Obstacle Course to Mecca: Jazz in New York
Hentoff, Nat
The final tournament still takes place in New York. Here the jazzman from Detroit or Houston or Paris is tested. The judges who are by far most important to him are the other musicians. He is...
...He can find the club's illumination wanting or he can plant under-age customers and wait until they're served...
...If you want so-and-so," one agency often proposes, "you gotta take Smith for a week too...
...New York obviously isn't Birmingham, but the Negro musician with a white girl often gets the treatment...
...He doesn't even walk the beat, but he makes the rounds like the rest of them...
...Can you wonder why...
...A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous...
...A musician or waiter has to go downtown, get printed and mugged, and pay $3 for his cabaret card plus a dollar for pictures...
...There has been, for example, a large quantity of Detroit emigrants in the past six years...
...And significantly, Evans broke the barrier because Miles Davis hired him for a time as a pianist...
...That's why it took us so long to get in there...
...One owner assigned a bodyguard to a vocalist who wanted to leave his club and his record company...
...It has to be renewed at the same fee every two years...
...One of the promoters frequently paid off in cash, and the figures in his books didn't always jibe with what the musician took home...
...And since most established players are now grouped into their own combos, their need for jamming is not nearly so acute as was the case in the thirties and forties when most of the better players were imprisoned in big bands during the night and had to have room to stretch out before they went home...
...softer, more melodic jazz...
...The booking agencies, by and large, work for the clubs rather than the musicians...
...The apprentice, therefore, has to catch on as best he can...
...The moocher became louder and increasingly importunate...
...A card has been given a player after three months if he has a job with a band that will be spending most of its time out of town for the next three months...
...If the offices are against them, most of the clubs will be too since the offices use their "name" attractions as weapons to get what they want from the club owners...
...Costs of a session, album covers, liner notes and "promotion" are usually charged against the leader of a date...
...Birdland pays about $130 for a six-day week as does the Roundtable with the hours being from 8:15 to 2:30 or 9:45 to 3:45...
...I was talking with a jazz club owner when a man in street clothes came and in tried to mooch $5...
...There is also some amount of racial selection, with the selecting usually done by the Negroes...
...The club owners' exasperation with the police is usually taken out on the musicians and waiters...
...experimentalists vs...
...The main current influences on the developing jazzmen are Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, the perennial Duke Ellington and the bitterly controversial Ornette Coleman...
...Be a nice girl, sweetie," her companion soothed her, "or I'll break your arm...
...The discrimination among society bands is worse than in any other area, the main offenders being Meyer Davis, Lester Lanin, and Ben Cutler...
...Davis, as usual, played the Inauguration Ball this year...
...11 Most younger players, however, know someone when they arrive...
...Among the young modernists, for instance, the "hard" players generally stay by themselves...
...That guy encourages miscegenation...
...I get up at noon," a jazz player said recently, "and I read about a new advance in nuclear warfare and there's a Saturday Evening Post ad how about how seriously Sammy Davis takes Judaism, and then I go to work and smile at the hoods, and play for an audience that's talking and boozing and trying to make out for the night, and I begin to feel I'm talking to myself, and maybe I've flipped long ago without realizing it...
...Of course, if a booking agency or another interested party has intense economic reasons for wanting a man to have a card, the card can be obtained for a consideration...
...A sideman can get all of $154 for a six-night week at the Embers, but he has to work from 7:30 p.m...
...Few leaders derive much income from recordings—except, of course, for the major figures in the field...
...Since the musicians are now pretty well divided by style—older men vs...
...New York is the only major city which requires anyone who works where liquor is sold to be "approved" by the division of licenses of the police department...
...If you don't live in the same part of the city with the other guys, if you don't hang around with them, you don't hear about the jobs...
...I moved away, assuming the man to be a relative or old friend of the owner...
...Hawkins cited the case of a Florida alto saxophonist, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley and his brother, Nat, a trumpet player...
...Normally querulous, they are further harassed by consistent and insistent police graft...
...Having been mugged, printed, granted a police card and a union card, the player is then an official member of the jungle...
...but many still believe that while there are some white "swingers" like Zoot Sims, there are very few white originators...
...This town is like a world governing body of jazz...
...The Davis imprimatur is one of the most effective in jazz...
...They arrived in the summer of 1955, and made an initial impression...
...An out-of-towner is not fully admitted to Local 802, American Federation of Musicians, for six months during which time he must remain in New York...
...Then when they come back they are all right...
...When they first come here, I don't care what they were in their home towns, when they come here, they get cut...
...There are ways around the regulations...
...The newcomer to New York, therefore, finds it more difficult to be accepted if he's white...
...hard" vs...
...The jazz player gets little help from the union...
...Here the jazzman from Detroit or Houston or Paris is tested...
...and remedial action began only after a 1958 Urban League report embarrassed heads of symphony orchestras, producers, and network brass...
...39I...
...The key testing grounds used to be jam sessions, but these informal after-hours debates can seldom be found now...
...but even his frequently stated conviction that he doesn't care if a man is green so long as he can play well, has not much moved the more racially prideful jazzmen...
...A jazz musician," says apprentice Steve Lacy, "is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator and general all-around good fellow...
...Gerry Mulligan is not apt to jam with Horace Silver...
...Such a musician also needs a permit from the State Liquor Authority which has its own quixotic criteria...
...Sometimes the company man in charge of recording has a sub rosa publishing firm and insists that several of his songs be included on a session, or the leader can't do the tunes he wants to...
...Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for 40 years...
...No matter what they bring here, New York shakes them...
...Even Cohen, however, recently lost an important test case that should result in an indefinite retention of the card system...
...A cop who is overlooked can palm the soap in the men's room and issue a summons for not having a cake there...
...Well, Cannonball left—he came back...
...The important composer-arrangers are George Russell, Charlie Mingus, Benny Golson, Horace Silver, John Lewis...
...Or, if they stay around they can develop to be all right...
...You're playing too goddamn white, man," one leader snapped at a sideman on stand...
...They lack "the soul" that is endemic to the Negro musician who has earned his authenticity by the amount of "dues" he has paid by being a Negro...
...Sidemen get paid only for the date, no matter how much their improvisations contribute to the eventual success of the record...
...There are not only the Christmas lists which could take care of a large chunk of the Times' "Neediest Cases," but there is the week-to-week greed...
...He also finds few jam sessions in which to warm up and gain major league experience over a long period of time...
...Because you're Jewish," her Negro pianist friend answered...
...Nor is the Negro one of their basic concerns...
...THOUGH HOODS don't own all the jazz clubs, they own some...
...If a leader makes a change or a sideman quits, hiring and recommendations for hiring are all by word-of-mouth...
...If a player has even been convicted previously of a felony or certain specified misdemeanors (such as possession of narcotics or "lewdness"), he may not be able to work even if he somehow gets a police card...
...If he acquires enough of a reputation to draw the interest of a record company, he may well be conned into signing a contract by which the firm has so much the upper hand that at the end of the contract, the musician will owe the label a considerable amount of money...
...He is interested economically in being noticed by the critics, but with very rare exceptions, the young musician's self-respect rides on what the established players say...
...That," the owner said later in disgust, "was a clerk at the local precinct...
...Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous...
...All are Negro...
...A previous arrest for possession of marijuana or narcotics usually means automatic denial unless the musician has heard of Maxwell T. Cohen, a tough lawyer who consistently fights card cases and often wins them...
...he's blowin' now...
...Several have been beaten up, particularly in the Village, and it is not uncommon for a taxi to ignore a mixed couple...
...In fact, the only white player in the past couple of years to have won serious respect among some Negro players has been pianist Bill Evans...
...Cannonball, now a successful combo leader, agrees: "No matter how much talent and experience a player brings here, there's things to learn when he sits down with a seasoned band...
...The chutzpah of the cops is awsome...
...One reason for their decline is involved with the increased departmentalization of jazz...
...When Charlie Mingus played in one club, he drew quite a number of mixed couples, and the local constabulary told the owner not to book him again...
...He figured if he didn't make out here, he wouldn't have a good night...
...The jungle hardly ends at the city limits...
...Some companies are honest and the musicians' grapevine eventually hips a player about those he should avoid...
...If a leader becomes a valuable enough property, the office will be solicitous of his feelings...
...A complete loner of whatever color is apt to starve if he thinks talent alone will feed him in New York...
...In some of the Village jazz clubs, the scale is as low as $76 for a six-day week (Local 802, as mentioned before, is seldom militant for its jazz constituents...
...IN ADDITION to waiting for a union card that is of slim use to him, the newcomer also has to apply for a police permit...
...If a booking agency has a particular interest in getting a man a card immediately, a certain amount of "persuasion" will always work...
...OSTENSIBLY, more of the Negro modernists have recently been willing to admit white players to the club...
...Strip joints, neighborhood clubs, and the ultimate sacrifice—a day job...
...A similar geographically oriented, ambulatory hiring-hall exists for most of the other players in a latter-day equivalent of Jewish landsmen societies...
...My husband," complains the wife of another player, "comes home exhausted...
...A card has been denied because a player was busted ten years earlier for having a gun in his car...
...neoorthodox followers of Charlie Parker—the old-style, free-for-all session has almost disappeared...
...Why," said one young lady after two cabs had whizzed by, "don't they stop...
...One owner, reported to have strong ties with the Syndicate, somehow manages to persuade nearly everyone who appears regularly at his club to sign with his record company...
...It's the same thing in the studios and the Broadway shows," says one Negro musician...
...Nearly any jazz player could "sit in" twenty-five years ago...
...He was bugging me so much because this was his first call, and he's superstitious...
...Most of the major offices are still run as "plantations" and if the player doesn't like the way he's treated, he's free to move on to another "plantation...
...Options usually are entirely at the firm's discretion...
...Club work is not especially well paid...
...The city, after all, has our tax money to finance its legal staff...
...Moves to start a co-operative, musician-run booking agency have never worked because most of the players are afraid of being blacklisted by the big offices...
...but if he's relatively unknown, he "cooperates" or is ignored...
...The money finds its way—with absolutely no statutory authority—into the police pension fund...
...The same company was one of the leading disbursers of payola to disc jockeys, according to belated FCC statistics...
...There is strong indication that this requirement is unconstitutional, but no musician or other night club employee has had the money to fight a denial of his card all the way through the courts...
...Part of the prejudice comes from the Negroes' belief that whites have too often capitalized on what have essentially been Negro contributions to jazz ("You think Count Basie ever made the money Benny Goodman did in the thirties and forties...
...No notices of auditions are posted anywhere...
...III With scant exceptions, club owners are not especially fond of jazz and they tend to classify the musicians as somewhat below the status of a busboy...
...Grace notes—such as sending a sideman a copy of the record on which he's played—are practically unknown in the record business...
...It's supposed to be an identification card," a musician points out, "but now a cop can run us in early in the morning on the way home because we don't have our card...
...Permits are often denied on whim...
...A card has frequently been denied because a musician has been arrested—not convicted—in the past...
...For the first three months, he can only play one-nighters in the area, although he can begin working regularly after three months...
...But now there are more generic "styles" than there were in the twenties and thirties—although not as many individual styles—and as a result, cliques have developed...
...Some cops, notably in the Village, are unhappy when a room begins to attract Negro-white couples...
...The earlier adventurers are now part of "the establishment" so that the newer wave at least has a chance to be heard and considered for jobs...
...The judges who are by far most important to him are the other musicians...
...For some years, especially in the fifties, there has been a strong anti-white animus among many of the younger Negro players...
...They have a point...
...If he has no contacts at all in New York, he must somehow become known to the regularly working players...
...to 4:00 a.m...
...Musicians playing some of the summer festivals found that a new combine which controls several of these events have forced prices down so that if a man wanted to work any of their cultural events, he had to take their price or be frozen out...
...They have to come here and learn all over again, practically...
...and part has arisen from a fierce conviction among some that whites by definition are inferior jazz players...
...younger...
...And, conversely, an agency can convince a club not to book Smith...
...Under a relatively new ruling, the club owner keeps the police cards of all the musicians during their engagements, somewhat in the manner of a hotel clerk in a totalitarian state...
...Finally the owner went to the register and gave him the five...
...The flagrant discrimination in the networks, classical orchestras and Broadway pit bands has been ignored by the present union administration...
...While 802 does a relatively competent job of bargaining for the symphony and general recording players, its officers have little knowledge of, or concern for, the particular problems of the jazzman...
...but, according to Hawkins, "the boys were talking . . . his brother plays a nice trumpet, but man, Cannonball's nothing...
...These powerful figures build up their own cliques and few will voluntarily hire Negroes...
...This place," says patriarch Coleman Hawkins, "makes all musicians sound kind of funny when they come around...
...The union countenances an extraordinary procedure by which contractors—hiring agents—are both union members and hirelings of employers...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
