Jazz and Justice - Gerald Horne

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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

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