Jazz and Justice. Gerald Horne
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