better, overall, in the diaspora than they did in America where jazz and its inventors ...... upscale jazz establishments like The Quartier Latin, a real cost: it was so ...
1
INTRODUCTION In the early years of the twentieth century when the musical genre commonly known as “jazz” emerged in America, it was berated almost immediately in mainstream publications and considered to be the embodiment of savagery, of little consequence, and ephemeral. At the end of Reconstruction in 1877, a cultural hierarchy, which placed African American culture at the bottom, was established in America as the nineteenth century came to a close. As far as America’s cultural hierarchy, jazz, an African American cultural product, was given the very low status of its inventors: surprisingly, this was not the case outside America. Little attention has been given to the differential cultural experiences of the African American jazz performers who refused to accept Jim Crow Laws, and the way that they were being treated at home. According to Ingrid Monson “The pull of African Americans in Britain, especially its music and its civil rights and black power movements, emphasizes the importance of African American travel to Europe as a source of diasporic crossfertilization. The implications of musicians as travelers for issues of globalization have not been sufficiently analyzed.”1 (I experienced the differential acceptance of African American jazz abroad first-hand when I went to Copenhagen in 1983, frustrated with the rapid demise of the places where we used to play jazz: nightclubs started using disc jockeys to replace bands. My fieldwork in Europe continued for the next sixteen years, and included The Netherlands, England, France, and Germany. I usually start my sojourns in Copenhagen and work my way west by train, crossing the waterways between Denmark and Germany by ferry. Over time, I have observed some dramatic socio-cultural changes in Europe, 1
Ingrid Monson, ed., The African Diaspora (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000), 7.
2 especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, changes that have had an effect on African American jazz musicians going abroad.) This book provides evidence that African American jazz musicians fared better, overall, in the diaspora than they did in America where jazz and its inventors were born: To speak of diaspora evokes many interrelated ideas; dispersion, exile, ethnicity, nationalism, transnationalism, postcolonialism, and globalization among them. African in front of the term adds the concept of race and racism, conjuring debates of Pan-Africanism, black nationalism, essentialism, and hybridity as well as invoking issues of history, modernity, and cultural memory.2 Therefore, the “concept” of “race” must be a central component of the discourse here, and it will be dealt with in anthropological terms, as well as in social terms. (As a result, the reader may find portions of this book disturbing or distasteful, for one’s repressed feelings regarding their presumed “race” may be drawn into question.) In Anthropology & Race, Eugenia Shanklin posited that “Prior to the eighteenth century, race was an uncommon idea in Western society, but it became enormously popular in scientific circles in the nineteenth century and underwent many changes in both scientific and popular conceptions.”3 Curiously, the popularity of “race” was concurrent with the burgeoning Atlantic Slave Trade, during which Europeans were making massive profits from their human cargo: “race” served as a convenient justification for their enterprise. Shanklin makes the seminal point that “race is not a valid scientific concept; it is a critical construct in folk taxonomies (including those that underpin most social sciences). A folk taxonomy is the popular way of naming or classifying things, of categorizing perceived differences.”4
2
Ibid., 1.
3
Eugenia Shanklin, Anthropology & Race (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1994), iv.
4
Ibid., v.
3 Formatted: Indent: First line: 0.5"
Introduction to Physical Anthropology, written by Harry Nelson and Robert Jurmain, offers a rather comprehensive list in Box 7-1 of the “racial” classification schemes that Europeans developed in order to establish a scientific basis for their presumed superiority. To say that “races” do indeed exist is rather easy, however proving the existence of “races” turned out to be quite problematic for those who believed in, and promoted, the concept of “race.” In seventeenth century France, Dr. François Bernier may have been the first to make a ‘scientific’ attempt at dismembering the world’s population into identifiable “races.” Bernier claimed that there were four races: “Europeans, Far Easterners, Blacks, and Lapps”5 in 1684, however Carolus Linnaeus disagreed with Bernier in 1758, claiming that the “races” were “Homo europaeus, Homo asiaticus, Homo afer, and Homo americanus.” (In the case of North America alone, the reader can see that Linnaeus’s Homo americanus classification presents some problems, since Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans lived in close proximity, and a great deal of mating between these populations was taking place.) Dr. Johann Blumenbach of Germany disagreed with both Bernier and Linnaeus; Blumenbach claimed that the “races” were “Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay, Ethiopian, and American.” Again, Blumenbach’s American “race” classification presents some problems, but his classification scheme remains with us to this day; Blumenbach poured seeds and gunshot into his collection of skulls in order to measure the cranial capacities of his specimens, which he then placed into their respective categories based on the number of seeds, or gunshot, that each skull would hold. Thus, when a person is classified as “Caucasian,” it is a direct result of Blumenbach’s folk taxonomy, which relied on seeds and gunshot.
5Harry
Nelson and Robert Jurmain, Introduction to Physical Anthropology (St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1988), 186.
4 In 1861, E.G. Saint Hilaire disagreed with Bernier, Linnaeus, and Blumenbach, claiming that the Caucasian “race” must be divided into two categories: “Caucasian and Alleghenian,” the Mongolian “race” must be divided into six categories: “Hyperborean, Malay, American, Mongolian, Paraborean, and Australian,” the Ethiopian “race” must be divided into four categories: “Kaffir, Ethiopian, Negro, and Melanesian.” Saint Hilaire put the San of South Africa into an altogether new “race” because they were dark-skinned with kinky hair, but their eyes had the so-called “epicanthic fold” that was associated with the Mongolian “race,” so he named them Hottentots: they just didn’t fit into any of the existing “races.” Thomas Huxley created the Xanthochroid and Melanochroid “races” in 1870. Northern Europeans were classified as Xanthochroid while “Southern Europeans, Arabs, Afghans, and Hindus” were classified as Melanochroids; Huxley divided the rest of humanity into three “races”: Negroid, which included the “Bushmen” whom Saint Hilaire had named Hottentots; Australoid, which included “Australians, Dravidians, and Ethiopians,” and Mongoloid, which included “Mongols, Polynesians, American Eskimos,” and the so-called Malay. J. Deniker disagreed with Bernier, Linnaeus, Blumenbach, Saint Hilaire, and Huxley in 1900 claiming that humanity really consisted of “types” instead of “races.” Deniker claimed that there were six distinct types: the “wooly hair with broad nose type” that included “Bushmen, Negritos, Negroes, and Melanesians,” the curly or wavy hair type that included “Ethiopians, Australians, Dravidians, and Assyroids,” the wavy brown or black hair with dark eyes type that included “IndoAfghans, Arabs of Semites, Berbers, Littoral Europeans, Ibero-insulars, Western Europeans, and Adriatics,” the fair, wavy or straight hair with light eyes type which included “Northern and Eastern Europeans,” the straight or wavy hair, dark with black eyes type included “the Ainu of Japan, Polynesians, Indonesians, South Americans,” the straight hair type included “Northern Americans, Central Americans, Patagonians, Eskimos, Lapps, Ugrians, Turks, and Mongols.”
5 E. A. Hooten disagreed with his predecessors and claimed, in 1946, that there were three “Primary Races” with “composite races, composite subraces, and residual mixed types” within the three primary races. According to Hooten, the “White Primary Race” had six primary subraces: “Mediterranean, Ainu, Keltic, Nordic, Alpine, and East Baltic,” three composite races that included “Australians, Indo-Dravidians, and Polynesians,” two composite subraces that included “Armenoids and Dinarics,” and residual mixed types that included “Nordic-Alpines and Nordic-Mediterraneans.” Hooten’s “Negroid Primary Race” was less complex, and it did not have any composite subraces or residual mixed types: it was comparatively straightforward; the primary subrace included “African Negroes, Nilotic Negroes, and Negritos.” The composite race included only the “BushmenHottentot,” those problematic Africans with the so-called Mongoloid-looking eyes. Hooten’s “Mongoloid Primary Race” was also comparatively straightforward, and it had no composite subrace or mixed residual types; the primary subraces were “Classic Mongoloid and Arctic Mongoloid,” and the composite races were “Indonesian-Mongolian and American Indian.” Notably, Hooten claimed that Mongoloids had a secondary subrace that included “Malay-Mongoloids and Indonesians.” No other “race” had a secondary subrace. Around the same time that Hooten was active, Dr. Henry Field, the former Curator of Physical Anthropology of the Field Natural History Museum and his colleague Dr. W. D. Hambly, Curator of African Ethnology for the Chicago Natural History Museum, which had been the Field Museum of Natural History before it was renamed, published The Races of Mankind. In this 1946 publication, Field and Hambly claimed that Somalis, Ethiopians, Nubians, and Moroccans were of “White Stock,” while Senegalese, Sudanese, Ubangi, and Zulus were of “Negro Stock.” Field and Hambly explained the so-called “Bushmen” of the Kalahari Desert by categorizing them as a “Negro-Mongoloid mixture.” Lapps were categorized as a “White-Mongoloid mixture,” however the rest of Europe’s population, and Turkey’s as well, was classified as “White Stock.” Field and Hambly’s treatment of Asia was
6 even more outrageous: for example, they explained that “Hawaiian Man” was a “White-Mongoloid-Negro mixture,” apparently descending in order of importance. These racial classification schemes did not satisfy Stanley Garn, who claimed in 1965 that there were “Geographical Races” and “Local Races,” populations separated by natural barriers like mountains of bodies of water, and local “races” who maintained their separation by social or natural boundaries. According to Garn, the “Geographical Races” are “Amerindian, Polynesian, Micronesian, Melanesian-Papuan, Australian, Asiatic, Indian, European, and African,” and the “Local
Races”
are
“Northwest
European,
Northeast
European,
Alpine,
Mediterranean, East African, Bantu, Tibetan, North Chinese, Extreme Mongoloid, and Hindu.” Garn also claimed that cities or neighborhoods could contain “MicroRaces” as well. In sum, none of the aforementioned folk taxonomies are in agreement, nor did they involve genetics, and the concept of “race” is no longer valid in science, even though it is alive and well in the mainstream of civilization. Research on mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) has yielded evidence that strongly suggests that all modern human populations descended from a woman in Africa about 200,000 years ago;
therefore,
all
humans
have
an
African
ancestry
in
common.
Paleoanthropologists have traced the origin of humans to East Africa where they discovered the remains of Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba (dated at 5.7 million years ago), Ardipithecus ramidus (4.4 million years ago), Australopithecus anamensis (4.1 million years ago), Australopithecus afarensis (3.2 million years ago), Homo habilis (2.5 million years ago), and Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago). Taung, South Africa is the site where Australopithecus africanus (3.0 million years ago) was found by Dr. Raymond Dart; South Africa is also the location where the earliest know fossils of Homo sapiens sapiens were found at the Klasies River Mouth site (dated at about 125,000 years ago). In America, a folk taxonomy based on the One-Drop-Rule developed, and it reduced the dismemberment of its population to “blacks” and “whites,” with the
7 former serving as a marker of inferiority and the later serving as a marker of privilege. The U.S. Public Health Service has been compiling records on the life expectancies of “Negro” and “White” males and females since the nineteenth century; I used these data to calculate and predict the differential life spans of jazz and classical musicians, and the results were statistically significant. (The Office of Management and Budget Statistical Directive 15, which was implemented in the early 1970s, now dictates what “race” a person can be on job application forms and other official documents: the “other” option is available for those who believe that they do not fit into any of the “races” that forms generally offer.) Throughout this book, the reader will encounter the terms darkey, negro, colored, the “N” word, and other derogatory references to African Americans that have been used over time; these terms reflect the distorted prescriptions of “race.” (In an age of political correctness, it is easy for us to forget that it was only in the late 1960s that African Americans became “Black,” and the term took on a more positive connotation, one of self-determination.) And these terms are still in use: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which was founded by whites after a Springfield, Illinois race riot, and the United Negro College Fund, exemplify this fact. The extent to which “race” affected African American jazz musicians abroad is far-reaching; that is, white American racism followed them around the globe, even as far away as China. Some of the resultant social situations were bittersweet, at best. For example, trumpeter Buck Clayton of Parsons, Kansas was a hot commodity in Shanghai, China in the 1930s; his records were widely distributed around the world, and he was extremely popular. The demand for African American bands was high in Europe and Asia:
Buck Clayton arrived in Shanghai with his jazz orchestra for an extended engagement at the elegant Canidrome Ballroom. For Clayton—who would go on to jazz fame as a member of the Count Basie Orchestra—the sojourn in Shanghai represented “the happiest two years” of his life, during which he felt he “finally” received the sort of respect and recognition that had been
8 denied him in his native country because of his color. The city in which Clayton found himself was a “seventh heaven for the jazz musician,” a “Paris of the East” that far outstripped the real Paris in terms of “the appreciation of jazz.”6 There was no segregation based on skin color in China, however there was a class system in place: coolies (Chinese peasants) were treated poorly by almost everyone, except for the African American musicians with whom they identified; they understood one another’s status in the colonial administration. Clayton was booked to play with his band at what was probably the most prestigious ballroom in Shanghai in 1935: “So elite was the club’s patronage, in fact, that China’s ‘first lady’ Madame Chiang Kai-shek attended the orchestra’s first performance at the club with her sister Elsie Soong, who went on to take private lessons in tap dancing from Clayton’s trombone player, Duke Upshaw.”7 Buck Clayton had created a sensation in Shanghai, but American racism surfaced and it brought about the end of Clayton’s newly-found happiness:
Their identity as African Americans, however, soon landed them in trouble with their fellow expatriates in Shanghai. The first intimation of the kind of homegrown American racism that would eventually cost the band their cozy position at the Canidrome is also an object lesson in the tangled colonial hierarchies into which Clayton and his band had been placed by their presence in Shanghai. Almost a month after arriving at the Canidrome, Clayton and several members of the band were assaulted by a contingent of American marines. Riding in rickshaws and shouting racial epithets, the soldiers hurled bricks at Clayton and his sidemen. A melee ensued, from which the musicians emerged more or less victorious, if not unscathed.8 After the fight, the Chinese coolies who witnessed the event followed the African American musicians home, cheering them all the way for their courage. This
6
Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 1.
7
Ibid., 4.
8
Ibid.
9 was only the start of the African American musicians’ problems that were initiated by American racism abroad, though: It was also an American marine who sucker-punched Clayton one night as he introduced a new act recently imported from the United States, the Hollywood Blondes. The blow was landed (in full view of the nightclub’s elegant patrons) in retribution for the ostensible crime of having looked at a white woman; a nasty brawl resulted. A telegram from a group of white Southerners threatened the Chinese owners of the club with a hail of machine-gun bullets if Clayton should appear onstage at the ballroom.9 The Canidrome Ballroom cancelled Buck Clayton’s engagement, the band was sued for the damages that resulted from the fight that was thrust upon them, and Buck didn’t even have enough money to pay his passage back to America. Fortunately, he scrounged up a few gigs and was able to leave China in July of 1937, which was two weeks before the Japanese invaded and occupied China: the atrocities committed by the Japanese during this invasion are notorious, including the infamous Unit 731 and the Japanese death factories where all of their Chinese victims perished. Thus, Clayton’s escape was a timely one. Buck Clayton’s experiences offer a counterpoint to what African American jazz musicians like Dexter Gordon, Kenny Clarke, Ed Thigpen, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Art Farmer, Albert Ayler, Dr. Nathan Davis, and numerous others encountered as they established thriving jazz communities in the diaspora that remain vital to this day. For example, when Sidney Bechet played at London’s Buckingham Palace in 1919 as a result of the king’s special request, he exchanged pleasantries with King George V, who said that out of everything that the band had played, he enjoyed the song Characteristic Blues the most. Often, it was the first time that many African Americans had been treated like human beings in their lives; once they returned home, all of that changed.
9
Ibid., 5.
10 Here, we must also consider the differential ways that Africans from France’s colonies and African Americans were treated during the World War I years; author Brett Berliner examines this phenomenon, and points out the emasculating prescriptive imagery and commentary that was widespread among Europe’s colonizing nation states in Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France. African soldiers were segregated from the French population in order to keep them away from Paris, and from French women: fears of the Black males’ sexual potency were rampant. “Savages were threatening in the bedroom as well as on the battlefield. But the Tharauds assuaged any metropolitan fear about the danger of black men around white women by representing the savage soldier as a sheepish child, resigned to his race and his fate.”10 At the same time, white men, even married ones, usually had an African woman that they kept as a concubine, known as a petit épouse; this practice was so common that it hardly merited any discourse. White women, like Nancy Cunnard, who dared to taste the forbidden fruit and openly wear African jewelry, often faced punishments for their presumed excesses:
Her stylish references separated her from conventions of refinement, yet curiously her refinement is reinforced by her accessories: they were intended to enhance and complement, and during this period were read like a shorthand for the ‘exotic.’ Nevertheless, Cunnard’s predilection for African forms went beyond the mere sporting of fashion accessories. Despite theis censures of her family, she dared to have an affair with the black musician Henry Crowder. It led to her eventual disinheritance and excommunication from the wealthy Cunnard family.11 When African American troops landed in France, they fought side-by-side with the French troops and established an unprecedented camaraderie; they became war heroes and the bearers of the new “high” culture that captured the world’s 10
Brett A. Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 27.
11
Petrine Archer-Shaw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 93.
11 attention: African American jazz! This created a scenario that I would term both ambivalent and paradoxical. One the one hand, Europeans were trying to justify their colonial activities by claiming that they were “racially” superior, while on the other hand they were praising the African American soldiers for their bravery in battle and their ability to play the best scored music in the world. African American jazz musicians were in demand all over Europe, and their mobility was not encumbered: there were no Jim Crow trains. Certainly, one direct effect that African American jazz musicians had on the diaspora was that they actually changed the course of both world wars of the twentieth century. At the end of World War I, Lt. James Reese Europe’s 369th Infantry Band known as “The Hellfighters” were so popular that after they defeated the Germans, the Germans were cheering them as they marched in to occupy their cities. Jim Europe and his band were winning the war with machine guns in one hand, and their instruments in the other, handling both masterfully. During World War II, the African American saxophonist Benny Carter was so popular with the German soldiers that his fliers were being passed among them, detailing where Carter was playing, while they dug in at the Russian Front: Nazis Hans Bluthner, Lt. Dietrich Schulz-Kohn, and Werner Daniels risked their lives during the Nazi occupation of Europe to promote American jazz musicians and distribute news about what these musicians were doing. (Luftwaffe Lt. Dietrich Schulz-Kohn reproduced the fliers using Nazi stationery.) Josephine Baker’s participation in the French Resistance was so extensive that the Nazis offered a reward of 100,000 francs for her capture. With more than forty years experience as a musician, I am writing about the socio-cultural dichotomy of jazz praxis, at home and in the diaspora, from the inside out. I must point out the fact that this is not a history of jazz nor a discography review, though it involves some jazz history and discography. Rather, I am examining some of the cultural and microeconomic externalities that contributed to the migration trends of African American jazz musicians whom I believe are of
12 substantial importance. In order to do this, one must indeed be able to pass as a member of the group, in no uncertain terms. This requires both the ability to play jazz and the cultural acceptance of the group: as we have learned from ethnographic studies in anthropology, it is the group who decides who is a member, not the individual. There are a number of people who write about jazz, or discuss jazz, but they can’t play it. Therefore, how much do they actually “know” about jazz? Everything that they “know” is certainly second-hand if they have never played jazz “under fire” as we say. This means playing jazz in front of real audiences at gigs (the word “gig” was first used by James Reese Europe in New York, according to Eubie Blake, to refer to scheduled engagements that he contracted for jazz musicians). As Ingrid Monson points out, “Translating musical experience and insight into written or spoken words is one of the most fundamental frustrations of musical scholarship. Charles Seeger called this dilemma the linguocentric predicament – no matter how elegantly an author writes, there is something fundamentally untranslatable about musical experience.”12 The definitive feature that is said to separate jazz from other music genres is that the individual’s improvisation is paramount, although improvisation is used in other music genres as well. On the surface, jazz improvisation may seem easy: “Oh, I can just play what I feel…no problem” so to speak. In reality, it doesn’t work like that. Underlying what ‘sounds easy’ while listening to a jazz recording is a level of technical complexity that has never been, altogether, sorted out: that’s why we don’t have any more Art Tatums or Charlie Parkers around. Though their music has been transcribed, copied, and imitated, no one has been able to decipher its underlying genius. A jazz musician has to “go into the shed” for years, usually decades, in order to produce the sound that the listener ultimately hears. Is it in the notes that are being played? Is it something special about the instruments that are being used? When European musicians first heard James Reese Europe’s band, they were convinced that the African American jazz musicians were using modified 12
Ingrid Monson, Saying Something (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 74.
13 instruments to get the sounds that they were making: upon close inspection, they found that nothing had been done to modify the instruments. It was a matter of how the instruments were being played, as opposed to some sort of physical modification. The topic of African American jazz musicians in the diaspora piqued my interest after I had been in instrumental music for over twenty years. The effect that this music genre has had on the world is only now being realized according to Christopher Harlos:
Now, however, in two distinct but related movements, it is possible to observe a significant transformation in jazz writing’s business-as-usual. The one movement, within which musicologists like Tomlinson, DeVeaux, and Porter could be cast, is discovered in that expansion of jazz titles among scholarly presses and academic journals – attributable to the growing acknowledgement that jazz has affected twentieth century world cultures in numerous ways not yet completely understood.13 When I started playing classical music on the violin in 1961 at the age of eight, which was the case for a number of jazz musicians, I could not have imagined that music, and especially jazz, would become my life's theme. At the age of ten, I started playing the guitar as well, and then other instruments in school orchestras and bands: cello, oboe, and bassoon at age twelve, tenor and alto saxophones at age fourteen, and piano at age fifteen. In 1965, I took private lessons on cello and oboe from members of The Cleveland Orchestra, Mr. Donald White and Mrs. Stocks, respectively. In 1967 at the age of fourteen, I was already doing jazz gigs, and my manager Joseph Moore took me, and my Gibson L7, to New York City to study jazz guitar with Carl Lynch, who was a studio musician for Atlantic Records. The opportunity to work with these masters of their instruments proved to be of immeasurable significance. (I have now settled on the piano as my main instrument.) In conjunction, playing first chair in different sections of the orchestra, I developed an understanding of what parts instruments played in the
13
Krin Gabbard, ed., Representing Jazz (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 132.
14 overall performance, and the ability to arrange ensembles. Though I cringe a bit at the notion, many people have told me that I am a “gifted” musician, and I had accumulated a number of instrumental music awards by the time that I finished high school and started playing in New York City. (As a matter of fact, I was unable to attend the graduation ceremony because on June 10, 1971, I started playing at the Copacabana, 10 East 60th Street in Manhattan, with the Motown artist Edwin Starr: I was seventeen-years-old. Notably, the singer Tom Jones was at the front table, and when he heard our band, he “sat in” with us on that gig. Back in those days, jazz was rapidly losing ground to pop music, and I played popular music like a number of jazz musicians playing for Motown did, but I was still focused on jazz; jazz gigs were drying up fast, and rock was taking over.) However, I believe that music is accessible to almost anyone who does the work that is necessary to become a proficient musician, butand I do concede that some people appear to have less difficulty playing an instrument than others. Ironically, the deeper I went into classical music, the more it seemed at odds with the dynamic cultural changes of the early 1960s. It must be noted that “classical” training is also at the root of jazz (e.g. Creole musicians in New Orleans are said to have used their classical training to play ragtime, and there are theories that as “ragtime” and “the blues” were fused when the African American and Creole populations were ‘brought in closer contact’ by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in 1897, jazz as we know it coalesced. However, Scott Joplin was an African American from Texas, and he may have been the most outstanding composer of the ragtime genre), a music genre that combines and reformulates the disparate musical elements of America's immigrants and its aboriginal populations. The misrepresentation of “Creoles” is probably responsible for much the confusion that exists about the origin of jazz; there is a prevailing notion that there were separate spheres for “negroes” and “creoles” in New Orleans:
The generic creole male of this fantasy moves in a world devoted to the theater and opera, occupying himself with thoroughbred horses, dueling
15 foils, and the pleasures of both dining and gaming tables, eschewing in his patrician self-esteem all employment which might require removal of his jacket or the use of his hands. Women of the demi-paradise shine as paragons of gentility, style, and grace, matrons ruling as arbiters of all the nuances of polite society. Regrettably, this by-now hallowed vision of creole society violates the past into fundamental respects: it demonstrably affirms error as historical fact, and it so exaggerates some verities of creole society as to create a caricature rather than a faithful portrait of its subjects.14 Another misrepresentation of the past, based on the abominations of “race,” is that many African Americans actually have Native-American and/or EuropeanAmerican ancestors too, even though some would rather not acknowledge it; such a reality can be painful for many people. For example, my great-grandmother Lydia Phillips who lived from 1861 to 1967 was known to be of Native-American ancestry; Black Indians by William Loren Katz discusses this overlooked aspect of African American culture in detail. And it is only recently that the descendants of Thomas Jefferson acknowledged the fact that he had six children with his slave Sally Hemings: his descendants are multicultural. My musical background and formal training as a Cultural Anthropologist allows me to offer a valid perspective on the impact of culture on jazz performers and praxis. With this fresh approach, “the notion of success replaces truth as criterion of validity and where the participation of the researcher becomes the main means of verifying his account. If able to interact successfully with and towards subjects, i.e. if able to pass as a member, the anthropologist's understanding of the culture is right.”15 Chapter 1 examines how “race” affected African American jazz musicians at home, and their rejection by the dominant group and religious African Americans as well; the mainstream press was condescending, and the editorials were most often scathing indictments of jazz, however a few prominent figures from the 14
Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, ed., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 136.
15
R.F. Ellen, Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct (London: Academic Press, 1984), 30.
16 classical music genre like Leopold Stokowski, Antonin Dvorak, and John Philip Sousa spoke out in favor of African American jazz musicians and endured the scorn of their peers. Author Mark Twain was deeply moved by African American musicians, however he lamented the fact that since they were American “negroes” he would be unable to fully express his approval. The music of African Americans was relegated to a space reserved for savages; the interactions spheres of African Americans and whites were almost totally separate, and all African American cultural products were considered “lowbrow” in comparison to the “fine arts” that the majority group identified with, even though these fine arts were not American cultural products. The invention of sound recording made the music of African Americans available to a wider audience, and soon their music reached Europe, Asia, and Australia; as a result an international demand for African American jazz musicians developed. Chapter 2 elucidates this international demand, describes the experiences that African American jazz musicians had abroad, and compares them with the experiences that they had upon their return to America. When African Americans migrated to France, they walked into a milieu that was saturated with colonial issues; France had stolen massive amounts of territory in Africa, and they had taken advantage of African soldiers during World War I, rewarding them with a liminal status after the war: they were considered “citizens” of France, but they were to be deported, back to their African colony of origin, after the war. No pension, no benfits: but they were “citizens.” Brett Berliner’s Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France notes that Africans were referred to as nègre, grand enfant, indigène, sauvage, or primitif depending on the context; these freighted terms suggested the atavistic tendencies of the colonized peoples, and assured Europeans that it was their mission and right to bring civilization to their charges. Many French women believed that they should take the helm of the civilizing mission, and surveys conducted the 1920s suggested that about half of the French women believed that marrying a black man would be acceptable, because
17 they could improve him and make him a fully human, civilized man; they also lamented the fact that it may take some time for them to get past their unusually large lips, and noses, as well as the colorless palms of their hands, and colorless skin on their feet. African Americans had been treated differently during the war by the French. In conjunction, African Americans brought jazz to France, which forced the French to reassess their perception of African peoples, to a degree. Jazz, an African American cultural product, defined the postwar age, not only in France, but around the globe. Some of he leading figures who established jazz in Europe and Asia, James Reese Europe, Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker, Doc Cheatham, Benny Carter, Garvin Bushell, and Buck Clayton, are discussed in this chapter. Chapter 3 examines the impact of jazz on Germany between 1925 and 1945, and the effect that Germany had on jazz in Europe during the war years. In the 1920s, Germany was considered sexually excessive by many Americans, therefore they often preferred to spend their leisure time in France, because it was more conservative:
Berlin at the time was easily as exciting as Paris, a super-metropolis where gifted and ambitious people gathered from all over Europe. The ruinous inflation of the early twenties was over, leaving behind a heritage of recklessness. New factories, schools, and theaters were being built – some designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. There were three opera houses open ten months a year supported by the city of Berlin and the state of Prussia. Stage designers came from Greece, conductors from Poland, publishers from Russia, playwrights from Budapest, composers from Spain and Italy, pianists from Latvia and Switzerland. Sexually, Berlin was a much wilder city than Paris. Homosexuality was totally in order. Booted prostitutes of both sexes abounded. Both cities were cheap for foreigners, but because of the sexual climate the less adventurous American foreigners tended to go to Paris whereas the English preferred Berlin.16 Anita Berber’s exploits in Berlin exemplify the level of excess that was not uncommon. From the mid-1930s until the end of World War II, jazz was often 16
Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 83-4.
18 illegal in Germany, officially. However, jazz flourished at a breakneck pace all over the country. The Nazis claimed that Jews and Blacks were involved in a conspiracy that would undermine Germany by saturating the country with decadent jazz, thereby corrupting the country’s young women in dance halls! Unfortunately, many Germans were thrown into jail for listening to jazz on stations that were being run by the Allies; eventually, some of them wound up in concentration camps as a result of the chaos that characterized Nazi Germany. In spite of this, almost every Nazi concentration camp had its own jazz band, and German officers were competing for jazz musicians; sometimes the officers would even play in the band. German musicologists could not agree on whether their scorn should be directed at America, or Africa, for inventing jazz and as a result their credibility as musicologists came into question; there was also an attempt to blame the saxophone for the existence of jazz, however the inventor of the saxophone was connected with Germany, and the saxophone was often used by Richard Strauss. The Nazis had another problem with jazz: they were unable to figure out who the African Americans were from the records that they heard. As a result, Duke Ellington’s records were dropped from the catalog, however the Mills Brothers’ records were considered acceptable: they thought that the Mills Brothers were “Aryans.” The more that the Germans tried to suppress jazz, the more popular it became across Europe. At the end of World War II, the Russians banned jazz in the East Germany, because they considered it a decadent product of the West. In spite of this, neither the musicians nor the music could be suppressed, and the new group of African American jazz musicians migrated to Europe and Asia during the postwar years, which is described in Chapter 4. Saxophonist Don Byas was touring in Europe in 1946; pianist Dr. Billy Taylor played in the group as well, but he decided to return to America while Byas decided to stay and look around Europe. Byas “looked around” France, The Netherlands, and Denmark for the next twenty-five years… GiGi Gryce, James Moody, Tadd Dameron, Roy Eldridge, Dickie Wells, Kenny Clarke, Donald Byrd,
19 Bud Powell, Kenny Drew, Albert Ayler, Dexter Gordon, Dr. Nathan Davis, Ed Thigpen, Johnny Griffin, Art Farmer, Donald Bailey, and numerous other African American jazz musicians became jazz exiles after World War II. After 1968, the number of African American jazz musicians who migrated to Japan and the Germanic countries was about equal to the number who migrated to France. The jazz venues in Paris, Amsterdam, and Denmark are discussed, and the reader can get an idea of the relative popularity of jazz abroad today. In Chapter 5, I compare the mortality rates of jazz musicians with those of classical musicians in order to exemplify the affect of culture on life span. From this analysis, I conclude that classical musicians, who are revered in Western culture, have longer life spans than jazz musicians do. I also found that white jazz musicians were at greater risk for not reaching their life expectancy during most of the twentieth century, possibly because they are outcasts of both cultures: this is known as a “double-bind.” A study conducted among jazz musicians in New York suggests that many white jazz musicians used drugs while drug use among African American jazz musicians was comparatively low. In conjunction, the career of the jazz musician generally declines with age while the career of classical musician is enhanced over time. The cultural changes that have occurred in Europe since 1983 when I started my research are profound, and I discuss them in the form of a personal narrative in Chapter 6. These changes became visible to the world in this year’s elections in France and The Netherlands, where the candidate Pim Fortuyn was assassinated by an immigrant. It was popular for candidates to take an anti-immigrant stance during the 2002 elections, and this was already happening in 1998 when I experienced the anti-immigrant sentiment for myself in Copenhagen. (The breakup of the Soviet Union was a major contributor, and the guest workers who had been imported from the Middle East and Asia had now borne children: these children had grown to adulthood, and they began to compete for mainstream employment, thus, discrimination against “citizens” whose ancestry is not indigenous is now rampant
20 in Europe.) Two of my acquaintances, Sami, who gained political asylum in Copenhagen after fleeing from Kurdistan, and Said, whose parents came to Copenhagen as guest workers, apprised me of their situations. Inadvertently, all people of color now suffer from increased discrimination in Europe as a result of the shifting political landscape: African Americans, or any people of color, are simply another group of unwanted immigrants in Europe’s political sea change. Chapter 7 is an analysis of the current state of jazz; the owners of the methods of production of jazz actually define jazz today: that is, the owners of the jazz magazines, recording companies, concert halls, and night clubs. There are many gloomy forecasts for the future of jazz, however I believe that the music is well established abroad, and jazz will pass the test of time on its won merits.
21
22
Chapter 1 THE PERILS OF JAZZ MUSICIANS IN AMERICA
The jazz genre originated in America; however, it was quickly denounced by the dominant group because of its carriers: the so-called “negroes.” It is rather remarkable that the genre has even survived to this day. In contrast, jazz was received with relatively open arms abroad, along with its carriers (e.g. James Reese Europe, Sidney Bechet, Will Marion Cook, Josephine Baker, and Doc Cheatham) in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Jazz was not just instrumental, as many people may think of it today; at the turn of the century, Jim Europe’s popular jazz orchestra included singers and dancers who were often the main event, while musicians were for the most part complimentary accompanists. The musicians were often dancers or actors as well during performances. Jazz grew out of the traditions of New Orleans that dated back to the slave gatherings at Congo Square in the early nineteenth century, a tradition of expressive culture and improvisation. John Robichaux had one of the earliest known jazz bands of importance by the late nineteenth century:
In particular, they seem to have taken hold as players in the ubiquitous string bands of African American music made the transition to a different kind of instrumentation. Among the Creole musicians, drummer and violinist John Robichaux (1886-1939) was the most significant figure. Roy Carew confirms Robichaux’s importance: “Robichaux’s outfit was the top Negro band in New Orleans in my time…the only one I heard mentioned.”17 17
Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz (London: Continuum, 2001), 81.
23
Years later, Paul Whiteman who was touted as the “King of Jazz” in the 1930s even though he was a light classical conductor, paid homage to John Robichaux. “Paul Whiteman praised Robichaux and contended that jazz ‘started along the waterfront among natural Negro musicians, and developed into the heart and soul of New Orleans.’”18 The Supreme Court of the United States of America ruled, in 1897, that separate but equal was constitutional, and “creoles” in New Orleans like John Robichaux were forced into a new status: the same degrading status that African Americans had already been enduring. White musicians now performed at the venues that Robichaux had become accustomed to working. An unsung hero named James Reese Europe had a great deal to do with the spread of jazz, not only in America, but around the world. Jim Europe was born in 1880 in Mobile, Alabama, however the family moved to Washington DC inand 1889. He found that there were not great deals of opportunities for him to play music, so he moved to New York City after he heard that African American entertainers were doing well; a lot of the music that they played would be considered “popular” and dances like the Cakewalk and the Fox Trot became the rage. “Next season’s bookings show a general rise in salaries,” reported a typical article in the Colored American in July 1898; “there will be sixteen straight Afro-American companies on the road.” As a popular entertainer, said the American the following year, the Negro “has always been a success. Nearly all of the leading vaudeville, specialty, and variety shows have engaged first class colored talent for next season. Coon songs are popular. So is the prize cake walk, and as minstrels they cannot be truly imitated.”19 Jazz originated in New Orleans, but as early as 1905, major jazz performances were taking place in New York at Oscar Hammerstein’s Victoria
18
Ibid.
19
Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 25.
24 Theater, according to author and composer James Weldon Johnson. These performances were taking place at the same time that Buddy Bolden’s band was active in the South. Johnson contended that The Memphis Students’ 1905 concert was New York’s first modern jazz performance, and some of the performances that followed outstripped contemporary venues in New Orleans. For example, James Reese Europe’s 1914 concert at Carnegie Hall that included at least 105 musicians and singers caused the management to lift its segregated policies, and the concert was wildly successful in every way. Jim Europe’s orchestra differed from the traditional European orchestra, because a substantial contingent of banjos and mandolins were included: rhythm was paramount, and audiences became ecstatic when this huge, well-organized orchestra performed. Jim Europe’s mobility in New York was enhanced by a white dance couple: Vernon and Irene Castle. Vernon was from England, and his wife Irene was American. The Castles insisted on having James Reese Europe’s band play for them wherever they danced, and they even did an international tour together. The Castles refused to dance to the music of white musicians, in most cases, after working with Jim Europe. Together, Jim Europe and the Castles invented the Fox Trot, which became a wildly popular dance. Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. denounced dances like the Turkey Trot, the Texas Tommy, and the Tango as well as ragtime music in 1914 as the Castles worked to make such music and dancing “respectable” enough for white society; their efforts were successful, and soon New York’s elites were dancing their afternoons away in clubs and halls where ‘commoners’ were unwelcome; in conjunction, the African American servants who worked at these elite gatherings refused to serve Jim Europe and his band after they finished playing, because they were “negroes.” This music was harshly criticized by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who was a classically trained British musician of African and British ancestry, during his 1904 and 1906 tours in America; Jim Europe’s sister Mary played the piano for Coleridge-Taylor, and he specifically asked for her during his second tour, praising her technique. Coleridge-Taylor had studied at the Royal Academy College of
25 Music, and he urged African Americans to learn to play “serious” music, and to discard the “popular” tunes that characterized the repertoire of Jim Europe’s orchestra. According to Coleridge-Taylor, popular music that was designed merely for entertainment, as opposed to religious purposes or “serious” concerts, would actually hinder the “cultural progress” of African Americans. Of course, having lived his life in England, he had never actually lived in America and he had little knowledge of, or experience with, American slavery and its aftermath; William Edward Burghardt Dubois disagreedffered with Coleridge-Taylor:
Europe and the formidable editor of the Crisis had known each other personally for years; Du Bois often attended Europe’s concerts at Carnegie Hall and at the Manhattan Casino, and they had worked together in the National Emancipation Exposition in the fall of 1913. Du Bois was neither a musician nor a musicologist to, but in the lyrical and plaintive final chapter of his classic work he wove together the themes of racial consciousness and national identity in a discussion of African American folk songs, the “sorrow songs” of slavery, which he said constituted at once “the greatest gift of the Negro people,” and “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation.”20
African American musicians played in minstrel shows and theater productions like Darkydom during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; these demeaning venues were extremely popular, and they contributed to the expectations of the audiences, both white and black. The cast had to be “genuinely negro” in order for the project to be successful. If the performers showed too much intelligence, or if they spoke too properly, the performance was often deemed counterfeit or suspect. Minstrels served as an escape for whites who had used black bodies to create an economy of global proportion, according to Eric Lott who points out that by demeaning African Americans in this way, whites absolved themselves of guilt, at least psychologically:
20
Ibid., 97.
26
Cultural strategies must be devised to occlude in such a recognition: reducing the body purely to sexuality is one strategy; colonizing it with a medical discourse in which the body is dispersed into discrete parts or organs is another. Shackling the body to a discourse a racial biology is still another, and in western societies the black body in particular has, in Dyers words, served as the site of both “remembering and denying the inescapability of the body in the economy,” of figuration of the world’s body and its labor, easily called up and just as easily denied. In antebellum America, it was minstrelsy see that performed this crucial hegemonic function, invoking the black male body as a powerful cultural sign of sexuality as well as a sign of the dangerous, guilt-inducing physical reality of slavery but relying on the derided category of race finally to dismiss both.21 Most of the musicians in Jim Europe’s orchestra read music, however a number of them did not. As a result, the musicians who could not read music simply listened to the person next to them and filled in what they thought should be played: this was improvisation, and it made up a substantial portion of each performance. Europe explained, “I ways put a man that could read notes in the middle where the others can pick him up. They can catch anything if they hear it once or twice, and if it’s too hard for ‘em the way it’s written, why they just make up something else that’ll go with it.”22 Sometimes, African American musicians were urged to pretend that they couldn’t read music. Quite often, the white audiences preferred to see the musicians playing as though everything came to them “naturally.”
The other tradition, which was born early and stubbornly refuses to die, despite all the evidence to the contrary, regards Jazz merely as the product of noble savages – music produced by untutored, unbuttoned semi- literates for whom jazz history does not exist. This myth was invented by early jazz writers who, in attempting to escape their American prejudices, turned out all whole world of new clichés based on the myth of the innate ability of the 21
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 118.
22
Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 65.
27 early jazz musicians. Because of these writers lack of understanding of the mechanics of music, they thought there weren’t any mechanics. It was the “they all can sing, they all have rhythm” syndrome.23 Regardless of the critics, Jim Europe’s music became so popular in New York that white musicians, who were in the union, feared that the black musicians were going to take over altogether: their fears were eventually realized. In 1913, Jim Europe signed a contract with the Victor label to make his first recordings, and a couple of years later, he heard the Memphis Blues by W. C. Handy and invented the musical accompaniment for the dance called the Fox Trot. (For the sake of perspective, one must remember that Louis Armstrong was about twelve-years-old at this time, thus he was not a significant figure in jazz yet; Armstrong was playing gigs for Sidney Bechet for fifty cents, and he was so poor that when Bechet invited him to his middle-class home for dinner, Armstrong balked because he didn’t have any shoes: Bechet then gave him the money that he would need to get his shoes repaired, but still, Armstrong didn’t show up for dinner. In conjunction, Sidney Bechet auditioned for Jim Europe’s orchestra in Chicago, shortly after the war: Europe didn’t hire him, possibly, because Bechet didn’t read music and his clarinet was on the brink of falling apart, save the tape and rubber bands. But he sounded great!) The popularity of jazz in New York, played by African American musicians, was so great between 1913 and 1917 that there were not enough musicians to meet the demand. In 1915, “the demand was not just at home. Two months earlier, Dan Kildare, president of the Clef Club, had left his position in New York to take an orchestra to Ciros, one of the swankiest restaurants in London where there was now an acute shortage of musicians.”24 In 1917, America was preparing to enter World War I. African Americans signed up in great numbers, and a “colored” band known as the Harlem 15th 23
Robert Walser, ed., Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 335.
24
Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 122.
28 Infantry Regiment was formed with Jim Europe as the leader: this is the band that would be renamed the 369th Infantry Regiment Band when they served in France and Germany. These African American jazz musicians gave up their successful careers in New York to fight for America in World War I, but the Unites States Army did not plan on having them on the battlefield: these soldiers’ role was to serve as manual laborers. Racism and patriotism clashed in the army, and there was a case of this in Houston, Texas where white and black soldiers had a confrontation; seventeen of the white soldiers ended up dead and thirteen of the black soldiers went to trial, and they all received the death penalty. The sentence was carried out by hanging, and another forty-one African American soldiers received terms of life in prison, as a result of the legal proceedings. The U.S. Army had a “race” problem. In order to train African American soldiers, they would inherently have to come in contact with white soldiers. In order to defuse future incidents of this type, the 369th Infantry Regiment was sent to Europe after a confrontation occurred in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where the African American troops from New York were training. Fears surfaced even before the African American troops arrived in South Carolina, because the Southerners knew that segregation was not “always” strictly enforced in the North: it was strictly enforced in the South, and the African American troops were warned to “stay in their place” and not to expect the same treatment that they were used to. Nobel Sissle, one of the soldier/musicians in the 369th Infantry Regiment, went to Spartanburg to buy a newspaper; he was in full uniform, and he went into the lobby of the hotel to purchase the newspaper. There were a number of white soldiers in full uniform wearing their hats sitting around chatting and reading their papers. As Sissle walked out of the hotel, the owner came up behind him and started beating him over the head and cursing at him. The owner later said that he had beat Sissle because he “did not take off his hat” in the hotel. All of the white soldiers were wearing their hats, and none of them wasas attacked. The white soldiers were shocked and angered by what the hotel owner had done, and they resolved that they would kill him and burn his hotel down. The situation in
29 Spartanburg was about to get out of control, and the worst fears of the U.S. Army were about to materialize. Jim Europe arrived on the scene, defused the situation, and the soldiers left in peace. However, the U.S. Army realized that bringing Northern blacks to the South for training was not going to work: the army decided to send the 369th Infantry Regiment to France, and that is the only reason that they ever had the opportunity to fight in World War I. Even though the band had played in Spartanburg to jubilant audiences, they were not welcome at the town’s business establishments. The 369th Infantry Regiment then took Europe by storm, and their experiences will be discussed in Chapter 2. As I have noted, jazz had branched out from New Orleans long before 1915 when two other early bands performed in New York and Chicago. Trumpeter Freddie Keppard’s band played at the Columbia Theater in New York on December 11, 1915, and the performance was reviewed by the New York Clipper. According to the review, the “Creole band of six pieces… played a rather ragged section selection for a starter, the clarinet being particularly strong for the comedy effect. The oOld darkey whom they were serenading responded by singing Old Black Joe and the band chimed in with fine harmony both instrumentally and vocally.”25 The reviewer went on to report that “the playing of such ragtime melodies worked the Old darkey to dancing pitch, and he did pound those boards until the kinks in his knees reminded him of his age. Lots of bows, an encore, more bows and another encore stamped this offering as OKok.”26 According to Chris Goddard, as early as 1915, “another white New Orleans band led by Tom Brown had caused quite a stir in Chicago. It was Brown who, unable to take the job himself, had recommended the Original Dixieland Jazz Band for the job at Reisenweber’s in New York which finally launched them.”27 It is widely believed that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was the first “jazz” band to record in 1917 and play jazz outside New
25
Chris Goddard, Jazz Away From Home (New York: Paddington Press Ltd., 1979), 22.
26
Ibid., 22-23.
27
Ibid., 22.
30 Orleans; however, according to Goddard’s research and the fact that Jim Europe was recording as early as 1913, this was not the case. Jazz was initially characterized as the embodiment of vulgarity, and the antithesis of the dominant group’s aspirations of national character around the turn of the century. The categorization of jazz as “lowbrow” music relegated the genre and its practitioners to a position of insignificance. Instead of being considered a musical contribution that deserved serious artistic attention, jazz was viewed as a passing phase in “popular” culture. Popular music was thought “to be of little worth aesthetically, for that became the chief criterion: the cultural categories that became fixed around the turn of the century were aesthetic and judgmental rather than descriptive terms. The notion of culture was lifted out of the surrounding world into the universe of gentility.”28 In this way, jazz became the “antithesis” of Culture for Americans, “because the genre was new while the music associated with Culture was old. A music or musics that came to be known as jazz appeared in and were quickly diffused throughout the United States at the same time that the phenomenon known as Culture (with a capital C) made its appearance.”29 Jazz was judged to be raucous, but Culture was considered to be harmonious and reasonable. Jazz was considered to be “spontaneous,” while Culture allegedly “resulted from rigorous study and training; and not the least of all, the audience participated in jazz, thereby blurring the invisible line between the performer and the audience.”30 This ran in direct opposition to the expected behavior of individuals possessed with genteel Culture. If an exuberant person were to clap in the middle of a classical music performance, the person would be considered an ignorant boor, and the audience would certainly let out a gasp of outrage. By the 1920s, America had been independent from Great Britain for almost 150 years, however British culture still served as the model for the majority group; African Americans and Native 28
Lawrence W. Levine, "Jazz and American Culture," in the Journal of American Folklore 102, no. 403 (January-March 1989), 7.
29
Ibid., 7.
30
Ibid.
31 Americans were urged to emulate European customs in order to “improve themselves.” These prescriptions, whether subtly or overtly coercive, included good music, dress, and the Christian religion, and this had been the case since the Revolutionary War. The Antebellum South was an American attempt at emulating the “ladies and gentleman” that they saw parading around in Europe. As a matter of fact, Britain was going to recognize the Confederacy as the legitimate government of the United States, as opposed to the North. It is estimated that approximately 500,000 tons of cotton per year were being shipped from the South to Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century, thus their ties were both cultural and economic. Since jazz was an indigenous product, it was subject to the prevailing attitude that, “If it's American, it can't be very good,” held by Europeans and Americans alike. This was not the first time that the worth of American culture has been questioned. As a matter of fact, the War of 1812 was supposed to put an end to such questions, and establish the American “character” on the global stage: it didn't. Author Henry James, a New Yorker who was educated in Paris, London, and Geneva, was critical of America because he felt that it lacked museums, novels, literature, and paintings of its own. (Apparently, he ignored or disapproved of Benjamin West and Winslow Homer.) Some of the most telling commentary from the time when jazz emerged came from the author Van Wyck Brooks, who wrote America's Coming-of-Age in 1915. Brooks argued that “highbrow” culture and “lowbrow” culture could not coexist: one had to make a choice. Gilbert Seldes, a leading New York jazz critic in the 1920s, came up published The Seven Lively Arts in 1924, and his view of jazz was less than flattering: Throughout Seldes’s writing on popular songs, ragtime, and jazz, there is an effort to articulate how these musical forms manifest something neither high nor low, something interstitial, which sometimes veers toward a broader,
32 Bosnian sense of culture. More often, however, Seldes retreats to familiar discursive terrain assuming the responsibility of categorizing different jazz styles and ranking their aesthetic values. In his book The Seven Lively Arts, there are three such styles: the low, primitive, and African American; the high, refined, and Anglo-Saxon; and an intermediary Jewish style. With respect to the larger distinction between low/popular art and fine art, refined white jazz emerges as “middlebrow,” – a category that simultaneously opens up and battens down the binary structure that its supplements.31 However, there were some visionaries, domestic and foreign, who drew inspiration from ‘some’ late nineteenth and early twentieth century American music. They began to see American music, and particularly Negro/African American folk music, as evidence of an indigenous American musical tradition. Author Mark Twain's critique of the Jubilee Singers in 1897 illustrates the tensions of the politically independent, yet culturally dependent America. Twain praised “negro” singers privately, however, he was guarded with his approval in public for fear of going against the prevailing attitudes and suggesting that the music of African Americans had substance. The most famous dissenting voice and advocate of “negro” music at the end of the nineteenth century was the Czech composer, Antonin Dvorak, who was teaching and composing in the United States. Dvorak believed that the music of African Americans would become the basis of an important musical genre in the future. Dvorak's opinions were met with hostility by American critics. Though Dvorak was a member of the European caste that American highbrows were attempting to approximate, they deemed his theory impossible because of the esteem in which hethey held “negro” composers and performers. This contradicted deeply held beliefs that European Americans had about the inferiority of African Americans; the idea that the music of slaves could become the basis of a symphony was unthinkable, and it challenged their notion of what ‘good’ music was. Boston
31
Nicholas M. Evans, Writing Jazz (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000), 110-11.
33 critic William Apthorp attacked Dvorak’s New World Symphony for its use of African American musical ideas. Apthorp was opposed by one of America's most touted composers: John Philip Sousa. Sousa's opinions were in accord with those of Dvorak in many ways, and he took issue with those who demeaned America’s indigenous music. Sousa saw genius in anyone who could compose and/or perform music that would be embraced by multitudes and popular with the public at large. The reason that Americans believed indigenous products were inferior to those of their European relatives lay in the notion that Europeans were the standardbearers of “Culture.” So then, how could Americans reverse the trend and bring Europeans to America for culture? Actually, they were already coming to America in throngs, to the point that the immigration quotas were being manipulated to keep the hordes of Southern Europeans out during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: however, these people were considered to be lowbrows, who could only serve as fodder for America's factories. The notion that African American cultural products were inferior and of no merit was challenged when jazz went to Europe: The opposition between the civilized European and the wild Negro – so crucial to the anti-jazz camp, was undermined when European professors of music acknowledged the superior quality of jazz’s syncopated rhythms. The fact that jazz became popular in Europe increased its symbolic value in America. Furthermore, Americans eventually realized that by adapting this musical expression as “their” national tune, America had something to contribute to global culture. Exporting jazz, America, perhaps for the first time, made an impact on European culture. This process reversed centuries of transcultural relations.32
(Recently, a documentary produced by Ken Burns, Jazz: A History of America’s Music attempted to accomplish this for America. Though it was stated
32
Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 93.
34 up front that jazz was invented by African Americans, the genre, somehow, became an American cultural product, thereby making credit for its development and popularity available to anyone who fancied themselves a “jazz” musician, regardless of the cultural context: whoever sold the most records was the greatest jazz musician, according to the documentary. In the companion book, Burns states that: “When I began the project, I had perhaps two jazz records in my fairly large music collection.”33 He should have stopped there, and turned the project over to Doc Cheatham, Milt Hinton, Wynton Marsalis, Lionel Hampton, and other musicians who have experience in jazz and know a great deal about the topic at first hand. But Ken Burns is a man whose heart is in the right place. In May of 1993, he was the keynote speaker at our graduation ceremony at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio where I triple-majored in Anthropology, History, and International Studies. The student body was about 3% African American, even though the university is located in the middle of the city, and more than 50% of the city’s population is African American. Burns blasted the crowd for their tacit approval of racism, and I doubt that they had any idea that he would be saying those types of things. Therefore, I know that Ken Burns is very sensitive to African American issues, and he tried to do his best; but jazz is very complex and it requires expertise, just like all of the disciplines in which we earn our advanced degrees at universities.) The question that Progressive Era America had to answer was who would decide what America’s ‘cultural melting pot’ should consist of? In the American mainstream, the idea was that “the classics” should form the basis of American culture. Immigrants from Southern Europe, African Americans, and Native Americans were seen as “lowbrows” and primitives bereft of any “culture” worth paying attention to.
33
Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Jazz: A History of America’s Music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000) x.
35 These attitudes formed the basis upon which the concepts of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” rested; these concepts soon went beyond the boundaries of culture. “Highbrow” entered the popular lexicon in the last quarter of the 19th century and it referred to the high cranial vault associated with Dr. Johann Blumenbach’s socalled “Caucasians.” The term “lowbrow” referred to the sloping forehead that was associated with Homo erectus and H neanderthalensis, both presumed to be intellectual brutes. The practice of measuring human craniums, and from that, making generalizations about the individual's intelligence and “race” was a cornerstone of anthropometry, championed by Germany's Dr. Johann Blumenbach in the late 1700s. Blumenbach’s anthropometry used seeds, and later gunshot, to determine the so-called “race” of his human specimens. French physician Dr. Marcel Boulle, who was given the earliest known specimen of H. neanderthalensis for analysis near the end of the 18th century, determined that H. neanderthalensis was clearly an ignorant brute. He noted that the sloping forehead, or brow, of the specimen, and its clearly deformed spine that made him walk hunched over, proved that H. neanderthalensis was a “race” of brutes. A hierarchical model was established that placed “lowbrows” at the bottom and “Caucasians” at the top. Years later when the same specimen was examined by other physicians, they found that this particular H. neanderthalensis skeleton had scoliosis, and that his cranial capacity was actually greater than that of modern humans. Nevertheless, the mythical associations of the sloping brow with ignorance, and the higher cranial vault with intelligence, persist to this day, even though no one has ever conclusively defined intelligence: to be called “a Neanderthal,” is considered to be an insult. Empirically speaking, no other human species has ever had a larger cranial capacity than H. neanderthalensis, which means that their brains were actually larger on average by volume than the brains of today’s human populations’. With the establishment of the racial-cultural hierarchies came the rigorous attempts to promote and maintain them; thus jazz was considered a threat to the culture and values of the so-called Americans of Western and Northern European
36 ancestry. Religious leaders around the country, both white and black, actively denounced jazz, claiming that it made people behave like savages. The instrumentation used in jazz was attacked as well; the saxophone was targeted and demonized as thehat instrument that was responsible for making jazz so savage and disturbing. Oddly, the mandolin and banjo were not attacked like the saxophone was, even though they were prominent in New Orleans bands in the South, and James Reese Europe’s orchestra in the North. There was indeed no shortage of periodicals that openly castigated the emerging musical form known as jazz in the early 1900s, deeming it mere trash. Even the Chicago Defender's music critic, Dave Peyton, offered some unsolicited advice to the “negro” pianists of the 1920s; he advised them to stay all way from jazz, and concentrate on practicing their scales instead. Peyton’s view is in accord with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s denigration of African American music: Coleridge-Taylor called ragtime the “worst rot.” Jazz was also condemned by religious “negroes” who were attempting to imitate their white counterparts; they claimed that jazz musicians were somehow defiling the so-called “negro race.” This claim is inherently problematic, considering the numerous white jazz musicians, like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who promoted the genre. Almost as rapidly as jazz had developed from ragtime music (and this point is arguable), it had ruptured its “racial” boundaries in praxis. As I will demonstrate later, white jazz musicians may have suffered most from the aforementioned rhetoric that was extremely hostile towards jazz musicians, regardless of their skin color. Another aspect of jazz that apparently angered whites in no small way was the use of classical themes by African American jazz musicians; it was assumed that African Americans would not be able to play classical music in the first place, and if they did, they certainly could not have done so very well. In view of these opinions, it is no less than remarkable that the famous classical composer/conductor Leopold Stokowski, who was the conductor of the prestigious Philadelphia Orchestra in 1924, embraced jazz musicians and praised
37 their musical contributions. Stokowski made it clear that it was the black musicians, not the ODJB, who created the new musical genre, and he surmised that since they had not been trained in an institution, they had a more creative approach to music. However, some of the African American jazz musicians had formal musical training, including Will Marion Cook who even went to Europe to study with Dvorak. (Dvorak may not have played a significant role in Cook’s development, because Dvorak told Cook that he would have to be a violinist in his children’s class and start from the beginning, which Cook rejected.) These opinions were quite a reversal, compared to what many of their contemporary writers had penned. Embedded in these distinctly opposing perceptions was the duality that may comprise the essence of jazz itself. Jazz was not in accord with the American concept of culture, which was Eurocentric at bottom. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued in The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man that “each culture is dominated by a control mechanism, a unique set of regulating ideas that shapes the individual into a unique kind of human.”34 As Stokowski pointed out, the early African American jazz musicians were not constrained by the conventions of the dominant culture in most cases, because they had never been included in it, per se. The control mechanism of the dominant culture relied on Eurocentric fixations and emotional repression, while “negro” culture relied on innovation and expression in order to deal with the alienation that resulted from years of discrimination, abuse, and exclusion. Essentially, jazz and blues are inseparable: it’s the blues in jazz that makes jazz jazzy, in my opinion. If you play jazz without the blues in it, the music will sound somewhat sterile. (This became obvious when German conservatory musicians tried to play jazz, which will be discussed at length in Chapter 3.) Jazz and blues are culturally related products of the African Americans’ frustration in the place that they were born. In view of the dominant culture's denigration of jazz in
34
Clifford Geertz, "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man," reprinted from New Views of Man, John R. Platt, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 17.
38 its attempt to emulate European Culture, and the castigation that religious “negroes” levied upon jazz and its practitioners, what African American jazz musicians experienced once they left America becomes an exceedingly interesting phenomenon: their experiences serve as points of reference. When World War I finally ended, Europe was left in shambles; the dark, portentous premonitions of the surrealist De Chirico and musicians like Stravinsky about the modern industrialized world had come to pass. Europeans were eager to obtain foreign currency, and Americans were welcomed. American expatriates and exiles, especially writers and jazz musicians, began to settle in Europe for various periods of time, and some stayed permanently. Coinciding with the war, the red light district of New Orleans known as Storyville had been “cleaned-up” in order to keep the rate of venereal diseases among the soldiers under control. (In his book Treat It Gentle, Sidney Bechet remembered that when he was a young teenager, about the age of fourteen, a lot of the musicianers who he played with were bandaged around their pelvises, because they were suffering from venereal diseases: they told him that they had been with women. Bechet was so impressed by this that he bandaged himself around the pelvis, and claimed that he had been with a woman and that she had caused him to suffer from the same disease that the musicianers he looked up to had.) Jazz musicians suffered when the numerous bawdy houses where they worked periodically, like Tom Anderson’s Café, were closed, and the migration of these musicians to northern American cities like Chicago and New York escalated; others, like Will Marion Cook and Sidney Bechet, went on tour in Europe in 1919. The African American jazz musicians who remained in America had to contend with the segregated conditions that existed everywhere, whether they were defacto or dejure. Things were startlingly different abroad for the African American jazz musicians who introduced Europeans to jazz, a musical form that most of them had never heard before, certainly not “in person.” Audio recording techniques were not
39 very sophisticated in the early 1900s. Musicians would simply crowd around a megaphone-like device, aiming their instruments toward it, and hope that the machine would detect their instrument. The recording sessions often took place in a warehouse or a virtually abandoned building in an out-of-the-way place that would, be, presumably, be quieter than in the city: this approach was no assurance of silence, though. During many recording sessions, all recording had to be stopped for passing trains. Record distribution was somewhat hit-or-miss, and the recordings made by African Americans were usually marketed as “Race Records” to a target community. Thus, most Europeans may not have had many preconceived notions about jazz before they heard the first African American jazz musicians perform. One can assess the impact of the introduction of jazz on Europeans from some of the contemporary critiques; the differential acceptance of jazz and African American jazz musicians abroad is, fortunately, well documented. I will rigorously employ the available resources in order to assist the reader in distinguishing fact from fiction.
40
Chapter 2 JAZZ PRAXIS ABROAD AND MUSICIANS' RETURN TO AMERICA
The most notable jazz musicians of the early twentieth century who introduced Europeans to jazz are Lt. James Reese Europe and Sidney Bechet. Personality had a lot to do with each musician’s success, or the lack thereof, as their careers developed. When Sidney Bechet arrived in Europe to perform as a soloist for the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, the road had already been paved by James Reese Europe and his 369th Infantry Regiment Band; in France, the African American soldiers and musicians were given a new deal:
To the surprise of their French instructors, who were assigned roughly one to each platoon, the African Americans seemed especially adept at two important aspects of close-in, hand-to-hand combat. (This was due to baseball and boxing practice.) One problem they did not have to face, and it made all the difference in the world, was bigotry. The French military, from the interpreters to the drill instructors to the staff officers to the commanding generals, showed none of the prejudice toward the black American regiment that they had experienced in the U.S. Army. From all accounts, a true comradeship developed between the French and noncoms assigned to 369th and their American counterparts.35
African American soldiers, like Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts, became decorated war heroes in France, overcoming German soldiers even though they 35
Reid Badger, A Lifetime in Rag (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 174.
41 were outnumbered by a ratio greater than ten-to-one. German soldiers feared African American soldiers, and that is how the 369th Infantry Regiment Band got their name “The Hellfighters.” When the band played at the Théâtre des ChampsElysées in 1919, the crowd, by all accounts, became ecstatic from the start of the performance, and Jim Europe said that he had “conquered Paris.” At this time, Jim Europe’s band was the most famous and sought-after band in the world. However, two events were about that have a devastating effect on the reputation and historical stature of James Reese Europe upon his return to America. “Black troops returned to America on segregated ships. Even when white Americans offered praise, it was riddled with racist stereotypes. ‘Those two colored regiments fought well. Is there no way of getting a cargo of watermelons over there?’”36 Jim Europe had a child out of wedlock, James Reese Europe, Jr., with Bessie Simms, a dancer who he had known for a number of years; he was often seen around New York with her, even though he was married, so the “affair” was out in the open. Jim Europe’s wife and family did not accept the love-child, and we know this because James Reese Europe, Jr. went to the Europe family’s home in Washington, DC after his father’s death. When he arrived at the door and announced who he was, the door was closed in his face. Herbert Wright, who was a drummer in Jim Europe’s band along with his brother Steve, murdered James Reese Europe because he was angry about the way that Europe looked at him onstage when mistakes were made in the percussion section: Herbert claimed that Steve was making the mistakes, and that Europe was blaming him unfairly. Herbert barged into Jim Europe’s room backstage on May 9, 1919, and stabbed him in the neck with a pocket knife. Thus, James Reese Europe endured the horrors of World War I only to return home and be murdered by a young man who he had been nurturing for years in his band. Even though his funeral was elaborate, James Reese Europe ultimately faded from the memory of
36
Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, The African American Odyssey (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2003), 383.
42 most Americans, and he is not often acknowledged for his outstanding accomplishments at home and abroad. Sidney Bechet made his European debut in the year that James Reese Europe was murdered, and he was immediately embraced by the French public with a passion that transformed his status to a level that is usually reserved for deities. Bechet was born in New Orleans in 1896 or 1897, and he proved to be a gifted clarinetist, though he is known as a soprano saxophonist by most people today. Bechet's work is of great historical importance to the jazz genre, because he was soloing in a modern way, with abandon,. long before 1919! This man’s family has roots that extend back to Congo Square; his grandfather Omar was one of the most famous entertainers there during the Antebellum, and his father, who was emancipated in 1863, became a musician and shoemaker. Omar never had a last name, however his son was given the last name of his slave master when Omar was murdered by another slave seeking the bounty that the Bechet’s had put on his head. Before his murder, Omar had been shot by the slave master in the bayou where Omar and Marie were making love. Omar and Marie had fallen in love at Congo Square; however, the slave master wanted the girl Marie for his concubine, and he had been fantasizing about her. Marie’s son was named Omar Bechet, and it is from this horrible past that Sidney Bechet drew his inspiration. Sidney started playing the clarinet at about the age of six; his mother’s spoke French to him, thus when he arrived in Paris, French was not a foreign language for him, which must have amazed the Frenchmen. Bechet attempted to study with a number of musicians, however he always ended up doing things his own way. Reading music was something that he abandoned early on, and he did not want to play in the controlled, accepted manner that his teachers promoted: You know, there’s this mood about the music, a kind of need to be moving. You can’t just set it down and hold it. Those Dixieland musicianers, they tried to do that; they tried to write the music down and kind of freeze it. Even when they didn’t arrange it to death, they didn’t
43 have any place to send it; that’s why they lost it. You just can’t keep the music unless you move with it.37
The formal and informal training that Bechet received in New Orleans prepared him well for the road. “After working in New Orleans with Bunk Johnson and King Oliver, Bechet led from 1914 to 1917 an itinerant life, touring in shows and going as far north as Chicago, where he frequently teamed with Freddie Keppard, a hard-drinker with whom the usually prickly Bechet got on perfectly.”38 Will Marion Cook, who had studied with Antonin Dvorak, “hired Bechet as a soloist for his New York Syncopated Orchestra in 1919; Bechet played everything from the blues to Brahms's Hungarian Dances.”39
Cook facilitated Bechet's
European debut later that year, and the Swiss composer Ernest Ansermet was apparently in awe of what he heard. Ansermet wrote: “There is in the Southern Syncopated Orchestra an extraordinary clarinet virtuoso who is, so it seems, the first of his race to have composed perfectly formed blues on the clarinet. I wish to set down the name of this artist of genius: as for myself, I shall never forget it - it is Sidney Bechet.”40 The reception of Bechet's music in Europe was the opposite of its American reception, evidenced by the comments of the Swiss composer Ansermet upon hearing Bechet play for the first time! Bechet must have been inspired by confirming comments such as these, and “it may have led to his adoption of the instrument with which he is eternally linked, the soprano saxophone; its bore is considerably wider than that of the clarinet, and the bell flares out more, thus the instrument is capable of producing more volume than the clarinet.”41 Only a few
37
Sidney Bechet, Treat it Gentle (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975) 95.
38
Lewis Porter, Michael Ullman, and Ed Hazel, Jazz From Its Origins to the Present (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1993), 47.
39
Ibid., 48.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
44 players have mastered the soprano saxophone, though many reed players have used the instrument since it was revived by John Coltrane in the early 1960s. During his tour of London with Cook’s orchestra, the virtues of the soprano sax became clear, and Bechet eventually mastered the instrument. Bechet’s appearance at Buckingham Palace was but one of his performances in Britain, France, Germany, and Russia over about a three-year period. Sidney Bechet had his troubles in Europe, but they were thrust upon him just like the troubles that the African American soldiers had in America were. Bechet was convicted in England on a flimsy, trumped up charge of rape. The woman that he was accused of raping was his former girlfriend, and frequent prostitute. They were in his room drinking, and an argument seems to have gotten out of hand; the landlady called the police and since Bechet was a foreigner, and the offense was against a British citizen, he was almost automatically guilty by law. No rape ever took place. Although Bechet was innocent and falsely accused, he was imprisoned in Britain. During the mid-1920s, Bechet’s contribution to jazz in the diaspora was substantial; in 1925, Bechet went to Russia after playing at the Nelson Theater in Berlin with Josephine Baker: After we’d had this great success in Paris we took the whole show on to Brussels, and then to the Nelson Theater in Berlin. It was while we were there that Josephine Baker got an offer to go to the Folie Bergères, so she left to go back to Paris and was replaced by Maude de Forest. And not long after that I left too, and went to Russia. There was a number of musicianers going to Russia at that time.42
In 1928, another incident occurred that landed Bechet in jail, this time it occurred in Montmartre, France. The Roaring Twenties extended all the way to France, and a number of the musicians who were there were originally from Chicago. They saw themselves as extensions of the cool, tough, hard gangster
42
Sidney Bechet, Treat it Gentle (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975), 147.
45 culture of Chicago, and they tried to impress and intimidate Bechet with their presumed power: they chose the wrong target, for Bechet never backed down from anyone. Bechet carried a gun in order to protect himself, and when he was confronted by jealous musician, a gun fight broke out and a French woman, who was a bystander, received a bullet wound. Again, Bechet was presumed guilty because he was a foreigner, and he was sent to jail before he was deported; as a result, a great deal of attention has been paid to the Bechet’s so-called criminal side, at the expense of attention being paid to his music. Throughout his career, Sidney Bechet had to contend with jealous musicians; he was simply on a level that they could not imagine reaching, like Charlie Parker would be in the 1940s and 1950s. The fact that Bechet’s personality was somewhat abrasive did not help him in these situations, either. Alcohol consumption may have played a role as well, but Bechet was a rather ‘controlled’ alcoholic, as opposed to his friend Bunk Johnson, who was an out-of-control alcoholic. “The period of Bechet's greatest fame in this country came after he started recording under his own name for Victor and for Blue Note in the thirties. There were periods of discouragement and inactivity. For a while, he and his friend, trumpeter Tommy Ladnier, ran a tailor shop in New York.”43 Quite possibly, Bechet's abrasive personality may have been responsible for the demise of his collaboration with Armstrong; he was very competitive, as opposed to accommodating, with Armstrong during the recording sessions. Armstrong became competitive with Bechet during the recording sessions as well, so the weren’t exactly “playing together.” Armstrong had become an international jazz star by this time, and he was touring Europe in the 1930s, frequently performing in Copenhagen, Denmark and other European cities. In the late 1930s, Bechet started recording again, and notably, he experimented with a number of musical genres including Haitian merengues; he
43
Lewis Porter, Michael Ullman, and Ed Hazel, Jazz From Its Origins to the Present (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1993), 50-51.
46 received harsh criticism from purists who sought to confine him to the New Orleans genre that had made him famous.
In 1941, Bechet did some experimental
recordings on “Victor—Mezz Mezzrow called them outrages—recording Shiek of Araby and Blues of Bechet as a one-man band. He plays as many as six instruments himself. Although he complained later that the sides would have been better if he had rehearsed more fully with the recording engineer, he never repeated the experiment.”44 Mezzrow was a white jazz musician who had become famous as a bandleader: Mezzrow, he’d had this rage of being King of Harlem for a while and that was wearing out some. He began to see that something different would have to be tried. I’m not saying Mezzrow is all that bad a player. He’s played some nice things and he’s put out some good records. He played, for example on the date when we made Really the Blues, and he and I were to put out some records together which were good. You see, he had a feeling for what he was doing; he had a way of working with around what was being done. But still when a man is trying so hard to be something he isn’t, when he’s trying to be some name he makes up for himself a instead of just being what he is, some of that will show in his music, the idea of it will be wrong.45 Bechet had signed a contract to record for Mezzrow’s company, and when the records were sold and the revenues were collected, Mezzrow embezzled the funds. Bechet had to go to Mezzrow’s house and pull a knife on him in order to get his money, an incident which probably contributed even more to the myth of Bechet’s “criminal” inclination. In this way, the white jazz musicians who were having successful careers in America, after appropriating jazz from the “negroes,” became the “aesthetic” standard bearers of jazz by owning the methods of production, and artistic criticism. Bechet played with Bunk Johnson, Johnny Windhurst, Muggsy Spanier, Pops Foster, Baby Dodds, and James P. Johnson during the 1940s on various 44
Ibid., 51.
45
Sidney Bechet, Treat it Gentle (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975), 168-9.
47 occasions, but at bottom, he was not particularly successful in America. “Bechet didn't enjoy the stardom of Louis Armstrong: not until he made his permanent home in France, where after successful tours in 1949 and 1950, he emigrated in 1951. He was adored there. The Rue Bechet was named after him, and his wedding in 1951 was covered by the press as if he was royalty.” 46 In France, Bechet was not criticized for his compositions; rather, he was revered: “He was greatly respected for what he had produced in the past, and given a free hand to create as he pleased. He recorded prolifically in the fifties, usually with a young band of Frenchman Claude Luter, who turned the musical direction over to Bechet while treating the older man as, according to Bob Wilber, a kind of capricious god.”47 In France, Bechet's compositions became hits, which is in itself a remarkable and telling occurrence. The question becomes, how could a jazz musician, playing the same material, become virtually royalty in France within just two years, and at the same time be ignored in America? The question is somewhat perplexing, but in the view of the literature that I have examined, there is substantial evidence that Bechet's skin color, the concomitant segregation, and the denigration of jazz as an expressive musical genre in practice throughout America was, in no small way, responsible for Bechet's fledgling career at home. By the time Bechet’s career became a success, he only had about eight more years to live. “In 1956, Bechet discovered he was ill with lung cancer. At the 1958 Brussels World Fair, paired with swing trumpeter Buck Clayton, he played with the relentless vigor that Ernest Ansermet had heard in Bechet 40 years earlier. He was living boldly: he kept separate establishments for his wife and mistress.”48 Rather than being robbed of what little time he had left, “Bechet continued to carouse and frequent the nighspots until he died in 1959 on his birthday, May 14th. Bechet's life was a jazz life, and he lived it in that particular way; jazz, or ragtime as he persisted in calling it, had its own needs, its own way, 46
Lewis Porter, Michael Ullman, and Ed Hazel, Jazz From Its Origins to the Present (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1993), 53-54.
47
Ibid., 54.
48
Ibid., 55.
48 which was related to the history and the future of the African American people.”49 According to Bechet, “playing it took the utmost sensitivity to other musicians and the music itself, for the music will tell you which way to go in your life, and what you can feel.”50 Until his death, Bechet insisted that jazz must continue to expand its scope by including experimental techniques, like overdubbing and borrowing from other musical genres, while still expressing himself through the music. His contribution to music is recognized around the world. Trumpeter Freddie Keppard might have been the first to record jazz in New Orleans, had he accepted an offer from Victor Records in 1916. Bechet claimed that Keppard did not record because he just wasn’t interested in it; he didn’t think that it was of any importance. Rather, Keppard believed that performing live was the way that jazz should be heard. This view is at odds with many jazz historians’ opinion on the subject. The American critic Rudi Blesh, “in his book Combo: USA, asserts that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band stole Livery Stable Blues, one of their most popular numbers, from the black trumpeter Freddie Keppard. Ironically, Keppard refused, in 1916, to record for the Victor label for fear that his rivals would steal his ideas from his records.”51 As a result of Keppard's refusal, the so-called Original Dixieland Jazz Band is said to be the first band to bring jazz to Britain, but James Reese Europe had sent his Clef Club Orchestra there in 1915 under the direction of Dan Kildare. African American jazz pioneers found a myriad of venues in the jazz diaspora. For example, in the mid-1920s, “Sam Wooding's quazi-jazz orchestra toured Europe and the Soviet Union; in 1926 Jack Carter and Teddy Weatherford began leading bands in China, Singapore, India, and other Asian locales; beginning
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid.
51
Jim Godbolt, A History of Jazz in Britain 1919-1950 (New York: Quartet Books, 1984), 53.
49 in 1929, Valiada Snow, from Carter's Shanghai band, toured the Middle East and the Soviet Union.”52 The reasons why musicians traveled abroad varied from escaping family circumstances, to escaping from the castigation that has been mentioned earlier. “Benny Carter left for Europe in 1935 to prevent his former wife from obtaining custody of their daughter. Those who were in Europe willingly sometimes felt uncomfortable. Doc Cheatham recalled that in Germany, they couldn't go out onto the streets: people would follow them around because they were such a novelty.”53 SoHowever, the situation was not altogether rosy. Elliot Carpenter surmised that Americans were not held in high esteem by the French, and the French “figured that the black ones were just as bad. As a result Negroes had a way of isolating themselves and got to fussing and fighting among themselves. Duke Ellington undoubtedly had mixed feelings in 1931 when a London hotel provided a room only after he proved he was not a West Indian.”54 So, even in other parts of the world, the legacy of discrimination had arrived in advance of the jazz musicians, and it must have been a sickening reminder. In spite of this, African Americans who migrated to the diaspora between World Wars I and II “savored various freedoms and the absence of Jim Crow. The adulation jazz received from European admirers had important emotional and intellectual effects on the players. Prominent European art musicians publicly praised black ragtime and jazz and incorporated their properties into their compositions.”55 Europe was especially fertile ground for jazz, because the music incorporated familiar elements, theories, and methods that had been gleaned from European music praxis. “Jazz players drew on the musical cultures of Europe and Africa, as they had been transformed in the first few
52
Burton W. Peretti, The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 55-56.
53
Ibid., 56.
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid.
50 centuries of democracy and slavery in North America. Africa and Europe thus were the two general traditions upon which jazz drew for its musical identity.”56 Another jazz great who had a phenomenal career abroad was composer/trumpeter Buck Clayton, who was born in Parsons, Kansas in 1911. His father played trumpet, bass, and piano, and led the orchestra of his church. Buck’s father taught him to play the trumpet and the piano, and “eventually he played in the church orchestra when he was 19-years-old. Buck went to California in 1932 and started playing in a 14-piece band later taken over by Teddy Weatherford, with whom he worked at the Canidrome in Shanghai from 1934 to 1936.”57 Clayton did tours in France in 1949 and 1953, receiving rave reviews, and returned during another European tour in 1959 with his own group. Buck Clayton's tenure abroad and at home was brilliant. Clayton’s “open sound and highly individual use of the cup mute were some of the vitally distinctive sounds of the great Basie band of the 1930s, and during the same period they were heard on hundreds of recordings under the names of Teddy Wilson and Billiey Holiday. Clayton won Esquire's best musician Gold Award ‘45.”58 My colleague and friend Ed Thigpen, a jazz famous drummer who moved to Copenhagen, Denmark in 1972 and unselfishly collaborated with me while I was conducting my research, speaks of Buck Clayton's career, and especially the fact that Clayton was playing jazz in China back in the 1930s, as if it's one of his fondest memories; that must have been big news in the African American community during The Depression. Jazz singers made a substantial contribution to the proliferation of jazz abroad during the 1920s, and the career of jazz singer/dancer Josephine Baker was simply amazing, as well as illustrative of the experience differential that existed; Baker almost single-handedly represented the jazz-age in Paris. Baker, who languished in poverty during the 1920s, became a millionaire within two years after 56
Ibid., 100.
57
Leonard Feather, The New Edition of the Encyclopedia of Jazz 3 rd ed. (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 162.
58
Ibid., 163.
51 migrating to France.
Her contribution to jazz in the diaspora cannot be
overestimated, and we can only marvel at her accomplishments. “If there was ever an instance of a person or party being in the right place at the right time, it was Josephine Baker in Paris in the mid-1920s. A few years earlier, Josephine was doing laundry and trying to collect for it from whites in St. Louis. By the time the twenties came to a close, she was worth more than a million dollars.”59 Before Josephine Baker’s arrival in Paris, an African American exile community had begun to coalesce in Montmartre; Eugene Bullard was one of the movers behind its development into a home away from home:
Until Bullard opened Le Grand Duc at 52 rue Pigalle in the early autumn of 1924, there was no “home” in Montmartre with a “soul flavor” where the growing community of black musicians could congregate after hours or between gigs at other night clubs in the quarter. In the hustle for bookings at the most popular night clubs in Paris and elsewhere in France and Europe, small musical groups Briggs’s Savoys were constantly on the move, spreading the gospel of jazz.60
The community thrived at Montmartre, in part, because of “the popularity of black Americans in France and the willingness of French authorities to support them overtly – attitudes and behavior so markedly different from those in the United States – were deeply rooted in French history and culture.”61 Josephine was nineteen years old when she arrived in Paris. The cast of African Americans numbered 24 persons, and they arrived in France on September 22, 1925. They were in for aon number of surprises, but the first surprise was that when they boarded the train, they sat in the same dining car that the white
59
Stephen Papich, Remembering Josephine (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1976), 52.
60
William A. Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 29.
61
Craig Lloyd, Eugene Bullard: Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 75.
52 passengers sat in. They were served in the same way that the white passengers were served. Sidney Bechet was with Josephine on this trip, and he knew what to expect:
The troupe that sailed on the Berengaria landed in Cherbourg on September 22, 1925, and proceeded to Paris the same day by train. All the black performers noticed that they were not told the dining car was filled but were served in the same car as whites with what seemed like enthusiasm. Sidney Bechet told them, not for the first time, that this was one of the reasons he had wanted to come back to France.62
Josephine's unique talent was noticed by Henry Varna, who first saw her at a dreary rehearsal hall located upstairs from the Theatre des Champs Elysees. “After witnessing the rehearsal, Varna quietly thanked the group and walked over to Josephine. On his way, he picked up a slipper. She looked at it for a long time, then at him. She had no idea that he was Ziegfield ten times over. Varna only kneeled down and put the slipper on Cinderella's foot. The rest is history.”63 History, indeed.
Varna assembled the most important figures in Paris for
Josephine’s opening, including “certain important members of the theatrical press corps. He brought up the big guns. He invited Maurice Chevalier, and Mistinguett, then the reigning queen of the theatre. He invited the Rothschilds, his bankers. Also in the audience were DeGaulle, Hemingway, Piaf, the Fitzgeralds, and Stravinsky.”64 Another distinguished patron was in attendance at the opening who would have an almost surreal connection with Josephine: His Royal Highness Gustav VI, the Crown Prince of Sweden. “That night, as the prince entered the royal box, the audience rose to applaud him. Josephine commented later that when he spoke, ‘it
62
Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 65.
63
Stephen Papich, Remembering Josephine (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1976), 53.
64
Ibid., 57-57.
53 was like you poured warm honey into some hot butter.’”65 Even though Gustav VI was married to Louise Mountbatten, who was from one of England's most revered families, he wanted to meet Josephine, for romantic purposes. When Josephine and Gustav VI finally met in 1929 after he had Varna introduce them in her dressing room, “The Crown Prince asked her to go to Sweden with him, and she agreed to it. Gustav VI took Josephine Baker, singer and dancer from East St. Louis, to Sweden. He took her to the summer palace in the dead of winter. They were alone for a month, with only three servants to wait on them.”66 The Revue nègre had such a great impact on France that there was a cultural backlash:
In that aftermath of the Revue nègre, the popular dance establishment did indeed start “regaining hold” of itself. Beginning with the presentation that Henriette Regnier, a professor of the Opéra, held in 1925, Paris witnessed a parade of new dance steps and music. These choreographic initiatives reflected an extraordinary unanimity of purpose: to “combat the intrusion in our country of dances of exotic origins” and to “launch at home things which we can send abroad instead of borrowing everything from foreigners.”67 Clearly, what Josephine Baker experienced and her impact on Europe was a long, long way from doing laundry for whites and trying to collect for it in St. Louis! “In conjunction with a successful career in music, Baker served in the French Air Force and the Resistance Movement known as the Marquis, a group of elitists dedicated to the overthrow of the Germans.”68 America's armed forces were totally segregated at the time, though they claimed to be outraged by Hitler's racist agenda. The German High Command offered a 100,000 francs reward for the capture of Josephine Baker, not only because of her resistance, but because her husband Jean Leon, was Jewish. 65
Ibid.
66
Ibid., 84.
67
Jody Blake, Le Tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 19001930 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 101.
68
Stephen Papich, Remembering Josephine (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1976), 120.
54 Baker's return to America was disappointing, to say the least, for American audiences did not find her particularly compelling as a performer; the facilities and props were meager, in juxtaposition to the accoutrements that she was afforded in Paris. “The Folies Bergere was in many respects far superior to any New York shows, including Ziegfield at his best. Josephine expected too much. She expected more from her producers than they could, or cared to, give her. She really did not realize that what she and Varna had accomplished was the ultimate.”69 Adding insult to injury, Josephine had a rather portentous escapade with Ziegfield's wife, Billie Burke, that really put everything in perspective in terms of how far she had, and had not, gone. Baker's encounter with Billy Burke occurred on the voyage to New York from France, aboard the Normandie, an art deco vessel with which the French were enthralled, believing that it accurately represented their sophistication. Baker saw this as an opportunity to meet Ziegfield’s wife, who was an MGM star. Baker had tried to contact Burke and invite her to dinner, however “the purser was unable to contact Burke to inform her of the request. Josephine dressed in a silk chiffon gown by Erte. She wore emeralds. And when she walked down that long staircase into the grande salle a manger, it must have been something. The whole room, led by the captain, rose and applauded.”70 The scenario was repeated when Billie Burke descended the staircase and entered the room; Burke had a penchant for expensive jewelry too, and it eventually helped Ziegfield to go bankrupt. As Burke entered, she was led by the steward to where Baker was waiting. “The entire room sat down and watched her. Josephine remained standing. The steward stopped at the table and pulled out the chair. Billie Burke gave Josephine an icy stare, brushed past the steward, past the captain's table, and marched out of the dining room. The passengers were stunned. Josephine took the blow to her dignity.”71 Josephine simply ate alone, and all of the diners rose as she left the
69
Ibid., 102.
70
Ibid., 103.
71
Ibid., 103-4.
55 dining room via the stairway she had descended; as she turned around to smile at her supporters, the crowd began to cheer her.
Quite a homecoming, by any
standard. The Baker-Burke confrontation had nothing to do with professional rivalry: it had everything to do with the racism that jazz musicians have always encountered in America. This vignette aptly exemplifies the difference between life in Europe, and life in America for so-called Negroes in the early twentieth century. When Josephine Baker arrived in New York, no one was there to meet her, and she hired a number of taxis to take her 100 bags to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel: the desk clerk told her that there was no reservation for her. The Plaza Hotel and the Essex Hotel told her that no accommodations were available. The Ziegfield show in which she appeared was a flop, and the critics maliciously attacked Baker. Thus Josephine returned to France, greatly disillusioned. “Her dream of becoming a real American star would never become a reality. As Josephine thought about her experiences in America, the scenes with Billy Burke and at the Waldorf, their significance began to come to her. She wondered why blacks in America stayed there. Why didn't they leave?”72 Had they migrated to France, they would have enjoyed freedoms that were unthinkable in America during the Roaring Twenties; the Cotton Club and the Plantation Club in New York City were both segregated; African American jazz musicians were expected to walk along the wall during their breaks so that they wouldn’t cross the dance floor, which would bring them close to the white clientele:
By the early 1920s a tiny black American community had taken root in Paris. It was a diverse assemblage of people, who had come to the French capital by many different roads and for many different reasons. Some had been attracted by the legends of intimate cafés and the bright lights of the Champs-Elysées whereas others came there as self-conscious refugees from American racism. Still others ended up in the city by chance, drawn by the serendipity of their careers or personal relations. But African Americans 72
Ibid., 107.
56 living in Paris after the war shared a common feeling of liberation from the harsh limitations of life in the United States.73
For some unknown reason, Josephine Baker “was still craving American stardom, which landed her in New York again. In 1950, Josephine Baker went to the famous Stork Club in New York, which was very expensive, very exclusive, and very anti-black. The famous velvet rope was not let down for any black.”74 No one knows how she was able to get beyond the velvet rope, and inside the Stork Club, but it is known that she was with friends, and she had just finished a show. “After Josephine and her party had ordered, the captain came over to the table and told Josephine that she could not be served. It was against the policies of the club, he said, and he requested that she leave.”75 The entire incident was seen by the famous columnist Walter Winchell, “who trivialized the encounter and wrote that it was a manufactured protest; he accused her of being pro-communist, pro-Fascist, anti-American, anti-Semitic, and of all things, anti-Negro!”76 These charges were certainly fantastic, considering the fact that Baker had put her life on the line for the Allies during World War II. “Winchell demanded in the newspapers and on the radio that Senator McCarthy investigate her, and McCarthy did just that. When the senator reported to Winchell that he found no basis on which to make any charges, it infuriated Winchell even more. For McCarthy to have come to Josephine's defense seems incredible.”77 Winchell ruined Josephine Baker's career; “she was reduced from doing the Folies Bergere, to doing small nightclubs that would agree to let her perform.
Just before Winchell died, he made a public apology to
Josephine at the Juin le Pain, a small club in southern France. When he held out his 73
Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996), 34-5.
74
Stephen Papich, Remembering Josephine (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1976), 175.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid., 175-76.
57 hand, she refused to take it”78 Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois both suffered a similar fate during this time; though their careers were quite different, they were unified by skin-color and their refusal to accept the American status quo: segregation. Josephine Baker raised, after her confrontation with Billie Burke, what I believe to be the most important questions relating to jazz and skin-color in America: why did Negroes stay in America, and why didn't they leave? Josephine Baker’s legacy has not been forgotten by the French, evidenced by the comparison that is being made between Baker and Dee Dee Bridgewater, another African American jazz exile: “Yeah, I kind of am,” Dee Dee Bridgewater said, responding to my observation that she was recently described as “the darling of Europe” in the press. “It’s true, it’s really true. In France, now they call me ‘Josephine Baker the second.’”79 In 1927, trumpeter “Doc Cheatham landed his opportunity to go to Europe by playing in Sam Wooding's band: three or four of the other guys in the band wanted to stay in New York, so Wooding hired Cheatham, Jerry Blake, and Ted Fields.”80 Wooding recorded one of Cheatham's arrangements in Europe. Cheatham recalls that their boat docked at Cherbourg, and they took a train to Berlin, which became the band's headquarters; they lived at 28 Ranka Strasse. To him, “Berlin was a most beautiful city; each day he used to ride on top of a bus down the Unter den Linden with trees overlapping the street, and he admittedly was never so happy as he was in Germany.”81 The band played in Romania, Czechoslovakia, Holland, France, Spain, Istanbul, and Belgium and “in about every country all over Europe, 78
Ibid., 177.
79
W. Royal Stokes, Living the Jazz Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 123.
80
Adolphus Doc Cheatham, Alyn Shipton, (ed.) I Guess I'll Get The Papers And Go Home (London: Cassell plc with Bayou Press Ltd., 1995), 25.
81
Ibid., 27-28.
58 Sam was recognized as having one of the greatest entertaining bands in the world at the time, a time when jazz and jazz musicians were consistently being denigrated.”82 The band recorded on rare “wax disks” in Barcelona that have now become treasured collectibles, and they played in Nice, France at the Hotel Negresco where visiting nobility, like the Prince of Wales and the King of Norway, were in attendance. “The band used to have a special table near the bandstand where they were waited on through the night with food, drinks, special Turkish coffee, and just about anything else they wanted.”83 This could not have happened in America in 1927: it would have been outrageous, as well as illegal. “In the daytime, Cheatham used to go across to the beach opposite the Hotel, swimming and thanking God that he was there.”84 Cheatham lived in Europe until 1930, when the band was playing at the Paris Club Florida during the stock market crash. When he got back to America “he was sorry for a while that he had left Europe. His reason for leaving was that he wanted to play a better type of jazz; he took a job at the Savoy in New York.”85 Cheatham traveled through the South, and “the musicians had to sleep on the bus; they would hang their pajamas over the seats and change into their clothes on the bus. After the job, they would change into their pajamas on the bus and hang their suits up, and when they woke up the next morning, they would dress on the bus.”86 They couldn't eat at white restaurants: “they could stop and draw the bus around the back, or even two to three blocks away, and send in their white or black manager with the musicians’ orders.”87 There were a few hotels in the South that catered to Negroes, but they were rat-infested holes. “Cheatham registered at one hotel where the manager gave each musician a baseball bat; they asked what the bat 82
Ibid., 28.
83
Ibid., 29.
84
Ibid.
85
Ibid., 30-31.
86
Ibid., 37.
87
Ibid.
59 was for, and the manager replied that they may see some rats: they did. The rats were as big as dogs, and there were chinches and bed bugs all over the beds, which were filthy.”88 Thus when musicians finished a tour of this type, their bodies would be covered with insect bites and crabs. A telling incident occurred when Cheatham played at an all-white dance in Memphis, Tennessee with Cab Calloway's band. He recalls that the hall was very crowded, and the people really enjoyed the music to the point that they rushed the stage for autographs of the musicians. “A white man became angry about this contact between whites and Negroes, and he started throwing bottles at the stage; the musicians hid behind chairs in order to keep from being seriously injured by flying missiles.”89 When the musicians started to fight back, a riot broke out and the victims were yet again victimized, arrested for defending themselves, and they were blasted with more projectiles as the trucks took them to jail. “This was typical in the South, and events like this happened so often that bands refused to perform at a number of establishments in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Georgia, that were known for such dangers.”90 Cheatham notes that “they wanted the musicians to play there, but at the same time, they resented them and did everything that they could to harass them while they were there. A lot of musicians felt their whole lives had been hurt or damaged by going there.”91 In 1934 when Cheatham went to England with Cab Calloway's band, it was evident that winds of change were blowing in Europe. “Calloway, who the British considered crude, was heckled by the pit band when his name was announced at one engagement; an appearance in Manchester was similar. However, the band was well received in Scotland.”92 The ugly receptions in England caused Calloway to find solace in the bottle. He went on a drinking binge, “ending up late and drunk in 88
Ibid., 39.
89
Ibid.
90
Ibid.
91
Ibid., 41.
92
Ibid., 47.
60 Paris at one of the band's most important engagements. Ironically, in the last years of his life, when Cab made a tour of Europe, there were lines waiting right around the block wherever he played. In London, Paris, and Japan, Cab was one of the biggest musical stars in the world.”93 Cheatham was heading for a job in Paris, in 1939, on the SS United States just as World War II was about to break out. He heard conflicting news reports during the crossing, and he presumed that the hostilities would cease so he decided to stay when the boat docked at La Havre. He checked into a hotel, but the situation in France was more desperate than he had imagined. Cheatham decided to return home, but he didn't even have enough money to buy a return ticket. Eventually, a friendly worker at the consulate loaned him enough money to pay his hotel bill and buy a return ticket to America. With the money to pay his bill in hand, Cheatham proceeded to the front desk: “the hotel owner had been arrested, and shot. There was nobody to pay. The only food in the place was in an icebox in the kitchen. He found some sausages, some stale bread and an open bottle of wine. People were just going in there and helping themselves. That's how he ate.”94 When World War II ended, Cheatham received his lost trunk in New York, shipped there by “the American Express company, for free: everything he owned was in the trunk, and nothing was even missing from it. After that, he never wanted to go back to Europe to live, not because of the wartime experience, but because of the language.”95 Cheatham returned to Paris in 1950, and he played with Coleman Hawkins and Eartha Kitt, also filling in on occasion for Buck Clayton, before returning to New York. In 1958, Cheatham returned to Europe to record and travel extensively through the decade, and into the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s with a number of distinguished ensembles that included Eddie Lockjaw Davis and Illinois Jacquet. Cheatham’s return engagement in Vienna, Austria, “sixty years after his
93
Ibid., 47-48.
94
Ibid., 64-65.
95
Ibid., 66.
61 first performance there, was a poignant one. Cheatham appeared at the Moulin Rouge, and the place was packed every night. A lot of elderly people came to hear this old trumpeter in his 80s who'd been there so long ago; professors, teachers, musicians, they all came to hear what it was all about.”96 It was the same when he recently performed in Nice, Barcelona, and London; however, Cheatham was shocked by the reality of America's devaluation of jazz, and jazz musicians, when he returned to New York to do a concert in the park, in the Bronx. According to Cheatham, the band that he played with was a great one, but the audience situated itself “with their backs turned to the music, just like they'd sit out any other hot night, band or no band. It broke him up, after coming from France and Spain where people crowded around him to hear every note that he was playing, to be back in a country where nobody gives a damn whether you're playing, or not.”97 In Europe and Japan, the fans revere jazz musicians and know all of their vital statistics. This includes the children, as well as the adults, so it seems that the parents or the educational systems in the jazz diaspora are committed to the inclusion of jazz musicians among the significant contributors to music as a whole. Cheatham admits that it hurts when he deplanes in New York, “and nobody cares whether you play the saxophone or the telephone. Cheatham laments that it just brings him down, but there is still no place like home. He believes that playing in Europe makes jazz musicians play better, because they know that they are being listened to carefully.”98 On June 1, 1997, Doc Cheatham died in Washington, D.C. at the age of 92. His life span occurred in tandem with the very origin of jazz, its rise to prominence during World War II, and its demise during the 1960s. Cheatham was one of those rare musicians who continued to improve as they aged, rather than falter: he made
96
Ibid., 81.
97
Ibid., 85.
98
Ibid.
62 an intentional commitment to do so. Doc Cheatham’s contributions will not be forgotten by jazz historians, musicians, enthusiasts, or Parisians. The questions that arise from analyzing the migration of American jazz musicians to the diaspora caught the attention of Bill Moody, who is a jazz musician, author, and English instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; he wrote The Jazz Exiles: American Musicians Abroad in 1993.
The book is,
essentially, a compilation of first-hand interviews with the most prolific jazz exiles of all time, along with his insights on jazz over the past three decades. Moody believes that exile, as opposed to expatriate, is the most appropriate term for describing these dislocated artists, based on the way that their “music was treated in America.”99 Moody was trained at the Berklee College of Music, and in 1967 he embarked on a three-year European tour that included performances with Jr. Mance and the singer Johnny Hartman.
Upon his return to America in 1970, “his
reflections on the experience caused him to question when this migration had started, why it had started, and how many of the major names in jazz were spending large portions of their lives in foreign countries performing a music that was uniquely American in origin.”100 American jazz exiles “were accorded respect, sometimes star treatment from European jazz fans, and enjoyed ample opportunities to perform though many of the musicians were forgotten names back home, however much in demand they were in Europe.”101 This migration paralleled the exodus of American writers to Europe in the 1920s who “became known as Gertrude Stein's ‘lost generation’, thus American jazz musicians took the road to Europe at a steadily increasing rate, and Moody discovered that many of America's prominent jazz musicians live and work exclusively in Europe.”102
99
Bill Moody, The Jazz Exiles: American Musicians Abroad (Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1993), xvi.
100
Ibid., xvii.
101
Ibid., xxv.
102
Ibid., 9.
63 Reed man Garvin Bushell, who is unknown to most Americans, was a remarkable jazz exile whose career extended from the origin of jazz to its decline. He was born around 1900, and he began playing in circus sideshows in 1916. Bushell played saxophone, oboe, and bassoon, and he was one of those rare musicians who could play both jazz and classical music at their highest levels: Bushell even taught John Coltrane in his New York studio during the late 1940s. Today, we marvel at the ability to negotiate between these two musical genres displayed by Wynton Marsalis, but he is preceded by Garvin Bushell. “For symphonic work, Bushell unpacked his bassoon and oboe doing stints with Pablo Casals and the Puerto Rican Symphony, the New York City Ballet Theater, Radio City Music Hall, and the Chicago Civic Orchestra.”103 Bushell can be heard on two of John Coltrane's albums: Africa Brass and Trane's Modes. “Like most American jazz musicians, Bushell spent considerable time touring and living in foreign countries. He made his first trip abroad with pianist Sam Wooding and the show Chocolate Kiddies in1925 that resulted in a stay of nearly three years in Europe.”104 Bushell notes that in those days, people queued up to see them in the capitols of Europe, and that the musicians were “invited to dinner after each performance. While in Berlin, Bushell heard a number of orchestral performances, and it was there that he resolved to forge his career as a jazz and classical musician. He studied with Henry Selmer, the world's most famous saxophone maker, in Paris and bassoon with Eli Carmen.”105 He returned to America in 1927, where segregation was in full force. “Bushell started his own personal campaign by trying to integrate the Loew's Victoria theater in New York, sitting down in the restricted section, wearing a Homberg hat, speaking with a British accent, and daring them to throw him out.”106 (He was able to do this because he was a so-called mulatto, according
103
Ibid., 32.
104
Ibid., 34.
105
Ibid.
106
Ibid., 34-35.
64 to the One Drop Rule which prevailed: that is, if a person had one drop of so-called black blood, then that person was black. Before Emancipation, this “rule” allowed more people to be enslaved; since there was a ban on the importation of new slaves, whites had an alternative source of domestic slaves on hand during the Antebellum.) But, Bushell had another problem: his wife was a dancer at the Cotton Club, and he was not allowed in, unless he was playing there: their policy was, no Negroes allowed. At the Apollo Theater, Negroes had to use the back stairs to gain entry. “At the Roseland Ballroom, where he was performing with Fletcher Henderson, Negro musicians were not allowed to walk across the floor, rather, they were forced to walk along the wall and directly to the basement when the band took a break.”107 Bushell's experiences were even worse in the South while he was travelling with Cab Calloway's band. They were playing in East Texas, and they had to have a police escort to and from the gigs; one Texan tried to pay the sheriff to let him go up on the stage and hit Cab Calloway in the mouth. 108 Bushell moved to Puerto Rico in the early 1940s, and on one occasion, he visited Biloxi, Mississippi. He remembers being told by a cop that he didn't have to stay in the Negro section of town, and the progressive officer took him to a motel, “told the clerk that he had some niggers from Puerto Rico, and instructed the clerk to give them a room.”109 In 1948, Bushell received a call to go on tour playing bassoon and oboe with the Paul Whiteman band, however when Whiteman actually saw him, the name of the game was changed. Whiteman insisted that the double-reed player had to play flute too, though he had not mentioned this to the union previously. Bushell didn't play flute, and the job was given to one of Bushell's friends, who was white. “Eventually, Bushell landed the job as bassoonist of the New York City Ballet Theater. During the first three days of rehearsal, Bushell recalls, no one spoke to him. He responded with an old jazzman's trick: waiting for
107
Ibid., 35.
108
Ibid.
109
Ibid., 36.
65 a solo to show your stuff. After the solo, they spoke to him.” 110 Apparently, the dire expectations of the other orchestra members were not realized. “For Bushell and other black musicians, Europe, with the possible exception of England, was a different story when it came to prejudice; however Bushell recollects that the Germans and Swedes were very color-conscious even though segregation was not enforced.”111 We now know, as a result of some recent disclosures by the Swedish government, that Sweden was engaged in an aggressive eugenics program, and coercive euthanasia was being practiced during the first half of the twentieth century on a broad scale. These sentiments led to the horrors of World War II, and many jazz musicians were forced to leave the continent and return to America. As the influence of Germany expanded beyond its traditional boundaries, the face and course of jazz in the diaspora changed dramatically. The critic/historian James Lincoln Collier claims that jazz was appreciated and supported in America as much as it was in Europe, which is proof that he has no understanding of African American jazz musicians’ quotidian and chronic dilemma: exclusion from America’s political economy because of “race.” As Scott DeVeaux points out regarding the migration of Coleman Hawkins:
The assumption that jazz was better appreciated and supported in Europe than at home has recently come under sharp attack by the critic and historian James Lincoln Collier. Among other things, Collier argues that the actual audience for jazz in Europe was insignificant compared with the vast market of the United States. In a purely quantitative sense, this is certainly correct. But life as an expatriate offered other rewards. [Coleman] Hawkins settled into a pleasantly nomadic routine – shuttling between engagements in England, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland, returning to the United States only when threatened by the rumblings of war. As a freelance musician, he enjoyed a new professional autonomy.112 110
Ibid.
111
Ibid.
112
Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87.
66
Collier is in denial of the evidence that John Chilton offered in Sidney Bechet: the Wizard of Jazz that illustrates the great drop-off that African American jazz musicians who frequented the diaspora faced upon their return to a segregated America:
Sidney Bechet flew back to the USA, his ears ringing with the fervent applause of his fans and with the multitude of offers he had received from various promoters, all of whom were eager to get him back to Europe as soon as possible. The excitement over the trip to Europe gradually dispersed and Bechet settled down to his usual stints at Jimmy Ryan’s. The audience there was miniscule compared with the vast numbers who had attended his European concerts, but this didn’t put any sort of break on Sidney’s musical endeavors. Matt Walsh, the long-time manager of Jimmy Ryan’s, never knew of an occasion when Bechet attempted to coast through a gig.113
African American jazz musicians never had access to the vast American market because of the Color Line: that made all of the difference abroad. To miss this point is to ignore the tragic circumstances that African Americans continue to face. Part of Collier’s flawed assumption could lay with what he considers to be “jazz” in the first place; since he doesn’t actually play it, as I described in the Introduction, he really has no way of knowing. Chapter 3 provides evidence that jazz was, and continues to be, more popular abroad than it ever was in America. Bassist June Cole had been “working for five years in Europe. During a long conversation at Big John’s Bar, Cole told Hawkins of the advantages of working abroad, and advised him to contact Jack Hylton,”114 and Coleman Hawkins sent a telegram to England in 1934; Hawkins was hired immediately at his asking price. Hawkins and Hylton went on to establish a working relationship that was strong enough to humble the Nazis, at the height of their power.
113
John Chilton, Sidney Bechet: the Wizard of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 219.
114
John Chilton, The Song of the Hawk (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990), 95.
67
68
CHAPTER 3 JAZZ IN GERMANY: 1925 TO 1945 By far, the country that exerted the most influence upon the development of jazz in Europe from 1919 to 1945 was probably Germany, because Germany eventually occupied much of Europe and implemented its policies in the occupied territories which included France, Romania, Denmark, Norway, Poland, the Balkans, and even a large portion of the Soviet Union. Germany, during the Weimar Republic, was a crucible of the extreme liberalism evidenced by the exploits of Anita Berber, and pervasive racism. Bushell, Bechet, and Josephine Baker all performed in Germany in 1925, and Baker concluded that Berlin was the city of lights, rather than Paris, at that time:
Josephine began to feel comfortable with her new German friends. In some ways, she liked Berlin more than Paris. The lights were brighter and denser at night, the great cafés with their lights blazing looked like ocean liners in the dark, and people were looser. She didn’t have to worry all the time if her clothes were perfect or if she was doing something ridiculous, like eating the shells of the crevettes when she was supposed to peel them off. Here they didn’t care. They were kinkier. Aberrance amused them. The Folies-Bergère seemed far away. She began to think of accepting Reinhardt’s offer to stay in Berlin and work with him.115 115
Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Times (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 88.
69
Anita Berber, a contemporary of Baker from Berlin, “represented a particular kind of culture that defied categorization. This bisexual daughter of a professor of classical music personified the sensuality in which Berlin was awash.”116 To say that jazz became associated with some excessive behaviors early on in Berlin is a huge understatement. For example, Berber's favored hangout was the White Mouse; Miss Berber would perform sexually explicit dances at the club while smashing champagne bottles over the patrons’ heads. Upon her premature death in November of 1928, brought on by her frequent use of cocaine and alcohol in combination, throngs of transvestites, pimps, and their whores queued up at her funeral. The situation and reception of African American jazz musicians in Germany was further complicated by ambivalence: although the social conditions were thought to be liberal, people of African descent were denigrated privately, and often shunned. Racist attitudes towards blacks in Germany were fueled by their ill-fated colonial activities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Africa, and not by anything connected to African Americans, per se. “Nationalistic student fraternities did not accept student members who were colored or were married to colored females. When Margret Boveri, later one of the preeeminent journalists of the 1930s, had an affair with a visiting black American scholar, she was shunned by her colleagues and friends.”117 Josephine Baker surmised that the jovial reception she received was a cover for the real disdain that Germans actually harbored. The evidence that this was actually the case is borne out by a comparison of German and French practices. Though France had it’s drawbacks for African American jazz musicians, and people of color in general, what they were able to accomplish in France speaks volumes: they couldn’t have done it in America. 116
Michael Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3.
117
Ibid.
70 In Germany only a few black musicians, or foreigners at all, played jazz while the genre flourished in neighboring France. Germany kept blacks in the same relative position that they held in American’s Deep South.
In 1926, a hotel
advertised for two Negroes who could perform silly, stereotypical parts in a band; however, in 1932 the hiring of black musicians was banned altogether by the Nationalist Party. Jazz was denounced as “nigger music,” and blamed for the introduction of unwanted practices into Germany. Outrageous claims were made about the dangers of black male sexuality, which would allegedly undermine the reasoning capabilities of whites if it were allowed to proliferate. As far as the situation in Germany is concerned, their loss of World War I caused the country to be occupied by the Africans that they had previously administered in their colonies: this was certainly a blow to the Germans’ ego. The Germans considered themselves “more humane” than the French, as far as their colonial administration techniques were concerned, and they complained that Africans were “brutal and lazy,” and that they were devoid of the capacity for emotion that Europeans possessed. These claims were not new in Germany: they had been made in the 1853 publication of Jacques Arthur de Gobineau The Inequality of the Races, a volume that helped Hitler to shape his racial policies. The African participation in the occupying forces after World War I ended provided a convenient excuse for Germans’ animosity towards all people of African descent. Although there were only 2,500 African troops stationed in Germany in 1925, these troops were blamed for the ills of the entire country. It must have seemed surreal, and intolerable, to the Germans that their former colonial charges were now in power, as occupying forces.
The
combination of two ideas, that is, Social Darwinism and the occupation of the German home land by outsiders, was indeed perfect for propaganda purposes. Eugenics gained prominence during this period and became, increasingly, a part of Western cultural beliefs and practices. The cutting edge so-called “research” in Eugenics originated in America, and the notion of black inferiority was wellreceived by Europeans colonizers. In conjunction, the idea that blacks and Jews
71 were conspiring together by using jazz to infiltrate German gained popularity. Germans began to make an association between Jews and blacks; this was in accord with the popular Eugenicist views that were spreading around the country after the end of World War I. The so-called “sexual hunger” of jazz musicians was an underlying theme, and since many of the Jews were in the forefront of the performing arts at the time, they were high-profile individuals who served as easily accessible targets. Both groups were deemed racially inferior, and they became a target of the Eugenicists’ propaganda campaigns. Many Jewish musicians, who had some sort of involvement with jazz, became propaganda targets. In conjunction, many classical musicians in Germany rebelled against the trend of having jazz in the conservatory, mostly on musical grounds, supposedly. Some of the best known classical composers in Germany, like Richard Strauss and Siegfried Wagner, the son of Richard Wagner, fought against jazz by attacking its symbolic characteristics, modernity and self-expression. One particularly zealous opponent of jazz was racist Muck Lamberty. “Inspired by EEugenics, he formed a group that he called the Higher Breed Campaign; he collected a number of boys and girls and proceeded to have sex with the girls. Many of the girls became pregnant.”118 Lamberty’s took it upon himself to do this: there was no authorization for the project from Adolf Hitler. Hitler frequently referred to the presence of the Senegalese troops on the Rhine as the “black shame.” His repulsion was based, predominately, on Eugenics. Jazz just happened to be part of the alleged conspiracy being initiated by the Jews and blacks; according to Hitler, the Jews were making German women available to blacks at the dance halls. An amateur pianist named Joseph Goebbels, who happened to be an advisor of Hitler, received an appointment from the leader to control the arts. Goebbels was drawn into jazz, even though he resisted it with a passion. The film The Singing Fool, in which Al Jolson performed jazz songs in blackface, 118
Ibid.
72 added fuel to Goebbels claims of a Jewish-black conspiracy. Alfred Rosenberg, a rival of Goebbels, founded the Combat League for German Culture in 1929. The purpose of this group was to stress the connection between “race,” art, and scholarship and reinforce the foundations of so-called German culture. Hans Hinkel worked with Rosenberg to develop the Kampfbund, and eventually he became a close associate of Goebbels. With Hinkel in charge as general secretary, the Kampfbund embarked on a mission of ethnic cleansing, and the establishment of true “Nordic” arts. In 1930, the National Socialist Party banned jazz along with anything related to African American culture, as well as artistic works that were stylistically modern. In the 1930s, Germans who aligned themselves with the Nazis were suspicious of anything connected with the Americanism, and jazz happened to be one of the casualties of this association. However, other Germans attempted to imitate African American jazz musicians, but playing jazz represent a source of frustration for them, regardless of their level musical training. At the Frankfurt conservatory, jazz was approached with the seriousness of the current German harshness; thus the music was executed in a very clumsy manner, and it lacked the lyrical fluidity that is commonly associated with the performance of jazz music. The Nationalist Party clearly intended to eradicate jazz from Germany; however, they could not have imagined that the music genre was about to increase in popularity. In 1933, Fritz Stein, who directed the Berlin Conservatory, banned jazz, in accordance with the sentiments of the National Socialist Party. However, Goebbels paid a backhanded complement to jazz by noting that “America's only contribution to the world of music was what he called jazzed-up nigger music not worthy of a single mention.”119 Then, why was he mentioning it? The popularity of jazz was so great that the music could not be ignored, under any circumstances: the Nazis were forced to engage it. 119
Ibid., 30.
73 The Nazis experienced difficulties in their attempts to eradicate jazz, because they really had problems deciding what it was. German musicologists couldn't agree on whether their scorn should be directed at America or Africa for originating jazz, and as a result their credibility as musicologists came into question. Another problem was that they identified rhythmic devices that were supposedly unique to jazz; however, they found that the same devices had been used by Bach himself. Then, there was an attempt to blame the saxophone, a claim that was advanced early-on in America; however, the inventor of the saxophone had a connection with Germany, and Richard Strauss used the saxophone quite often in his music. Finally, the Nazis arrived at the argument that the sexual powers of jazz were so profound that it would corrupt national morality. In spite of all of this, “jazz was never officially banned.”120 Hitler didn't seem to bother himself with trying to mold the cultural desires of the public; rather, he left it to his subordinates. This was another miscalculation that Hitler made: he had no idea that jazz would later undermine his armed forces’ belief in their cause. Most people think of the Nazis as a highly efficient organization; however, recent information has proven otherwise. The leader, Adolf Hitler, seldom rose before noon, and sometimes he would not appear until 2:00 in the afternoon. Hitler was annoyed by details, and according to his philosophy, things would work themselves out if they were just left alone. His subordinates were careful not to make any decisions without his personal approval, and there was a great deal of bureaucratic inefficiency. Hans Bruckner, who seemed to hate jazz more than anyone in the Nazi regime, was impatient about purging jazz, blacks, and Jews from Germany. Without any official permission, Bruckner “published a periodical that would point out which musicians were Jewish; however, he made so many errors that his plan backfired. Bruckner, who at great cost to himself had published his third edition in 1938, became the laughing stock even of the party.”121 Thus, the 120
Ibid., 33.
121
Ibid., 44.
74 bureaucratic shortcomings of the Nazis may have helped jazz slip through the cracks, or shall we say, gaping administrative holes. Ultimately, it was the mainstream of Germany's population, during the Nazi regime, that sustained jazz, risking their lives in the process. There was such a demand for jazz music that even Goebbels was rendered defenseless. Goebbels had second thoughts when it came to an outright ban on the performance of jazz in Nazi Germany. Real pressure was being exerted on Goeeobbels's broadcasting monopoly by powerful foreign radio stations that Germans could easily listen to on their Superhet receivers, and by the preexisting agreements with foreign record companies for the distribution of their respective records. German citizens received New Orleans-style and swing-style broadcasts from the powerful Radio Luxemburg, right in their homes on demand: this posed some staunch competition for the Nazi-sponsored broadcasts of propaganda and marches! This forced Goebbels to program Nazi-sponsored jazz on his stations in order to compete for the listeners’ attention. Apparently, jazz was not as trivial as Goebbels pretended; the demand for jazz music actually dictated to him what his programming agenda must include. Goebbels launched a jazz band on his Duetschlandsender station called the Golden Seven, but they were eventually purged, as the Nazis became more powerful. Afterwards, during a national broadcast on how to screen jazz out, demonstrations of jazz music were played as examples of what should be avoided; this move led to another problem for the Nazis that would compromise the regime’s income. In order to keep their war machine going, the Nazis needed the foreign currency that they received from record sales; they had made contracts for the distribution of German recordings, and they would in turn make American and British records available in Germany. Germans could purchase jazz recordings from record stores, but it had to be done in a clandestine manner, because such an act could be interpreted as a crime by the Nazis. To remedy this, store owners or
75 dealers would exchange the labels on jazz records with classical German labels: a Duke Ellington record might have had a Richard Strauss label on it. Another way that Germans got their hands on coveted jazz records was by mail-order. After the spring of 1938, German jazz record collectors entered a potential crisis. However, there were numerous loopholes in Nazi security that were exploited. Schultz, a student at Konigsberg who would eventually become an SS officer, paid no attention to the proscriptions against jazz. A December 1937 initiative was launched by the Nazis against non-Aryan artists, especially focusing on African American jazz musicians, but they were not very good at figuring out just who was, or was not, an African American. As a result of these difficulties, the Nazis allowed certain black musicians to pass, whereas other black musicians were not allowed to pass: they couldn't figure out their exact status. Duke Ellington was dropped from Brunswick’s catalogs while his song Caravan was not dropped. The Mills Brothers sang Caravan, and the Nazis apparently thought that the Mills Brothers were “Aryans.” Both Hitler and Goebbels “claimed” that they hated jazz, and they were not open to its coexistence, but for all their hatred of jazz, their inept bureaucracy allowed it to flourish. Goebbels was a frequent patron of the most popular jazz clubs in Nazi Germany. Hitler’s objection to jazz was in line with his rejection of modernity and cultural products that were not of German origin. Goebbels’s kept a diary, and in it, he wrote about the widespread administrative incompetence within the Nazi regime. The Nazis became increasingly frustrated in their attempt to eradicate jazz, so they decided to create a “new” musical form that would replace it; they assumed that they would be able to create a great new form that would exceed the popularity of jazz, but they failed to do so. To the dismay of the Nazis, some of their own party members were imitating Negro jazz musicians religiously, like Fritz Schulze, who was virtually addicted to the African American pianist Teddy Wilson’s playing. The Carlton Bar was a site that was known to Germans as a jazz club, and
76 there were a number of similar clubs in the area. At these classy jazz establishments, the owners contrived ways to get around the RMK prohibitions. The doormen admitted high-class patrons, and turned away the unknown or unfashionable; it was known that Nazi spies dispurported themselves in a low-key manner, so they were seldom well-dressed. The musicians had jazz arrangements on their music stands, but at the ringing of a certain bell, they would start playing corny, non-confrontational songs like "Schwarzer Panther" that were also included on the jazz arrangements, for an emergency situation. There was a cost to these upscale jazz establishments like The Quartier Latin, a real cost: it was so expensive to go there that only the extremely wealthy, and movie stars, could afford it. For example, Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld would drink cheap booze at a nearby club before going to The Quartier Latin where he might nurse the cheapest drink that he could get for the evening. Coleman Hawkins was active in Germany at this time; Jack Hylton, an EnglishGerman bandleader with whom Coleman Hawkins was playing in the mid1930s, had been ordered to leave him Hawkins behind when the band was scheduled to perform for the Nazis; Hylton was also instructed to put any Jews who were in the band in the back. These orders came directly from Goebbels, but Hylton ignored the orders. Curiously, some African Americans had eluded the Nazi purges, and they were still playing jazz in Germany. By passing as an Egyptian, Herb Flemming, who had played with Sam Wooding’s band, was the headliner at Berlin’s upscale Sherbini Bar. Jazz thrived in most of Germany’s major cities, and young people were forming clubs, organizing dances, and collecting records. Thus, a “jazz paradox” existed in Nazi Germany: officially, the regime denigrated jazz and its practitioners, but they had jazz clubs that were too expensive for European royalty to afford, German jazz radio stations, and later they would even have jazz bands in the concentration camps with which Nazi officers or
77 soldiers often played. Such was the pull of jazz in the diaspora: it had the power to overcome even the sternest proscriptions. A rather perplexing event took place in Dusseldorf in 1936. Under the auspices of Werner Daniels, the International Swing Rhythm Club was founded. These were young jazz enthusiasts who had heard jazz on the radio and they had really been attracted to it. The members all paid dues so that they could obtain a subscription “to a Dutch jazz journal. The members all adopted English names, used greetings such as ‘Swing High,’ and tried to identify as closely as possible with blacks in Harlem and the rural American South, rather than the Hitler Youth most of them belonged to.”122 Jazz drummer Fritz Brocksieper and all of his friends who were becoming jazz fanatics, and they scoffed at joining the Hitler Youth. Another curious thing about the Nazis’ relationship with jazz musicians was that some high Nazi officials actually protected certain jazz musicians, like Fritz Schulze. Schulze appealed to an SS general that he knew to relieve him of SS service, so that he could focus on playing jazz. The general released him from his obligations, citing his past contributions to the SS, and Schulze was allowed to continue his life of playing in jazz clubs. The inconsistent enforcement of policies finally reached Goebbels himself. Goebbels had an “affair with a Czech actress named Lida Baarováa, and his aide Karl Hanke, who was in love with Goebbels’s wife Magda, repeatedly took his boss’s wife to the Ciro. Even the proverbial rowdies of the Nazi movement, the storm troopers, partook of the forbidden fruit.”123 General Secretary Hans Hinkel, the foremost jazz-hater of the Reich at times, was forced to accompany Fritz Brocksieper’s band on a concert stop. When Hinkel told the troops that no American or Jewish tunes would be played, the troops threw apples at him. The band then acknowledged the troops and played a popular, 122
Ibid., 81.
123
Ibid., 101.
78 swinging tune called “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön,,” a jazzy, rhythmic song that was a standard. (When I played in Burt Stratton's klezmer band during the 1980s, this song was still extremely popular with audiences. African American musicians playing in klezmer bands is not uncommon. The guitar’s rhythm is quite similar to what the Big Band guitarists played, a strong boom-chuck boom-chuck feel.) From the accounts of Werner Molders, a pilot who was one of Hermann Goering’s greatest, we know that the Luftwaffe’s pilots didn’t bomb the BBC radio tower because they wanted to have some jazz to listen to on the way home. Molders eventually approached Goebbels and told him that the Luftwaffe's pilots were listening to British jazz and news broadcasts on their missions, arguing that it was a threat to national security: it was, because Germans were being assailed with enemy propaganda as a consequence of their search for jazz. Goebbels took Molders's advice seriously, and he formed a German-type jazz orchestra with a budget of over one million marks per year. This new band, the DTU, had two purposes: it was supposed to keep the German military from listening to British stations, and it was supposed to satiate the civilians’ hunger for jazz as well. The band was restricted, as far as what it could play. All American titles were banned; however, the Luftwaffe pilots requested Rhapsody in Blue by a George Gershwin, a Jewish composer. Goebbels ignored the request, and they took to the skies, disappointed. Brocksieper, who was admittedly “one-quarter Jewish,” was making 500 marks per week playing jazz for the Third Reich, while other German workers were making 200 marks per month; he was at odds with himself about being in the employ of the Nazis. Brocksieper had a difficult choice; he had to either work for the Germans as a jazz musician, or work as an enlisted man on the battlefield. Had he picked up a rifle and started shooting, he would've probably most certainly killed Allies. (In his situation, what would you do? Probably, anyone who was not there could not possibly answer that question.) Jewish musicians, like Hanns-Joachim Bessunger, risked their lives to play jazz in Germany the 1940s, after the Nazis had killed his family.
79 Goebbels's attempts to suppress and destroy jazz were further impeded by SS member Dr. Johann Wolfgang Schottlander, a musicologist from the Berlin Conservatory whose research was funded by Heinrich Himmler. One of his duties was to develop the German film industry by using American films as a model. Schottlander became enamored with the films and the culture he was supposed to be “studying” for the Nazis. Germans who were at odds with the Nazi regime's measures aimed at banning jazz and jazz musicians found refuge in Dr. Schottlander's inner circle, which met to view American films; they concluded that their cause was unjust,, however Schottlander's group had no designs on overthrowing the Nazi regime. Another staunch defender of jazz during the Reich was trumpeter Carlo Bohlander. Bohlander was stationed near the site of Geissen, and he was trying to get out of military service in the early 1940s; Bohlander sneaked out to play with the Harlem Club and meet with young Germans in Frankfurt who opposed the Nazis. The Harlem Club consisted of jazz musicians and teenagers who were jazz fanatics. This club was conspiratorial, rather than accommodating, towards the Nazi regime’s policies. They broke all of the rules, like listening to foreign radio stations, playing jazz, and showing up for jazz performances instead of attending Hitler Youth meetings. These activities brought even younger listeners into jazz. For example, sixteen-year-old clarinetist Emil Mangelsdorff would bring his 13-yearold brother Albert along on occasion; this, is turn, had quite an effect on the younger brother who happened to be a violinist at the time. Albert became so inspired that he soon changed instruments so that he could play jazz using one of its prominent tools, the guitar. These activities became increasingly dangerous, and many of the Harlem Club’s teenage men were eventually forced to join the army. Therefore, it was the young women, like Jutta Hipp, who sustained jazz during this period, because they could not be forced to join the army. She studied harmony and sight reading with the orchestra of her church, and she idolized pianists Teddy Wilson, Fats Waller, and Art Tatum. Jutta listened to their music illegally over the
80 BBC in her basement, and used a crude flashlight so that she could see as she transcribed the music for the jazz band that she helped to form. Jazz became a form of protest for Germany’s young people, and its popularity soared. Young people in Hamburg, known as the Hamburg Swings, were behaving in the same way; many of these German youths from middle and upperclass families were persecuted by the Gestapo for listening to, or dancing to, jazz. An untold number of them were thrown into concentration camps, though they really had no political agenda against the Nazi regime, per se. These were not political radicals, as they were portrayed to be by the Nazis: they were just young people exhibiting their penchant for new experiences. Their activities were politicized by the Nazis, who were clearly being ignored by the jazz lovers, and many of them were thrown into prison. As the Nazi regime crumbled, these young Germans who had been jailed often ended up in concentration camps: it didn’t matter what their offense had been in the chaos. This is a stark example of how a repressive regime can become cannibalistic, feeding on the youth whose futures they are supposed to be protecting. The German high command’s resistance to jazz finally gave way in the middle of 1943, when it was clear that the end was near. They were faced with an increasing demand for jazz performances by their soldiers, and the decreasing availability of jazz musicians. The best musicians happened to be in the Army, stationed at lonely outposts in many instances. The Nazis were unable to provide accomplished jazz musicians to entertain the troops, because their safety could no longer be guaranteed. Soldiers who were headed for the Eastern front, probably, were not going to be returning. Since most of the German soldiers wouldn’t be coming back, they were allowed to request African American or Jewish tunes: they were known as “suicide squads.” Also in 1943, early one morning, there was a knock the door of pianist Martin Roman’s rented room in Amsterdam. He was taken to the Westerbork concentration camp by the Gestapo to play. Roman had been playing with Coleman Hawkins, Lionel Hampton, and Django Reinhardt in
81 Amsterdam. The SS commander of the camp happened to be a jazz fan, so Roman played for months with a band called The Westerbork Stage Group, the concentration camp’s jazz band. Later, Roman was transferred to Auschwitz along with guitarist Coco Schumann and clarinetist Bedfrich Weiss. Coco Schumann came face-to-face with Dr. Joseph Mengele at the Awschwitz concentration camp. Schumann, who had blue eyes, tricked Mengele into believing that he was a plumber from Berlin: Mengele put him in line with those who would be allowed to live. Shortly afterwards, musician Bedrich Weiss’s parents were sent to the line for those who were to be murdered; Weiss asked Mengele if he could go with them, and Mengele grinned and granted his wish. The Weiss family was murdered within hours. SS Corporal Pery Broad, stationed at Auschwitz, was a musician, and he was “crazy” about jazz. Coco Schumann and Martin Roman were concentration camp survivors.survived. SS corporalofficer Pery Broad, who was stationed at Auschwitz, was a musician and he was “crazy” about jazz. Broad played accordion; his father was German and his mother was Brazilian. He was twenty-four-years-old, and he had learned several languages. Broad played with the concentration camp band, when he was in good spirits. However, Broad was known as a sadistic murderer among the inmates, even though he was never convicted of war crimes during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of the 1960s. Jazz musicians Roman, Schumann, and Eric Vogel were liberated from Auschwitz by the allies at the end of World War II; these musicians believed that jazz saved their lives. German jazz musicians like Hans Bluthner, Dietrich Schulz-Kohn, and Werner Daniels risked their lives during the Nazi occupation of Europe to promote American jazz musicians, and distribute news about what these musicians were doing. They redirected supplies that were supposed to be used against the allies; “they openly composed stories about condemned people and undesirables such as Jews (Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman), blacks (Benny Carter), and Frenchmen and Gypsies (Eddie Barclay and
82 Django Reinhardt); they unashamedly lauded American jazz and its subculture.”124 These newsletters were dropped in occupied France, sent to soldiers at the war fronts, and in the neutral countries, without any official authorization. This is quite remarkable, considering that Schulz-Kohn was lLieutenant in the Luftwaffe. The publications leaked sensitive stories that the Nazis would rather have suppressed, like the story about African American jazz trumpeter Harry Cooper, who had been recently released from a concentration camp; Cooper was now playing in Paris, according to the newsletter. One article on Benny Carter, written by Gerd Peter Pick, included a clear drawing of a black man; it seems surreal to even imagine that such newsletters were being read at the Russian Front near the end of the war. Hans Bluthner later conceded that they all would have been hanged at least seven times, had they been caught. Both Schulz-Kohn and Bluthner contend that Schulz-Kohn, the Luftwaffe lieutenant, “provided the list of mostly military addresses and placed his own portrait, in full military regalia, on the cover of the first issue in late 1942, the latter intended as a protective shield, what ever good that may have done them. Schulz-Kohn was assuming a considerable risk for his own person.”125 In that same year, the Luftwaffe lieutenant traveled to Paris to hear his favorite gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, and he even took a photograph with him. Schulz-Kohn posed for pictures with African, Jewish, and Gypsy jazz musicians, and he provided food stamps to some of them as well. This was an example of multiculturalism taking place in Europe, ushered in by jazz, during the world's most violent conflict ever. Only now can this story be told, since it would have meant certain death for those involved, at the time. On May 8th, 1945, Victory in Europe Day, jazz musicians and jazz lovers alike thought that they would be able to gorge themselves. However, the new Russian administration in East Germany followed the Nazi policy of banning jazz, a product of the West; this curtailed the development of jazz in East Germany 124
Ibid., 199-200.
125
Ibid.
83 The Third Reich did not achieve the Final Victory or the eradication of jazz:; rather, they may have helped to expand its reach as it became the theme of the new generation. Thus, the stage was set for the post-war African American jazz exiles, and for the first time in over a decade the music could flow freely in most of Europe.
84
CHAPTER 4
85
JAZZ MUSICIANS IN POSTWAR EUROPE Throughout the history of jazz, France has claimed the lion’s share of American jazz musicians who chose to migrate. This trend continued after World War II, but a number of musicians chose to live in The Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Germany, especially after 1968. Times had changed, and jazz music had changed as well. Many African American jazz musicians had served in the United States armed forces, however it did little to change the racist policies that they were being subjected to:
Army anxieties about homosexuality, venereal disease, camp followers, and foreign war babies were particularly acute near the end of the war, when soldiers would soon be reentering civilian life. Fraternization between black U.S. soldiers and white German women was a singular source of army consternation. In 1945, official army policy banned mixed marriages between black and GI’s and white European women, even if both parties and their parents approved the union, and even if the couple was expecting a baby.126 After two world wars, during which some African Americans had become war heroes while others paid the ultimate price, they were still being denigrated in America as the jazz genre moved into another phase of its development. There was a shift from the “swing” style to what became popularly known as the “bebop” style that had gradually taken hold by the end of the war. Bands were being downsized. As a consequence of the fact that a number of musicians did not make the shift to bebop when it began to flourish, musicians like Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young were at odds with the new approach, and they did not change their styles of playing.
126
Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 238.
86 One of the players who did make the stylistic transition before he moved to Europe was tenor saxophonist Don Byas. Byas went on a European tour in 1946 with arranger Don Redman’s band, which included pianist Dr. Billy Taylor, trumpeter Peanuts Holland, trombone and vibraphone player Tyree Glenn. After their engagements in Switzerland, France, and tThe Netherlands were finished, Byas decided that he would, maybe, “just look around” for awhile: he looked around for about 25 years, living in France, the Netherlands, and Denmark. In 1970, Byas briefly returned to America in order to play at the Newport Jazz Festival, but he went back to Amsterdam, and passed away there in 1972, never having lived in America again after his migration to Europe in 1946. Don Byas is known as the first post-war jazz exile. In his time, Byas was a saxophone ‘colossus” among his peers, but few Americans remember him at all; this is one of the drawbacks that African American jazz exiles continue to face. Composer, saxophonist, and arranger, GiGi Gryce first went to Europe in 1948. He returned to France in 1952 on a Fulbright Scholarship and performed with Lionel Hampton, Tadd Dameron, Max Roach, and Oscar Pettiford, Clifford Brown, and Donald Byrd, most of whom would become jazz exiles if they hadn’t already done so. The versatile woodwind player James Moody migrated to France in 1949 while playing with Dizzy Gillespie. His migration was initially unintentional; however, the pace of the road work got to him, and he ended up staying in Paris for three years. Moody enjoyed living in Paris so much that he had no desire to return to America. However, to almost everyone’s surprise, a record that he had recorded some time ago in Sweden became a hit in America, and ultimately, he returned to receive his well-deserved accolades. Three other important jazz exiles moved to Europe in 1949: Benny Waters, Tadd Dameron, and Benny Bailey. Waters, who was born in 1902, had a career that spanned the entire existence of jazz as we know it. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, Waters played with
87 King Oliver and Clarence Williams. Waters is known to have returned to New York, periodically, as late as the 1980s. Pianist and arranger Tadd Dameron migrated to England in 1948 to, for the most part, write bebop arrangements for big bands after touring with Miles Davis. Miles and Tadd played at the Paris Jazz Festival, and a memorable recording of Lady Bird was made that is a “must hear” version. Dameron spent most of his time arranging for bands, as opposed to playing gigs; he was able to transfer bebop’s “feel” to big band arrangements. However, he did not play as much piano as other musicians would have liked him to during this period, and his discography does not reflect his true stature in jazz. Benny Golson, the composer of Along Came Betty, told me that Tadd Dameron had a great impact on his career, as a composer and performer. Taken together, this collaboration was responsible for a number of jazz standards that almost every jazz musician plays. Dameron’s career was probably compromised by his recurring drug habit, and he died in 1965 of cancer at the age of 46. Trumpeter Benny Bailey, who had toured Europe with Dizzy Gillespie in 1948, left America again in 1949 to play with Lionel Hampton in Sweden and Germany: he decided to stay, citing that Europeans appreciated his work more than Americans did. Bailey appeared on over 200 jazz albums, but most of them are not available in the United States. Bailey remains very happy about his tenure abroad, especially because of the fact that he was able to maintain his individual style of playing instead of changing with every new trend in music that came along; Bailey often performed in big bands with other famous jazz exiles, as well as European musicians. Trumpeter Roy Eldridge, who was one of the first to break the ‘color-line’ in America by holding a chair in the band of Gene Krupa in 1941, became disgusted by the racism that he encountered. In 1950, he left America for a tour in France, but he stayed for a year. Eldridge was able to maintain a successful career
88 upon his return to America though, and he remained active until the 1980s when his health failed. Trombonist Dickie Wells migrated to France in 1952; drummer J.C. Heard and clarinetist Albert Nicholas left America in 1953. Heard, who played with Cab Calloway, took up residence in Japan. Nicholas, who had played in Paris, as well as Egypt and China during the late 1920s, moved to France. Pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong, who was a music major at Fisk University, was influenced by Jelly Roll Morton. Hardin was impressed with Morton’s heavy attack on the piano, and she employed it in her playing style; she was also a voracious sight-reader, having worked as a demonstrator of sheet music. Lil Hardin Armstrong played with some of the most celebrated bands in jazz history. “In 1952, she left for Europe where she lived for four years, playing at Metro Jazz, the Alhambra and the Olympia Theatre in Paris. She appeared on television while abroad and played with most of the local jazz bands.”127 One of the most prolific of the jazz exiles, drummer Kenny Clarke, took up residence in France. Clarke is credited with inventing the technique for bebop drumming while playing with the Teddy Hill band. Disgusted by the conditions for jazz musicians faced, and the death of his colleague Charlie Parker, Clarke migrated to France in 1956, never to live in America again. Clarke had performed in Europe as early as 1938, in Stockholm, Sweden, and he had performed with Dizzy Gillespie in France in 1948: he decided to stay in France sometime after the tour, but it was not a ‘permanent’ relocation. Clark went back to New York in 1951 and eventually became a member of the Modern Jazz Quartet; however, he felt that the band was too stiff, and he eventually quit. “When Clarke relocated to Paris in 1956, he became a celebrity in Paris and Europe. The French and the Europeans all adored him. He was considered the father of modern jazz. Just as Sidney Bechet had symbolized Dixieland music to the
127
Mary Unterbrink, Jazz Women at the Keyboard (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company Publishers, 1983), 29.
89 French, Kenny became the symbol of modern jazz.”128 Clarke was able to thrive in Paris throughout the 1950s, and even the late 1960s when the French musicians’ union placed restrictions on the hiring of black American, or any American, jazz musicians. According to the union's law, only “one American jazz musician” was allowed to play in a club at any given time. This restriction had roots, because it had been imposed on Louis Armstrong when he played in Paris: Louis Armstrong, accepting a celebrity engagement at Bricktop’s, was the idol of French jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt who performed of regularly there, but the visiting Satchmo failed to acknowledge the presence of the French guitarist, to the dismay of Django, perhaps because of the whiteblack ratio imposed by the French quota system. (Django was white: five French musicians must be employed for every “foreign” jazz player)… but French jazz was an oxymoron to African American musicians: Louis Armstrong had probably never heard of Django Reinhardt.129 Clarke had been teaching in conjunction with playing, and by the 1960s it had backfired: now, French drummers believed that they were as good as he was, and they moved against him. Trumpeter Donald Byrd, also an exile, assessed the situation, making the point that the respect that Clarke had originally received, vanished, unlike the respect accorded to classical musicians. “The thing with European musicians was, as soon as they stole the Afro-American musician’s stuff, they would go out playing like black cats and they would try to keep the blacks from working. They were cutting his throat. And then they just tried to wipe him out, just like the white cats in America.”130 The theft of African American jazz musicians’ music was a recurring problem that can be traced back to the Original Dixieland Band’s theft of
Ursula Broschke Davis, The Afro-American Musician and Writer in Paris During the 1950’s and 1960’s (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1983), 61.
128
129
William Wiser, The Twilight Years: Paris in the 1930s (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 2000), 59. Ursula Broschke Davis, The Afro-American Musician and Writer in Paris During the 1950’s and 1960’s (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1983), 72.
130
90 the trumpeter Freddie Keppard’s music before 1920, and Mezz Mezzrow’s theft of Sidney Bechet’s in the 1940s. In fact, bebop was often said to be, in part, an attempt by black musicians to perform some music that whites would be unable, or unwilling to steal. However, the fact that the music was played on Western instruments undermined this approach, because music can be transcribed rather easily by trained musicians. (For example, one of John Coltrane’s complex solos, played on Blue Train, was transcribed by a classical pianist named Zita Carno. Carno eventually met Coltrane and asked him to play her transcription; however, he declined and said that it would be too difficult. Coltrane, in fact, could have ripped the chart; he had been working out of Nicholas Slonimsky’s book, which is even more complex, and when he was a music student, his teachers were never able to give him anything that he could not play.) Kenny Clarke remained unaffected by the French union’s measures though, accepting the fact that he was an outsider and he would never be “fully” integrated into European society. In spite of this, he never returned to America and the thought of doing so disgusted him. Clarke even refused to allow his son to visit America; he returned to receive awards at Yale University and turn down a teaching job there, and to teach at the University of Pittsburgh where Dr. Nathan Davis, his protégé in Europe, also taught. Clarke was not impressed with what he saw, and he immediately returned to France. Part of Clarke’s success can be attributed to the big band that he formed with Francy Boland, a Frenchman, which lasted over a decade and included some of the best jazz musicians who ever played; he died in Paris on December 26, 1985, and the world lost yet another great jazz master who could never be replaced. Pianist Bud Powell and bassist Oscar Pettiford migrated in 1958. Pettiford is noted for his influence on the other bassists of the 1950s who adopted his improvisational technique; he moved to Scandinavia where he played with Kenny Drew and Stan Getz. Bud Powell is one if the tragic geniuses of jazz.
91 Powell’s physical ailments were the result of his violent confrontation with the Philadelphia police. This landed Powell in a number of mental institutions, and his reliance on alcohol became ceaseless. When Powell migrated to France in 1959, he was but a shell of the man that he had been before his head injuries occurred. Powell’s injury occurred in 1945 when he was caught in the middle of a racial incident, and he had a number of nervous breakdowns afterwards. The electroshock treatments that he received at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center aimed at ameliorating his condition were, apparently, unsuccessful. Powell drank and used drugs almost incessantly, possibly in order to kill the pain: this took its toll, and almost certainly hastened his demise. In spite of this, Powell played with intermittent success until he returned to America in the middle of the 1960s, performed at Carnegie Hall, and died in 1966 having been stricken with tuberculosis. Powell is fondly remembered by jazz musicians, and enthusiasts alike, as the quintessential bebop pianist of his time, and he was a welcome addition to the European exile community. Opportunities to play with him were treasured by his colleagues. Jimmy Woode, Lucky Thompson, and Tony Scott migrated to Austria, Sweden, and Japan respectively in 1959. Woode played with Duke Ellington, Thompson played with Dexter Gordon, and Scott played with Billiey Holiday. In 1961, Idrees Sulliman and Kenny Drew migrated to Sweden and France respectively, and Drew later moved to Denmark. Albert Ayler, who was strongly influenced and encouraged by John Coltrane, was known as “Little Bird” around Cleveland, Ohio before he went on the road in the late 1950s to play in a blues band. Ayler enlisted in the Army and he “began to play for the Special Services band. For a while, Ayler and Beaver Harris played together, taking a few jobs in Louisville, the nearest town, before the saxophonist finally shipped out to Europe. He was based in Orleans but frequently
92 found his way to Paris where he would sit in at various clubs.”131 Ayler had been an alto player, but he switched to tenor during this period. Like Ornette Coleman, who felt that “the best statements Negroes have made of what their soul is had been made on this instrument, Ayler dug deeply into its ethnic and sociological implications. It seemed that on tenor you could get out all the feelings of the ghetto.”132 This is perplexing, especially for Albert Ayler to adopt it, if Valerie Wilmer’s data is accurate. One would assume that all “negroes” in the 1950s lived in the ghetto; however, Albert is said to have lived in Shaker Heights, Ohio, which is an affluent suburb of Cleveland. According to Valerie Wilmer, “Albert Ayler was born 13 July 1936 in Cleveland, Ohio the elder of two sons. The family lived in Shaker Heights, a pleasant residential district with a racially mixed population.”133 However, Shaker Heights is more than just a pleasant residential district, and it does not have a ghetto: it never had one. The area was initially ‘settled’ around 1830 by the Shakers, a radically conservative Protestant religious sect that migrated from England in the late eighteenth century after the Reformation produced them, as well as religious sects like the Quakers, the Seekers, the Levelers, and the Muggletonians. The Shakers did not believe in sexual intercourse, so they had some recruiting problems and over time, they literally died out, though some small New England Shakers communities have survived well into the twenty-firstieth century. The Shakers are internationally known for their distinctive architecture and fine furniture making; thus Shaker Heights is one of America’s most historic sites. The city of Shaker Heights was designed by the Van Sweringen Brothers to avoid the ghettos that had developed in Cleveland around the turn of the century. The Van Sweringen Brothers, who were real estate magnates before the stock market crash of 1929, were also the builders of Terminal Tower, a massive building 131
Valerie Wilmer, As serious as your Life: The story of the new jazz (Westport: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1980), 99.
132
Ibid., 100.
133
Ibid., 96.
93 on Cleveland’s Public Square, downtown, that resembles New York’s Empire State Building, though it is not quite as tall. Terminal Tower is a hub of transportation and commerce, and it has recently been restored to house a complex of chain stores, restaurants, and a myriad of small vendor stands. Shaker Heights was designed with its own private railway system, which took passengers directly into Terminal Tower so that they would not have to confront the squalor of Cleveland’s ghettos, which the privatized train passed rapidly. Unprecedented numbers of immigrants were converging on the ethnic neighborhoods of Cleveland, and most of them worked in factories for the industrial magnates. The average home in Shaker Heights resembles a small castle, many of them having coach houses or servant’s quarters. In view of this, I wonder where Albert Ayler got his so-called “ghetto” feelings. Ayler was a golf champion at John Adams High School, at a time when the only Negroes allowed on golf courses were caddies. I used to hear a rumor that the Aylers once lived on Rawlings Avenue, across from Rawlings Junior High School, which is one block from where I grew up: that is certainly in the so-called ghetto. According to Samuel Benford, owner of the Casino Royale jazz club who knew both Albert and Don Ayler, they did live in the ghetto before they moved to Shaker Heights. Thus Albert grew up, at least in part, in the ghetto. If Albert Ayler lived on Rawlings Avenue, it would explain his feelings of the ghetto, but you can’t get them living exclusively in Shaker Heights., I don’t think. Avant-garde music was gaining prominence in the early 1960s; Ayler started listening to what John Coltrane was doing, and became influenced by his approach. “He visited Denmark, and Sweden, a country that has always shown its hospitality to Black musicians; not surprisingly, it was there that his experiments were first treated with respect, and he planned to return there on quitting the Army. His discharge came in 1961 in California.”134 134
Ibid.
94 When Ayler returned home and played his avant-garde music in Cleveland, “his revolutionary ideas were greeted with disbelief by most of the musicians. Lloyd Pearson’s first reaction was that the Army had affected his mind in some way that he had not touched his horn throughout his Service sojourn. He was rejected by the audience, the musicians, and all of them.”135 The musicians’ outrage resulted in a debate on “musical aesthetics” that was eventually taken up with John Coltrane himself, who affirmed what Ayler was doing. Ayler eventually tired of the rejection at home, and he resolved to go to Europe where his music would be accepted. Bengt Nordstrom “was the first recording executive to ask Ayler to record his music, which he agreed to do on October 25, 1962 at the Stockholm Academy of Music. (The resulting album was titled Something Different.) Three months later he was invited to Copenhagen to tape a transmission for Danish Radio,”136 and another album resulted from the performance. By chance, trumpeter Don Cherry was doing a European tour at the time, playing with Sonny Rollins, and Ayler met him backstage after one of their perfomances.
Albert Ayler and Don Cherry decided to go to the Jazzhus
Montmartre to hear Don Byas and Sonny Rollins play: it resulted in a jam session. “The trumpeter was invited to join the veteran saxophonists for a ballad medley, then Ayler offered a rendition of ‘Moon River’ which startled all those present. Later, Ayler and Rollins played together on many occasions, and according to the latter, influenced each other.”137 The first established musician to really give Ayler a chance to play was avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor, however, the job didn’t last long due to the lack of available work. While Ayler was in Cleveland, he could hardly get a job, and he would walk into clubs with “his saxophone under his arm, a loner in his own hometown. He had brought fifty copies of the Bird Notes album Something Different from Sweden, and sold them on the street corner. His personal
135
Ibid.
136
Ibid.
137
Ibid., 101.
95 reputation was still considerable, though by and large, his dress drew more favorable comment than his music.”138 Ayler moved to New York in 1963 where he collaborated and recorded with Ornette Coleman, who played trumpet on the recording sessions. At the time, African American jazz musicians were hurting for work and recording opportunities, and they had to accept whatever contracts they could get; thus “the next time Denmark called, Ayler was offered only a one-way ticket. He reluctantly agreed to the terms because ‘American-minded people’ were still rejecting his vision and he felt he had to leave. It provided a better opportunity to expose the music than at home where opportunities were, frankly, nonexistent.”139 Ayler was accompanied by Gary Peacock, Sonny Murray, and Don Cherry on the trip, which also included performances in Holland and Sweden. During this time, John Coltrane was paying a great deal of attention to Ayler’s music, and his career as a whole. Coltrane helped Ayler get a recording contract with Impulse Records, one of the important recording labels for jazz musicians. Apart from the fact that Coltrane helped Ayler financially, the relationship between the two men was a very special one. They talked to each other constantly by telephone and by telegram and Coltrane was heavily influenced by the younger man. Coltrane recorded Ascension, which featured an avant-garde big band, after hearing Ayler’s Ghosts and Spiritual Unity albums. Coltrane called Ayler and told him, “I recorded an album and found that I was playing just like you, and Albert replied: No man, don’t you see, you were playing like yourself. You were just feeling what I feel and were just crying out for spiritual unity.”140 “One of Coltrane’s last wishes was that Ayler and Ornette Coleman, the other important influence on his later career, should play at his funeral.”141 It came
138
Ibid., 103.
139
Ibid., 106.
140
Ibid., 107.
141
Ibid.,.
96 to pass after John Coltrane’s death on July 17, 1967 when Albert Ayler, Don Ayler, Richard Davis, and Milford Graves played for Coltrane’s funeral. Ayler was criticized harshly “for recording New Grass in 1968 and other rock-oriented albums with Canned Heat guitarist Henry Vestine, Bill Folwell, Stafford James, Bobby Few, and Muhammad Ali. Whatever Ayler’s reasons for recording this music, his – and Maria’s – tortuous singing was light years removed from the sheer majesty of Witches and Devils.”142 In the twilight of his career, Ayler was asked to play two concerts in France that, fortunately, were recorded live. “These Nuits de la Fountain Maeght took place at Saint-Paul de Vence (the town where James Baldwin makes his home). They were recorded by the French company Shandar and released shortly after his death.”143 Ayler, suffering from depression and rejection, may have committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in New York on November 25, 1970, having never been accepted in America. (Author Jeff Schwartz has suggested that Ayler may have been under pressure from his mother to allow his younger brother Don to live and play with him; Ayler’s girlfriend Mary Parks said that on the night of his death, he had angrily smashed his saxophone over the television set and stormed out in a rage, thus suicide was a possibility, given the circumstances.) Albert Ayler had one of the best tones of any jazz tenor saxophonist who ever played the instrument, however, how he chose to use it certainly shocked many of his peers who had little regard for the avant-garde; today, Albert Ayler is recognized as a major contributor to the genre. Dexter Gordon, one of the most celebrated exiles, migrated to Europe in 1962, first living in France, and then moving to Denmark. Gordon was one of the most influential saxophonists of the 1940s, and his career in America started out as a promising one. Since Gordon was arguably among the handful of top bebop tenor players, the 1950s was the opportune time for him to develop a successful career, but it was not to be. Gordon spent a good portion of the 1950s dealing with the 142
Ibid., 108.
143
Ibid., 109.
97 consequences of his drug habit. “He had a number of colleagues, like Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro, and Wardell Gray, who were also addicted to heroin: Parker and Gray both died in the 1950s, before their life expectancy. Gray's sudden death hit Gordon's hard, even though he was sufficiently occupied at the time with his own drug difficulties.”144 To make matters worse, Gordon did time in prison for heroin possession in the 1950s. While Gordon was in prison, jazz was changing rapidly; therefore, he was running the risk of becoming obsolete. Once Gordon was released from prison, two people who believed in him helped to put his career back on track, Cannonball Adderly and playwright Carl Thaler. In September of 1962, Gordon landed a one-month engagement at the Ronnie Scott Club in London, England. Ronnie Scott was a saxophonist himself; he was born in Europe, and he liked bringing accomplished American saxophonists over to play at his club. While playing at Scott’s club, Gordon continued to do drugs, and his relationship with the other musicians was compromised. “Near the end of the engagement, Gordon's playing was noticeably, challenged, but his overall review was favorable and he was able to fly to Paris at the conclusion of his Scott’s debut to undertake another month-long season, this time at the Blue Note Club.”145 Gordon's personality and music were a hit in Paris, and he was invigorated by the warm reception. Gordon had a commanding presence and personality, which served him well in some of his future endeavors, most notably, his late-found career as an actor. (As a matter of fact, his film career, as opposed to his saxophone prowess, introduced the American public to Dexter Gordon, for most people had never heard of him before ‘Round Midnight was filmed.) “His next European experience was to have the most far-reaching consequences for Dexter Gordon. This was a trip to Scandinavia, to accept yet another comprehensive engagement, this time at Montmartre Jazzhus in
144
Stan Britt, Dexter Gordon: A Musical Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 72.
145
Ibid., 87.
98 Copenhagen. The reception, once again, was extraordinary.”146 Gordon worked as much as he wanted to in Denmark and France for the next two years, keeping his drug habit going all the while. Gordon took a three-month trip back to America, staying in New York for a while, and then California, finding that he did not enjoy living in America anymore. “Gordon realized that if he used that return ticket it would be to resecure his European foothold. Periodic stateside visits notwithstanding, he had a feeling it would be a long time before he would leave his new friends and security in Europe. There were several reasons for using that return ticket.”147
Europe was an adventure for Gordon; he embraced the cultural
differences that he found and savored the opportunities that he was afforded to play with fellow exiles like Don Byas and Bud Powell. Gordon stated, “There was nothing to really hold me in the States. In two years in Europe I had gotten a taste for the life. Just knowing that I could work – regularly. All these things were waiting for me.
Getting to work with Byas and Bud was part of the main
ingredient. No, I never regretted going back.”148 Periodically, Gordon returned to America to play at special events during the late 1960s and early 1970s in conjunction with recording for Blue Note, in Paris, and Prestige at other European sites. Gordon recorded for Nils Winther of Steeplechase, a Copenhagen company, from 1971 to 1976 at the famous Montmartre which, regrettably, has been closed. Gordon also taught at jazz clinics, for high school students, during the summer. The jazz scene in Paris, where Gordon planned on settling, was the most dynamic one in Europe at that time, and Gordon could often get together, at gigs or jam sessions, “with old buddies such as Kenny Clarke, Bud Powell, and Art Taylor – all residents of Paris – and others like Idrees Sulieman and Don Byas – which gave Gordon ample reason for dropping anchor. As temperamental as they could
146
Ibid., 88.
147
Ibid., 88-89.
148
Ibid., 89.
99 be, he liked the locals, especially (to him) their almost unbelievable lack of racial prejudice.”149 However, Gordon found that in Denmark, people were even more accommodating and easy to get along with: “particularly, the residents of Copenhagen – seemed only too happy to accord Dexter Gordon his rightful status as a major contributor to one of the century’s most vital musical forms. And, as in France, he found there was a refreshing absence of racial prejudice.”150 Though Gordon had settled in Copenhagen, he became a frequent flyer, criss-crossing Europe in response to the multitude of bookings that were coming in. Gordon was being booked in European capitols at a pace that he could not have imagined in America during the 1950s, and the audiences knew his discography well. Other musicians who had played in Europe had told Gordon about how much they had been appreciated by European jazz fans, but it still had not prepared him for what he encountered: Gordon contends that it was nothing short of a revelation. “And to feel this respect, as an artist… Because jazz musicians were, in America, just hornblowers: ‘Oh, you’re one of them horn-blowers!’ A kind of musical wierdo? Yes. Unless you were Duke Ellington – you had to be put on a pedestal to get any kind of respect. But I found it in Europe.”151 Gordon found that his discography was well known by the patrons in every country where he played. The only apparent drawback to Gordon’s residence in Copenhagen was the dearth of competent jazz players. Most of the Danish jazz musicians were not full-timers, and they all had day-jobs. These musicians lacked experience as jazz performers, since the jazz genre has its own unique, relatively culture-bound training method, as Gordon explains: “Because all they knew was what they’d learned from records. Which was considerable, but not enough… And with jazz, you’ve gotta come up by playing with other musicians – older musicians – who would explain and tell you about this
149
Ibid., 90.
150
Ibid., 91.
151
Ibid., 93.
100 and that. In the way we all came up in the States.”152 (This is why playing jazz and knowing about jazz are not comparable; there are people who can tell you every album that every jazz musician recorded, every song that every musician composed, they might own the best instrument that has ever been produced, and they might have an album or compact disc collection that takes up rooms: butbut, if you listen to them play jazz, you will often be disappointed. The rigorous collecting and fact-finding is often an attempt to disguise the fact that they can’t really play jazz. If a person is unable to play jazz, then, they really know nothing about it: listening to hundreds of albums will not suffice. Jazz is to be found in its playing: it’s practical, not theoretical.) However, Gordon was able to find a few players, like Orsted Pedersen and Alti Bjorn, who could make the gigs at Montmartre happening events. Eventually, Gordon married a Danish woman and settled in Valby, a suburb of Copenhagen, and he was virtually adopted by the Danes. This is evidenced by an episode that occurred in 1966. While in Paris, Gordon was busted for drugs again, and he ended up spending a few months in jail. As a result, the Danish Home Office decided against allowing Gordon to return to the country. The Danish public came to his aid, and they organized a huge rally in Copenhagen, and ultimately overturned the decision of the Danish Home Office: Gordon was allowed to return to Copenhagen. Saxophonist and jazz exile Johnny Griffin, who was playing in Paris during this episode, recalls “These people had a big rally in the Town Hall Square, in Copenhagen. Students carried big signs saying: ‘We want Dexter – we don’t want NATO.’ And this was nothing to do with socialism or communism or such. They got him back in Denmark too. They took good care of him. That’s the way these people are.”153 Overall, the fourteen years or so that Gordon spent in Europe were laced with spectacular achievements, though there were some artistic failures. Around 152
Ibid., 94.
153
Ibid., 97.
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101 1975, Dexter Gordon started to become homesick, and visions of home soon overwhelmed him: “not the pleasant home in Valby, but home in the United States of America. Not necessarily Los Angeles – although he retains an imperishable affection for his native city. Not necessarily New York – although this location, too, was constantly in his thoughts.”154 On his return trip to America, Gordon performed at the Storyville Club, and the tremendous audience response could not have surprised him more. “Soon after this engagement, Bruce Lundvall of Columbia Records offered Gordon a recording contract. And so, apart from the contractsigning formalities, and much to his amazement, Gordon found himself a member of the roster of a major US record company for the first time in his professional life.”155 Thus, Americans discovered, in 1976, what the Europeans already knew in 1962. Gordon’s return to America destroyed his marriage, and heis divorced his wife who took their son back to Denmark with her; After having lived in Europe for about fifteen years, he found it difficult to become “Americanized” again. Gordon had changed, and he knew it; he said, “It’s still strange. Learning all the different cultures, some of the languages – some bits and pieces. Whatever. But my outlook is much different. I just don’t think like an American… You know: America first – God’s country. Even in daily life and so forth, I’m not really American.”156 In spite of this, Gordon was in awe of his invitation from President Jimmy Carter to play at the White House on June 17, 1978: nothing could have seemed more unlikely, considering. Gordon was on a first name basis with the President of the United States, and he was playing with the all-time greats of jazz like Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Roy Eldridge, Herbie Hancock, and Cecil Taylor. Part of the performance was broadcast over National Public Radio. In 1984, Gordon’s health failed, and it became uncertain whether he would ever recover from his
154
Ibid., 101.
155
Ibid., 103.
156
Ibid., 107.
102 numerous ailments. He disbanded the quartet that he had formed. Eventually, Gordon recovered, to a point, and he was cast as Dale Turner in the film ‘Round Midnight by Bertrand Tavernier. At the 1986 Venice Film Festival, the critics were , generally, in accord. Among them, it “was unanimous: ‘Round Midnight was the best movie of the year. As such it became the firm favorite to carry off the coveted Golden Lion award. But tThe top-film prize was given to Le Rayon Vert. The majority of critics were astonished – they composed a note of protest, which was handed to the head of the jury.”157 Gordon received the acclaim of his peers, and a number of well-established actors commended him for his performance as well. “Dexter himself thoroughly enjoyed his unaccustomed feting. He also enjoyed the new experience of several internationally renowned movie stars, including Peter Ustinov, requesting his autograph.”158 Gordon beat the odds and eventually did a tour in Japan before his death; he is now remembered as one of the most illustrious tenor saxophonists, ever, immortalized by ‘Round Midnight and his extensive discography. Dexter Gordon passed away on April 25, 1990 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Nathan Davis, a saxophonist from Kansas City, Kansas, migrated to Paris in 1962 and played with Kenny Clarke. Davis exemplifies the blending of the best two attributes that a jazz musician can have: practical experience and academic credentials. Davis holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology and he is the Director of Jazz Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, a post that he has held since 1969. When Davis was discharged from the Army in 1960, he had the option to remain in Europe for a year, and the Army would still fly him home, so he decided to stay and do some playing, for a while. However, he was working so often with so many jazz greats that he decided to join Kenny Clarke’s band and stay. Kenny Clarke urged Davis to take the position at the University if Pittsburgh, insisting that Davis would 157
Ibid., 120.
158
Ibid.
103 be helping all jazz musicians by teaching the truth about the music and its practitioners. The Nathan Davis perspective on the exile life offers an insider’s view of the Paris jazz scene in the sixties as well as an educator’s view on where jazz has gone since. “During his ten-year stay in Europe, Davis returned to America only once for an Army music competition in 1961. If anything, Davis says that he became more American as a result of his foreign residence.”159 Davis had moved beyond just considering himself an American; rather, he had joined the ranks of the citizens of the world, who freely live and work in various locales. “Davis’s last engagement before returning to America was at the Golden Circle in Stockholm. It was the end of an era for Davis but one he continues to carry with him. Davis notes that he experienced little or no prejudice, and that the jazz musicians were looked upon as special.”160 Saxophonist Johnny Griffin provides some reasons for the post-war migration trend of American jazz musicians with his observations of the jazz scene at home and abroad in 1963 when he moved to France. After assessing these domains, Griffin now contends that “black musicians were treated with the respect that was generally reserved for classical musicians, in Europe. However, when he returned to New York, musicians were having the same old problems with the record companies and booking agents.”161 He decided that he’d had enough of it, and in 1963, he moved to Paris where he performed with Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, Art Taylor, and pianist Kenny Drew. In order to do this, though, there were a number of adjustments that he had to make; the pace in France was much slower than what he was accustomed to, and he was unable to see his children for more than a decade. In a 1969 interview
159
Bill Moody, The Jazz Exiles: American Musicians Abroad (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1993), 127.
160
Ibid., 132.
161
Ibid., 66.
104 conducted by drummer Art Taylor, Griffin assessed the predicament that African American jazz musicians were in: They’ve got all the black musicians on the run. Black musicians all over Europe, running away from America. But that’s part of the white power structure that’s killing us and our music. Just like they’ve killed it with the so-called cool school, West Coast jive. They sold us down the line. Took the music out of Harlem and put it in Carnegie Hall and downtown in those joints where you’ve got to be quiet. The black people split and went back to Harlem, back to the rhythm and blues, so they could have a good time. Then the white power structure just kicked the rest of us out and propagated what they call avant-garde. Those poor boys can’t blow their way out of a paper bag musically. But the white power structure said they’re geniuses, so-andso is the natural extension of Charlie Parker. That’s what they waited for. As soon as Bird died, everybody turned left, Bird had given them the message. They were glad to see Bird gone, because he was the truth. I don’t mean they all turned left, I mean the critics had a breathing spell so they could finish killing us. If it wasn’t for the revolution that’s taking place, they would probably be writing in fifty years that jazz was all white.162
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Since the French don't play baseball or American football, Griffinhe had to adapt by cultivating an interest in soccer, which is the national pastime there! Griffin first returned to America in 1978 to record and tour, and he frequently makes the trans-Atlantic trip. Griffin believes that European audiences and American audiences differ in a particular way: that is, European audiences appreciate his music whereas American audiences can relate to what he does culturally, and the response is more immediate. In the spring of 1998, Griffin appeared in St. Louis for a number of performances. (A friend of mine from Germany, Dagmar Von Tress, went to the club where he was playing every night. She told me that hardly anyone was there: a testament to the fact that even though Griffin is very well known in Europe, he remains a virtual unknown to the majority of Americans, in spite of his prolific
162
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Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 67.
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105 career. Quite possibly, the reason could be that Griffin has refused to go commercial, while many of his counterparts have done so.) Though Griffin misses performing for American audiences a great deal, he remains in exile and has not made arrangements to repatriate. Saxophonist Sahib Shihab had not planned on moving to Europe. However, when he completed a tour with Quincy Jones in the late 1950s, he decided to remain. He lived in Scandinavia, spending most of his time in Copenhagen, for about twenty-five years; her returned to Los Angeles from 1973-76, noting that he left America in order to survive and maintain some faith in humanity, which he was losing. While he was there, he played with Kenny Clarke on numerous occasions; he was an important contributor to the avant-garde movement, having played with Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Sahib Shihab passed away on October 4, 1989. Drummer Art Taylor, who migrated in 1963, lived in France and Belgium and he often played with saxophonist Johnny Griffin. Taylor’s work with John Coltrane, recorded just before his migration, is exceptional. What Taylor played on Coltrane’s Giant Steps album, in my opinion, represents the apex of jazz drumming. While in Europe, Taylor wrote Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician
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Interviews, but publishers were not interested in hearing from the musicians themselves: most of the literature about jazz musicians is written by non-players. In the book’s foreword, Taylor states:
In 1966, I began tracking down and interviewing musicians whom I had worked with or known for many years. They gave me encouragement when it seemed I would never get this work published and urged me to publish the book privately, which I did in Europe in 1977. My predominant motivation for publishing Notes and Tones was that it was inspired by the real voices of musicians as they saw themselves and not as critics or journalists saw them. I wanted an insider’s view.163
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Ibid., 5.
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106 Taylor conducted the majority of his interviews in the diaspora, and he must have sensed that what he and his colleagues were doing was very special; Taylor interviewed Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis, Randy Weston, Ornette Coleman, Philly Joe Jones, Don Byas, Johnny Griffin, Ron Carter, Charles Tolliver, Don Cherry, Kenny Clarke, Richard David, Betty Carter, Dizzy Gillespie, and many other prominent African American jazz musicians. When Taylor interviewed Miles Davis in Paris on January 22, 1968, he asked Miles if New York had changed since the days when he played on 52nd Street, and Miles replied: They don’t have anyplace to experiment for young guys who start playing and who play their own stuff. It’s because of all those records they make nowadays…you know, they guys copy off the records, so they don’t have anything original. You can’t find a musician who plays anything different. They all copy off each other. If I were starting out again, I wouldn’t listen to records. I very seldom listen to jazz records, because they all do the same thing. I only listen to guys that are original, like Ahmad Jamal and Duke Ellington, guys like Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, and Coltrane.164
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Taylor interviewed pianist Randy Weston on two occasions; in Paris on February 7, 1968 and in Casablanca on May 17, 1970. When asked whether the young musicians of the day had the same opportunities that they once had, Weston replied:
Not really, because today, with so much emphasis on rock-and-roll music and with so many white men playing jazz and playing the blues, the average black child doesn’t have a chance to be involved with other black musicians. You see, it’s like a tribal thing with us, a thing that we have to communicate to each other and learn from each other. When we were coming up, there were rehearsals three, four, five times a week. We would go to rehearsals and listen to bands. Or I could go by Monk’s house and all the guys would be there. We would all sit around and listen to him play. We had a tribal thing going. It wasn’t planned like that, but it was something that happened. It was our culture. I look upon it as our folk music, as the folk music of the Afro-American, this music that they call jazz.165 164
Ibid., 14.
165
Ibid., 21-22.
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107 Thus, America had lost two of its finest jazz drummers, Art Taylor and Kenny Clarke, in a few short years; fortunately, Tony Williams emerged and launched a whole new approach to the instrument for jazz. Albert Heath, Stuff Smith, and Don Cherry all migrated in 1965. Heath and Smith moved to Denmark, and Cherry moved to France. Albert Heath performed with Dexter Gordon in Denmark, and with Kenny Drew in France. Stuff Smith, a violinist who had performed with Jelly Roll Morton, was born in 1909; he only spent two years in Denmark before he passed away. Don Cherry, who is famous for his sessions with Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane in the late 1950s and early 1960s, lived in France and eventually relocated to Sweden. Cherry was a leading figure in the avant-garde music movement, at home and abroad. Pianist Randy Weston, who wrote the popular jazz standard “Hi-Fly,” migrated to Morocco in 1967, and Jimmy Heath migrated to Sweden that same year.
Weston established his own group, and played a number of African
engagements. Jimmy Heath worked with Art Farmer in Sweden, but he eventually returned to America and formed the commercially popular Heath Brothers around 1975, with Percy and Albert Heath. Philly Joe Jones, Slide Hampton, Clifford Jordan, Hank Mobley, and Art Farmer all migrated in 1968. Jones initially moved to London, but he eventually moved to Paris. Jones is one of the most prolific drummers ever in jazz, having played with Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Lionel Hampton, Dexter Gordon, Paul Chambers, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Duke Ellington, to name a few. Slide Hampton stayed in Europe until 1978 when he returned to America to play with the World Trombones group, and later record with the likes of bassist Ron Carter, pianist Kenny Barron, and drummer Art Taylor. Clifford Jordan, who had played with Charles Mingus, Horace Silver, and Cannonball Adderly, originally settled in Germany and played a number of engagements in Africa and the Middle East. Hank Mobley, who played with Miles Davis on some notable sessions, and with virtually all of the major jazz stars of the 1950s and 1960s, was an
108 exceptionally fine tenor saxophonist; his health deteriorated after he moved to France, though, and he was forced to abandon playing altogether shortly thereafter. In 1986, Hank Mobley died from double pneumonia. For Art Farmer, Vienna rather than Paris was his destination, although Farmer had been in Europe several times before in the early sixties, and had even played there as early as 1953. “In 1965, he was asked by Viennese pianist Friedrich Gulda to be one of the judges for an international competition of young jazz musicians. While in Vienna, Farmer heard about the formation of a radio jazz orchestra that needed a trumpet soloist.”166 He was hired, and he gave up his apartment in New York. Farmer believes that the stable environment of Vienna has actually contributed to his playing, and he has learned to speak some German. Farmer claimed that he has never experienced overt racism in Europe, with the exception of London where there is an element of tension. As a result of his migration to Europe thirty years ago, Farmer was been able to continue to play “legitimate” mainstream jazz, though most of the record business has become almost totally focused on commercialism and profit. Farmer is one of those rare musicians like Garvin Bushell and Wynton Marsalis who can play the jazz repertoire and the classical repertoire simultaneously, and he recorded in both genres until his death in 1999 at the age of 71. A soft-spoken man, known for his gentle personality, Art Farmer is revered around the world by both jazz and classical music lovers. Drummer Ed Thigpen migrated to Denmark in 1972. Thigpen played drums in the famous Oscar Peterson Trio from about 1959 to 1965, and the group set a new standard in trio playing. The name “Mr. Taste,” which is the title of one of his recent albums, is definitely appropriate for Thigpen’s playing and his character. (When we met in the early 1990s, at the Cleveland Institute of Music where he was performing with Oliver Jones, we resolved that we would keep in contact, and we
166
Ibid Bill Moody, The Jazz Exiles: American Musicians Abroad (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1993)., 84.
109 did. I never formally “interviewed” Thigpen; I simply couldn’t, because it was an intergenerational friendship between jazz musicians, similar to what Dexter Gordon noted, and that’s really how you learn about this music. While he was playing, Thigpen used to make eye contact with me in the audience, and he said that he “played off of me” because I was down with what was happening. That was a great compliment, coming from such a jazz master. Thigpen was always happy to talk with me about what it’s like to be an African American jazz musician living abroad. Since I had frequented Denmark in the past, we could talk about how the city “used to be” and how it had changed. When Thigpen told me that he was experiencing racism in Copenhagen, I had trouble believing it: I had been there in the 1980s, and never had I experienced even a hint of discrimination. When I went back in 1998, all of that had changed, and the city had become, surprisingly, racist. This will be discussed further in Chapter 6.) Thigpen has written a number of books on drumming, including The Sound of Brushes and Rhythm Brought to Life, and he also taught in Sweden at the Malmo Conservatory. Thigpen became famous as the drummer for the Oscar Peterson Trio, which is one of the best of the ensembles that have ever played jazz; what he is able to do with a set of drums defies explanation. Donald Bailey and Thad Jones migrated to Japan and Scandinavia, respectively, in 1979. Bailey contends that the jazz fans in Japan knew more about him “than he knew about himself, and currently, Japanese jazz fans are considered to be one of the world’s largest jazz communities, numbering an estimated 200,000 people. One of the first lessons drummer Donald Bailey learned when he arrived in Japan was the way the Japanese do business, even in jazz.”167 Rather than the mundane telephone call, Bailey was invited to dinner first when someone wanted him to perform, which, in Bailey’s estimation, raised the level of esteem between the musician and his patrons. It is a very “classy” way of conducting business, and Bailey wondered why others were not doing so. In conjunction, Bailey notes that
167
Bill Moody, The Jazz Exiles: American Musicians Abroad (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1993), 148.
110 he was paid well in Japan, compared to what he was being paid in America, and he surmises that it was a message from the Japanese that they wanted him to return to perform again. Upon Bailey’s return to Japan, he decided to stay. “After an initial tour with Peggy Lee, he listened to some producers, liked what he heard, and took up residence in Tokyo. Bailey recorded over fifty albums during his stay, including one with George Kawaguchi, a drum star for years, and a ten-year-old drum prodigy whom Bailey taught briefly.”168 However, these recordings are not widely available in America; thus most Americans have no idea of what Bailey accomplished in Japan: “Bailey was always treated cordially, and he was offered more engagements than he could accept. Personally, Bailey counts his Japanese experience as very rewarding, particularly regarding the race question. Unlike musicians in Paris, Stockholm or Copenhagen, there was no colony of Americans in Tokyo to keep in touch with.”169 In spite of this, Bailey contends that Japan was the first place that he went to “where he was not made to feel that he was Black. With lots of work, friends, and an atmosphere conducive to growing as a musician and a person, Bailey missed little about the States.”170 Admittedly, the Japanese years had a profound impact on Bailey, and “when he returned to America five years later, in 1982, Bailey felt he had changed considerably because of the experience.”171
Bailey asserts that in Japan, he “learned about culture and
tolerance, and he would never have come back to America, had it not been for official problems that simply could not be worked out.”172 Thad Jones is well-known for the Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra, which performed from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s when Jones left to head the Radioens Big Band of Denmark. I had the good fortune to see the Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra at the State Theater in Cleveland, Ohio at the end of the 168
Ibid., 148-9.
169
Ibid., 150.
170
Ibid.
171
Ibid.
172
Ibid., 152.
111 1970s, in, possibly, one of its last performances. Thad had a commanding stage presence, and his cornet sound was a natural for the nostalgic theater. We only had to pay about two dollars to get in, and the theater was not crowded at all. The State Theater, located downtown, was being restored and the owners were bringing in jazz bands to raise funds for the restoration project. Based on this scenario, I doubt that the band made anything close to what they were actually worth, nor was there a great deal of interest in the music that they were doing. Thus, the migration of Thad Jones to Scandinavia was probably motivated by the two recurring concerns that jazz musicians are constantly confronted with: acceptance and survival. The majority of jazz musicians who migrated took up residence in France; fifty percent of the musicians who migrated, according to Bill Moody settled there. However, this trend changed after 1968 when an almost equal percentage of those who migrated settled in circum-Alpine or Germanic countries. Dexter Gordon’s success in Scandinavia may have influenced some musicians, suggesting to them that Paris was not the only site in Europe where American jazz musicians could flourish. The climate of Scandinavia may have been a deterrent, though, for when compared to central Europe, the conditions are rather harsh, and there are also the months of darkness to contend with. After 1968, it didn’t seem to matter though, for a number of musicians like Slide Hampton, Red Mitchell, and Thad Jones moved to Sweden, and Ed Thigpen, Horace Parlan, and Ernie Wilkins chose to settle in Denmark. In 1968, Paris erupted when students staged massive city-wide protests and rallies denouncing the government’s policies at the universities, and the government’s failure to keep the promises that it had made to improve conditions. Thus, Paris may not have seemed as welcoming, as it had been in the past. Curiously, this did not seem to stop jazz musicians from migrating there to any appreciable extent: the trend had been too well established, and the opportunities in Paris certainly outweighed the risks. America was not exactly an island of stability, in 1968, either.
112 When crowds of student protesters are turning over cars and trucks and setting them on fire, one would be wise to avoid it. Germany, Sweden, and Denmark were the countries where most of the musicians who migrated settled in, while the number of musicians who settled in France diminished. As Nathan Davis describes it, France was the hub of the European jazz world, so in spite of the political problems that the country was enduring, it would still have been attractive to jazz musicians, who were used to controversy. Art Farmer remarked that there was quite a sense of stability in the circum-Alpine region, and the reception and ongoing support of the fans in these countries was exceptional. In virtually every case, the decision to migrate from America was certainly a wise and rewarding one for musicians who committed their lives to jazz praxis. Acceptance and financial stability were available to them, though they were denied these essentials at home. Most of the migrating musicians contend that the lack of discrimination, even before the Civil Rights Movement took place in America, was a profound revelation for Negro, Colored, Afro-American, Black, or African American jazz musicians who performed and lived abroad. Once they returned home, as Doc Cheatham pointed out, they often fell into the same rut of rejection, discrimination, and anomie. Some musicians, like Kenny Clarke and Thad Jones, never returned to America to live, and they died in Europe. In Europe, the number of sites where jazz musicians can work is, frankly, staggering. As of September 22, 2002, there are about 673 jazz performances scheduled for Paris, and about 1,652 jazz performances scheduled for France as a whole. In France, a new jazz club opened in 2000 called the Sunshine Club at 60 rues des Lombards with an entry fee of between 50-120 francs, and you are required to buy at least one drink for 25-60 francs: this is about the going rate. The jazz clubs in Paris are far from déclassé. For example, just to get into the Alliance Jazz Club located at 7-11 Rue Saint-Benoit, it costs 120 francs for the first set. Since the exchange rate is roughly 6 francs to one American dollar, it will cost you
113 $20 just to get in. The good news is that your first drink is included! It costs even more to attend a special concert there. If you attend the second set, you can get in for only 100 francs, and that is decreased to 80 francs for the third set. The Alliance Jazz Club also offers a dinner show package from Tuesday to Saturday for 200 francs, which is about $35. Therefore, most people are not able to just ‘hang out’ at a jazz club like this, but the Alliance Jazz Club is not at all unusual. Jazz Club Lionel Hampton located at the Hotel Meridien, 81, Blvd. Gouvion Saint Cyr, charges 130 francs to get in, about $22. The Petit Journal Montparnasse, 13 rue de Commandant Mouchotte, has jazz seven days a week, and it only costs 100 francs to get in, $17, but drinks cost 40 francs, $7. With $7 drinks, patrons who are light in the pocketbook might leave a little thirsty! Other jazz clubs in this price range include the New Morning at 7 rue des Petites Ecuries, the Petit Journal SaintMichel at 71 Boulevard Saint-Michel, La Villa at 29 rue Jacob, and Hot Brass at Parc de la Villette 211 avenue Jean Jaures. However, there are some sites that are more affordable. Baiser Sale at 58 rue des Lombards only charges 45 to 60 francs to get in, $8 to $10, and the Caveau de la Hunchette charges 60 francs from Sunday through Thursday and 70 francs on weekends. Duc des Lombards at 42 rue des Lombards charges 50 to 80 francs, so it falls into the somewhat affordable range, compared to Jazz Club Lionel Hampton. It is conceivable that jazz musicians could work almost constantly in the numerous jazz clubs of Paris, not to mention the multitude of such clubs all over France. In conjunction, there are a number of jazz concerts and festivals that take place on an annual basis, and the result is a vibrant, artistic working environment for jazz musicians. In Denmark, virtually all of the jazz clubs of note are located in Copenhagen. The famous Montmartre Jazzhus is now closed; this club was world famous, and the fact that it is now closed suggests that their venues fell on hard times. This was Dexter Gordon’s domain, and certainly a site where mainstream jazz flourished; when I visited the club in 1983, there was a lot of fusion happening, and groups like Weather Report were coming in: they strayed from “mainstream”
114 jazz. However, a number of new clubs have opened since then. In Copenhagen, the clubs mix jazz with other genres freely, so that one night you might hear Third World, the next night Techo, the next Disco, and the next acid-jazz. Bebop or mainstream jazz is not a given when someone says “jazz” today in Copenhagen; rather, it could mean almost any music from the Americas, or even Africa! This is especially the case with the student population that generally frequents Copenhagen’s jazz clubs. For example, the Copenhagen Jazzhus at Niels Hemmingsensgade 10 is known as the leading jazz club of the city; the club turns into a disco after the live music performances, and its emphasis is on contemporary Danish and jazz-oriented music. The Tivoli Jazzhouse, located at Bernstorffsgade in the Tivoli Gardens and formerly known as Jazzhus Slukefter, caters to the young local musicians who play mainstream and bebop from May through September. From October through April, the club is open on weekends only, and it turns into a disco after the live performances year round. The Park Café, located at Osterbrogade 78, is a beautifully designed club surrounded with plate glass windows and attractive modernistic accoutrements.
The club presents jazz
occasionally, but it generally offers acid-jazz and disco to appeal to its younger clientele. Bananrepublikken, located at Norrebrogade 13, is considered a jazz club, but in reality, the club presents Third World, acid-jazz, and hip-hop groups; this is also the case with the Studenterhuset, located at Kobmagergade 52. Students have been a major driving force behind jazz venues in Copenhagen, historically, evidenced by the student protests that brought Dexter Gordon back to Denmark after his banishment; students’ tastes influence or decide the venues of the larger clubs. For example, the new Vega Musikkens Hus, located at Enghavevej 40, has three stages, seats 2,300 people and features hip-hop, techno, Third World, rock: occasionally, they will book a jazz act. We should not expect today’s students to embrace the same music that their counterparts did three or four decades ago, anyway, because their cultures are markedly different. Today’s students have grown up in a digital age, surrounded by digital technology, which is now taken for
115 granted. There are, however, a couple of refuges for mainstream jazz lovers in Copenhagen. Long John, located at Kobmagergade 48, is a plush, cozy club that offers late afternoon mainstream jazz in a nostalgic atmosphere. The Drop Inn, located at Kompagnistraede 34, is supposedly another mainstream jazz holdover. For the most part, the cost to attend the Danish mainstream clubs is very cheap, compared to their Parisian counterparts, since most of them do not even charge an admission fee, and drinks are only about 15 Danish kroners, or $2. At these low prices, I doubt that they could support professional jazz performers on a daily basis: it does not seem to be possible, economically. And, the supply-demand curve for jazz performances, today, must be considered. The jazz scene in Holland is quite appealing for the mainstream jazz lover, because it seems to combine the best features of the Paris scene and the Copenhagen scene: mainstream jazz at an affordable cost. Amsterdam, the ultimate commercial and cosmopolitan city in my estimation, where virtually anything that you can think of is for sale and is legal too, has the largest number of jazz clubs in the country. There are over thirty, approaching the number of clubs in Paris. Then there are the coffeeshops, where jazz musicians can also perform. Once you reach Korte Leidse Dwarsstraat, you can just walk from club to club and maybe find a number of jazz performances in progress, if one’s timing is good. Cafe Alto, located at Korte Leidse Dwarsstraat 115, the Bamboo Bar, located at Lange Leidsedwarsstraat 64, and Bourbon Street, located at Leidsekruisstraat 6, are about two minutes or less, from one another.
Some other notable jazz clubs in
Amsterdam are Jazzcafe ‘t Geveltje, located at Bloemgracht 170, Muziekcentrum Noord, located at Alkmaarstraat 10, De Heeren van Aemstel, located at Thorbeckeplein 5, and the Black Star Coffeshop and Juicebar located at Rozengr 1a. The city of Arnhem has five notable jazz sites: George’s Jazzcafe, located at Hoogstraat 5, Café Dingo, located at Bovenbeekstraat 28, Standhuishal Arnhem, Rietveldkantine, located at Onderlangs 9, and Willemeen, located at Willemsplein 1. Other cities in Holland that have jazz clubs include Alkamaar, Almelo, Almere
116 Haven, Alphen aan de Rijn, Amersfoort, Amstelveen, Andijk, Apeldoorn, Assen, and Austerlitz; however, the complete list would be quite lengthy.
Again,
compared to Paris, Amsterdam’s jazz clubs are not expensive. Seldom does one have to pay an admission fee, and drinks are usually ten guilders or less. Two Dutch guilders are roughly equal to one American dollar, so the taxi ride will probably cost more than one’s night of jazz patronage. These sites exemplify the extent to which jazz has been embraced by Europeans. France led the way before 1920, and other countries apparently followed their lead. The substantial number of places to play has certainly been a factor in American jazz musicians’ decisions to migrate, and these numerous sites represent the extent to which the jazz genre has become a part of Europe’s artistic landscape. Today, the meaning of the term jazz in Europe has been extended to include genres that did not even exist just a decade or two ago. The current generation of listeners appears to embrace the myriad of genres that have recently developed, while preserving their predecessors. The reasons for this, in part, may have to do with the changing character of Europe’s cities, which can no longer be described as homogeneous. (Note: the term “jazz” has never been defined, conclusively. It is rumored that Louis Armstrong said that, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll probably never know.”173)
173
Zane Publishing Company, History of Jazz CD-ROM (http://www.zane.com), 1996.
117
118
CHAPTER 5 THE INFLUENCE OF AMERICAN CULTURE ON THE DEATH RATES OF JAZZ AND CLASSICAL MUSICIANS The working environments of jazz and classical musicians differ in extreme ways. During the Roaring 20s, jazz became the music that was popular in smoky bars, while classical music was played in concert halls. As we have seen, jazz musicians have also played at venues like Carnegie Hall and Buckingham Palace, but this was occasional work; the musicians “in the trenches” seldom played such venues. For example, Bud Powell’s working environment was described by his friend Francis Paudras:
In July, 1959 he started playing at Le Chat Qui Pêche, a damp, uncomfortable, smoke-filled cellar in the best Parisian tradition, the hangout for diehard jazz freaks. The tiny stools were more like instruments of torture than seats, but the joint was full of soul. So here I was back in the Latin Quarter that I had deserted for the Right Bank since the Blue Note opened on Rue d’Artois. My repeated visits had exhausted my meager savings and I was so broke I couldn’t afford the admission to Le Chat Qui Pêche.174
Cigarette smoke and jazz are virtually inseparable; if one looks at the covers of jazz albums, made before 1975, almost every jazz musician is either holding a cigarette, smoking a cigarette, or surrounded by cigarette smoke in the place where they are performing. Today, we know the toxic effects of cigarette smoke, but at the 174
Francis Paudras, Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 47.
119 time no one even paid any attention to secondary smoke, probably because they were smokers themselves. In conjunction, jazz musicians were usually surrounded by alcoholic beverages, and an untold number of them had problems with these toxic partners, not to mention heroin. Paudras lamented the frequent deaths of major jazz musicians that were taking place: “La Capitale” was losing all its giants. Alone with Bud at the Storyville bar, I would avoid talking about this. He seemed sad enough as it was. So many had died since 1955; I felt myself aging too quickly. Musicians probably never imagine how deeply they enter the emotional lives of their admirers, to what extent they become their “spiritual family.” Bird, Billie, Tatum, Clifford, and Lester were an intimate part of my sentimental life. Each loss left in empty space in my world. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Each death was like a wound that wouldn’t heal.175
This difference was noticed by sociologists and musicologists rather early on, especially after the shift from “swing” to “bebop” took place. Since “jazz” has now moved into the academy, it is becoming more akin to classical music, as far as praxis, yet there is still quite a cognitive and functional divide between the two career paths. Early on, there were attempts at melding jazz and classical music, and George Gershwin, Maurice Ravel, andor Frederick Delius are composers who are said to have done so; however, this notion was challenged by drummer Gene Krupa in a debate on the topic with Leonard Bernstein in 1947. Krupa argued that:
The jazz influence is said by some critics to be especially a parent in Leonard Bernstein’s own compositions. I disagree. I have never heard anything genuinely and honestly derivative of jazz in any such music, even, maybe especially, in such works as the Igor Stravinsky’s Ebony Suite, which Woody Herman, with his usual swing instrumentation, brilliantly performed last season in Carnegie Hall and several other places. Leonard Bernstein and others profess to hear traces, echoes, derivations of jazz in Frederick Delius, John Alden Carpenter, Manuel De Falla, Honeger, 175
Ibid., 49.
120 Prokofiev, even Shostakovitch. The influence of jazz has been found by someone or other, unnecessarily eager to make out a case for jazz that it doesn’t need, anxious perhaps to endow it with reflected “respectability” so that he won’t need to make excuses to himself and others for liking it, in the works of every one of these composers. But in my opinion, it isn’t there.176
The next step then, as far as the academy was concerned, was to simply use classical training methods to teach jazz: a diet of theory, harmony, and classics. Then, classically trained musicians wouldn’t really have to do anything different, and they would be able to compose and play jazz: that seems simple enough, right? Academic programs that claim to be teaching their students how to play “jazz” are often using their classical methods and approaches, and improvisation is relegated to the periphery: In spite of the seemingly unblemished reputation that John Coltrane’s name carries today, certain musical and extramusical aspects of his work challenge the guidelines of “good music” set by most schools. Consequently, these aspects get brushed aside as aberrations or ignored altogether in college jazz ensembles and in improvisation classes. Such institutional biases carry repercussions: they affect what kinds of music jazz students value as they make their way into the world as players, listeners, and teachers, ultimately influencing what they and others hear as “good jazz” and even what counts is “jazz” at all.177 However, music is a cultural product that does not exist apart from the practitioners, and its value within a given cultural context is relative. This is exemplified by the spheres inhabited by African American jazz musicians and classical musicians that, when juxtaposed, suggest an indisputable cultural bias in favor of classical musicians, and a devaluation of jazz musicians. David L. Westby argued that classical music is not altogether accessible to the general public: it is somewhat cost prohibitive. A good instrument costs 176
177
Robert Gottlieb, ed., Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 775. David Ake, Jazz Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 113.
121 thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even in the 1950s, its audience was waning even though classical musicians still commanded high status. According to Westby, “symphonic music as an art form offered a meaningful aesthetic experience to a limited public in America nearly five decades ago.”178 If we examine classical music praxis, from the professional practitioners' viewpoint, “his/her occupational world may be thought of as an array of symphony orchestras in major cities, each of which is the bearer of a relatively stable quantum of prestige, and the entire array ranged on the status hierarchy roughly corresponding to (1) the relative wage scale, and (2) the length of the season.”179 This is not the case for professional African American jazz musicians. “While the jazz community is characterized by a number of distinctive behavior patterns, almost without exception these tend to cluster around one central theme – the isolation of the group from society at large, an isolation which is at once psychological, social, and physical.”180 Classical musicians aspire and compete for positions with the best orchestras in America, which include the orchestras of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Thus, they are able to achieve the financial and status rewards that they desire. In some cases, a classical musician will even turn down a lucrative, stable position with one of the prestigious orchestras, if she/he does not like the conductor. The life of a jazz musician can be characterized as comparatively nomadic, for he spends a “goodly portion of the year traveling from area to area, rarely playing for long periods of time in one location; there is thus relatively little chance to develop a sense of belonging to any particular community. The jazz musician is considered by the lay public to be a generally unstable member of society.”181 The indefinite nature of the jazz musician’s employment contributes to his insecurity: he may be working, and all at once, he may not be working, for there David L Westby, “The Career Experience of the Symphony Musician,” Social Forces 38 (1960), 223.
178
179
Ibid., 224.
180
Alan P. Merriam and Raymond W. Mack, “The Jazz Community,” Social Forces 38 (1960), 211.
181
Ibid., 214.
122 is no such thing as a permanent position, equivalent to an orchestra position. Without capital or the health insurance that classical musicians are generally afforded, the lot of the jazz musician is, comparatively, precarious.
A few
foundations exist that help musicians in need. “Further, he is dependent upon club owners for employment as well, and the interests of the club owner are by no means identical with the interests of the musician, for the club owner takes his profit from entertainment, while the jazz musician is primarily concerned with artistic endeavor.”182 In conjunction, the jazz musician often relies on a booking agent for work, and is kept in operation by “a system that rests upon entertainment rather than necessary artistic talent.”183 Merriam and Mack contend that the lack of formal education is another factor that exerts a portentous force on the lives of jazz musicians, who are, presumably, reluctant to interact with the world outside their sphere of influence. Since jazz musicians usually begin their careers while they are still teenagers, they are automatically separated from their peers, because they must concentrate and create at the level of working professionals, though a small margin for error is allowed. Formal education is relegated to the periphery (the “Young Lions” are exceptions) in the excitement of performing and creating music that is generally forward-looking, though it may involve variations on old themes. However, in the case of a creative musician like Ornette Coleman, it was an altogether ‘new’ thing. Since jazz musicians start their careers as teenagers, they are often less educated, and Merriam & Mack contend that they may, in turn, seek others like themselves which “leads specifically to exclusiveness.” The educational background and career path of the professional classical musician is different from that of most jazz musicians: the goals of the music that they play are different as well, or at least, they should be! In conjunction, due to the cost of higher education and professional instruments today, socio-economic status 182
Ibid., 215.
183
Ibid.
123 has become a factor in jazz praxis, if one takes the institutional route. This has been the case for professional classical musicians all along: “The training of a musician, particularly the string musician, begins at an early age in the form of private lessons (usually) and long practice sessions. Some musicians actually begin their training at age 3 or 4.”184 Thus, there is a major commitment of money and effort early on, and most of the normal childhood activities become peripheral for the aspiring classical musician. In this rigorous scenario, the basis of a strong commitment to work is fostered, as well as the individual’s strong identification with the music profession: he/she projects himself/herself into the role of the musicians that they are taught to emulate. According to Westby’s research, if a string player does not start early, she/he cannot hope to be a successful classical musician. Starting early and continuing on such a path has a cost, though. “Isolation from other occupational experiences, toward which the musician is predisposed in early training, is perpetuated by two institutional features characteristic of his/her late youth and early adulthood: (1) the conservatory, and (2) his/her great social and geographic mobility.”185 A classical musician may spend up to fourteen years in a conservatory, during which she/he is focused on performing, and little else. Thus, the conservatory is not concerned with graduating individuals that are fluent in the liberal arts as a whole; rather, the goal is specifically to train individuals to be professional music practitioners. Westby found that seventy-seven percent of the working classical musicians that he interviewed had attended a conservatory: I seriously doubt that working jazz musicians could approach such a percentage even today. Once their training is completed, a classical musician’s venture into the job market differs dramatically from the prospects that jazz musicians face, whenever they happen to enter the market. A classical musician’s attempt to maximize David L. Westby, “The Career Experience of the Symphony Musician,” in Social Forces 38 (1960), 227.
184
185
Ibid.
124 his/her growth potential, by exploiting the numerous venues that he/she can work in worldwide, “forces her/him to face upward toward better jobs in other orchestras – and thus outward from the community she/he is, at the moment in, but not of – his/her social life is typically restricted to a culture flourishing on the periphery of his/her work life, stopping for a year or two, then going on.”186 Classical musicians enter the labor market as trained professionals, while jazz musicians enter at various stages of their development, musically and personally, that is, they are generally experiencing the American phenomenon of adolescent rebellion.
Norman
“Margolis has analyzed in some detail the attraction of the adolescent to jazz, not only as a performing musician but as a nonplaying part of the jazz community as well. The psychology of the adolescent is essentially ambivalent in that there are strong forces which push him toward independence and adulthood.”187 The presumed rebellious nature of jazz, combined with its penchant for improvisational spontaneity, its rejection by and of the mainstream of American society, taken together, are suggestive of a refuge for the disillusioned. “The problem of revolt is also part of Aaron Esman’s analysis of the characteristic makeup of the jazz audience, which, he feels, can be broken down into three major groups – adolescents, intellectuals, and Negroes. The intellectuals are also in a state of protest and revolt.”188 As a result of the dominant culture’s tireless effort to foster conformity, intellectuals who strongly believe in individualism are often rejected, in lieu of commercialism, by American society. “It is important to point out here that these characteristics draw not only the audience of jazz, but the musicians as well, thus providing an exceedingly strong set of ties which bind the musician and his knowledgeable public into a single group, the jazz community.”189 The non-performing members of the jazz community have made, apart from their 186
Ibid.
Alan P. Merriam and Raymond W. Mack, “The Jazz Community,” in Social Forces 38 (1960), 216.
187
188
Ibid.
189
Ibid., 217.
125 patronage, a substantial contribution to the community, often becoming spokespersons for the music genre. Possibly, the recurring question that is leveled toward jazz musicians, and seldom toward classical musicians, is whether their music is even worthwhile. This question has been asked since the emergence of jazz. “A major factor which contributes to the isolation of the jazz musician, and his public as well, from the general society involves the nature of the artistic product and the question of whether it is, indeed, an artistic product at all.”190 There is no question, in the general society, whether classical musicians are producing art, since their endeavors represent Culture at its apex. Thus, the market implications, as far as the supplydemand curve for jazz products goes, are relatively straightforward. According to the 1997 publication Blue: The Murder of Jazz, the market share of jazz records has fallen from 5% to about 3% of America’s total recording sales. As classical musicians age, they become even more established in their profession, and they generally acquire even more status or economic rewards. On the other hand, advancing age is a liability for jazz musicians, exemplified by the case of trombonist Dickie Wells, who migrated to France in 1952. “Does life begin at forty? That’s what the title of a prewar comedy asserted. The jazzman does not bear out this optimistic philosophy, for it seems that his life – his musical life, of course, usually comes to an end around that age. Some exceptions, like Sidney Bechet, do not invalidate this general rule.”191 Andre Hodeiier contends that after about age forty, jazz musicians often become pale reflections of what they were in their younger years. Of course, a number of jazz musicians never make it past age forty, and we are left to wonder what they would have become: Clifford Brown, Charlie Parker, Lee Morgan, and John Coltrane are but a few of the jazz musicians who fall into this category. “The European composer moves toward purity without losing his 190
Ibid.
191
Andre Hodeiier, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1956), 63.
126 essential driving force and grows greater with meditation. The jazzman may well be thought to be at a disadvantage. His fate is too precariously tied up with his youth for him not to feel bitter regrets when he grows old.”192 Hodeiier posits that this decline is “at once physical and psychological, involving both the loss of physical plasticity, the boredom of repetition, and the pressure of having to continually produce something new. Such as it is, there is something pathetic in a destiny that corresponds to the development of the human body rather than to that of the mind and spirit.”193 Dickie Wells, who was born on June 10, 1907 in Centerville, Tennessee, started playing with the Booker Washington Band when he was fifteen-years-old. “Around 1925, he went to New York, where he worked with Charlie Johnson and the Scott Brothers. After playing with Luis Russell in 1931, he played with Elmer Snowden and Bennie Carter before joining Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra in 1933. He later joined Teddy Hill’s band and went to Europe with it.”194 Wells’s career took a quantum leap in Europe: he recorded in Paris, and the records were in his name, as opposed to just being on the record as a sideman, which was the case on his previous recordings. Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt appeared on some of Wells’s recordings. (Django was a favorite among African American jazz and blues guitarists, and a number of songs that they have composed bear his name; examples are Wes Montgomery’s and Grant Green’s Django.) “Upon [Wells’s]his return to the United States, he was signed by Count Basie, with whom he remained until after the war, when he joined Sy Oliver’s orchestra. As far back in his past as records permit us to look, Dickie Wells has always been an innovator with a powerful personality.”195 In 1927 when he was nineteen-yearsold, he recorded with Lloyd Scott and upstaged all of his peers on the record.
192
Ibid.
193
Ibid., 64.
194
Ibid.
195
Ibid.
127 Drawing from his predecessors like Jimmy Harrison and Jack Teagarden, Wells raised the profile of the trombone in jazz with his innovative playing: “the tone is denser, the accent more somber and grandiose, and the phrasing more supple than Harrison’s.”196 Wells is often credited with redefining the phrasing of jazz solos. An example of this is his solo on Bright Boy Blues: “there is much more than a suggestion of his idea of using contrasts; this idea, his deep tone, and the fact that no other trombonist has so much melodic inventiveness, which has made it necessary even for those who hate all superlatives to call him the most remarkable musician on his instrument.”197 Hodeiier emphasizes the fact that Wells was able to elevate the trombone to an unprecedented level as a solo instrument, for “when played without majesty, the trombone easily becomes wishy-washy and unbearable. Dickie Wells was majesty personified.”198 Wells was the embodiment of the youthful, visionary jazz musician, and he exuded class, charisma, and confidence. The jazzman is almost totally dependent on his youthful vitality, but one’s youth is certainly fleeting and all too soon, it is gone. By the end of World War II, when Wells was playing with Count Basie, the quality of his solos had diminished. Hodeiier states, poignantly, that “there is perhaps no way to conclude except returning to our starting point, which is not exactly optimistic. It is unpleasant to observe the decline of a musician one likes. Many people refuse to do so. facts.”199
Nevertheless, the sincere critic must face the
The number of solos with the Count Basie band fell off, and Hodeiier
suggests that Wells had lost his desire to play, and he was playing his instrument by coercion. When Wells migrated to Europe in 1952, there were expectations that his playing would improve, or, return to its former glory, but it was not to be. “All that
196
Ibid., 65.
197
Ibid., 66.
198
Ibid., 66-67.
199
Ibid., 76.
128 was heard time after time was a worn-out, diminished, unrecognizable Wells. The fate that condemns nine jazzmen out of ten to end up as caricatures of their past greatness had caught up with the great trombonist. Under these circumstances, it is better to remember the marvelous soloist he was before the war.”200 There is yet another factor that distinguishes the careers of jazz musicians from those of classical musicians. The accepted cultural practices in America have had lethal, and possibly unintended, results in this respect for jazz musicians born after the turn of the century. The so-called “Color Line” excluded black jazz musicians from jobs en masse, as we observed in the case of Garvin Bushell’s audition for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, which certainly affected their survival. The U.S. Public Health Service has been compiling records on the life expectancies of Negro and White, males and females, since the nineteenth century and according to the data in Table i, about 31% of black jazz musicians born after 1900 did not reach their life expectancy. By comparison, only about 16% of white classical musicians did not reach their life expectancy. The highest percentage of jazz musicians who died before their life expectancy is a surprising one: about 46% of white jazz musicians born after 1900 did not reach the life expectancy for their group.
TABLE i. LIFE EXPECTANCIES OF JAZZ AND CLASSICAL MUSICIANS Mortality N
Mean
below life expectancy SD
N % below
Jazz (Total)
122
54.01
14.97
43
35
Jazz (BJM)
87
53.52
14.90
27
31
200
Ibid.
129 Jazz (WJM)
35
55.23
15.29
16
46
Classical (WCM)
61
66.23
13.27
10
16
A number of statistical measures were used to verify this unknown feature of jazz praxis, including t-tests and X2. A random selection of the most prolific jazz and classical musicians who lived and died within the twentieth century included jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and Errol Garner, along with prolific classical musicians like Jazcha Heifitz, Rudolf Serkin, Benjamin Edward Britten, and Leonard Bernstein. The dates of birth and death of the musicians were culled from a number of biographical resources (Lyons & Perlo 1989; Feather 1960; Baker & Slonimsky 1988). The life expectancy of each musician, based on the year of birth, was obtained from U.S. government records (U.S. Bureau of Census 1976, p. 55). The abbreviations for the groups under study that will be used hereafter are WCM for white classical musicians, BJM for black jazz musicians, and WJM for white jazz musicians. A comparison of the life spans of the aforementioned groups indicates that the mean age of death for WCM is sixty-six years, and the mean age of death for jazz musicians is fifty-four years: this is a statistically significant difference (t=5.40; p
