Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld

by T.J. English

Sicilian immigrants—especially those who were seen as having any association, real or imagined, with the mafia—were susceptible to a kind of bigotry and racism that African Americans knew all too well. In a sense, they now had a shared experience, however temporal, as “niggers.” There may well have resulted a kind of kindred understanding, perhaps empathy or solidarity, that laid the groundwork for a mutually conducive working relationship.

Some Sicilian musicians from New Orleans would go on to find fame and fortune, none more so than Louis Prima, who was born December 7, 1910, in the neighborhood of Little Palermo. As a trumpet player, singer, and entertainer, Prima would become a jazz legend. His roots in New Orleans were a classic byproduct of his Italian American heritage in the city at a time when jazz was inspiring levels of excitement that bordered on pandemonium.

Sicilians and Blacks in New Orleans banded together in honky-tonks like Matranga’s, Joe Zegretto’s, Pete Lala’s, Lala’s 25 Club, Eddie Graciele’s, Dante’s Lodge, and other Sicilian-owned clubs. It was a relationship that would continue, in various permutations, throughout the history of jazz.

By 1916, New Orleans musicians were in demand in other cities, especially Chicago, where jazz was on fire. As a last-minute replacement, Nick LaRocca was offered an opportunity to play cornet in a band led by drummer Johnny Stein in Chicago. He took the gig; the rest, as they say, is history. The band would become known as the Original Dixieland Jass Band, and it became the first band to make commercially issued jazz

recordings for a record label. By then, Stein had left the band and LaRocca took over as leader.

The Victor Talking Machine Company, which recorded LaRocca’s band on February 26, 1917, had been looking for an all-white band to record. It was complicated enough that jazz was perceived to be “Negro music” without having to sell the idea to white consumers that they should patronize Black musicians. Racism in America was about white supremacy, but it was also a commercial construct.

The French Quarter, to a degree, would pick up where Storyville left off and become a nexus point for jazz in the city, but the closing of Storyville had a powerful psychological and symbolic effect. Thus began an era when many of the best jazz musicians left New Orleans, a movement that would continue over the next decade.

The steamboats are remembered in the lore of jazz history for having brought the music “up stream.” Armstrong wrote about it in his memoir, noting that in Jim Crow America, white folks in places like St. Louis and Davenport, Iowa, were seeing all-Negro bands for the first time in their lives:

Gamblers, hustlers, pimps, and prostitutes circulated around the jazz universe like bees to a hive.

Jazz was a cultural expression that helped to define America as a place of diversity and possibilities. It represented the creation of something spontaneous and wondrous. In this freshly tilled soil, the seeds had taken root; jazz was spreading, and wherever it spread, it took on the dimensions of a potentially lucrative commercial venture.

The thinking was that if you were a fan of this music, you likely did not have the money to purchase a disc, much less an actual phonograph player.

Jazz was the music of the proletariat; it had not yet been formulated into something that could be monetized on a mass scale.

The biggest single boon to the machine occurred on January 16, 1919, with passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which, once it went into effect one year later, inaugurated the long, bloody era known as Prohibition. The Volstead Act—a series of laws and regulations that sought to eliminate the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of alcohol in the United States—became the law of the land. Thus began the most robust era in the history of organized crime. It was also a time when the new music became elevated to an exalted cultural status, so much so that a young author named F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1922 published a collection of short stories titled Tales of the Jazz Age. From that point onward, both Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age were on their way.

The saxophonist was talking about Piney Brown, but he could easily have been talking about Boss Tom or the Pendergast organization in general. You could depend on it if you needed it: The machine philosophy was based on doing favors for those who identified themselves as being one of its constituents. In that sense, musicians were like everyone else in the city.

By now, Kansas City musicians were used to playing at clubs run by mobsters. They had learned how to navigate this reality without getting themselves killed, but the nuances could be treacherous.

For the country’s young jazz musicians, the arrival of Armstrong in Chicago was a seismic event not unlike the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D., which was the result of many foreshocks, with occasional rumblings, until the force of its power rose up and spilled over for all to see.

By now, Armstrong knew he was gifted, but he remained solicitous of those who took the time to nurture his talents, none more so than King Oliver. On his very first night at Lincoln Gardens, the young cornetist stuck to his role as backup to Oliver’s lead. “I did not solo until the evening was almost over,” he wrote in his memoir. “I did not

try to go ahead of Papa Joe because I felt that any glory that came to me must go to him.” As the set wound down, patrons near the stage shouted out, “Let the youngster blow!” Oliver nodded approvingly for Armstrong to step forward and let it rip. The audience roared their approval.

In his memoir, We Called It Music, Condon described arriving at Lincoln Gardens: As the door opened the trumpets, King and Louis, one or both, soared above everything else. The whole joint was rocking. Tables, chairs, walls, people, moved with the rhythm. It was dark, smoky, gin-smelling. People in the balcony leaned over and their drinks spilled on the customers below . . . Oliver and Louis would roll on and on, piling up choruses, with the rhythm section building the beat until the whole thing got inside your head and blew your brains out.

When jazz aficionados talked about “the Chicago jazz style,” they were usually referring to those “cats from New Orleans” who brought their sound north to capitalize on the opportunities to be found in the big town.

Among other things that he would never forget about the Karnofskys: They lent him the money to buy his very first cornet.

Would the culture of jazz have captured the zeitgeist in the way that it did were it not for the phenomenon of Prohibition?

As an art form, the genesis of jazz bore no relation to the historical circumstances of the 1920s. On the other hand, the reality of Prohibition created a framework for the music that would otherwise not have existed. And it wasn’t just that new venues created by the people’s desire to imbibe were ready-made for jazz combos and dangerous rhythms. There was something about the Roaring Twenties itself—the clandestine social interactions, the pushing of racial boundaries, the hoodlums, the musicians—that turned jazz from a subculture into a telling representation of the national psyche.

Prohibition gave rise to an elaborate ecosystem for the music: Speakeasies, or “blind pigs,” became the place for trios and quartets, nightclubs for larger bands with floor shows, and dancehalls and theaters for big orchestras and “Battle of the Bands,” raucous affairs where multiple bands faced off against one another in a show of musical supremacy.

This period, from 1925 to 1929, was possibly the most violent of the Prohibition era, when the presence of gangsters in the city became a sign of the times.

As one of the biggest stars in jazz in the 1920s, Fats Waller was in high demand. Based in New York City, where he’d been born and raised, Waller played multiple instruments, but he was especially renowned for his innovations on the piano. He practically invented the Harlem stride style, which was rhythmic and jaunty and, when Fats played it, sounded as if multiple pianos were playing at once.

In Waller’s retelling of this story over the years, he entertained Capone and his men for the next three nights. Staying in a room at the Hawthorne Inn, he rose in the afternoon, ate a big meal, and performed late into the night and the following morning. By the time he left, Capone had stuffed his pockets with cash—$3,000, claimed Fats, which today would total over $40,000. Fats left Chicago and returned to New York with a great story to tell. Not only had he emerged unscathed from his encounter with some notorious gangsters, he had come through it all with a pocket full of dough. Not all entertainers were as lucky as Fats.

The club was so well connected that cops were known to duck inside for a drink every now and then; they knew that the inner sanctum of Green Mill was a safe zone for coppers on the take.

It was the same crossroads that confronted jazz musicians from New Orleans to Kansas City to Chicago. If hoodlums owned the clubs where you performed, if they controlled your ability to practice your art and make a living, did that mean they owned you?

One of the hoodlums said, “Just one favor, Joe. Don’t yell.” And then they were on him. Decades later, the assault was described in the book The Joker Is Wild: The Story of Joe E. Lewis, a biography of Lewis written by newsman Art Cohen: [The lead gangster] drew a .45 revolver. One of his helpers pulled out a .38 and moved behind Joe. Joe braced himself for a bullet. It did not come. A horrendous blow hit him from behind. He turned and he fell and saw the man with the .38 raising his arm to clout him again. The third assailant was unsheathing a hunting knife. Pain coiled around his brain, tighter, tighter, and sank its fangs deeper and deeper . . . The knifeman went to work. He punched the blade into Joe’s left jaw as far as he could, ripped his face open from ear to throat, and went on cleaving impassively, like a butcher.

The entertainer and the mobster: In the 1920s, jazz musicians found themselves at the center of this conundrum. As hired talent, you worked for the boys. This put you at their mercy. Sure, you could resist, try to stand up for yourself. But then you might just wind up like Joe E. Lewis, cut within a millimeter of your life, spending the rest of your career as a compliant slave.

The popularity of the hip flask turned out to be an example of how the lingo of the Prohibition era became the lingo of jazz. Among patrons in a club, if a person asked, “Are you hip?” they were asking if the person was carrying booze on them. Jazz musicians and their followers took the term and turned it into an existential statement. “Are you hip?” was a broader question about a person’s state of awareness. To be hip meant that you were in the know. And to be a hipster usually meant that you were a lover of jazz.

Judge Cliffe ruled against the club owners by declaring that the Volstead Act outlawed not just public places that actually sold illegal alcoholic beverages but also “places where people carrying liquor congregate.” It was a serious blow to the city’s nightclubs and therefore the many musicians who depended on the clubs to make a living. Thus began a period of club closures, with musicians leaving Chicago to find work in other localities.

Capone, though no race pioneer, took pride in the fact that his clubs were Black-and-Tan. This likely was because the mob boss understood that the roots of jazz—or at least the venues where jazz was played—involved an intermingling of Italians and Blacks. From the beginning, jazz was race-mixing music, and selling it to the public as such was part of its appeal.

Playing in clubs that were owned and operated by white gangsters was, according to Mezzrow, regrettably part of the devil’s deal that made the music possible. “Our whole jazz music was, in a way, practically the theme song of the underworld because, thanks to Prohibition, about the only places we could play like we wanted were illegal dives.”

That would change as gangsters like those in the Purple Gang introduced the product into the nightclub scene, especially among a group they figured would be an easy sell: musicians.

Mezzrow was an enthusiastic marijuana user, as were many jazz musicians. Smoking the plant was not yet illegal in most states and would not be until the 1930s. Mezzrow would soon become known as one of the most reliable weed sellers in the jazz world, a “gage hound” with the best product (which he purchased from a Mexican supplier on Chicago’s South Side). As someone who was often on the lookout for the cutting-edge experience, Mezz was aware of the harder drugs like opium and heroin, but their use was not yet common among jazz musicians.

Technically, Louis didn’t have a manager. His wife, Lil, had assumed the role ever since Louis left King Oliver’s band. She deserved credit for many of his biggest successes:

Jazz musicians had multitudinous names for cannabis: “muggles,” “tea,” “gage,” “muta,” “bush,” “reefer,” “hemp,” “hay,” “grefa,” and so forth. A marijuana smoker was known as a “viper.” To “tighten somebody’s wig” meant to get them high. Once Mezz Mezzrow emerged

as a primary dealer among jazz musicians (he was Armstrong’s dealer of choice), his product became known as “the Mezz,” as in “Ah man, this is really the Mezz.” A particularly fat joint was called a “Mezzroll.”

Violence, or the possibility of violence, had become part of the nightclub scene, but this had little to do with jazz. The demonization of the music had been there from the beginning: Jazz was “jig music” and therefore violence-prone and dangerous, according to white (and some Black) opinionators, politicians, socialites, and race-baiters. This represented a strain of Americana that would continue throughout history, where music designated as “Black” (early rock and roll, rap, hip-hop) was characterized by polite society as innately violent.

Other musicians had their own ways of internalizing the tension. One source of relief, an endeavor that in some ways mimicked the mentality of the gangster life, was the notorious cutting session. “Cutting” was an informal, competitive form of playing between musicians that began as a

friendly show of prowess and sometimes turned into musical bloodletting. It was not violent, per se; it did not involve an actual knife or blade, nor did it result in the destruction of the flesh or the puncturing of internal organs, but it was definitely aggressive and occasionally ruthless.

The competition at rent parties was fierce. Primarily piano players were showcased, and some of the most prodigious pianists of the day—including Willie “The Lion” Smith, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and a young kid from Washington D.C. named Edward “Duke” Ellington—made a name for themselves at the rent parties.

The very night that Duke and his band were scheduled to debut at the Cotton Club, they were already booked at the Standard Theater on South Street in Philadelphia, playing in a vaudeville show. The producer of the show, Clarence Robinson, refused to release Ellington from his obligation. Madden took control of the situation. He called Maxie “Boo Boo” Hoff, a powerful bootlegger in Philly who frequently did criminal business with Madden. The Cotton Club owner explained the situation to Hoff and stressed that it was urgent. Hoff sent a number of his underlings to visit Clarence Robinson. One of them—Yankee Schwartz, a former light-heavyweight boxer—told the producer, “Be big or be dead.” Robinson released Ellington from his booking.

For two years, the most renowned jazz musician in America lived in exile in Europe, partly because he believed his life was in danger back in the States. Armstrong lived in London and Paris and toured in Scandinavia, where he was adored in Copenhagen and Stockholm. In early 1935, he returned to the United States, but he lay low for months, hardly performing anywhere.

Years later, when Glaser and Armstrong recounted how they reunited after a decade apart, they told different versions. Said Glaser, “When Louis came back from England, he was broke and very sick. He said, ‘I don’t want to be with anybody but you. Please, Mister Glaser, just you and I. You understand me. I understand you.’ And I said, ‘Louis, you’re me, and I’m you.’ I insured his life and mine for one hundred thousand dollars apiece. Louis didn’t even know it. I gave up all of my other businesses, and we [became a team].”

Crosby revered Armstrong, and Sinatra revered Crosby. And the trajectory of jazz vocals in the United States would never be the same.

Frank Sinatra also had dealings with the underworld. Unlike Crosby, Sinatra was born into a world where hoodlums and mafiosi were literally just around the corner. It some ways, this would come to define his career in music.

In November 1938, at the age of twenty-two, Sinatra was arrested on a charge of “seduction.” It happened while he was performing at the Rustic Cabin, a club in New Jersey, while sitting with his fiancée, Nancy Barbato, a local Hoboken girl. While Sinatra was on a break, two cops came into the club and cuffed the young singer. The arrest warrant stated that Frank Sinatra, “being then and there a single man over the age of eighteen years, under the promise of marriage, did then and there have sexual intercourse with the said complainant who was then and there a single female of good repute for chastity whereby she became pregnant.” The headline in the Jersey Observer read: “Songbird Held in Morals Charge.”