Jazz and Justice. Gerald Horne
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said producer John Hammond, was a devotee of the new music.36 and anti-racist to the point that he once called James Petrillo, leader of the morally compromised musicians’ union, and threatened to organize a competitor union if no speedy reform was forthcoming.37 In sum, despite the best efforts of those like Bridges and Johnson, Negro musicians were being driven together by Jim Crow, meaning the most creative and competent artists were forced into a hothouse of innovation, leading to a new turn in the new music.
Fortunately, it was not just Bridges and his powerful union that objected to Jim Crow in the music business. In 1942 Walter White of the NAACP issued a “vigorous protest,” reprimanding James Petrillo, the union boss, reproving “the practice of Chicago and other places … requiring radio stations to sign contracts to use only white musicians.”38 Petrillo denied the allegation and replied unconvincingly that “the situation is entirely satisfactory to the colored membership.”39 White would have been wise not to take the union boss’s words too seriously since it was well known that Petrillo was a comrade of Sidney Korshak, a key fixer for racketeers; Petrillo’s rise to union leadership was littered with stories of clubs that were firebombed and stink-bombed for using musicians not represented by Petrillo. His first job was as a union muscleman, and with the backing of mobsters, this man, known, insensitively, as Little Caesar and the Mussolini of Music, was able to lead the often fractious American Federation of Musicians local in Chicago for four decades and the entire union for another eighteen years, with its 250,000 members.40
THE BIAS THAT LED TO BRIDGES’ protest in San Francisco and White’s objection to goings-on in Chicago were hardly sui generis. Lester Young discovered during this time that prestigious hotels in midtown Manhattan were reluctant to hire Black bands, for fear of upsetting racist customers, or at least that was the argument offered.41 The club owner Max Gordon, who initiated the prominent Village Vanguard in Manhattan, not only had to deal with police officers hassling him about a liquor license, but, he said, “in 1943 you had to think twice before bringing a black woman to the smart Upper East Side of Manhattan.”42
Walter White of the NAACP, who happened to be quite light-skinned, could have added chapter and verse. In early 1943, in the midst of complaining to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, he reminded the portly politico that “there are a great many colored people who look … white” and thus could—theoretically—be barred from various clubs on spurious grounds. It is “possible,” he insisted, “that Mrs. White and I while patronizing the Savoy, as we have done on many occasions could be thought by some policemen” that a “white man and colored woman were dancing,” inducing harassment. Police thought that if the Savoy closed, “it would keep white people from coming to Harlem,” which he thought was a noxious policy goal. “Some five hundred thousand people were patrons of the Savoy during 1942,” he said, and it was the “favorite dancing place of many defense workers.” Yet these workers often were harassed by police who chose “to follow each patron after they leave.” If the Savoy were closed, the “alternative would be for the colored patrons of the Savoy to dance in downtown places,” which was also unacceptable. Those under eighteen years of age were also being barred.43
The age bar helped to generate vibrant youthful protest and consciousness, while the dancing bar contributed to a trend of the new music’s shift from dancing to listening. Interestingly, the Savoy was owned by Moses and Charles Galewski, of Polish Jewish ancestry, who changed their name to Gale. It had opened in 1926 and was “fronted” by Charlie Buchanan, Negro.44
The bunching of Negro musicians uptown was hardly happenstance. Beating one slave can keep the entire plantation in line.45 Nonetheless, this putrid prejudice was not merely a Gotham matter; in Los Angeles there was a similar attempt to ban “mixed dancing,” with “white girl hostesses” choosing to “refuse to dance with Negro servicemen” at a local canteen.46 The crackdown facilitated the rise in listening, laying the groundwork for the new music known as bebop.
However, there was gnawing sentiment hostile to White’s ideas. An otherwise unidentified “white woman” told him bluntly that it was “about time this cesspool for miscegenation between degenerate white prostitutes and Negroes was shut down…. I know that your race feels that sharp sense of sweet revenge,” she proclaimed, “whenever you see a Negro breaking down the white blood race by having a Negro intermarry with a white woman.”47 The Savoy was instructed that “if the management refused to admit white people, it could remain open.” Thus, it was stated, Harlem would be akin to the “Jewish quarters in Germany.” Of late, “some 75% of the dancers seemed to be boys and girls ranging from 12 to 16 years of age,” an age range that fueled outrage.48 Joining the fray was Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians—“on behalf of its twenty-one thousand members.”49
Across the continent in Los Angeles, a film studio objected to the presence of the youthful guitarist Barney Kessel, born in 1923, a “white musician in an otherwise black cast,”50 as it was put by an observer. Dimly recognized at the time was that such barriers were hampering the development of these “white” musicians, isolating them not only from those with talent but those on the cusp of developing new musical forms that would prove to be dominant for some time to come. Billie Holiday asserted that once in Detroit she was told she was too light-skinned to play with Basie since “somebody might think I was white if the light didn’t hit me just right. So they got special dark grease paint and told me to put it on.”51 Apartheid barriers ironically helped to create a greenhouse of creativity among exceedingly talented Negro musicians.
Drummer Roy Porter, born in Colorado in 1923, was in Los Angeles then and told of “the man who ran the Say When,” a popular club, “a racist called Dutch. He’d hire you, man, make it clear what he thought of you”—not much. “Billie Holliday worked for Dutch once during this time. He treated her like she was a dog,” no doubt hastening her precipitous decline and premature death. Porter, who described himself as a “mixture of black, Mongolian and English,” was a regular visitor to Central Avenue in Los Angeles in the 1940s and noticed that the cops there tended to “harass black musicians and the black pimps that had white whores or any black men with white women.” Beyond this venue, there was a “club named Diane’s on 8th or 9th Street near Alvarado in the Westlake District … supposedly owned by [mobster] Bugsy Siegel and was operated by the Virginia Hill” routinely referred to as a “gun moll.” There he worked alongside Benny Carter.52 The massive influx of African Americans during the war, joining a preexisting progressive movement,53 allowed some musicians to undermine the rancid bias foisted upon them.54
Still, the fact remained that Negroes were barred from certain clubs, even if Negro musicians were performing there.55 This was notably the case in Los Angeles, thought to be immune from such pestilences, as when during the war a Negro fan was denied entrance to a club where Benny Carter was performing, and Jimmy Lunceford abandoned a gig because of likeminded bias.56
Carter felt that because he had neither a Glaser nor a Mills behind him (an exploiter with the heft to enhance a musician’s popularity), his historical impact was lessened. By 1943, he found “no blacks in the studio orchestras” in Hollywood, “other than Lee Young,” drummer and singer born in 1914. By 1944, he sought to move to a neighborhood where restrictive covenants barred those of his ancestry: “We decided to fight … we won it,” he said triumphantly. “There were many blacks who didn’t want … desegregation” of the union locals, a battle he took on nonetheless, delivering mixed results.57
Musician Buster Smith, whose alto style influenced Charlie Parker,58 contends that Hollywood was not unusual in seeking to erect firm Jim Crow barriers. In Dixie, where this Texan frequently performed, “90 percent” of the audiences were “white” and there they did not play the new music: “No, not too much of it. The only time we played much of that jazz was around the colored places.” The question then becomes: To what extent did this bifurcated system and the fact that those like Smith played often before non-Negro audiences retard the music’s evolution? Bassist Milt Hinton once told him of a gig and “there was this little room underneath the bandstand. And they got locked