his rep with the Duke [Ellington], his new orchestra consists of white musicians.”⁸³

The rigidly enforced Jim Crow drove artists together and often shielded others from sharing effectively in the resultant musical bounty. “Trummy” Young resided in Harlem at 555 Edgecombe Avenue, #9H, then turned the apartment over to Johnny Hodges, yet another masterly musician. His peer, Don Redman, was next door. Boxer Joe Louis was on the first floor, close by Erskine Hawkins, trumpeter. Unavoidably there was a sharing of ideas, musical and otherwise, with mutual benefit.⁸⁴

Jim Crow perversely and maniacally reinforced musical trends and norms among African Americans to the detriment of those denied access. Thus, the bassist George “Red” Callender, born in Virginia in 1916 but a longtime resident of Los Angeles, recalled when he was tasked to perform at a “Black and White Revue” in New York City, “They needed a bass player,” but he did not recognize that the descriptor of the sessions “means just what it says. There was a black part of the show and a white part … we’d go on separately. The same band played for both parts but the white part of the show would go on first and the black part would go on second.” To his immense benefit, it was there, said Callender, “when I first met Art Tatum,” the pianist whose keyboard mastery was seen as almost mystical. Then he met Roy Eldridge, another giant.⁸⁵

Marshal Royal, clarinetist and saxophonist, was in Southern California in the early 1940s. “Italian gangsters, the Rizzoto brothers,” as he recalled, “had enough influence with the police downtown that they could run an after-hour joint upstairs” and “they always hired a piano player,” luminaries “like Fats Waller.” Indeed, “I used to go up there quite often with Fats Waller.” It was in such venues, sites of misery and musical exhilaration combined, that new musical trends were developed. “Blues singing,” he declared, “came from despair and things that were wrong in people’s lives, where people were tearing their hearts out…. The same thing [holds] with jazz music … new ideas come from jazz guys out of frustration and pride … a lot of the things that have come out of jazz are just out of frustration … to just try to do something that nobody else can do”—and be “inventive” in doing so.⁸⁶

Drummer Foreststorn “Chico” Hamilton—that’s an “Apache name,” he said referring to his given moniker, who was in the military from 1941 to 1945, had chilling experiences then: “I was at a lynching and didn’t even know it,” he said, referring elliptically to being “down in Mississippi.”⁸⁷ Similarly, the vocalist Jon Hendricks was with U.S. forces in Europe during the war: “We had race riots all the way—constant fights with American white soldiers,” not least “because in England or Scotland or Wales there was a shortage of black women,” and Hendricks and those like him were embraced across the heterosexual color line: “To the southern whites and the northern American whites that was something that we were not supposed to do.” Hence, said Hendricks, “they would just attack us in full force and with weapons. It caused a lot of—it caused some deaths and a lot of woundings. A lot of blood was shed over this, because this went on all the time. So we took to carrying guns in our waist bands,” something not unknown to Negro musicians in the United States in any case.⁸⁸

Whether to join the military was not an easy choice to make for African Americans; that is, why make the ultimate sacrifice for a government and a nation that treated you so shabbily? The drummer Elvin Jones recalled that during the First World War his father received a draft notice. Furious, “he walked from Vicksburg to Jackson. That’s 60 miles,” he estimated roughly, and “went to the Draft Board, handed them the letter back and said, ‘I ain’t going’ and he walked back to Vicksburg. He didn’t give a damn. He said, ‘I ain’t going nowhere. I ain’t going.’ That sort of sums it up for me.”⁸⁹

By the time the United States entered the Second World War, such anger had not dissipated, particularly since an opponent—Tokyo—had assiduously cultivated African Americans over the years.⁹⁰ On the other hand, there was a sense that an anti-fascist war would also mean pushback against Nazism’s close cousin, Jim Crow, and this was not far wrong.⁹¹