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3. One O’Clock Jump

IT WAS NOT JUST CHICAGO AND HARLEM and Paris that benefited from the mass flight from Dixie. Roy Wilkins, who was to become a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was residing in Kansas City during this era. This midwestern metropolis on the Missouri-Kansas border was a hotbed of organized crime—and Jim Crow, too. The difference with Dixie was the ability of many more to cast a vote, and that modicum of political power was hardly minor and certainly was perceived as such by those fleeing Arkansas and Mississippi for this town. Still, Wilkins recalled then that “in those days, even good manners could be a crime for a black man,” and apartheid was prevalent “right down to [the] bootstraps” in that “neighborhoods, schools, churches, hospitals, theaters and just about everything else were as thoroughly segregated as anything in Memphis.” There was a “large black ghetto,” said Wilkins that proved to be a hothouse for the flourishing of emerging musical trends. “Most Negroes in town,” he said, “were jammed into the Central East Side,” while on the “North Side,” there were “Italians and Negroes [who] lived easily side by side,” though this was in a sense illusory since “there didn’t seem to be any limit to what the white people would do to keep blacks from moving up,” including violence. The Kansas City Star, the major mainstream newspaper, did not report on the bombings designed to keep Negroes from moving into apartheid neighborhoods and “refused to print even a photograph of a Negro.” This miasma of intimidation meant, he said, that “almost all entertaining was done in the home, because the Jim Crow laws barred black people from most public watering holes, theaters and the like.” This presupposed that those willing to violate this brutal edict were sufficiently hardened to be unafraid of confrontation. Wilkins, a journalist for the Negro press, was told by the authorities that he was a “marked man” because of his willingness to expose illegal activity, a salient factor that ultimately contributed to his departure for Manhattan.¹

Others were not as lucky in escaping and had to deal with the far-reaching political machine of Tom Pendergast, who was sufficiently powerful to propel one of his underlings, Harry S. Truman, into the White House. As in Chicago, there were “Negro jazz raids,” this time aided by the city’s police chief, John Miles. At that point, “KCMO” had more murders per capita than Chicago, but the authorities seemed preoccupied with rousting Negro musicians and club owners. The pressure placed on both, which induced frazzled harriedness, may have played a role in the impromptu performances now known as “jam sessions.”²

Brothels and gambling joints flourished under Pendergast’s dominion, as he invested heavily in construction materials, liquor, taxicabs, hotels, and race tracks, all of which were facilitated by his political tentacles stretching from the suites to the streets.³ Time magazine, then arbiter of middlebrow opinion, announced with wonder in 1934 that Pendergast’s machine was responsible for “nominating and electing” a mere “county judge, Harry S. Truman, to the U.S. Senate.”⁴ As early as 1931, Truman gushed, “I am obligated to the Big Boss,” speaking of Pendergast, who, he claimed curiously, was “all man.”⁵

Pendergast was ruthless, with a quick and at times violent temper, made more menacing by his coarse, gravelly voice. Thousands worked for him, including those who tended to his horses. He was a hopelessly addicted gambler on horses, and during the depths of the Great Depression he bet millions of dollars monthly, sometimes losing a hundred thousand dollars in a single day, a loss facilitated by the immense profits he garnered from payoffs, kickbacks, bribes, and other bounties of graft. Because of his mismanagement, Kansas City had the greatest per capita deficit ever accumulated by a U.S. municipality. He routinely deployed thugs at electoral polls to guarantee results. His crew included plug-uglies, ruffians, and ex-convicts who would beat senseless any who complained. He thus had a unique tie to the underworld, yet Senator Truman assailed his prosecutors from the floor of Congress.⁶

This rationalization occurred, although threats, violence, and bombings accompanied Negro attempts to escape neighborhoods where they were consigned. Red-light districts favorable to brothels were sited routinely in Negro neighborhoods too, and then grew exponentially during the Pendergast reign since his machine skimmed a percentage of their profits. Pendergast and his comrade Johnny Lazia installed other forms of vice in Negro vicinities. Naturally police were far more draconian in confronting Negro-operated vice, as opposed to other varieties. There was a harbinger of the post-1932 shift of the Negro vote nationally from the Republicans to the Democrats: in brief, this shift was evident as early as 1925 in Kansas City. Ellis Burton and Felix Payne, Negro gamblers and nightclub owners, were in the vanguard of this epochal transition. However, this didn’t bar the 1929 kidnapping of Payne by his alleged “’business partners” with the order to produce $20,000 cash. The unseemly Burton was accused of hiring a thug to assault an organizer for the predominantly Negro union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Bandleader Benny Moten, according to instrumentalist “Hot Lips” Page, was tied directly to Pendergast.⁷ Pendergast formed an alliance with Felix Payne, local Negro powerbroker, who was co-owner of the Kansas City Giants, a Negro baseball team. He also initiated a Negro newspaper and, like Pendergast, was close to Moten. However, when Pendergast fell, so did this periodical, along with clubs that employed the likes of Moten.⁸

But Moten and other Negro musicians did not have many choices. Not only did the local philharmonic orchestra refuse adamantly to hire these artists but also barred them from attending concerts. However, at Western University, the “Tuskegee Institute of the Midwest,” across the river in Kansas City, Kansas, Negro artists found a niche and were educated in the intricacies of music, and this trickled down to public elementary and high schools and into the wider community. As early as the 1920s, Negro elementary school teachers introduced into the curriculum of their schools the history of African Americans in music.⁹

Even after being placed on probation in the aftermath of a criminal conviction. Pendergast violated the terms of this status by aiding Senator Truman’s political campaigns. In fact, his nephew, Jimmy Pendergast, directed the successful attempt to win the Democratic nod for the future president.¹⁰ It was not just Truman who sought Pendergast’s favors, according to officialdom. Despite being described as a “political boss” by the authorities, governors, judges, and the like were “craving” an “audience and favors” from him. His influence over the “ready mixed concrete” market provided him with further reach in this boomtown. “Vote fraud investigations and prosecutions” dogged him.¹¹

But as powerful as Pendergast was, in some ways he played second fiddle and deferred to Johnny Lazia, the top mobster in Kansas City. Born in 1897, he was jailed in 1916 on charges of highway robbery, but then received an early release from a Pendergast-connected lieutenant governor. One of his early ventures was forcing stores to carry his soft drinks. He claimed to control 7,500 votes of fellow Italian Americans.¹² These voters, it was thought, were not necessarily progressive. As African Americans moved into neighborhoods favored by these relatively recent immigrants, they were said to have “turned with fury” on the newcomers, as “homes of Negroes were dynamited.”¹³

Lazia was part of a wider influx from Sicily that arrived in the Midwest in the late nineteenth century. Many had arrived in New Orleans, then fled north for various reasons, one factor being the lynching of the 1890s (suggesting that the lack of a direct river tie between the two cities did not bar connection). Many worked in the packing houses and rail yards of the Midwest. Many fell under the influence of “Brother John”—Lazia—and his burly bodyguard, Charles Carrollo. They effectuated an entente with their Irish and Irish-American competitors, on the higher altar of “whiteness.”¹⁴ In other words, by the beginning of the new century, many of the clubs in New Orleans were owned by Sicilian immigrants and tied to organized crime, but rampant bias drove many away to more favorable climes in Missouri and Illinois.¹⁵

Pendergast was receiving tens of thousands of dollars regularly from dog races, a good deal of which was poured into his incessant gambling, particularly on horseracing. Testifying against him, New Orleans’ Arthur Slavin, a nightclub owner in Kansas City with ties to the Cuban Gardens, spoke almost enviously about one of Lazia’s clubs: it “had a dance floor and dining room one side and a casino on the other side for gambling. Dice games, card games”—and more. Local banks were among Lazia’s boosters, he said; they were eager to handle his cashier’s checks. At one point, Lazia had an accident crossing a bridge and the result was that his eyes were affected, causing furious blinking and twitching. His spouse, Marie Lazia, says her husband “nearly lost his eye; he was ill for a long time” too, leading to “three operations.” By 1929, “he was not up at all,” virtually recumbent. He had developed glaucoma. Cuban Gardens opened on September 15, 1929, but Lazia was not in the mood to enjoy the festivities: “I had to wear a bandage on my right eye all through the year 1929,” he told the court and “it made me nervous” since “my eye was inflamed….” It was “terrible, torture, terrible pain,” he said, speaking in early 1934. Lazia’s bodyguard Carrollo, a felon but president of North Side Finance Company, was also an investor in Cuban Gardens. His alias was “Charlie the Wop” and along with Lazia he too was indicted for violating laws on prohibition of alcohol.¹⁶

In the courtroom, Lazia’s jaws and teeth rhythmically chomped on a wad of gum while he kept blinking, his weak eyes barely glimpsed through his thick spectacles. Previously it had been observed that Lazia was frequently in and out of the office of Eugene C. Reppert, the local police chief.¹⁷ It was Pendergast who appealed to White House honcho James Farley for assistance in settling the income tax charges faced by Lazia.¹⁸

In early July 1934, shortly before dawn, Lazia, a power in the Democratic Party political machine, was struck with a hail of machine gun bullets. Before expiring, he said breathlessly, “If anything happens,” call Pendergast, “my best friend, and tell him I love him.” Presumably, Lazia’s attempt to elbow his way into the beer business contributed to his demise. Lazia and his fellow corrupt politicos had been receiving payoffs from increasingly restive owners of beer parlors and night club proprietors. The funeral procession for Lazia extended for several miles, an indication of the overwhelming majorities at the polls he helped to deliver to Pendergast.¹⁹

At the zenith, there were about 250 clubs performing the new music in Kansas City. After Lazia’s murder, scrutiny of these enterprises intensified, to their detriment. Musicians were not oblivious to or protected from this gunplay. After Lazia’s death, Jesse Price and his bandmates were ordered into a large automobile by armed gangsters and driven to a lonely spot on Cliff Drive overlooking the city. There the mobsters impressed upon them the naked power wielded by nightclub operators, hammering home the utter seriousness of their anti-union policies, meaning, of course, that musicians better not complain about poor pay levels.²⁰

AS SO FREQUENTLY HAPPENS AMONG the U.S. right wing in their perpetual quest to dilute the potency of Negrophobia, a myth developed suggesting that Irish Americans too faced rampant bias, not unlike that which ensnared Negroes, up to and including signs stating, “No Irish Need Apply”; as an attempt to dilute the poisonousness of white supremacy, this was an urban myth of victimization in that, as one analyst put it, “the names of local politicians read like the roster of a unit in the Irish Republican Army.” The Scotch-Irish Truman was among those favored, as suggested by his moniker: the “Senator from Pendergast.” Appropriately, the outlaw Frank James, brother of the more renowned Jesse, ended his life as a bouncer and floorwalker in the Pendergast-controlled Jefferson Hotel. The Pendergast machine was heavily larded with saloonkeepers and gamblers, the constituency often found when the new music was being exhibited. The machine routinely raided clubs whose owners did not pay tribute, meaning that Pendergast was making a great deal of money by the 1930s. The machine was close to the Catholic Church and parochial schools, providing Pendergast with ever more far-reaching tentacles.²¹

Saxophonist Buddy Tate, who wound up in Kansas City, hailed from Sherman, Texas, a Jim Crow bastion. In 1926, at the age of thirteen, he began playing professionally. And by the age of fourteen, he was performing before segregated audiences, recalling that “you had to kind of stick more to dance music when you played for the white crowd…. Playing with the black crowd you could swing all night,” raising by implication the matter of what impact segregation had on the music’s evolution. His mother wanted him to be a physician, but his father died, and he wound up in Kansas City playing with Andy Kirk’s band. As for Pendergast, he concluded, “Everybody dug him,” since “he let you make money.”²²

“I knew old Thomas personally,” said musician Eddie Durham, born in 1906 in San Marcos, Texas, speaking of Pendergast. Thus Durham well knew why “liquor stores stayed open 24 hours a day” and how and why the machine “would protect … gangsters.” Negroes worked for Johnny Lazia and vicariously thought “they were big shots because they worked for this big gangster.” Often they were armed, just like the leader of the musicians’ union and Durham himself: “Everybody in Benny Moten’s band had guns.” This was necessary for Moten since he would promote dances himself, foiling traditional promoters: “He would rent the auditorium himself” and the “band [served as] the bouncers … the reed section all had automatics and the voice section all had revolvers … I had a .45.” Once Durham went to church and was chagrined when his pistol “fell out” with a clang.²³

“Everybody carried a gun,” mused bandleader Count Basie, born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1904, speaking of Kansas City, including “machine guns”; this also meant that “bulletproof vests” were de rigueur. In the ubiquitous clubs, patrons would “shoot at each other, and if you played a song they didn’t like, they’d shoot you” too.²⁴

The pianist Mary Lou Williams, born in 1910, recalled that in Kansas City “’most of the nightspots were run by politicians and hoodlums and the town was wide open for drinking, gambling and pretty much every form of vice.” Bandleader Abie Price carried a pistol—then accidentally destroyed several of his toes with this ill-placed weapon.²⁵

Williams, one of the few women to be found on the bandstand, also was aware of the casual corruption that routinely defrauded musicians. Joe Glaser, whose main client was Armstrong, also represented Missourians and was known to maintain double books, that is, as an agent he booked bands at a certain fee, then paid artists at a lower rate, pocketing the difference, plus his percentage of what was taken in at the “door.” Andy Kirk, bandleader, told her as much, stressing that “a lot of these promoters stole from the black acts at that time…. We were making enough, more than the average black anyway. They [were] skimming off the top, but we knew it.” Yet how could they respond effectively given the class and racist biases encoded in society? “’Besides Andy,” Williams continued, “Glaser stole from Louis and all the black acts he had, like Lionel Hampton.” However, since there was reason to believe that Kirk too kept two sets of books, his victimization seemed less dire. Glaser also swindled Williams.²⁶

“See, it’s a gangster town,” concluded guitarist Eddie Durham, speaking of Kansas City. “I met Pretty Boy Floyd there and I saw Baby Face Nelson,” referring to two of the more bloodthirsty mobsters. “These guys paid you double for anything you ever done in Kansas City. They never owed a musician a nickel,” unlike other patrons.²⁷ Buster Smith, a saxophonist who served as a mentor for the better-known Charlie “Bird” Parker,²⁸ knew that in Kansas City “’big clubs were [run by] … big gangsters and they were the musician’s best friend,” at least paying them after performing. But this patronage came at a high price, as musicians were subjected to a cesspool of gambling, live sex shows, and the like. Waitresses at times picked up their tips with their labia. The Chesterfield Club featured four categories of naked waitresses, two “white,” two “black” with pubic hair shaved to represent a heart, spade, diamond, and club. Said Durham, understatedly, “The clubs were very risqué.” Bassist Gene Ramey, born in 1913, recalled that as late as 1934, “nude women [were] working there every night,” referring to certain clubs where the new music was played. There were “’teenaged boys” sneaking peeks through unguarded windows, though he did not reflect upon the impact of social mores or gender conceptions more generally of such displays. However, he did say that as Prohibition was coming to a close, “the mob began to shift into narcotics sales,” with even more impact on the wider community.²⁹ (In this context, the escapades of Eubie Blake should be noted. His relations with women reflected the degradation of women that flowed from mob-controlled performance venues, as did the relations of others in this environment. Several of his lovers committed suicide as a direct result of their interactions with him, and others were beaten by their spouses, while Blake deplored same-sex coupling. According to an observer, “He hated for show business men, even straight ones, to hug him or kiss him.”)³⁰

According to a biographer of Charlie Parker, Kansas City clubs featured “men in dresses … performing oral sex on other men…. Women had sex with other women. Some puffed cigars with their vaginas, others had sex with animals.”³¹

This gangster-dominated climate not only shaped patriarchy and degradation. Gene Ramey recalled an era when bandleaders left the musicians they had hired stranded and then bolted with their wages or gambled these dollars away. Or, when the time came to pay musicians, they would receive the equivalent of 50 cents, rather than the $1.50 promised. But even a bandleader like Basie could be cheated by a club owner, as evidenced by a time when he had patches in his pants and holes in his pockets, as he walked the “streets, trying to be a dignified beggar.” One time, Ramey and his fellow musicians had been stranded and were all jammed into one room.

But why did Kansas City, of all places, become a beacon for the new music? Gene Ramey arrived there on August 18, 1932, via the “hobo” route, that is, hitching rides undetected on trains, many of which were headed to this center of stockyards. He also played semi-pro basketball, and the sport was developed—if not invented in essence—in nearby Lawrence, Kansas. It quickly became popular among Negro men who saw this college town as a place to know. Another diversion was the fact, said Ramey, that marijuana grew wild along the highway headed to Omaha.³²

Basie may have been bilked by club owners, but the musician Buster Smith asserts that the bandleader was not wholly innocent. He told the rotund pianist, “I don’t think you done me fair about that ‘One O’Clock Jump,’” the signature tune of his band as Basie pleaded, “Don’t sue me.” This was a turnabout in what Smith had thought was a mutually fruitful relationship. “He loved gin and I did too,” said Smith. “We were sipping on gin and I’m griping.” Undeterred, Smith also mentored Kansas City’s own Charlie Parker when the saxophonist turned up in New York City. “He hoboed it there,” said Smith. “He came up and slept in the bed in the daytime and my wife and I slept in the bed at night.”³³

IT WAS NOT JUST KANSAS CITY that presented a danger to life and limb. Playing before Euro-American audiences in southern states such as Texas was bound to engender friction too. Once in the 1930s, bandleader Woody Herman was onstage in Texas when he was handed a note demanding that he “stop playing those nigger blues,” a crudity that underscored how bluntly Black artists were barred from profiting from their compositions.³⁴ In the 1930s when the band of King Oliver arrived to play in Texas, one of the musicians recalled that “everyone rushed to see the boys get out of the bus,” but “when the driver put the lights on they were struck dumb because we were colored. We unpacked and went into the hall and started to play but no one came in, so the man giving the dance went out and asked [why] they didn’t come in, they remarked that they didn’t dance to colored music. We were then told to pack up and leave immediately and there were many cars which followed us out of town.”³⁵ Presumably the musicians had not been in violation of a related social norm, that is, it was verboten to be driven by a man defined as “white.”³⁶

Juan Tizol, a Puerto Rican trombonist born in 1900 who played with Ellington, had similar difficult experiences in the Southwest, which cried out for the development of a countervailing force. Once in Dallas, he recalled, “we were getting ready to play and there were a lot of people there and people started looking at me,” probably because he was of a lighter hue than his bandmates. Then he was asked rudely, “’What are you doing playing with those niggers?” At other times, he would be able to fetch food for the band from sites where darker-skinned musicians were banned. “I’d get some food and take it to them,” he said. “I used to do that all the time down South.”³⁷

Further north, bassist turned agent and manager John Levy was performing in Cicero, Illinois, in 1937 when “ten gangsters with their women arrive[d],” and when he sought to depart one of these unsavory characters tapped him with a pistol and said no, he could not leave. Since Levy had become enmeshed in the numbers racket at the tender age of eighteen, he knew it would be unwise to disagree.³⁸ This illicit business was a kind of lottery that generated substantial profits and thereby attracted the ravenous attention of better connected—mostly Italian-American—mobsters.

This mobster influence was particularly resonant near the Canadian border. Before Prohibition was repealed in 1933, gangsters accumulated great wealth by dint of organizing distilleries, manufacturing and selling lightning and corn whiskey. In Detroit, this was the province of the “Purple Gang.” However, in Paradise Valley, where Negroes were proliferating, powerful Black challengers were also flourishing. Formidable barriers prevailed, however, as these entrepreneurs often were ensnared by loan sharks at best and denied capital altogether at worst. It was not unknown for sharks to charge interest rates of 50 percent. One of these challengers, Sunnie Wilson, exhibited the potential of his socioeconomic stratum when he established a school for the Black poor so they could learn how to read and write. His friendships with boxer Joe Louis and Duke Ellington bolstered both to the advantage of their wider community.³⁹

Wilson’s benevolence could not obscure the pervasive gangster influence that afflicted artists. Pianist Duke Anderson forgot to play at a gig for a gangster in Newark. “Right then and there,” he recalled, “I got the worst whippin’ I ever got in my life. They broke my jaw and wrist. Eventually, I went back to playin’ but from then on, I was scared stiff of anyone who looked like a gangster.”⁴⁰ Anderson may have been “scared stiff” for quite a while since for a fifteen-year period beginning in the late 1920s there was a sprawling neighborhood known as Newark’s “Barbary Coast,” featuring what one scholar termed “high-class pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, numbers bankers and hustlers.” It was anchored by the “Kinney Club at Arlington and Augusta Streets,” Newark’s “version of New York’s infamous Cotton Club” and “one of Newark’s first black nightclubs”—though “three quarters of the customers at the Kinney Club were whites,” many of those being racketeers.

One of the key figures of that dissolute era was Herman Lubinsky, a man despised by Negro musicians since his unscrupulousness rivaled, and perhaps exceeded, that of Glaser and Irving Mills, notorious for bilking Duke Ellington and others. “It spoils my whole day to mention Herman Lubinsky” was the considered comment of musician Al Henderson. He was the “’worst thief in the world. He made millions on us [black musicians] and he wouldn’t pay you nothin.”’ He was a “wily, unethical shark,” according to scholar Barbara Kukla, driven by a passionate “desire to steal their songs and talents for a pittance…. Some musicians contend Lubinsky got them drunk”—later hooked on hard drugs—“then had them sign a contract for a few bucks.” Nate Brown argued with similar passion that “Lubinsky [put] me out of business…. He wanted me to sing the blues but said I didn’t sound Negroid enough.” Thus, one journalist is not far wrong in concluding that “there is no doubt everybody hated Herman Lubinsky.” Lubinsky capitalized on technology as he was a prime mover in installing jukeboxes at local clubs and taverns, which meant huge profits for gangsters like himself who owned and controlled these devices; thus, as Kukla put it, “mobsters either owned the taverns or the owners were so in debt to them they had to take the jukeboxes whether they wanted to or not.”⁴¹ It was inevitable that at a certain juncture African Americans would seek to develop their own organized crime factions, and it was virtually inexorable that they would be crushed by their competitors often employing the organs of the state.⁴²

Further south in the “Garden State,” Abe Manley, who also had a hand in the numbers racket and, reputedly, took his poker seriously, administered his far-flung business interests from his nightclub in Camden, across the river from Philadelphia, which was graced by an elegant piano that cost $8,000. In early April 1931, armed men invaded his club, followed by the bombing of the site, as other racketeers sought to oust him. A chastened Manley then moved to Harlem, where Negro political power was growing, as evidenced by the rise of Adam Clayton Powell to the U.S. Congress shortly thereafter, with his City Council seat won by the Black Communist Ben Davis, Jr. Abe’s spouse, Effa Manley, also was involved in his varied enterprises and in 1937 sponsored a concert in Newark featuring Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald. At this juncture, the Manleys had wealth of an estimated $1 million, quite unusual for a U.S. family generally and a Negro family particularly.⁴³ Just as Glaser invested in boxers, the Manleys invested in the Negro baseball league. A fellow baseball owner, Gus Greenlee, was invested in the numbers, but like Manley he too was squeezed by Italian and Jewish racketeers, who shifted into numbers as the business of illicit alcohol dried up with the end of Prohibition.⁴⁴

Possibly the Manleys arrived in Harlem unaware of the disturbing case of Barron D. Wilkins. This Negro entrepreneur had come to Upper Manhattan in the early 1900s and by the 1920s was a powerful club owner and a collaborator with boxing champion and musician Jack Johnson, but, said musician Sam Wooding, “Italians,” meaning competitors and mobsters, “got hold of Yellow Charleston,” a petty Negro gambler with debts and “they told him, ‘Look, if you want to get dope [drugs] and all the dope you want, you’ve got to shoot old man Barron.” And promptly, that is what the compromised Charleston (also known as William Miller) did. This crime took place “right in front of his place,” meaning Wilkins’s club, that is, “right there at Seventh Avenue and 134th Street,” and then the “white gangsters had him for a while,” meaning Charleston, until the furor ebbed.⁴⁵

Unfortunately, travails were not the sole province of the Southwest and Northeast. Jabbo Smith, the trumpeter and rival of Louis Armstrong, born in Georgia in 1908, found it necessary to quit the band of Claude Hopkins because it was “too dangerous” not to do so. “While we were playing,” he recalled, “the drivers were supposed to be resting up to drive us. But instead they were out lollygagging, messing around. We’d get through playing, get in the cars and then we’d find out that the drivers were drunk. We’d be so scared riding on those mountain roads, we’d hang on to each other. We couldn’t sleep during the rides so we’d be real tired when we got to the jobs,” with resultant impact on performances.⁴⁶

Thus, propelled by threats and intimidation, what might be considered a “Jazz Diaspora” kept moving westward, not only to Asia but making an intermediate stop in California before decamping to Honolulu or Shanghai. Elihu “Black Dot” McGee, an important figure on Los Angeles’s culturally rich Central Avenue, arrived in the City of Angels from El Paso, Texas, in 1926. Rather quickly he came to own and operate “The Flame,” “The Casablanca,” “The Congo Room,” along with the “Turf Barber Shop,” where many patrons gathered not just for a trim but to share bonhomie. A dapper dresser and considered a “a very hip cat,” he and his comrades controlled a good deal of the bookmaking business and numbers. Early on, records were sold by McGee and his colleagues, alongside other wares, for example, marijuana and heroin Inevitably, musicians were touched by this business, at times as avid customers of the drugs that permeated their environment.⁴⁷

As the Second World War erupted and Japanese Americans were interned, the African American population of what was to become a major metropolis grew exponentially as Los Angeles became a major battleground politically and culturally.⁴⁸

GIVEN SUCH DIFFICULTIES AT HOME, African American musicians were fleeing abroad, as the “Diaspora” extended westward and eastward alike. Edmund Thornton Jenkins was not a devotee of the new music, but he was a composer born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1894, as lynching was becoming customary. Still, by 1921 this Negro musician was exiled in Europe where he became involved with the W. E. B. Du Bois–sponsored Pan African Congress.⁴⁹

The growing list of those leaving included New Orleans’ Sidney Bechet. He arrived in Liverpool from New York City on 4 June 1919. By 1922 a police file on him in London described his complexion as “swarthy,” and the accusation was that he had committed an “assault” on a “female,”⁵⁰ a British subject, Ruby Gordon. Bechet had been employed by a club on Tottenham Court Road in London; this “man of colour,” as he was described, was listed as 5’3” tall with a “stout build” and a “valid American passport.”⁵¹ By 1926, he was playing in Moscow and when asked subsequently where he would choose to settle down permanently to play his music, he replied instantly, “Russia,” because he was treated so well. Shortly thereafter, he was in Paris where he was jailed because of a club shooting. He was not necessarily stunned by this turn of events, since, according to his biographer, the saxophonist “regarded mayhem as one of the hazards of a musician’s working life…. For much of his life he was fascinated by gangsters and hoodlums,” not unusual given the clubs he performed in back home.⁵²

The pianist Glover Compton, born in Kentucky in 1884, recalled the 1928 incident in Paris. Bechet and Mike McKendrick, banjoist, became embroiled in a fracas, leading to an exchange of gunshots, wounding the stunned Compton in the leg and two women in the shoulder and neck respectively. Neither duelist was hurt. Compton, a pivotal figure, wound up staying in Paris for almost fifteen years, having fled gangster-run clubs in Chicago near 22nd and State Street that had a clientele that was overwhelmingly “white.” It was Compton who introduced Earl Hines around Chicago, and it was Hines who replaced Compton in Jimmy Noone’s band when the Kentuckian departed for greener pastures in France.⁵³

Speaking of his European miseries, Bechet recalled of one of his victims, “I didn’t slap her hard,” speaking of a woman he was accused of raping. “They knew she was a whore,” he claimed. He was deported, nonetheless. As for Paris, he carried a pistol—but was jailed anyway. He wound up running a tailor shop in Harlem, though later he was lionized in Europe for his expert artistry and riveting performances⁵⁴

Embracing Moscow like Bechet did was Darnell Howard, born in Chicago in 1895, who attended school alongside Capone’s little brother, “Itchy.” By 1925, this clarinetist and violinist was in the Soviet Union with the Singing Syncopators, before heading further eastward to Shanghai.⁵⁵

Though Europe may have been more welcoming to these musicians than their homeland, it would be an error to assume that they were garlanded automatically with roses upon docking at local ports. It was in 1925 that a London periodical referred with contempt to the “Coloured Problem,” that is, the recent “attempt to introduce a nigger cabaret to London failed. At the Empire, a room was beautifully decorated by an American artist, with cotton fields in the distance and a nice cookhouse in which a real coal black mammy was to make hot waffles which were to be served while Negroes danced and sang.” A man interviewed was unequivocal: “I strongly object to coloured artists being employed where food is served to white people,” said one calloused observer. “So nervous am I about coloured shows generally,” he said, that “after Jack Johnson the famed pugilist and bassist—had been engaged at a high salary for four weeks by one of my assistants, I wouldn’t let him show.”⁵⁶ Still, the contemporaneous warm reception accorded Paul Robeson in London indicated that there was no unanimous hostility to visiting Negro artists.⁵⁷

Nonetheless, there were objective constraints limiting the arrival of U.S. artists, ancestry set aside. A kind of “protectionism” in Britain sought to bar foreign musicians in favor of the homegrown variety.⁵⁸ By 1929, Margaret Bonfield, parliamentarian, was told that “unemployment being created through the advent of Talking Pictures”—that is, the decline in pit orchestras in theatres that had been accompanying silent movies—had “already thrown out of employment some 400 musicians throughout the country, the number of which is increasing weekly and will probably affect thousands more.”⁵⁹ By 1930, British musicians were complaining bitterly about foreign competition, including challenges to that traditional sinecure: military bands.⁶⁰ Still, there seemed to be less resistance in London to granting visas to the Euro-American bandleader Paul Whiteman and his orchestra.⁶¹

African Americans long had toured Britain’s variety circuit with minstrel shows, various revues, and ragtime bands. The date of the arrival of the new music called “jazz” in Britain is usually set in 1919 with the arrival of an original Dixieland jazz band composed of Euro-Americans. However, although Britain may have been more advanced than the United States on matters racial, the hostile propaganda about the new music crossed the Atlantic, leaving some in London to see this art form, propelled mostly by men of African descent, as threatening.⁶²

But the musicians kept heading eastward because conditions in the United States were often violently hostile. When asked why Britain was so welcoming to the new music despite the complications delivered, English-born trumpeter Ken Colyer replied that in his nation “we really lost most of our own folk culture and jazz has got an international appeal…. That’s why we took to it. Because we’ve got no strong folk tradition anymore, of our own, and [jazz] took the place of it.”⁶³ He could have noted the unavoidable links between the United States and the former “mother country.” Keyboardist Roy Carew, born in 1883 in Michigan, had parents from Nova Scotia and grandparents from Britain, an inheritance that facilitated the crossing of musical borders.⁶⁴

Then there were those like cornetist Johnny De Droit, born in New Orleans in 1892, who at one time garnered a then hefty $86 weekly salary but had difficulty grappling with Jim Crow since his spouse was of English and German descent and a blonde besides. He left New York because of difficulty in pursuing his golf game since he would be inevitably grouped with a “’Chinaman, Indian and Nigger,” and many of those he encountered wanted him to speak like a “coon” besides. Class conscious—he termed himself a “dyed-in-the-wool union man”—he led his union for years, making his presence in the United States even more problematic. He could not forget that performer Cliff Curry sang “’Save Your Confederate Money, the South Will Rise Again”—this was through the 1950s—which was hardly reassuring. (By contrast, when he played “China, We Owe a Lot to You,” it brought down the house and became a feature of his performances.)⁶⁵ De Droit’s experience was hardly unusual, meaning that those like him were prime candidates for expatriation.

Also spending considerable time in Europe was violinist Eddie South, born in 1902, who happened to speak fluent French. However, in touring the United States with the band of Paul Whiteman, recalls pianist Dr. Billy Taylor, it happened that “because he was an African American … a curtain was placed in front of him, so that he’d be invisible to the studio audience.” Increasingly, he began to spend more and more time in Europe.⁶⁶

Sam Wooding, bandleader, pianist, and arranger, born in Philadelphia in 1895, toured the Soviet Union and Germany in the 1920s. Asked if he followed events back home, the cautiously acerbic musician replied, “No, I was glad to forget it…. We were happy to say we were out of it.” Wooding was reportedly the first person to bring a jazz band to Russia and the first U.S. band of this type or U.S. band of any sort to record outside of the United States, namely, his Berlin sessions in 1925. Wooding also ventured to South America.⁶⁷

Pops Foster, the self-described “New Orleans Jazzman” born in 1892, played aboard a ship to Belize in 1914. By the 1920s, he observed, “a lot of guys would get jobs on boats from the West Coast and when they got to China they’d jump the boat and get a job playing.” Some then went south to Australia, which Foster termed the “worst Jim Crow country in the world and the musicians over there didn’t want them to play.”⁶⁸

Willie Foster, older brother of Pops Foster, was born in McCall, Louisiana in 1888; he had worked in carpentry and painting, but was better known as a violinist. He made ten trips on a United Fruit Company vessel to South America.⁶⁹ He was not unique in venturing to Latin America: Jazz man, Lawrence Douglas Harris did well in Mexico playing with carnival bands.⁷⁰

In sum, musicians were fleeing in all directions from their home country, propelled by the new music and the skill to perform it in a way that enticed audiences. As noted, Armstrong fled to Europe and was playing there generally from 1932 to 1935. Fats Waller was in Europe for a good deal of the 1930s. Benny Carter was there from about 1935 to 1938 and Coleman Hawkins from 1934 to 1939. The first Norwegian club that specialized in the new music made sojourning in Europe all the more feasible. Serving to pave the way for successful performances was the rise of recorded music during this same era. Records of “King” Oliver, to cite one example, were released not only in the United States but also in Canada, Argentina, France, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Australia, and Japan. Then there was the overarching factor of these mostly Black artists receiving a more respectful reception abroad. Thus, in 1932 when the mid-level bandleader Rudy Vallee was drawing U.S. audiences of 2,800, Duke Ellington, arguably a more talented musician, was attracting 25 percent of this total. The now forgotten Ben Bernie was drawing 2,000 when Armstrong was attracting 350.⁷¹

France was to be a favored outpost for fleeing musicians, Bechet’s problems aside. Paris may have been neither Utopia nor Nirvana, but it may have seemed that way to those more accustomed to the peculiar folkways of Dixie. As Bechet was being jailed, Jack Hylton, a Euro-American conductor, found himself in trouble with the “French Association for the Protection of the Black Race.” According to an observant Negro journalist, somehow he had forgotten that he was “not in the southern part of the United States and let his race prejudice get the better of his good judgment.” Hylton had met “Nabib Gonglia,” a Black artist who was performing alongside him. When Hylton was informed of this fact, he refused to go on stage, but, unlike in Dixie, it was he who was reproached severely.⁷² The following year, the Negro press reported that even on the French Riviera, “a Negro may enter, not only with equality but with a preference. All, save Americans, want to know him,” it was said wondrously.⁷³

Teddy Weatherford, born in 1903, had been a bandmate of Armstrong in 1920s Chicago before abandoning North America for Asia, Shanghai, and then Calcutta. By 1926, he was performing in China and only returned to the United States once in coming decades.⁷⁴ Born in Bluefield, West Virginia, he wound up playing in Calcutta, Bombay, Ceylon, sites where he was joined at times by trumpeter Cricket Smith, born in 1881.⁷⁵ Buck Clayton, who, as we have seen, also made his way to China, said that Weatherford was a “king over there” and “would play four clubs a night.” Shanghai was their favored site; there could be found “two or three gambling casinos inside the place” with “two or three dance floors…. Madame Chiang kai-Shek used to come in there all the time,” referring to the spouse of the man who led the forces defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. There was a sizeable exile community, and Clayton “was learning Russian” since “there [were] a lot of Russians” and he was picking up the language “pretty well.”⁷⁶

An indication as to why so many musicians chose exile from their homeland, was indicated by Milt Hinton, who became a regular in pre-revolutionary Cuba. “What amazed me,” he said, “is that until that time, I’d never stayed at a place that served black and white guests. And everyone was treated equally.”⁷⁷ Benny Carter, composer and bandleader, thought similarly about Europe. In Harlem, he recalled, “many white musicians used to come in and listen to the black musicians and not only listen but sit in with them. Quite often. But we couldn’t go downtown and sit in with them,” placing him and those like him at a disadvantage while privileging those not in this persecuted category, meaning, “of course,” that the latter would learn lessons to enhance their careers. Whereas Europe was different, he said, in that there was “acceptance of you just on the basis of you as a human being.”⁷⁸

The development of the phonograph and recorded music helped to create a market abroad for practitioners of the new music, allowing them to seek what often amounted to a sinecure overseas. The critic Leonard Feather argued that Ellington was appreciated more in Europe and Britain particularly than in the United States, notably during the 1930s, which incentivized the bandleader to spend a considerable amount of time abroad.⁷⁹ In the ultimate commentary, the grandson of Booker T. Washington, the horn man Booker Pittman, left the United States around 1931 for Europe and did not return home until the early 1960s.⁸⁰

Negro musicians were so prevalent in Europe that during the pre-1975 wars in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, at one juncture political activists from there were able to reach their homelands without valid papers from European ports by simply dressing them up as “ ‘Negro musicians’ … along with a European guide who did have a proper passport.” Then, according to the radical intellectual and activist Samir Amin, “At the Luxembourg frontier, which was supposed to be the one with the loosest controls, our musicians gave a good imitation of collective drunkenness,” confirming the stereotype, and they flew from there to Africa.⁸¹

WAR ERUPTED IN ASIA AND EUROPE in the 1930s, and these years were transformative for the new music, establishing patterns that continue to resonate, not unlike what had occurred previously in terms of the mass diffusion of phonographs and radios and the arrival of mass electrification, facilitating the popularity of the electric guitar. That is not all. In the midst of war, the major musicians’ union engineered a strike over royalty payments, which bandleader Charlie Barnet termed “one of the biggest nails in the coffin of the big band era, for it brought vocalists very much to the fore. Musical backgrounds were being recorded for them in foreign countries and a lot of records were even made with voices substituting for instruments. Before the strike was over, bands had received a lethal blow.”⁸²

Simultaneously, the monopoly enjoyed by ASCAP in terms of music royalties and publishing was challenged increasingly by BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.), and, said pianist Dr. Billy Taylor, this “created important opportunities for many African American artists.” Dr. Taylor added that since vocalists “belonged to a different union,” the musicians’ strike opened doors for these songbirds. Moreover, a shellac shortage, due to Tokyo’s forces seizing the Malay Peninsula, created opportunities for smaller record companies.⁸³

In addition, the eruption of war made exile abroad less attractive, increasing competition for work in the United States. “All jazz is dead in Europe!” it was announced tremulously in mid-1942: “In Switzerland now there are only two Negro musicians”; elsewhere on the continent Negroes were to be found in “concentration camp[s].”⁸⁴ Trumpeter Arthur Briggs, born in 1899, spent four years in a Nazi internment camp after starring in Paris. With family in Long Island and California, this Negro artist once played with Noble Sissle. At the camp, he formed a six-piece orchestra, then another with twenty-five pieces that moved easily from “swing” to “classical.” He drew upon the talents of 2,000 internees to do so. He also formed a trio that sang Negro spirituals, which was bolstered by the fact that there were “50 colored boys in the camp,” according to journalist Rudolph Dunbar.⁸⁵

In Manila one musician, Whitney Smith, wound up in a Japanese-administered internment camp, while another, Bob Fockler, wound up broadcasting for a so-called “Nazi radio station,”⁸⁶ while pianist and arranger Sam Wooding, in contrast, said “the Nazi Party didn’t want any American music and especially the ragtime or jazz played by blacks. They didn’t honor blacks at all. So, they refused, they barred the contract, they discredited the contract.”⁸⁷

In Shanghai, the new music was in shambles, with artists fleeing in all directions. After the band of Butch Larkin dared to play “God Bless America” in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in early 1943, he was jailed. Many “white” musicians there were replaced by Filipinos, accelerating an ongoing trend regionally. Bandleader James Albert Spears was found dead, an apparent suicide, and in the Philippines Bill Hegamin—described as a “veteran colored leader and ace pia-nist”—was, reportedly, “doing okay teaching music and voice and has a large studio,” while Ray Reynolds was “now dancing nightly” and doing well for himself.⁸⁸ A favoritism toward Negroes was part of Tokyo’s wartime policy.⁸⁹

As opportunities abroad dried up because of the exigencies of war, this lucrative outlet for Negro musicians was blocked, generating more intense competition for remaining jobs. This was occurring as the number of jobs for Negro musicians in, for example, Jim Crow Chicago declined by about 30 percent because of the disappearance of Negro-owned clubs in the years leading up to 1940, a process driven by the ravages of the Great Depression, the decline of Negro-owned clubs as a result, the demise of “swing” music, and the perennial: continuing racism.⁹⁰

Consolidation within the industry was also a factor. The Club De Lisa in Chicago “wasn’t like any other club in the world,” wrote analyst Dempsey Travis. “You could buy anything you wanted within the De Lisa compound in the 5500 block on South State Street. The De Lisa brothers owned the hotel, the gambling operation, the liquor stores and dainty-looking girls who worked the bar stools inside the club.” Thus Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson, and the other musicians who performed there were subjected to a kind of monopoly pricing power that could force down fees, as the club tended to drive competitors out of business, which was garnished by Jim Crow that placed these artists in a disadvantaged bargaining position.⁹¹

The ripples of instability extended southward, too. Arriving on these shores were a number of talented Cuban musicians who contributed to the richness of the music. Machito, the percussionist born Frank Grillo in 1908, had his first rehearsal in Harlem at 122nd Street and Seventh Avenue, the headquarters of the Negro evangelist Father Divine. “They charged us fifty cents an hour for the rehearsal,” he recalled. Yet despite his base in Harlem, when his orchestra played in Miami, a Jim Crow haven, they were advertised as hailing “from Cuba,” and although his band was “black and white,” they evaded local apartheid because they were Cuban. “We even have a bodyguard to take care of us,” said the bemused dark-skinned artist, “and they transport[ed] us to Miami Beach. I used to live in a white hotel. I never had [a] problem, we used to eat in Miami City [sic] in those white restaurants, as a matter of fact.” His band included an African American, but the wily bandleader sought to keep him from speaking with his betraying accent and that “made the difference,” as they were treated “very good…. There was no problem because we were from Cuba and they consider the Cubans … are not black,” meaning not descendants of enslaved mainland Africans, the perpetual antagonist of North American republicans. Yet when the band played at the Savoy in Harlem “95%” of the audience was black and they were “crazy” about the music. After all, he said, “We [were] playing for black and it was black music…. You didn’t have to make no explanation to a black person about rhythm because … they come from where the rhythm come from.” Machito was no stranger to the Savoy: “I used to go practically every day, every night, to the Savoy because [drummer] Chick Webb was there [and] Ella Fitzgerald [vocalist]” too and fellow Cuban Mario Bauza “was in charge of rehearsing the orchestra.”⁹²

Machito had arrived on the mainland in 1938, while Bauza was already there, paving the way, having arrived more than a decade earlier. (He was to marry the percussionist’s sister.) It was on the mainland that Bauza heard the new music, and, he recalled, “I went back to Cuba and became a saxophone player. I came to New York to live in 1930 and I joined Noble Sissle’s band.” The trumpeter then joined Webb’s band, Webb telling him that, “if you can get the American Negro accent in your music you’re going to be great, because you’ve got the other side of the coin—the finesse, the technique.” He became Webb’s “musical director,” then it was on to Cab Calloway’s band.⁹³ It was Bauza who was partially responsible for the discovery of Ella Fitzgerald. He also had short stints with the band of Don Redman and Fletcher Henderson. It was Bauza who was also partially responsible for the breakthrough that led Calloway to hire Dizzy Gillespie, where they made music together side-by-side. As world war was erupting, Bauza joined Machito’s band, but the influence he left on the music, as exemplified by Gillespie, was significant.⁹⁴

The overall environment provided fertile soil for yet another rise of a phenomenon not unknown to the new music: a vast bubble of tiny enterprises run by what one commentator termed “dreamers, sharp operators, would-be tycoons and ambitious fans,” many more than willing to take advantage of a climate that facilitated rough exploitation of African American performers. For Lester Young, already familiar with Kansas City’s unscrupulousness, this development made it harder for him to trust people, especially Euro-Americans he didn’t know well, which had an ineluctable impact on his personality and ultimately his music.⁹⁵

Young also accompanied Count Basie, which illuminates what bandleader Charlie Barnet observed. He encountered the touring band of Basie in New York City in the 1930s: “I never forgot the pitiful instruments some of his guys were playing when they first came into Roseland,” a local nightspot. “They were held together by rubber bands and I just could not believe it, although instruments like that were not uncommon in other black bands across the country.” This decrepitude influenced the music in that “when they got new instruments, they had grown accustomed to a horn that is out of whack” and “it is hard to get used to one on which everything is good.”⁹⁶ On the one hand, this was outrageous; on the other, this deficiency in instrumentation could force more creativity in making lovely sounds.

Barnet had reason to know. A scion of wealth (the American Sugar Refining Company and the New York Central Railroad), he had relationships with various elites far surpassing those of his peers. Besides, he was married eleven times, providing him with entrees to even more relationships. To his credit, he was among the first Euro-American bandleaders who hired musicians of a different ancestry, and he has been credited with helping catapult Lena Horne, the songstress, to stardom.⁹⁷

Trombonist “Trummy” Young saluted Barnet—“He would fight, man,” he enthused, speaking of battling Jim Crow and “so would Boyd Raeburn,” bandleader born in 1913. This contrasted with Benny Goodman, born in 1909, who “would [not] go too far for anybody. Not only us but nobody else.” Given the conditions musicians faced, few eyebrows were raised when Duke Ellington, according to an interviewer, “used to say that the only basis for racial prejudice is economic,” and sideman “Trummy” Young replied, “oh, he’s true,” both opinions placing them alongside the left and distant from those who saw this pestilence as an individualized psychological delusion.⁹⁸ (Despite Young’s rosy memories, Barnet confessed that his band had “never played” the Palladium in Southern California “because of their policy of showing no black or mixed bands. So mine became a lily-white band in order that I might finally play the Palladium.”)⁹⁹

AS THE 1930S WERE LURCHING to a close, practitioners of the new music had survived the continuation of Jim Crow, and the rise of the phonograph and radio: related opportunities abroad, assisted by the general growth of unions driven by the ravages of the Great Depression, seemed to augur better days coming. The rise of fascism generated a counter-reaction—anti-fascism—which bid fair to open further opportunities for talented musicians. Alongside the ascension of unions was the growing strength of ASCAP, which, inter alia, collected royalties that became more important with the advent of radio and the phonograph. ASCAP in some ways represented the Janus-faced opportunity—and oppression—of Negroes in that it contained the potential to aid the growing raft of African American composers, though it found it difficult to do so while adhering to a Jim Crow diktat. Jelly Roll Morton, for example, did not earn any royalties until 1939, when ASCAP finally allowed him to become a member. He had applied five years earlier but had been rejected. But indicative of the continuing pull of white supremacy, he was placed in the lowest category of membership, where he received a mere $120 annually. Oscar Hammerstein III said that those in the top category—for example, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin—received an average of $15,000 annually,¹⁰⁰ yet another indication of the inflamed conjuncture where racism encountered economics.