When jazz was born in the brothels of New Orleans in the early 20th century, its parents were musicians and mobsters.
The latest book from author TJ English, “Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld,” out August 2, explains why jazz greats like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra flourished within mob empires headed by people like Al CaponeMeyer Lansky, John T. “Legs” Diamond and Charles “Lucky” Luciano.
“Jazz started at the end of a long sustained period of lynching after the Emancipation Proclamation,” English told The Post, speaking from his home in Manhattan, where he has lived for 32 years. “Music seems to me like an attempt to create a new reality,” she added. “The music says: ‘We are alive.’ I see jazz as a response to terror and violence.”
English, who has written several books about the criminal underworld as well as episodes for the television shows “NYPD Blue” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” said the unlikely connection between black musicians and Italian mobsters made sense in the context of an oppressive society. social order of the turn of the century.
Jazz began to bubble up in New Orleans, where Sicilian immigrants and black Americans faced the same situation: they were excluded from the wealthy white Anglo-Saxon Protestant society and harassed by corrupt white police officers.
“Black people had less to fear from a mob boss than from a white police officer,” said English, an avowed jazz fan. “They saw the mafia as their protection in the commercial market. That was very true of Louis Armstrong. I knew you had to have your gangster to protect you. Louis said, ‘Get yourself the biggest gangster you can.’ ”
The New Orleans Prescription: Where Black Artists Aligned With Mobsters Who Oversaw One Of The Nation’s First Legal Acts. red light districts, storyvillewhere brothels and bars thrived, it spread to Kansas City, Chicago, New York, and later Las Vegas.
In 1920, Prohibition ushered in a new era for nightlife as white society began to flood into speakeasies.
“They went where the drink was,” English said. Nightclubs became socially acceptable, jazz entered mainstream entertainment even as society remained segregated, and underworld stew became the business model for entertainment.
And many mob bosses really appreciated jazz.
“[Al] Capone was the biggest benefactor. He loved music,” English said, adding that henchmen of his once “kidnapped” New York City native Fats Waller after a 1926 performance in Chicago to surprise Capone for his birthday. the. Waller was very relieved when he realized what was happening. “[Capone] it was good for the musicians: it distributed the money in the world of jazz”.
Beyond paying for the entertainment and liquor, the mobsters continued to uphold their end of the bargain to keep the performers safe.
By the late 1920s, jazz had been appropriated by white artists and artists such as Bing Crosby incorporated the sound, perfecting pop vocal jazz. By 1932, Crosby was one of America’s biggest music stars, and when a thug tried to gain an advantage by extorting Crosby for protection money—that is, protection from the thug beating him up—the mob stepped in.
“Crosby was making money at the time and his management, MCA, had mob connections,” English said. “MCA sent a mobster named Jack McGurn to run it. McGurn takes the guy and kicks him and Bing was never blackmailed again.”
Bing and Jack, also known as “Machine Gun Jack”, who was allegedly involved in the Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, when seven Irish mobsters were shot to death by Capone’s rival Italian crew. they became golf buddies after.
But “America’s biggest singer playing golf with a gangster didn’t look so good,” English said. “So Bing ended the friendship. In fact, Jack was killed eight months later, so maybe it was wise to end it.”
Even as jazz became all-American music and the genre accelerated in different styles, from Crosby singing to wild swing to bebop, ties to the criminal underworld and mobsters, whether Italian, Irish or Jews, were closely related.
“The hottest club in New York City in the 1940s was Birdland, owned by Mo’ Levy, a gangster who sold heroin out of the club,” English recalled.
Mo’s brother Irving ran the club and got along with big stars like Marlon Brando and writers like Norman Mailer who were regulars. One night in 1959, Irving was stabbed and killed by a pimp while the band was playing. “It was sensational,” English said. One newspaper headline read: ‘Jazz Serves as Backdrop for Death’. ”
Then came the Rat Pack and Old Blue Eyes, who ruled the modern pop jazz scene, and their headquarters, mob-created Las Vegas, became the epitome of glamorous American nightlife and “The Good Life.”
“Sinatra’s relationship with the mob was very specific, very real,” English said. “The mobsters ran the casinos and the clubs and booked the music they liked.”
Which, in the 1960s, was at odds with the youth screaming for the British Invasion or the anti-establishment hard rock of hippie culture.
“Young people thought Las Vegas was cheesy. The music was the music that their parents liked,” English said. Jazz, once the music of rebellion, began to sound old-fashioned compared to the pop, rock, and soul of youth culture, and the mob’s grip on the entertainment business began to show cracks. By the 1980s, the old gangster world had fallen apart and jazz lost its financial backing.
By then, however, jazz was recognized for its artistic merits and cultural institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center intervened.
“[At the beginning] there was no sponsorship from the institutions of culture and wealth,” English said. “Jazz was not going to happen at that level. He had to earn his place at the table.”
That would never have happened without the mafia and the artists who for decades kept silent about what they saw.
“They kept their mouths shut,” English said of the musicians. “They played, they got paid, and they didn’t talk outside of school.”
English said that ultimately that’s because mobsters and jazz greats were united by the same goals, which is all they cared about.
“It was really the same quest for the American Dream,” English said. “Just from the gutter.”