“Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld” by T. J. English
This is an incredibly violent history of jazz music and its tight relationship with the criminal underworld.
It is the story of a turbulent and harsh era in America, where according to the statistics by Tuskegee Institute between 1882 and 1912 there were 2329 instances of lynching of black people; horrors that created the tales of hardship that became the basis of the soul of jazz music.
As the author T. J. English wrote right at the beginning of the introduction, “[t]here is a reason that “Strange Fruit” still stands as the seminal jazz song. Written by Abel Meeropol in 1937 and sung so memorably by Billie Holiday two years later, it beckons from the great beyond, elliptical and haunting. The song is both a ballad and a primal scream, an aching tone poem that carries with it the deep, heart-wrenching emotionalism of the blues, as well as the lucid, steely observationalism of someone who has been a witness to history. In form and content, it is a brutal diagnosis of the human condition in B-flat minor. That this song speaks for jazz at the core of its being is no accident.”
This partly explains why jazz music has this sad vibe to it, and a relatively somber tone.
English then continues, ““Strange Fruit” finds its power in the perverse metaphoric imagery of “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees . . .” Blood on the leaves, blood at the root. It is a song about lynching. And it is a song about America.”
It is in this kind of environment that the story of jazz began, in part 1 of the book, with Louis Armstrong as one of the main vantage points. It is when jazz musicians in New Orleans were given their first big breaks at venues owned by the mobsters, such as in whorehouses, clubs, honky-tonks, speakeasies, etc. That’s right, you cannot separate the history of jazz from the history of the mobsters, because their respective existance depend on each others.
As English elaborates, “[y]ou cannot understand America without knowing the history of jazz—or the mob. Taken together, they are part of the country’s origin story, symphonically intertwined, like an orchestral extravaganza by Ellington, with harmonic complexity, rich tonal shadings, dissonance, syncopation, and all the other elements that make a piece of music resonate in the imagination and remain timeless. Through the striving of numerous musicians, club owners, record label executives, and gangsters chronicled in this book, the contrapuntal groove between jazz and the underworld emerges as the heartbeat—and the backbeat—to the American Dream.”
Indeed, jazz is not a rigid music that is carefully created in conservatories or academies. But it is a freedom music with free-flowing improvs that mostly developed at night and became associated with vice – whorehouses, drinking, gambling, and artful carousing – which makes it the music of the people.
And this world fits both jazz musicians and mobsters, where during the age of segregation, mob-owned whorehouses and clubs became the safe space for all to mingle and interact, regardless of skin colour. As English remarks, “[t]he average Black musician had less to fear from an Italian mafioso inside a club than he did from the average white cracker out on the street. The early twentieth-century musician had less to fear from a gangster than he did from a policeman. For people in the jazz world, the bordello and the honky-tonk were a source of refuge from a society where, among other threats and indignities, lynching was an ongoing nightmare, and had been for generations.”
The book then elaborates on this in a massive scale; by telling the legends and stories of a cast of characters along the revolution of the music, through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War 2 era, all the way to the 1950s and 60s. First in Kansas City where jazz first branched out from New Orleans, then to Chicago and New York, before it spread everywhere to the likes of St. Louis, Pittsburg, Denver, all the way to the west coast in Southern California, and eventually Las Vegas, even to Cuba (which would gave birth to Latin Jazz).
The cast of characters are, on the musical side: Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Prima, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Harry Belafonte, to name a few; including Frank Sinatra as the primary vantage point in the story in part 2, and cameos from the likes of Stan Getz, Ella Fitzgerald, Quincy Jones, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, and Charles Mingus.
On the criminal underworld side: Al Capone, Legs Diamond, Owney Madden, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello, Johnny D’Angelo, Mickey Cohen, the Gallo brothers, Vinnie the Chin, Tommy Eboli, and many, many more. The book also covers the stories of notorious club owners and talent managers, such as Jules Podell, Morris Levy, and Joe Glaser, all of whom walked the blurry line between legitimate capitalism of the upperworld and the criminal underworld.
However, the interracial tollerance in the New Orleans days did not last long. Especially in the 1950s and 60s when racism became more blatant and mob violence increasingly got more brutal. And along with the evolution of the music, came new waves of problems: While in the old days if people wanted to hear a musician sings they needed to go to the club where the singer performs, in the 50s and 60s this arrangement gradually changed with the invention of vinyl records and jukebox. And thus the mobsters also got increasingly involved in the nasty battle to control the records, the distribution channels, and even the jukeboxes. And this book shows how this was brutally executed.
The book ended with a bit of a sour note, where by the late 1960s and 1970s the popularity of jazz music started to dwindle. And as its profitability declined, the mob also slowly left the industry in seach of other fish to fry. And by the 1980s, during the major prosecutions for mobsters, there was no longer a relationship with the jazz world. And so jazz – the real jazz as we originally know it – was never the same again.
All in all, this is one of the most impressive histories of a music genre ever written, narrated in a clear and concise manner despite the complicated multi-decades affairs that mimick the complexity of jazz chords and improvs. If only every music genre have this kind of biography. I really enjoyed reading it so much, while listening to the old jazz tunes from every single one of those eras.
THE CHAOS THEORY 