of Pops Foster, was born in McCall, Louisiana in 1888; he had worked in carpentry and painting, but was better known as a violinist. He made ten trips on a United Fruit Company vessel to South America.69 He was not unique in venturing to Latin America: Jazz man, Lawrence Douglas Harris did well in Mexico playing with carnival bands.70
In sum, musicians were fleeing in all directions from their home country, propelled by the new music and the skill to perform it in a way that enticed audiences. As noted, Armstrong fled to Europe and was playing there generally from 1932 to 1935. Fats Waller was in Europe for a good deal of the 1930s. Benny Carter was there from about 1935 to 1938 and Coleman Hawkins from 1934 to 1939. The first Norwegian club that specialized in the new music made sojourning in Europe all the more feasible. Serving to pave the way for successful performances was the rise of recorded music during this same era. Records of “King” Oliver, to cite one example, were released not only in the United States but also in Canada, Argentina, France, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Australia, and Japan. Then there was the overarching factor of these mostly Black artists receiving a more respectful reception abroad. Thus, in 1932 when the mid-level bandleader Rudy Vallee was drawing U.S. audiences of 2,800, Duke Ellington, arguably a more talented musician, was attracting 25 percent of this total. The now forgotten Ben Bernie was drawing 2,000 when Armstrong was attracting 350.71
France was to be a favored outpost for fleeing musicians, Bechet’s problems aside. Paris may have been neither Utopia nor Nirvana, but it may have seemed that way to those more accustomed to the peculiar folkways of Dixie. As Bechet was being jailed, Jack Hylton, a Euro-American conductor, found himself in trouble with the “French Association for the Protection of the Black Race.” According to an observant Negro journalist, somehow he had forgotten that he was “not in the southern part of the United States and let his race prejudice get the better of his good judgment.” Hylton had met “Nabib Gonglia,” a Black artist who was performing alongside him. When Hylton was informed of this fact, he refused to go on stage, but, unlike in Dixie, it was he who was reproached severely.72 The following year, the Negro press reported that even on the French Riviera, “a Negro may enter, not only with equality but with a preference. All, save Americans, want to know him,” it was said wondrously.73
Teddy Weatherford, born in 1903, had been a bandmate of Armstrong in 1920s Chicago before abandoning North America for Asia, Shanghai, and then Calcutta. By 1926, he was performing in China and only returned to the United States once in coming decades.74 Born in Bluefield, West Virginia, he wound up playing in Calcutta, Bombay, Ceylon, sites where he was joined at times by trumpeter Cricket Smith, born in 1881.75 Buck Clayton, who, as we have seen, also made his way to China, said that Weatherford was a “king over there” and “would play four clubs a night.” Shanghai was their favored site; there could be found “two or three gambling casinos inside the place” with “two or three dance floors…. Madame Chiang kai-Shek used to come in there all the time,” referring to the spouse of the man who led the forces defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. There was a sizeable exile community, and Clayton “was learning Russian” since “there [were] a lot of Russians” and he was picking up the language “pretty well.”76
An indication as to why so many musicians chose exile from their homeland, was indicated by Milt Hinton, who became a regular in pre-revolutionary Cuba. “What amazed me,” he said, “is that until that time, I’d never stayed at a place that served black and white guests. And everyone was treated equally.”77 Benny Carter, composer and bandleader, thought similarly about Europe. In Harlem, he recalled, “many white musicians used to come in and listen to the black musicians and not only listen but sit in with them. Quite often. But we couldn’t go downtown and sit in with them,” placing him and those like him at a disadvantage while privileging those not in this persecuted category, meaning, “of course,” that the latter would learn lessons to enhance their careers. Whereas Europe was different, he said, in that there was “acceptance of you just on the basis of you as a human being.”78
The development of the phonograph and recorded music helped to create a market abroad for practitioners of the new music, allowing them to seek what often amounted to a sinecure overseas. The critic Leonard Feather argued that Ellington was appreciated more in Europe and Britain particularly than in the United States, notably during the 1930s, which incentivized the bandleader to spend a considerable amount of time abroad.79 In the ultimate commentary, the grandson of Booker T. Washington, the horn man Booker Pittman, left the United States around 1931 for Europe and did not return home until the early 1960s.80
Negro musicians were so prevalent in Europe that during the pre-1975 wars in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, at one juncture political activists from there were able to reach their homelands without valid papers from European ports by simply dressing them up as “ ‘Negro musicians’ … along with a European guide who did have a proper passport.” Then, according to the radical intellectual and activist Samir Amin, “At the Luxembourg frontier, which was supposed to be the one with the loosest controls, our musicians gave a good imitation of collective drunkenness,” confirming the stereotype, and they flew from there to Africa.81
WAR ERUPTED IN ASIA AND EUROPE in the 1930s, and these years were transformative for the new music, establishing patterns that continue to resonate, not unlike what had occurred previously in terms of the mass diffusion of phonographs and radios and the arrival of mass electrification, facilitating the popularity of the electric guitar. That is not all. In the midst of war, the major musicians’ union engineered a strike over royalty payments, which bandleader Charlie Barnet termed “one of the biggest nails in the coffin of the big band era, for it brought vocalists very much to the fore. Musical backgrounds were being recorded for them in foreign countries and a lot of records were even made with voices substituting for instruments. Before the strike was over, bands had received a lethal blow.”82
Simultaneously, the monopoly enjoyed by ASCAP in terms of music royalties and publishing was challenged increasingly by BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.), and, said pianist Dr. Billy Taylor, this “created important opportunities for many African American artists.” Dr. Taylor added that since vocalists “belonged to a different union,” the musicians’ strike opened doors for these songbirds. Moreover, a shellac shortage, due to Tokyo’s forces seizing the Malay Peninsula, created opportunities for smaller record companies.83
In addition, the eruption of war made exile abroad less attractive, increasing competition for work in the United States. “All jazz is dead in Europe!” it was announced tremulously in mid-1942: “In Switzerland now there are only two Negro musicians”; elsewhere on the continent Negroes were to be found in “concentration camp[s].”84 Trumpeter Arthur Briggs, born in 1899, spent four years in a Nazi internment camp after starring in Paris. With family in Long Island and California, this Negro artist once played with Noble Sissle. At the camp, he formed a six-piece orchestra, then another with twenty-five pieces that moved easily from “swing” to “classical.” He drew upon the talents of 2,000 internees to do so. He also formed a trio that sang Negro spirituals, which was bolstered by the fact that there were “50 colored boys in the camp,” according to journalist Rudolph Dunbar.85
In Manila one musician, Whitney Smith, wound up in a Japanese-administered internment camp, while another, Bob Fockler, wound up broadcasting for a so-called “Nazi radio station,”86 while pianist and arranger Sam Wooding, in contrast, said “the Nazi Party didn’t want any American music and especially the ragtime or jazz played by blacks. They didn’t honor blacks at all. So, they refused, they barred the contract, they discredited the contract.”87
In Shanghai, the new music was in shambles, with artists fleeing in all directions. After the band of Butch Larkin dared to play “God Bless America” in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in early 1943, he was jailed. Many “white” musicians there were replaced by Filipinos, accelerating an
