Jazz and Justice. Gerald Horne
sternly warned that racially mixed couples should be barred. It had been owned by Bernard Levy, well known as a bootlegger and numbers banker,74 before the notorious racketeer Owney Madden seized control.75
Madden was quite the character, according to Ellington drummer Sonny Greer. “He was over Dutch Schulz, Al Capone and all of them.” Madden was a “little, tiny guy. Talked like a girl” with an accent that betrayed his British origins, but he also owned a casino in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and thus was familiar with the worst Jim Crow had to offer. Yet, said Greer, he “loved Duke because him and Duke used to sit up and play ‘Grits’ and all that, ‘Coon Can’ all night long…. He loved Duke and he loved me.” Mercer Ellington, the bandleader’s son, realized that Madden appreciated the profit generated by these artists, allowing for money laundering so that cash from his illicit enterprises could be sanitized: “It was a way to turn over a good front.” Barney Bigard, another bandmate, sensed a split between Madden and Capone, leaving Ellington to lean toward the former: “This guy was Duke’s bodyguard. He’d go get Duke from the theatre with his machine gun between his legs, and they had bullet-proof glass. You see there were two factions…. They had to protect their men from each other.”76 Like many mobsters, Madden had varied political ties, including to the still potent Tammany Hall in New York City.77
Ellington was not the only musician who had to confront the malignant influence of organized crime. “My Uncle Richard and Al Capone had a good business relationship,” said vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. “Capone called my uncle every day.” Hampton, who became a key fundraiser for the Republican Party, saw the mobster as a kind of latter-day Medici, responsible for the rise of the new music. “History has proved that Al Capone was the savior of the black musicians in those days. His nightclubs alone employed hundreds.”78 Hampton, born in 1908, received his first vibraphone from a wealthy uncle who had been the leading bootlegger on Chicago’s South Side and also served as manager for songstress Bessie Smith.79
Musician Mezz Mezzrow, born in 1899, who “learned to play the sax in Pontiac Reformatory,” knew that Capone “owned a piece of the Arrowhead,” a favorite haunt of clubbers, “as well as the whole town, including the suburbs.” The club was sited in neighboring Indiana. As a result of this ownership tie, the music itself was downgraded, termed contemptuously “’nigger music’” and “’whorehouse music,’” with those plying their trade in this musical form “looked down on.” As for Burnham, Indiana, the site of these escapades, it was basically a Capone subsidiary, ensuring degradation. “There never was a town sewed up as tight as Burnham,” said Mezzrow of a town that “was under the syndicate. The chief of police was our bartender and all the waiters were aldermen.”80 Agreeing, trumpeter and bandleader Max Kaminsky argued that during the 1920s “almost everyone in Chicago in those days was sooner or later, in one way or another—mostly another—involved with racketeers and gangsters.”81
Playing before often drunken audiences, replete with racists with pistols, Armstrong and other artists were vulnerable, as they focused on their performances and not necessarily the dangers that lurked. Then there was the basic issue: would one be paid after working? Danny Barker saluted Bert Hall, a trombonist, politician, and gambler who left Chicago for New York City and attracted adherents when he helped to introduce reforms into the musicians’ union local that were welcomed by Negro members who had been victimized more than most by employers who refused to pay performers, serving further to explain Armstrong’s tie-up with Glaser. Barker also recalled that “Jelly Roll” Morton was among the artists who was “forever beefing” about being cheated by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and the mangling of his copyright protection and how he was induced to sign “his songs over to some publishers and they became wealthy but Jelly received no royalties as the composer.” Then those like Morton were cheated further when “a whole lot of black music … wasn’t played on radio stations, theaters and Hollywood movies. This was done purposely through racism.” In a metaphorical ending for the man who was said to have invented the new music, Barker recalled that “an old underworld acquaintance of Jelly’s, a dope fiend and a notorious thief, sneaked into the undertaking parlor during the night and with a chisel and a hammer, removed the four-carat diamond from Jelly’s front tooth”82 and then departed.
Being cheated was part of the job of being a Negro musician then. “We were stranded all over the United States,” said saxophonist, Eddie Barefield, born in 1909. Why? At times, the promoter would not pay them or “sometimes the guys would run off with the money after the intermission and leave us.”83 One could not necessarily trust the bandleader or his favored mates. Once he told a band he was with that he was departing for Cab Calloway’s group, and a “free-for-all on the bandstand” ensued and “everybody jumped on me but … Roy Eldridge” and one other. “I was just throwing guys all over the bandstand. We fought all the way down to the hotel” for “ten or fifteen blocks,” followed by “fighting in the cars.” Yet “they didn’t pay me anyway and I ended up with a black eye.”84
CLUBS THAT FEATURED PERFORMANCES of the new music had appeared in Manhattan in the 1920s. The Village Vanguard, which became the premier venue for star artists, started as an all-purpose entertainment joint in 1934 but quickly turned to jazz. It is likely that it is the oldest club where this music is played in the world, or outside of New Orleans, at least. By 1936, Nick Rongetti, a lawyer and aficionado of the music, opened an eponymous club, Nick’s, at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 10th Street, which highlighted so-called traditional jazz. By 1945, as the music reached a critical turning point, Eddie Condon opened a club carrying his surname, with gangster backing, indicating that this force remained resonant.85
This “traditional” form of the music was exemplified by the appropriately named Paul Whiteman, who somehow gained the moniker “King of Jazz.” Like LaRocca, his being surrounded by African American musicians did not seem to impact him positively but instead seemed to engender the opposite reaction, as when he bet on the size of the penis of Negro musician Wilbur Daniels. Of course, this was during a time when these descendants of the enslaved were routinely and insultingly referred to as “jigaboos.”86 This was during a time, says pianist Dr. Billy Taylor, “when white artists took most of the credit for jazz.”87
This was also during a time when the music was seen as a vector of degradation—propelled by the degraded—particularly in the degradation of women defined as “white.”88 What this hysterical reaction reflected was that African American artists were talented and, at times, had celebrity and income, making them attractive to some Euro-American women, a confluence of circumstances that at times had generated violence and lynching. The clubs where the music was performed were often the site of what was termed euphemistically as “race mixing,” seen as a foretaste of the collapse of the color line generally, meaning stiffer competition for resources (and sex).89
This injurious influence had an impact on artists. At a time when much music degraded Negroes as “prancing, dancing and fighting,” the eminent composer and violinist Will Marion Cook, born in 1869, was said to carry a weapon, but worse, he took his anti–New Deal propaganda to outspoken heights.90 It was Cook who controversially demanded a boycott of Louis Armstrong given his management ties since “the Jews of Hollywood, the stage [etc.] exploit only the worst and basest of my race. Let’s stop it now.” This would have been bad enough if he had chosen to stop there but, instead, he punctuated his inflamed remarks with “Heil Hitler!” He had studied music in Berlin91 and was an example of Negroes whose outlook had been so warped by the United States that they turned to outright fascism.
As Prohibition was lurching to a close, coincidentally the Great Depression began to bite, inducing a further outflow of musicians from New Orleans. The mostly Euro-American musicians who came to characterize the music known as Dixieland also included musicians who reflected the dominant culture of Jim Crow, hampering the ability of interracial combos, further limiting opportunities for Black musicians.92 Danny Barker was among the artists forced to flee northward, in his case, to New York City. Pushing them out was the prospect of “more money. Make more money. [Being] treated better” than in Dixie, though