reportedly, “doing okay teaching music and voice and has a large studio,” while Ray Reynolds was “now dancing nightly” and doing well for himself.88 A favoritism toward Negroes was part of Tokyo’s wartime policy.89
As opportunities abroad dried up because of the exigencies of war, this lucrative outlet for Negro musicians was blocked, generating more intense competition for remaining jobs. This was occurring as the number of jobs for Negro musicians in, for example, Jim Crow Chicago declined by about 30 percent because of the disappearance of Negro-owned clubs in the years leading up to 1940, a process driven by the ravages of the Great Depression, the decline of Negro-owned clubs as a result, the demise of “swing” music, and the perennial: continuing racism.90
Consolidation within the industry was also a factor. The Club De Lisa in Chicago “wasn’t like any other club in the world,” wrote analyst Dempsey Travis. “You could buy anything you wanted within the De Lisa compound in the 5500 block on South State Street. The De Lisa brothers owned the hotel, the gambling operation, the liquor stores and dainty-looking girls who worked the bar stools inside the club.” Thus Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson, and the other musicians who performed there were subjected to a kind of monopoly pricing power that could force down fees, as the club tended to drive competitors out of business, which was garnished by Jim Crow that placed these artists in a disadvantaged bargaining position.91
The ripples of instability extended southward, too. Arriving on these shores were a number of talented Cuban musicians who contributed to the richness of the music. Machito, the percussionist born Frank Grillo in 1908, had his first rehearsal in Harlem at 122nd Street and Seventh Avenue, the headquarters of the Negro evangelist Father Divine. “They charged us fifty cents an hour for the rehearsal,” he recalled. Yet despite his base in Harlem, when his orchestra played in Miami, a Jim Crow haven, they were advertised as hailing “from Cuba,” and although his band was “black and white,” they evaded local apartheid because they were Cuban. “We even have a bodyguard to take care of us,” said the bemused dark-skinned artist, “and they transport[ed] us to Miami Beach. I used to live in a white hotel. I never had [a] problem, we used to eat in Miami City [sic] in those white restaurants, as a matter of fact.” His band included an African American, but the wily bandleader sought to keep him from speaking with his betraying accent and that “made the difference,” as they were treated “very good…. There was no problem because we were from Cuba and they consider the Cubans … are not black,” meaning not descendants of enslaved mainland Africans, the perpetual antagonist of North American republicans. Yet when the band played at the Savoy in Harlem “95%” of the audience was black and they were “crazy” about the music. After all, he said, “We [were] playing for black and it was black music…. You didn’t have to make no explanation to a black person about rhythm because … they come from where the rhythm come from.” Machito was no stranger to the Savoy: “I used to go practically every day, every night, to the Savoy because [drummer] Chick Webb was there [and] Ella Fitzgerald [vocalist]” too and fellow Cuban Mario Bauza “was in charge of rehearsing the orchestra.”92
Machito had arrived on the mainland in 1938, while Bauza was already there, paving the way, having arrived more than a decade earlier. (He was to marry the percussionist’s sister.) It was on the mainland that Bauza heard the new music, and, he recalled, “I went back to Cuba and became a saxophone player. I came to New York to live in 1930 and I joined Noble Sissle’s band.” The trumpeter then joined Webb’s band, Webb telling him that, “if you can get the American Negro accent in your music you’re going to be great, because you’ve got the other side of the coin—the finesse, the technique.” He became Webb’s “musical director,” then it was on to Cab Calloway’s band.93 It was Bauza who was partially responsible for the discovery of Ella Fitzgerald. He also had short stints with the band of Don Redman and Fletcher Henderson. It was Bauza who was also partially responsible for the breakthrough that led Calloway to hire Dizzy Gillespie, where they made music together side-by-side. As world war was erupting, Bauza joined Machito’s band, but the influence he left on the music, as exemplified by Gillespie, was significant.94
The overall environment provided fertile soil for yet another rise of a phenomenon not unknown to the new music: a vast bubble of tiny enterprises run by what one commentator termed “dreamers, sharp operators, would-be tycoons and ambitious fans,” many more than willing to take advantage of a climate that facilitated rough exploitation of African American performers. For Lester Young, already familiar with Kansas City’s unscrupulousness, this development made it harder for him to trust people, especially Euro-Americans he didn’t know well, which had an ineluctable impact on his personality and ultimately his music.95
Young also accompanied Count Basie, which illuminates what bandleader Charlie Barnet observed. He encountered the touring band of Basie in New York City in the 1930s: “I never forgot the pitiful instruments some of his guys were playing when they first came into Roseland,” a local nightspot. “They were held together by rubber bands and I just could not believe it, although instruments like that were not uncommon in other black bands across the country.” This decrepitude influenced the music in that “when they got new instruments, they had grown accustomed to a horn that is out of whack” and “it is hard to get used to one on which everything is good.”96 On the one hand, this was outrageous; on the other, this deficiency in instrumentation could force more creativity in making lovely sounds.
Barnet had reason to know. A scion of wealth (the American Sugar Refining Company and the New York Central Railroad), he had relationships with various elites far surpassing those of his peers. Besides, he was married eleven times, providing him with entrees to even more relationships. To his credit, he was among the first Euro-American bandleaders who hired musicians of a different ancestry, and he has been credited with helping catapult Lena Horne, the songstress, to stardom.97
Trombonist “Trummy” Young saluted Barnet—“He would fight, man,” he enthused, speaking of battling Jim Crow and “so would Boyd Raeburn,” bandleader born in 1913. This contrasted with Benny Goodman, born in 1909, who “would [not] go too far for anybody. Not only us but nobody else.” Given the conditions musicians faced, few eyebrows were raised when Duke Ellington, according to an interviewer, “used to say that the only basis for racial prejudice is economic,” and sideman “Trummy” Young replied, “oh, he’s true,” both opinions placing them alongside the left and distant from those who saw this pestilence as an individualized psychological delusion.98 (Despite Young’s rosy memories, Barnet confessed that his band had “never played” the Palladium in Southern California “because of their policy of showing no black or mixed bands. So mine became a lily-white band in order that I might finally play the Palladium.”)99
AS THE 1930S WERE LURCHING to a close, practitioners of the new music had survived the continuation of Jim Crow, and the rise of the phonograph and radio: related opportunities abroad, assisted by the general growth of unions driven by the ravages of the Great Depression, seemed to augur better days coming. The rise of fascism generated a counter-reaction—anti-fascism—which bid fair to open further opportunities for talented musicians. Alongside the ascension of unions was the growing strength of ASCAP, which, inter alia, collected royalties that became more important with the advent of radio and the phonograph. ASCAP in some ways represented the Janus-faced opportunity—and oppression—of Negroes in that it contained the potential to aid the growing raft of African American composers, though it found it difficult to do so while adhering to a Jim Crow diktat. Jelly Roll Morton, for example, did not earn any royalties until 1939, when ASCAP finally allowed him to become a member. He had applied five years earlier but had been rejected. But indicative of the continuing pull of white supremacy, he was placed in the lowest category of membership, where he received a mere $120 annually. Oscar Hammerstein III said that those in the top category—for example, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin—received an average of $15,000 annually,100 yet another indication of the inflamed conjuncture where racism encountered economics.
