PERHAPS OTHER FACTORS impacting the music was the change in the music itself, that is, the arrival of the still fecund music known as “bebop,”1 a form that created rifts among musicians and audiences alike. It featured a fast tempo, complex chord progressions, syncopation, intricate melodies, and rapid changes. Still, this musical turn was not greeted with unanimous approval. When Dizzy Gillespie, born in 1917, and Charlie Parker played in Los Angeles in the early 1940s, they were treated like lepers, and even worse: “Communist lepers” according to critic Leonard Feather during a visit to the old “Billy Berg’s Club” on Vine Street. Their music was either laughed at or violently attacked, and one radio station officially banned it.2
Thus, in Los Angeles within the ranks of the Negro newspapers, the left-leaning California Eagle was supportive of this turn in the music, while the less progressive Sentinel was not.3 Tellingly, the latter has survived, and the former went out of business decades ago.
The forces that helped to ignite the decline of big bands then facilitated the rise of smaller combos suitable for the new turn in the new music. As will be seen, attacks on dancing also facilitated the bebop turn toward listening. The desire to escape the heavy hand of white supremacy as it purloined the work of Negro musicians in turn facilitated the ascension of bebop, which was more difficult to copy by pale imitators, for example, the appropriately named Paul Whiteman.
In any case, conditions had matured for a new musical paradigm to emerge in that according to producer John Hammond the recording industry was “absolutely broke” in the 1930s. Columbia Records, for example, was plunged into bankruptcy and “there was no money for jazz at all,” creating a wide opening for experimentation.4
The bard of Harlem, Langston Hughes, who had reason to know, says the evocative descriptor bebop stemmed from the 1943 rebellion in Harlem, symbolizing in onomatopoeia the sound made by police clubs on Negro heads. This assertion also underscores the revolt of this music, buoyed by contemporaneous events in Harlem.5 The dislocation delivered in the early 1940s by war not only served to generate bebop but emboldened U.S. Negroes to become more steadfast in confronting white supremacy in its various permutations. During the previous decade, a hallmark was the control of musicians exhibited by mob figures. A counterreaction was signaled in 1939 when the musician Shadow Wilson, born in 1919, was among those appearing in the Negro gangster musical Paradise in Harlem.6
That is, what emerged was symbolized by how Negro baseball league mogul William Augustus “Gus” Greenlee, an imperial force in Pittsburgh because of holdings in the numbers, boxing, and nightclubs, not to mention hijacking of beer trucks, came to play an increasing role in the music, including connecting Duke Ellington’s muse, Billy Strayhorn, to the bandleader and composer. Strayhorn, born in 1914, had similar ties, having played at a Pittsburgh club with whispered mob connections. He was also a Francophile, which facilitated the foreign ventures of Ellington’s band (Ellington said that Strayhorn spoke French “very well”). He was politically aware, backing the New Deal and later becoming close to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was fond of alcoholic beverages, making him (unfortunately) typical.7 According to pianist Cedar Walton he was also victimized by homophobic attitudes because of his sexual orientation.8
Though a focus on harder drugs understandably has marked most comment on the new music in the 1940s, alcohol continued to plague, and Strayhorn was not singular. Fats Waller, just before he passed away in 1943, was told by an associate, “Last night I came away from Philadelphia with a heavy heart. I had seen you in such terrible condition from drink that your performance suffered frightfully—you announced to your audience that you knew you were drunk—and your memory was so bad you had to be reminded that you had drawn money earlier in the evening…. Your drinking is undermining your health, your artistry and giving you a reputation which will interfere with your bookings and earning capacity.”9 Weeks later, Waller was found dead on a train heading east from California, discovered (ironically) in Kansas City.10
Strayhorn was not alone in his fondness for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. On the evening the president died in April 1945, Ben Webster—saxophonist born in Kansas City in 1909—singlehandedly closed down West 52nd Street in Manhattan, where bebop ascended. “Get off the stand,” he growled, “nobody’s gonna play tonight. Roosevelt’s dead.”11
In brief, the progressive atmosphere symbolized by FDR, reflected in his still remarkable perorations in 194412 combined with the continuing dissoluteness of the conditions in which artists were forced to toil, created a symbiosis contributing to a new departure in a music that ever involved a search for creativity and truth.
Neither Strayhorn nor Webster were atypical in terms of political predilections. There was much reason for discontent, including the simple point alleged by yet another writer, Claude McKay, who contended that “even the most famous jazz bands such as Duke Ellington’s, Claude Hopkins’, Fats Waller’s, Count Basie’s, Lucky Millinder’s, Cab Calloway’s, Jimmy Lunceford’s, and Louis Armstrong’s receive a remuneration on a lower scale than white jazz bands.”13 Then there were the other rich income streams that Black artists often were denied. “The payola game was hot and heavy,” according to bandleader Charlie Barnet. “Either by direct payment for playing a tune on the air or by payment for a special arrangement of the tune”: this “had begun long before with vaudeville,” he said, but with the advent of radio in particular, “the money flew in all directions”14—except to some of the more creative bands devoid of the complexions and connections to guarantee otherwise.
THE RISE OF BEBOP ALSO OCCURRED as another new trend was emerging in the 1940s: the transition from dancing to the music to listening. This was hardly accidental, spurred in part by Jim Crow, which frowned upon heterosexual dancing across the color line, which was becoming normative north of the Mason-Dixon Line and was inflaming sentiments nationally. The pianist Randy Weston observed that during the war the “government put a 20 percent tax on dancehalls, which had the effect of killing off a lot of great dancehalls like the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, the Brooklyn Palace and the Sonia Ballroom. They all closed down.”15 This inflicted significant impact on the music. As club owner and producer George Wein argued, “Dancing is a very big thing…. It’s a social music” that accompanied it. “When it ceased to be a social music, that’s when it ceased to draw blacks,” he asserted.16
Also related to Jim Crow was the desire of Negro musicians to delve more deeply into the complexities of the music, driven in part by the imperative to flummox non-Negro copycats. Horn man Buddy De Franco, born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1923, said that pianist Bud Powell, “really resented George Shearing,” a peer. “Bud would play some line or something and the next set … George would play that line. And he would get furious”; “Poor George” may have been “intimidated,” but insufficiently to change.17 There was “so much thievery going on,” cried drummer Chico Hamilton, referring to the pilfering of his musical ideas. “I got a friend of mine to be my manager,” in response, he said, but that backfired when he “took a whole year of tax money of mine and never paid it and when the government came out, they were going to take my house,” yet another steep price being paid for being creative.18
According to pianist Mary Lou Williams, her fellow keyboardist Thelonius Monk formed a band “to challenge the practice of downtown musicians coming uptown and ‘stealing’ the music.” Said Monk, “We are going to get a band started. We’re going to create something that they can’t steal because they can’t play it.” Nonetheless, a Columbia University student during this time taped live performances of the brilliant pianist that were then released without obtaining his permission, a not infrequent occurrence.19
The critic Ralph Gleason of San Francisco recalled that even in this supposed “cosmopolitan” town, the “color line” was drawn “strictly,” separating musicians of various
