in a cabaret was required to be licensed as well. After 1940, both potential performers and regular employees of such venues were required to be fingerprinted and undergo police background checks. Depending on the results of the investigations, applicants were either issued identification cards signifying their suitability to work in cabarets or denied them in an effort to minimize the corrupting influence on cabaret patrons of “criminals and other undesirables … who come into contact with patrons under conditions conducive to criminality” (58).
The requirement of identification cards, Chevigny observes, was based on a preemptive logic that was not, at least according to existing records, supported by any actual cases of criminal conduct by musicians in or near clubs. Those musicians who were denied cabaret cards typically had criminal records, frequently for drug possession, though few, if any, arrests took place at performance venues. Rooted in fears about intimate contact between the public and (black) musicians or left-leaning comedians such as Lord Buckley, the cabaret and cabaret card laws were both paradoxical and hypocritical. As Chevigny (1991, 59–64) explains, the laws were arbitrarily enforced, so that Billie Holiday, denied a cabaret card after being convicted for narcotics possession and imprisoned in 1947, could still perform in concert in Central Park in 1948, and Frank Sinatra worked frequently at venues such as the Copa-cabana in the 1950s without ever obtaining a card.
Although the laws requiring identification cards were rescinded in 1966,5 other laws regulating the clubs continued to have an effect on jazz performers’ fortunes into the late 1980s. Dismayed by provisions in the city’s zoning regulations that forbade live performance in restaurants outside the areas where entertainment was permitted, lobbyists from Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) and later the owners of Greenwich Village coffeehouses convinced the mayor and the City Planning Commission to amend the existing laws in 1955 and 1961, to allow “incidental musical entertainment” performed by “up to three musicians, playing strings or keyboards” in restaurants (Chevigny 1991, 70–74). Because incidental entertainment could not feature horns or percussion instruments (including the vibraphone), in part to comply with noise regulations, this exception was damaging to venue owners who favored jazz but didn’t have the capital to obtain a cabaret license in addition to the other permits required to operate a business in New York City. As a result, many of them
tried to tailor their music to the … exception. The Burgundy Café … stopped using saxophones and began to emphasize the piano and hire singers. At Gregory’s, Warren Chiasson stopped playing vibraphone and switched to piano in the Chuck Wayne trio on Tuesday nights. Discovery, in 1985 a new place at Broome and Mercer Streets in Soho, took the ingenious approach of offering a trio of Reggie Workman on bass, Stanley Cowell on piano, and violinist Ali Akbar…. [But when] Bob Belden, a young saxophonist fresh from the big bands, tried to play his demonstration tape at the West End Bar … the management told him they could not hire sax players. Belden heard the same story at 55 Christopher Street, a small place in Greenwich Village. (84)
Chevigny chronicles the absurdity of the regulations and the varied legal strategies employed by the AFM, musicians, attorneys, and venue owners to have them overturned starting in the 1960s. Those efforts culminated in the incidental musical entertainment exception being ruled unconstitutional in January of 1988 by judge David Saxe, though actual change still lagged behind (86–131). The repeal of the laws was welcome, but Chevigny and a number of the people he interviewed felt that irreparable damage had been done to the scene. Indeed, the prospects for musicians seemed not to change markedly. Established performers, the very ones who could draw larger audiences, might have been less inclined to play in the venues that opened in the wake of the repeal of cabaret laws, preferring instead to devote their energies to teaching as well as performing in the dwindling number of clubs outside New York and in jazz festivals in the United States and abroad. Younger, less-established musicians perhaps benefited most from the repeal, for they found themselves with more opportunities to perform in restaurants in various parts of the city (154–66). For those reasons and many others, the economic climate for jazz venues was increasingly volatile in the 1980s and ’90s.
Some of the difficulties have a direct connection to many cities’ shifting toward neoliberal strategies to spur growth and derive tax revenue through the regulation of public space beginning with the fiscal crises of the 1970s (Sites 1997, 540). For much of the twentieth century and especially in the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States and other capitalist nations experienced unparalleled economic prosperity based on their ability to manufacture goods for domestic and foreign consumption (Harvey 1989a, 129). Indeed, the military and financial power of the United States led to the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, which “turned the dollar into the world’s reserve currency and tied the world’s economic development firmly into U.S. fiscal and monetary policy” (Harvey 1989a, 137). In this climate, ever more efficient, scientifically managed American corporations found ways to liquidate surplus goods overseas and to pass the benefits of their profitability along to their employees, especially those who were members of unions.
Between 1965 and 1973, however, signs that the postwar boom was coming to an end were ever more apparent. During that time, David Harvey writes, U.S. corporate productivity and profitability were declining; inflation accelerated to the point where the dollar’s stability as a reserve currency was called into question; and Western European nations and Japan challenged U.S. manufacturing dominance—all with the result that the dollar was devalued (Harvey 1989a, 141). One additional result of these changes, exacerbated by OPEC’s raising of oil prices in 1973, was that leaders in major municipalities had to acknowledge more directly that their tax bases were eroding. That is, the postwar boom had perhaps made it easier for them to ignore the fact that, beginning in the late 1940s, not only had affluent and middle-class dwellers (including white male heads of household who enjoyed the benefits of union membership) had chosen to move to more spacious and presumably safer suburbs (leaving other residents to deal with declining services, increased joblessness, and an attendant increase in crime; see Sugrue 1996), but corporations were also progressively transferring their manufacturing operations to more remote areas within and outside the United States as they struggled to remain competitive.
No longer able to depend on the tax revenues of the boom years, municipal leaders like those in New York City turned their attention toward the reconfiguring and regulation of space as a way of attracting capital investment from corporations and real estate developers, particularly in parts of Lower Manhattan (Sites 1997, 542–45; Hudson 1987). One related manifestation of this shift, with direct effects on jazz scenes, was those same leaders’ increased reliance on the revenue that could be derived from tourism. That is, municipal governments invested significant resources in building convention centers, improving roads in, around, or leading to central business districts, renovating or creating parks on riverfronts, revitalizing entertainment areas, providing incentives for professional sports teams to relocate, and emphasizing—sometimes even inventing—their unique cultural heritages in an attempt to attract business travelers and other visitors (Blank 1996; Zukin 1997; Hoffman 2003; Judd et al. 2003), despite little evidence that such schemes would result in the desired outcomes.
This same period witnessed the establishment of annual jazz festivals in New Orleans, Detroit, New York, and other cities (see, for example, Atkinson 1997), as well as shifts in locations where one might prominently find performing venues. As David Grazian observes in his study of blues clubs in Chicago, the cultural tourism of prior decades, which often entailed white patrons going into predominantly black areas to hear blues and jazz, was replaced by the relocation of venues to whiter, more centrally located areas—the very ones that might more easily draw visitors on vacation or on business. And as musicians realized there was more money to be made in these newer locations, it became increasingly difficult for venues located in lower-income or crime-ridden areas to remain solvent (Grazian 2003, 165–96). In New York, a similar process was underway as the aggregate number of venues decreased and the “slow march downtown” (Szwed 2000, 73), which had begun in the 1930s, continued. As a result, venues came to be more concentrated in and on the fringes of Greenwich Village. By the end of the twentieth century, even the lofts that had seemed a viable alternative in the 1970s were
