Jazz and Justice. Gerald Horne
of bebop harmed his career: “Yes it did. It did,” he insisted. It “affected everybody” when the music turned as even “your children say” with a Bronx cheer, “Pop, that’s old … they don’t play that anymore,” and “you can’t tell them that they’re wrong.” Fortunately, he was still appreciated in Europe, and, as so often happened, that helped him closer to home. “Toronto,” he insisted, reigned as “the greatest jazz town in North America. The people there really go for jazz and they really enjoy it.” But Autrey, like others overtaken by the advent of bebop, was resentful, which even hurt when he was forced by the traditional bandleader Lester Lanin to audition, which this veteran found insulting. “I walked the hell out … I cursed him out” before acceding, then storming out again yelling “to hell with you.”75
THERE WERE OTHER SIGNS OF DISSATISFACTION among Negro artists, which primed the pump for an artistic breakthrough. Jelly Roll Morton, a putative inventor of the new music, died in 1941 as this new era of bebop was hatching. But a few years later an interview with him was published that captured the zeitgeist. He was “bitter” about his experience in New York City. “He hadn’t been successful there,” and “he blamed the gangs. He said the gangs ran the bands in New York. He had no … connection with the gangs there so he had never made any money or gained any prominence.” This lack of connection also meant “his tunes had been stolen from him and sold in Tin Pan Alley.” Thus “Grandpa’s Spells” had become “Glad Rag Doll,” meaning he had been cheated of a fortune—or so he thought.76 Circumventing racketeers was a preoccupation of musicians. Ironically, wrote instrumentalist Rex Stewart, “King” Oliver spent a lot time playing in Capone’s Chicago, avoiding New York City because of the influence of the “syndicate.”77
Danny Barker has asserted that Morton was “forever beefing about and against ASCAP,” since “he signed his songs over to some publishers and they became wealthy, but Jelly received no royalties as the composer.”78
Also effectively blocking African American musicians from opportunity was the “white” union. Art Farmer, trumpeter, recalled that during the war a “lot of guys were in the army and big bands could still get jobs,” which theoretically meant more jobs for those like himself. When bandleader Horace Henderson came to his high school to recruit, Farmer was ready: “I remember going to school hungry a lot of times,” he recalled. So, then, in Arizona, “we went over there to the headquarters of the musicians’ union in Phoenix but they had no black members. We said we want to join the union and they said no. Then we wrote letters back to the headquarters of the union and to the president saying we want to join the union and they’re telling us we can’t join.” He moved on to Los Angeles then being transformed by a simultaneous internment of Japanese-Americans and arrival of African Americans. There, he recounted, “the black local was 767, the white local was 47,” with the former sited on Central Avenue and 17th Street: “The house next door was the house of [the] Young family. Lester’s house.” The saxophonist had relocated from Kansas City. “Downstairs was where the offices were, upstairs was just for rehearsals.” But like San Francisco to the north, Los Angeles, he said, was a “very restrictive town as far as police were concerned. They really bothered us…. They used to stop us … just for one joint you could get 90 days.” But the Negro local of musicians proved helpful, further bonding these artists with spillover effects on the music. “It was unheard of to be a musician and not to be a member of the union,” said Farmer, speaking in 1995, “like it is now.” This earlier situation was due in no small part to the solidarity musicians desired in the face of Jim Crow, which in turn fostered fruitful musical exchanges.79
Yet Barney Bigard, who had been thought to be otherwise, was said in late 1943 to be “not a Negro” and was now seeking to join Local 47; musicians of Mexican and Filipino ancestry who had attempted to join Local 767 were forced to join 47 instead, even though some preferred to belong to the Negro local. At this point, only two locals of the American Federation of Musicians—in New York City and Detroit—were said to admit Negroes to full membership; of the 673 locals in the American Federation of Musicians, 631 were limited to those defined as “white” and a few dozen or so were limited to Negroes.80
This attempt to bar other minorities from joining the Negroes was not just an attempt to forestall a “colored” alliance against white supremacy; it was also an indication of the ongoing attempt to isolate and persecute African Americans as a result of fighting against the slaveholders’ republic and a Jim Crow regime and allying with U.S. antagonists in doing so.81 By early 1944, it was reported that Bigard was “rejected for membership in [the] white union.”82 Yet by May 1945, it was reported that “though Barney gained his rep with the Duke [Ellington], his new orchestra consists of white musicians.”83
The rigidly enforced Jim Crow drove artists together and often shielded others from sharing effectively in the resultant musical bounty. “Trummy” Young resided in Harlem at 555 Edgecombe Avenue, #9H, then turned the apartment over to Johnny Hodges, yet another masterly musician. His peer, Don Redman, was next door. Boxer Joe Louis was on the first floor, close by Erskine Hawkins, trumpeter. Unavoidably there was a sharing of ideas, musical and otherwise, with mutual benefit.84
Jim Crow perversely and maniacally reinforced musical trends and norms among African Americans to the detriment of those denied access. Thus, the bassist George “Red” Callender, born in Virginia in 1916 but a longtime resident of Los Angeles, recalled when he was tasked to perform at a “Black and White Revue” in New York City, “They needed a bass player,” but he did not recognize that the descriptor of the sessions “means just what it says. There was a black part of the show and a white part … we’d go on separately. The same band played for both parts but the white part of the show would go on first and the black part would go on second.” To his immense benefit, it was there, said Callender, “when I first met Art Tatum,” the pianist whose keyboard mastery was seen as almost mystical. Then he met Roy Eldridge, another giant.85
Marshal Royal, clarinetist and saxophonist, was in Southern California in the early 1940s. “Italian gangsters, the Rizzoto brothers,” as he recalled, “had enough influence with the police downtown that they could run an after-hour joint upstairs” and “they always hired a piano player,” luminaries “like Fats Waller.” Indeed, “I used to go up there quite often with Fats Waller.” It was in such venues, sites of misery and musical exhilaration combined, that new musical trends were developed. “Blues singing,” he declared, “came from despair and things that were wrong in people’s lives, where people were tearing their hearts out…. The same thing [holds] with jazz music … new ideas come from jazz guys out of frustration and pride … a lot of the things that have come out of jazz are just out of frustration … to just try to do something that nobody else can do”—and be “inventive” in doing so.86
Drummer Foreststorn “Chico” Hamilton—that’s an “Apache name,” he said referring to his given moniker, who was in the military from 1941 to 1945, had chilling experiences then: “I was at a lynching and didn’t even know it,” he said, referring elliptically to being “down in Mississippi.”87 Similarly, the vocalist Jon Hendricks was with U.S. forces in Europe during the war: “We had race riots all the way—constant fights with American white soldiers,” not least “because in England or Scotland or Wales there was a shortage of black women,” and Hendricks and those like him were embraced across the heterosexual color line: “To the southern whites and the northern American whites that was something that we were not supposed to do.” Hence, said Hendricks, “they would just attack us in full force and with weapons. It caused a lot of—it caused some deaths and a lot of woundings. A lot of blood was shed over this, because this went on all the time. So we took to carrying guns in our waist bands,” something not unknown to Negro musicians in the United States in any case.88
Whether to join the military was not an easy choice to make for African Americans; that is, why make the ultimate sacrifice for a government and a nation that treated you so shabbily? The drummer Elvin Jones recalled that during the First World War his father received a draft notice. Furious, “he walked from Vicksburg to Jackson. That’s 60 miles,” he estimated