Dangerous Rhythms
Dedication
To all the musicians and jazz club impresarios
who kept the music alive during
the Great Pandemic of 2020–22.
Epigraph
In the primitive world, where people live closer to the earth and much nearer to the stars, every inner and outer act combines to form the single harmony, life. Not just the tribal lore then, but every movement of life becomes a part of their education. They do not, as many civilized people do, neglect the truth of the physical for the sake of the mind . . . The earth is right under their feet. The stars are never far away. The strength of the surest dream is the strength of the primitive world.
—Langston Hughes, The Big Sea
It’s got guts and it don’t make you slobber.
—a Chicago gangster explaining his love for jazz
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Intro
Part One: Major Chord
1. Shadow of the Demimonde
2. Sicilian Message
3. Kansas City Stomp
4. Disfiguration
5. Birth of the Hipster
6. Friends in Dark Places
7. Down on the Plantation
Part Two: Flatted Fifth
8. The Crooner
9. Swing Street
10. “Jazz Provides Background for Death”
11. The Ghost of Chano Pozo
12. Fear and Loathing at the Copacabana
13. The Muck and the Mud
14. Twilight of the Underworld
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Also by T. J. English
Copyright
About the Publisher
Intro
There is a reason that “Strange Fruit” still stands as the seminal jazz song. Written by Abel Meeropol in 1937 and sung so memorably by Billie Holiday two years later, it beckons from the great beyond, elliptical and haunting. The song is both a ballad and a primal scream, an aching tone poem that carries with it the deep, heart-wrenching emotionalism of the blues, as well as the lucid, steely observationalism of someone who has been a witness to history. In form and content, it is a brutal diagnosis of the human condition in B-flat minor. That this song speaks for jazz at the core of its being is no accident. It is a circumstance so sacred that any discerning listener of “Strange Fruit” can hear—and feel—the alchemy of lyrics, poetry, melody, and soulfulness that, through the artistry of Lady Day, rankled the conscience of America and set a new course for what has become this country’s most durable art form.
“Strange Fruit” finds its power in the perverse metaphoric imagery of “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees . . .” Blood on the leaves, blood at the root.
It is a song about lynching.
And it is a song about America.
It is generally agreed that jazz as a new musical art form began to take shape in the early years of the twentieth century. It is not generally commented upon that jazz, in its origins, was a response to the horror and reality of lynching in America. But consider this: From 1882 to 1912, in the thirty years leading up to the onset of jazz, there were 2,329 instances of lynching of Black people in the United States (according to statistics of the Tuskegee Institute). Many believe this number is low, given that the documentation of lynching was suppressed for generations.
During this period, a reign of terror was unleashed upon African Americans. Each act of lynching was designed to have a ripple effect beyond the individual person whose life was taken. The perpetrators meant to send a message to the entire Black community. Ritualistic, methodical, perverse in nature—the killings were designed to extinguish both body and soul.
They were also designed to traumatize the living by sending a chill through the hearts of Negroes that would be internalized and passed down from generation to generation.
Very few Black families in the American South and beyond were not touched in some way by lynching. If it was not a family member, a relative, or a friend who was murdered, it was someone in the community who was perhaps only a few steps removed. Of those many instances of lynching during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each act contributed to the overall effect of violent intimidation. Sometimes the process involved male genitals being severed and ears cut off and kept as trophies or mementos. Sometimes the killings were secretive or clandestine, but just as often they were conducted as public spectacles. Women and children gathered to observe the torture and hanging of a victim. The atmosphere at these events was festive, convivial, with white people gathering to affirm that despite the eradication of slavery as a legal institution, the dictates of white supremacy in the antebellum South would live on.
The fact that these spectacles were sometimes carried out with the acquiescence of legal authorities—politicians, local lawmen, Christian church leaders—undermined the confidence of Negroes in their own country. Lynching was designed to enforce the view that for Black folks in America, a sense of inferiority and terror was their rightful inheritance.
For the would-be inventors of jazz, this was the contemporary state of affairs. Black folks who sought to make music, to partake in a tradition that had flourished on the plantations and elsewhere for generations, did so with the knowledge that they were creating their sounds within a social context that was malignant and hostile.
The instruments were not new. String instruments, various types of horns, the piano, and drums had been around for decades or, in some cases, centuries. But what these early musicians were attempting to do with these instruments was almost beyond calculation.
It is difficult—perhaps even impossible—for people today to grasp the full immensity of what was taking place. The early formations of jazz—the rhythm patterns, melodic phrasings, and occasionally aggressive syncopation—were revolutionary. It has been commented upon that the creation of jazz was an attempt to codify an entirely new language. But it was more than that: Jazz was an attempt to rearrange the molecular structure of the universe, to obliterate recent history and replace it with expressions of joy, inventiveness, and grace. This new music was nothing less than an attempt to achieve salvation through the tonal reordering of time and space. The music was an affirmation of the human spirit, a declaration of the present tense. As the writer Stanley Crouch wrote, “Nothing says ‘I want to live’ as much as jazz.”
It is a quirk of history that around the same time that jazz was first taking shape, organized crime in America was also in its incubation stage. Organized crime, as opposed to random street crime or crimes of passion, was rooted in the economic system of the country. Almost from the beginning, there existed in the United States a belief among some that capitalism was a shell game that involved the exploitation of labor, using violence if necessary. American citizens in the early part of the twentieth century were having to face the truth, only recently documented, that the country’s wealth had been created, in part, through the institution of slavery and the eradication of indigenous populations and the appropriation of their land. This was the home of the free and the land of the brave, a historical narrative written in blood. The criminal underworld, which became the domain of organized crime, was designed to be a parallel universe to the upperworld, both in its philosophical imperatives and its methods.
By now it is a familiar story: Successive waves of immigration filled out the ranks of organized crime. At the street level, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other immigrant groups defined the terms of the underworld, but they did not c
reate the system under which it operated. This was created by the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (WASP) elite—the bank owners, land barons, early industrialists, and manipulators of capital who set the tone for a new century. The dye had been cast, and now the tapestry would be woven.
From the onset, social gathering places such as the saloon and, much later, the nightclub became places for the people to meet. It became commonplace for the financiers and owners of these establishments to be people with one foot, or perhaps both feet, in the underworld. Night people like to socialize and do business with other night people, and from the beginning music played a role as a facilitator of these interactions. As jazz evolved in the early decades of the century, moving from plantations and the streets into the saloons and clubs, it moved from the background into the foreground. Jazz was not music that had been carefully fostered in conservatories or academies. It was the music of the people. And the fact that it flourished mostly at night and became associated with vice—bordellos, gambling, drinking, and artful carousing—only added to its charm.
Many white people, from recent European immigrants to native-born Americans, were as enthused by this new music as were African Americans. The idea that jazz could cross over and become a viable source of commerce became a gleam in the eye of gangsters from sea to shining sea.
The intermingling of jazz and the underworld was there from the beginning—if not musically, certainly as a business enterprise. And it wasn’t always about the profit motive. Many gangsters of all ethnicities were drawn to jazz because they loved its energy and its rhythms. They sought to make this music part of their lives by owning the clubs where jazz was played, or by hanging out there, creating an atmosphere that contributed to and became interchangeable with the structural aspects of ragtime, Dixieland, swing, and bebop.
Jazz was eviscerated by white cultural commentators in its first decade of existence. It was thought of as “jig music.” And then there was the fact that it was played most commonly in places of ill repute—bordellos and clubs owned and run by Sicilian immigrants. These clubs were often located in vice districts made possible by political bosses who were Irish, another ethnic group often denigrated by the WASP ruling class. To top it all off, as the music developed and became more of a commercial venture, the agents and managers who became important brokers for the musicians were often Jewish, the newest target of bigotry and vilification to arrive on these shores.
The fact that jazz was attacked in the newspapers, with quotes from cultural arbiters, music critics, some politicians, and toadies in law enforcement, usually stemmed from the music’s roots in the underworld. Jazz was viewed as being morally suspect. That Negro musicians—in some cases, the sons and daughters of former slaves—were fraternizing with known criminals from the immigrant class was viewed as an unholy alliance. The question was posed: Unless the musicians themselves are of low character, why on earth would they be partnering with men who are ruthless, violent, and hostile to the God-fearing values of polite society (meaning white society)?
The answer to this question was simple: The average Black musician had less to fear from an Italian mafioso inside a club than he did from the average white cracker out on the street. The early twentieth-century musician had less to fear from a gangster than he did from a policeman. For people in the jazz world, the bordello and the honky-tonk were a source of refuge from a society where, among other threats and indignities, lynching was an ongoing nightmare, and had been for generations.
This book is an attempt to chart a narrative course through the history of both jazz and the underworld, focusing on the interactions between the musicians and the mob. As a criminal phenomenon, the mob, as organized crime became known, involved more than just the gangsters. In the case of its association with jazz, it also involved club owners, managers, business agents, record company representatives, and more. It involved people within the system—political bosses, elected representatives, and cops—who were “on the take,” in one manner or another, so as to facilitate the relationship.
The mob’s involvement in the music business is a broad and far-reaching saga. For much of the twentieth century, jazz was the music business in America; there was no other. There had never been a musical phenomenon in the country like jazz. In later decades, rock and roll, rap, and hip-hop surpassed jazz in commercial popularity and cultural relevance, but for seventy years or so, jazz constituted close to 80 percent of record sales and dominated the airwaves through live radio broadcasts. Furthermore, it was the music Americans wanted to hear when they went out for a night on the town.
In crucial ways, the mob used the popularity of jazz in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s as a way to stretch its muscles and expand to cities and small towns all around the country. There was a time when most jazz clubs in cities like New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and Kansas City were “mobbed up.” Throughout the century, this model spread to other cities on the coasts (especially in Los Angeles) and in the Midwest (St. Louis, Detroit, Denver, and others). In the Nevada desert, an entire city was founded on the relationship between jazz and the underworld (Las Vegas), and the model was transported beyond the boundaries of the United States to Havana, Cuba, in an audacious attempt by the mob to go international. The relationship between jazz and the underworld became a method by which the mob franchised and created beachheads in various localities. Through all this, the music developed and evolved according to commercial trends, technological advances, and the artistry of the musicians.
Whether or not this relationship was good for the music or the musicians is a topic of debate. In 1989, on the popular television entertainment program The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, African American bandleader Lionel Hampton made this provocative statement: “History has proven that nobody was better for Black jazz musicians than Al Capone. His nightclubs alone employed hundreds.” Hampton was a political conservative, a member of the Republican Party and a prominent supporter of Ronald Reagan. He was also a businessman, the proprietor of a band that hired and fired musicians on a regular basis. To Hampton, the relationship between the gangster and the musician was to be judged as the fulfillment of a capitalist pact. The mobster hired musicians, which was good for the musicians. End of story. But it is not that simple.
From the beginning, the relationship was based on a kind of plantation mentality. The musician was an employee for hire, not unlike the waitresses, busboys, and doormen who worked at the club. By its very nature, this was unfair to the musician. Patrons were drawn to a nightclub not because of the hired help, they were there because of the artistic talents of the musicians. Various musicians’ unions in different cities did try to establish work rules and basic pay standards, but more often than not, mob-controlled clubs ignored these regulations. They could get away with it because they exerted undue influence over the political and municipal system under which the clubs operated. Through corruption—payoffs to politicians, cops, and city officials that “greased the wheel”—a mob-affiliated club owner guaranteed that things went his way.
This universe of corruption was the context under which the musicians and the mob entered into their working relationship. Whether or not it was good for the musicians is most fairly assessed through the prism of history. Over the years, things changed. By the 1960s and 1970s, with the civil rights struggle redefining the racial dynamics of the country, Black musicians could view their relationship with white mobsters differently than they did back in the 1920s and 1930s. The plantation system was exposed for what it was. Despite the comments of a conservative bandleader like Lionel Hampton, for most musicians of color, the relationship between the mob and the music lost its appeal.
Of course, not all jazz musicians were Black. From the beginning, musicians of all ethnicities were drawn to the music. This presented unique challenges for some, especially, as noted in these pages, Italian American jazz musicians. Most notably singers, these artists sometimes found themselves having to navigate their ethnic proximity to the maf
ia, who, as a subset of the mob, were active participants in the history of jazz almost from the beginning.
This saga is loaded with illuminating anecdotes and a startling cast of characters. On the musical side: Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Louis Prima, and many others. On the underworld side: Al Capone, Owney Madden, Legs Diamond, Mickey Cohen, and Bugsy Siegel, to name a few. The story also includes notorious club owners and talent managers like Morris Levy, Jules Podell, and Joe Glaser, men who walked a line between the two realms.
In the first half of the book, the dominant figure is Louis Armstrong, a founding father of jazz. Armstrong pioneered a new sound on the horn and also embodied the spirit of jazz with a stage persona that was joyous and infectious. He was one of the first true stars of jazz and therefore had to navigate the business side of the music, which brought him deeper and deeper into the orbit of the underworld.
The primary figure in the second half of the book is Frank Sinatra. Through his immense talent and what J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), described as his “hoodlum complex,” the singer melded the worlds of music and organized crime in ways that were unprecedented.
Armstrong and Sinatra were shining lights in a constellation of planets and stars, circling around larger spheres of power while dodging the occasional asteroid. As jazz unfolded throughout the twentieth century, the participants of this saga communed among celestial bodies, but they also wallowed in what the great pianist Mary Lou Williams referred to as “the muck and the mud” of the jazz business.
To jazz purists everywhere, a word about my use of the term “jazz” throughout this book. Some might take exception that a book about jazz includes the likes of Bing Crosby or Joe E. Lewis or, for that matter, Frank Sinatra, whom many probably view as primarily a singer of pop tunes. I could defer here to saxophonist Lester Young, musical genius, hipster, the epitome of a jazzman, who in 1956 said to journalist Nat Hentoff, “If I could put together exactly the kind of band I wanted, the singer would be Frank Sinatra. Really, my man is Frank Sinatra.”