Dangerous Rhythms Read online

  In establishing a jazz singer’s bona fides, there is no higher praise. Even so, for the purposes of this book, it must be acknowledged that there was a time before the mass proliferation of records, cassettes, CDs, and streaming when American music was not nearly as categorized as it would later become. In the first half of the century, American music was American music. Yes, everyone knew that jazz was a specific musical style unto itself, but it existed as part of the whole. Popular singers like Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra, and even Armstrong freely moved between pop and jazz tunes with little commentary or criticism from critics or the public.

  Over the years, a cultural contretemps developed over the definition of what constitutes jazz. Was it exclusively music rooted in blues and swing, or did it, by its very nature, allow for flights of improvisation or borrowings from classical music or music of other cultures?

  This book addresses that subject only tangentially; it is not the central motif of this story. I am not writing here as much about jazz the music, as I am jazz the business and cultural phenomenon. Throughout the century, the culture of jazz was infused with all kinds of music and musicians who did not fit a present-day purist’s definition of jazz. This book addresses aspects of the business—the nightclubs, management relationships, dealings with agents and record companies, the relationship between musicians and mobsters as human beings—that became the foundation for all that came later.

  In the United States, music as a potentially lucrative target for underworld exploitation started with the business of jazz.

  It could be argued that this is not a book about jazz at all. It is a book about the American story, and the ways in which jazz became such an important compositional element of the narrative. You cannot understand America without knowing the history of jazz—or the mob.

  Taken together, they are part of the country’s origin story, symphonically intertwined, like an orchestral extravaganza by Ellington, with harmonic complexity, rich tonal shadings, dissonance, syncopation, and all the other elements that make a piece of music resonate in the imagination and remain timeless. Through the striving of numerous musicians, club owners, record label executives, and gangsters chronicled in this book, the contrapuntal groove between jazz and the underworld emerges as the heartbeat—and the backbeat—to the American Dream.

  Part One

  Major Chord

  1

  Shadow of the Demimonde

  At the age of fourteen, Louis Armstrong of New Orleans was a potent combination of streetwise youth and naïve back-alley urchin with a song in his heart. Already, young Louis had survived the Waif’s Home for Boys, an orphanage for wayward children of color, where he’d been sent for firing a .38 caliber pistol into the sky on New Year’s Eve, 1913. He meant no harm, but possession of the weapon—his stepfather’s—was a violation of the penal codes, so off he went. Louis made the most of the Waif’s Home. It was there, in the school band, that he began to play the cornet in earnest. With a determination and discipline that had heretofore not been present in his life, he learned to hit the high notes and hold it there; he perfected his embouchure; and under the tutelage of a serious instructor, he began to develop a voice on the horn—his own voice—that he would perfect in the years ahead. By the time Louis returned to New Orleans after eighteen months at the Waif’s Home, he was ready to reconfigure his existence in the city, on the planet, and in this universe through the performance and power of music.

  And what music it was! In the last decade, roughly from the turn of the twentieth century, New Orleans had been in the throes of a musical revolution. Few had seen it coming, though in retrospect it was a development that almost seemed preordained. Given the city’s unique cultural inheritance under French, then Spanish, and then American rule, a melting pot of musical flavors had been bubbling for some time. Like the churning waters of the Gulf as the tides enter the mouth of the mighty Mississippi, music in New Orleans was a confluence of rhythms. It wasn’t so much a melding of styles as it was the intermingling of powerful forces, a commingling of sources whose collective flow was irrefutable.

  It came from the plantations.

  Legendary bassist Pops Foster, whose mother was part Cherokee, was born and raised on a plantation near the town of McCall, in Ascension Parish, in south Louisiana. It was on the McCall plantation, in the early years of the new century, that Pops and other children of former slaves began playing a new kind of music on instruments that were often homemade. Pops Foster’s first bass was made by his brother, Willie.

  [Willie] put a two-by-four through the hollow of a flour barrel and nailed it on. We used some kind of wood for a bridge and carved some tuning pegs to stick on the two-by-four. Down on the two-by-four we bounded some nails in to tie the strings to. We couldn’t afford regular strings so we used twine. It had three strings: we’d twist three pieces of twine together for the lowest, then two, then one for the highest. For two or three days we’d rub the twine with wax and rosin before we’d put them on the bass. The first bow was a bent stick with sewing machine thread tied on it. After a while we got a regular bow without any hair on it. For hair we caught a neighbor’s horse and cut the hair off his tail, but it didn’t work, and we went back to the sewing machine thread. My daddy made us use the bow on it, no plucking.

  Pops learned to play the bass using this homemade instrument. Later, his uncle bought him a used cello for $1.50. Pops and his siblings practiced around the plantation. Sometimes they were hired to play at lawn parties and fish frys. In the fields, they played quadrilles, polkas, rags, lancers, and classical variations they’d heard emanating from the boss man’s phonograph. Eventually, friends and fellow musicians came from New Orleans full of excitement about what they were hearing there. Some brought back techniques, sounds, melodies, and musical flights of fancy that were incorporated into what was being played in the fields. A generation was intoxicated; clearly, New Orleans was the place. Budding musicians—including Pops Foster—became part of the flow to the big city in search of musical nirvana.

  It came from the funeral parades.

  New Orleans was known for its many social clubs and associations, some of which had bands that played at community affairs and, most notably, funeral processions that passed through the city’s streets on a regular basis. These bands were often exuberant, even during solemn occasions such as a funeral. They emphasized brass instruments—cornets, clarinets, saxophones, trombones, and tubas—which could be played while walking; and percussion, which became the primary purview of “the second line,” funeral followers who were not part of the immediate family. Quite often the music on these occasions was semi-improvisational. The players would take a well-known song—say, “When the Saints Go Marching In” (which was itself a melding of popular Negro spirituals)—and take it through endless variations to sustain the tune throughout the course of the procession.

  The funeral parades were serious musical displays, and many musicians—especially those who were canny showmen as well as brilliant players—emerged as stars. Cornet player Buddy Bolden, most notably, lit up the sky with his virtuosity and became the first great jazz legend in New Orleans. Young Louis Armstrong first saw and heard Buddy Bolden play at Funky Butt Hall, and like so many others, he was enraptured by the spirit of the music in ways that altered the trajectory of his life.

  It came from the bordellos.

  Prostitution had existed in New Orleans almost from the beginning. The cultural tradition of fancy bordellos was brought to the region by the French, who established the convention of a madam, or matron, who presided over the establishment. The best houses had a well-appointed foyer with lace curtains, Oriental carpets, mirrors, and furniture imported from Europe. Here pimps, johns, and ladies of the evening met, drank champagne, and smoked fine cigars while awaiting the main event in a room upstairs or down the hall. New Orleans had dozens of high-class bordellos, and they all had solo piano players—or sometimes a player piano—and occasionally a singer. The st
yle of the day was a jaunty form of music known as ragtime, and it would formulate one of the major tributaries that led to the creation of modern jazz.

  In the bordellos, the pianists were known as “professors,” and many would become musical deities in their own right. Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, better known as Jelly Roll Morton, did well for himself as Professor Jelly Roll playing at some of the best sporting houses in town. It was here, expanding on the parameters of ragtime, that Morton learned about music and about life.

  Those years I worked for all the houses, even Emma Johnson’s Circus House, where the guests got everything from soup to nuts. They did a lot of uncultured things there that probably couldn’t be mentioned, and the irony part of it, they always picked the youngest and most beautiful girls to do them right before the eyes of everybody . . . A screen was put up between me and the tricks they were doing for the guests, but I cut a slit in the screen, as I had come to be a sport now myself and wanted to see what everybody else was seeing.

  It came from Africa.

  On Sundays in what was once known as Congo Square (now part of Louis Armstrong Park), Blacks gathered to play the drums, chant, sing, and dance. These gatherings involved a near direct transference of rhythm patterns and dance movements from Africa, where rhythmic music has always been as much a spiritual undertaking as a social one. This tradition of drum circles in Congo Square continued throughout much of the nineteenth century, right up until the birth of jazz as the city’s popular musical form. The renowned Creole reed player Sidney Bechet, born in New Orleans in 1897, eventually found fame and a livelihood on a world stage, but he never forgot his roots.

  My grandfather, that’s about the furthest I can remember back. Sundays when the slaves would meet—that was their free day—he beat out rhythms on the drums in the square—Congo Square they called it . . . He was a musician. No one had to explain notes or feeling or rhythms to him. It was all there inside him, something he was always sure of.

  Congo Square was a place of profound cultural expression, and it was also where, on the other days of the week, slave trading took place. Thus, in New Orleans, music and slave commerce were inexorably intertwined; the ground on which the roots of jazz found fertile soil was also a locale of capitalist exploitation and sorrow. Eventually, this bitter reality would become the emotional foundation of the blues, another musical form whose folkloric impetus comes from the African continent.

  The kind of vocal blues made famous by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and many others was not indigenous to New Orleans; the blues singing tradition mostly came from the Delta. But the harmonic and emotional content of this music became the soulful core of jazz in the Crescent City. In later years, when people made note of a certain New Orleans sound or New Orleans style of jazz, they were, knowingly or not, referring directly to those elements of the blues that found their way into the bloodstream of the new music.

  Little Louis

  Back o’ Town was a Black slum neighborhood in the city renowned for its legacy of poor sanitation and municipal neglect. During the city’s periodic epidemics of yellow fever throughout the nineteenth century, Back o’ Town was hit hard. In such a densely populated area, the disease spread easily, and many people became feverish; unable to hold down food, they succumbed to diarrhea and nausea. Quickly, they wasted away and died a horrible death. (From dust they came and to dust they returned.) This tradition of pestilence and institutional dereliction of duty in what passed for city services continued into the new century. Local inhabitants were proud of their neighborhood, which was as commercially active as any Black neighborhood in the city. But inhabitants often found themselves on the losing end of battles with rats, stray dogs, cockroaches, water bugs, and assorted vermin drawn by horse manure and other effluvia that piled up in the streets. The other problem was flooding. Located between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, Back o’ Town was frequently underwater due to poor drainage.

  It was in this neighborhood that Louis Armstrong, born August 4, 1901, was first introduced to the world. As a child, he accepted the good with the bad. The physical environment of Back o’ Town was a mess, but this was also a vibrant red light district teeming with humanity.

  Little Louis, as he was known to his family and friends, had a hungry curiosity and an open heart almost from the beginning. As a kid, Armstrong was compelled to navigate an environment that was rambunctious and sometimes threatening. James Alley, the little street where Armstrong’s home was located, ran through a part of the neighborhood known as the Battlefield. In a memoir published in 1954, Armstrong remembered:

  [They called it the Battlefield] because the toughest characters in town used to live there and would shoot and fight so much. In that one block between Gravier and Perdido Streets more people were crowded than you ever saw in your life. There were church people, gamblers, hustlers, cheap pimps, thieves, prostitutes and lots of children. There were bars, honky-tonks and saloons, and lots of women walking the streets for tricks to take to their “pads,” as they called their rooms . . . [My mother] told me that the night I was born there was a great big shooting scrape in the Alley, and the two guys killed each other.

  Little Louis’s parents split when he was a child; there is no record that they were ever married. The future jazz legend was raised in Back o’ Town primarily by his grandmother. He later moved in with his mother, whom he worshipped to the point that he was ridiculed as a “momma’s boy” by other kids in the neighborhood. This led to a fistfight, which Armstrong claims to have won, but he would later admit he was not a fighter by nature. He was a fun-loving kid with a big smile who was popular with the many streetwalkers, pimps, and working-class citizens who populated his neighborhood.

  In the middle of the fifth grade, Armstrong dropped out of school. His mother hardly noticed. When she wasn’t working as a domestic for a white family in the Garden District, she was turning tricks with men she brought home. Louis and his sister referred to these men euphemistically as “stepfathers.” “All I had to do was turn my back and a new ‘pappy’ would appear,” Armstrong wrote in his memoir, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (published in 1954). “Some of them were fine guys, but others were low lives.” Young Louis took to the streets and got by on charm and sincerity. He got a job selling newspapers in the neighborhood and fell in with an older crowd of boys.

  When we were not selling newspapers we shot dice for pennies or played a little coon can or blackjack. I got to be a pretty slick player and I could hold my own with the other kids. Some nights I would come home with my pockets loaded with pennies, nickels, dimes, and even quarters. Mother, sister, and I would have enough money to go shopping. Now and then I even bought mother a new dress, and occasionally I got myself a pair of short pants in one of the shops on Rampart Street.

  Little Louis soaked up the sights and sounds of the city. He sought out the music, which was prevalent in the saloons and honky-tonks, which, technically, he was prohibited from entering due to his age. But the music often spilled out into the street, and Armstrong saw the effect it had on people. Before he’d ever even touched a cornet, he was drawn to the sound of that instrument and paid careful attention to the great players he heard: Bolden, Bunk Johnson, and especially Joe “King” Oliver, who would one day become a significant mentor to the aspiring young musician.

  At the time, Armstrong could not afford any kind of instrument, much less a cornet. But he and his closest friends had been bit by the bug, so they formed an impromptu vocal quartet that strolled the streets singing harmonies and songs for spare change. Armstrong and his friends didn’t know it, but they were engaged in an early twentieth-century version of an American tradition that would continue, in updated forms, for the next hundred years. Whether it be doo-wop singers harmonizing on a street corner in the Bronx or rappers spitting out lyrics in a park in South Central L.A., it was an organic way for new vocal traditions to take shape and give birth to entirely new musical forms.

  We began by walkin
g down Rampart Street between Perdido and Gravier. The lead singer and the tenor walked together in front followed by the baritone and the bass [Armstrong was a tenor]. Singing at random we wandered through the streets until someone called to us to sing a few songs. Afterwards we would pass our hats and at the end of the night we would divvy up. Most of the time we would draw down a nice little taste. Then I would make a bee line for home and dump my share into mama’s lap.

  In the honky-tonks and saloons, Armstrong noticed something right away: The best musicians—Joe Oliver, for example—played in the clubs that were frequented by a certain breed of clientele. The term used back then to describe the gamblers, pimps, and “players” of distinction was “sporting men”; later generations would refer to this breed as “gangsters.” They had a certain style, and they had power. In fact, many of them seemed to own the very honky-tonks where the best musicians plied their trade. Armstrong was too young to fully comprehend the stratified layers of this world, but he sensed instinctively that succeeding in this adult realm of music involved learning the lay of the land. It was a task he would spend nearly the rest of his life seeking to master.

  By the time he returned from the Waif’s Home for Boys, Armstrong had set his sights on a life in music. Thanks to his time at the orphanage, he could play the cornet with the skills of an adult, and he had begun to develop talents as a performer. People loved to watch this young kid play his horn. By the age of fourteen, he had established a reputation locally as a musical prodigy.

  One night, a friend named “Cocaine” Buddy Martin told him about a gig at a local honky-tonk in the city’s red light district. “The boss man’s name is Andrew Pons,” said Cocaine Buddy. “He is one of the biggest operators in the red light district, and he ain’t scared of nobody. He wants a good cornet player . . . All you have to do is put on your long pants and play the blues for the whores that hustle all night. They come in with a big stack of money in their stockings for their pimps. When you play the blues they will call you sweet names and buy you drinks and give you tips.”