Jazz and Justice. Gerald Horne
“I had the opportunity to defy them.”55
Glaser made no secret of his ties to Capone, apparently feeling that it could be intimidating. “Shine” was not the only disparaging term he heaped on his Negro clients; he added “schwarzes,” a like insult. The critic Nat Hentoff once saw a painting of the antebellum South on the wall of his office, featuring “happy darkies playing banjo and singing.”56 Glaser was asked once how he became involved in show business. “On account of the whorehouses,” was his prompt reply, implying that enterprise’s tie to the performing arts. Digging into the bottom drawer of his desk, he extracted a photo of two old brown-stones. The picture revealed two men standing by a used car lot with a large sign reading “Joe Glaser’s Used Car Symposium”: one man was Glaser, the other was Roger Touhy, one of his salesmen, an apprenticeship before he became a leading racketeer and a supplier for Glaser’s brothels.57
Jimmy McPartland, a former spouse of the more celebrated Marian, a pianist, confirms that “everybody worked for the mob in Chicago. Al Capone used to come into one place where I was … he’d send one of his torpedoes over with a fifty or a hundred. One night one of ’em shot a hole in Jim Lanigan’s bass and then asked him how much a new one would cost,” a maneuver that doubtlessly was attention grabbing.58
Earl “Fatha” Hines the pianist, born in 1903, knew well the racketeer-influenced Grand Terrace in Chicago where he often performed. “They always had four or five men there—floating [near] me” and “pistol play” was recurrent. “I was heading for the kitchen one night and this guy went pounding past and another guy came up behind me and told me to stand still and rested a pistol on my shoulder and aimed at the first guy and would have fired if the kitchen door hadn’t swung shut in time. Some of the waiters even had pistols.” Unabashedly, he confessed, “Racketeers owned me too,” but fortunately, as the progressive movement gained momentum, Hines said he “bought my way out of the Grand Terrace in 1940 after I finally learned about all the money I was making and wasn’t seeing.”59 Hines worked routinely from 10:30 in the evening until 4:30 in the morning, seven nights per week. Despite the violent madness swirling all around, he and his bandmates were “like three monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Otherwise you might be found dead in Jackson Park someplace.”60 The critic Stanley Dance commented about the pianist, “There is scarcely anything he hates more than writing letters”61—unsurprisingly, and to the detriment of history, but perhaps a reflection of nervousness about committing innermost thoughts to paper for fear of where they might end up.
Seeking to protect the value of this performer, Capone provided Hines with a bodyguard. Unlike other artists, Hines said he did not pack a pistol though he had an astonishing “40 or 50 bodyguards” alongside him. He may have needed every one when he arrived in Valdosta, Georgia: “Some hecklers in the crowd turned off the light and exploded a bomb under the bandstand. Sometimes when we came into a town, the driver of our chartered bus would tell us to move to the back of the bus to make it look all right and not get anyone riled up.” The problem? Those soaked in the brine of Jim Crow “never expected to see the Negroes dressed like we were, have the intelligence and self-assurance that we had.” “We were the first freedom riders,” said a weary Hines later, speaking of his travails then: “It was brutal in those days.” As for mobsters, he said, “I knew Al Capone like I’m talking to you … he used to come to the Grand Terrace two or three times a week and he would say, ‘I don’t like your handkerchief. And fix the handkerchief and there was a fifty dollar [bill] in it.’”62
“Pittsburgh was no heaven,” said Hines, speaking of his former city of residence, “but when I got to Chicago, I thought it was the worst town in the world. I found some of the most dangerous people in the country on 35th Street when I started working there. I knew how to duck and dodge but somebody was always getting hurt. Everybody carried a gun and you had to act as though you were at least a bit bad.”63
Hines was a stern critic of the evolving economic underpinning of the music business. A “good part of the blame for the doldrums that has many top-rate musicians toting bags in railroad stations belongs with the handful of booking agents who are strangling jazz with their monopoly hold,” he said. This was a “hangover from the days when gangsters muscled in on the entertainment world and used nightclubs as a front for their rackets. I know because I indirectly worked for the mob…. There’s not a single big name of the show world … Duke Ellington … Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong—who haven’t at one time or another had contact with the syndicates,” meaning mobsters.64
The aforementioned pianist, composer, and bandleader Duke Ellington, born in 1899 in Washington, D.C., had a similar experience near the same time. While performing in Chicago, mobsters sought to extort him. They presented their demand to Sam Fleischnick, who was then the Washingtonian’s road manager. “All our boys carry guns,” he replied, adding with gusto, “If you want to shoot it out, we’ll shoot it out.” The suave Ellington considered fleeing when he heard of this contretemps, but then he telephoned the influential owner of a Manhattan club and this man arranged for the Ellington band to survive without overt molestation in Chicago.65 But mimicking Armstrong, he forged an alliance with Irving Mills, born in Russia in 1894, who somehow became the publisher of some of the pianist’s most famous compositions, including “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and “Mood Indigo,” which enriched this manipulator and his descendants.66 Mills also was an agent for Cab Calloway. Mills succeeded Moe Gale after, said the bandleader, “the mob and Herman Stark” intervened.67
John Hammond, who worked for Mills, was moved to remark “how tremendously Duke was being exploited” by Mills. A consensus has emerged that Mills’s lengthy and fabulously successful career was underwritten by his lion’s share of Ellington’s copyrighted tunes.68 It was not just Ellington, however. Evidently, Fats Waller, on July 17, 1929, for a pittance, assigned all rights, title, and interest in such iconic tunes as “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and, ironically, “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” and other leading compositions to Mills.69 Thus, by December 1944, Waller’s widow was advised solemnly that she visit the “collector of Internal Revenue and advise him that you have received no income from your husband’s estate.”70
The restrained Leonard Feather termed “questionable” the practice of Mills of putting his name on Ellington’s compositions: “I don’t think he wrote a note of music in his life,” he said of Mills. Mills, said Feather, even placed his name on a composition, “Mighty Like the Blues,” that the critic wrote. In response to Mills, Ellington formed Tempo Music, one of the first Negro-owned publishing companies, a move soon emulated by Jimmy Lunceford. W. C. Handy was among the very first Negro composers to become a publisher, said Feather, while adding accurately that it remained “very difficult for anybody black to make much headway because of the tremendous amount of racism that was prevalent” in the United States.71
Ellington well knew that the modus operandi of these unscrupulous thugs included dropping in on targeted clubs, shutting the doors, and ordering the entire staff—band, chorus “girls,” and singing and dancing waiters—to put on a show, with failure to comply inviting brutal retaliation. Ellington probably knew of likewise situated nightspots in his own town of Washington, while in Chicago he spoke directly of the unfortunate tuba player Mack Shaw: “The police, gangsters, or somebody had caught Mack out in Chicago, beaten his face in and broken up all the bones. This cat would be blowing his tuba and blow out a loose bone. He had a whole lot of loose bones in his face and he’d just put them together again and continue blowing.” Ellington was an habitué of the Cotton Club in Manhattan and knew that this enterprise was connected in turn to mobsters both in the Empire State and Philadelphia; little “Brotherly Love” was exuded when gangsters in the latter town were seeking to induce a club owner there to allow Ellington to escape a gig there so that his band could perform in Manhattan. A few well-chosen words proved to be convincing, and Ellington and his band headed hurriedly northward.72 Ellington, who was the subject of a 1931 kidnapping plot, came to carry a pistol, along with his “entire band,” he confided.73
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