In January 1940, Minton hired musician Teddy Hill to replace Dewey Vanderburg as manager of his club. Hill, in turn, hired musicians whom he knew and encouraged jam sessions on the small bandstand.34 According to Kenny Clarke, arguably the first modern jazz drummer, Hill “never tried to tell us how to play. We played just as we felt.”35 Musicians’ eyewitness accounts provide valuable evidence of the cultural, and even musical, importance of the after-hours establishment to jazz life. Williams stresses that Minton maintained a down-to-earth atmosphere, believed in keeping the place up, and was constantly redecorating. “And the food was good. Lindsay Steele had the kitchen at one time. He cooked wonderful meals and was a good mixer, who could sing awhile during the intermission.”36 Miles Davis remembers that it did not cost anything to get into Minton’s unless you sat a table, and that cost around two dollars. He describes Minton’s as a supper club with neat white linen cloth tables complemented with little vases, where the clientele was well dressed. And Davis recalls that a great black woman cook named Adelle prepared the food.37 Another attraction of Minton’s was the “Monday night down home dinners” for the cast of current shows at the Apollo Theater.38 To away-from-home musicians such as Davis, the Minton’s milieu exemplified good food, music, atmosphere, stylish dress, and remembering the cook’s name. It was the communal sharing of urban African American culture.
The atmosphere of clubs such as Minton’s made Harlem a hothouse for early bebop and other forms of entertainment aimed at local black audiences. Harlem offered these musicians “a rediscovered community of things they had left behind: feasts, talk, home.”39 And, as Malcolm X observed, Harlem’s nightlife appealed to many who did not live there when he arrived in the early 1940s: “Up and down along and between Lenox and Seventh and Eighth Avenues, Harlem was like some technicolor bazaar. Hundreds of Negro soldiers and sailors, gawking and young like me, passed by. Harlem by now was officially off limits to white servicemen. There had already been some muggings and robberies, and several white servicemen had been found murdered. The police were also trying to discourage white civilians from coming uptown, but those who wanted to still did.”40 Fifty-Second Street, bebop’s new “home” after 1945, was starkly different. Leonard Feather once described the clubs there as having no identity, sleazy, discriminatory, with very small tables and watered-down drinks: “There was nothing to them except the music.”41 Perhaps candid observations by Davis and Gillespie, respectively, comparing Harlem and 52nd Street sum up best the tenor of each space: “It was a wonderful time. But 52d St. was better. Uptown we were just experimenting. By the time we came down[town] our ideas were beginning to be accepted. Oh, it took some time, but 52d St. gave us the rooms to play and the audiences.”42 Gillespie’s statement contrasts strongly with Davis’s:
It was Minton’s where a musician really cut his teeth and then went downtown to The Street. Fifty-second Street was easy compared to what was happening up at Minton’s. You went to 52nd to make money and be seen by the white music critics and white people. But you came uptown to Minton’s if you wanted to make a reputation among the musicians . . . After bebop became the rage, white music critics tried to act like they discovered it—and us—down on 52nd Street. . . . But the musicians and the people who really loved and respected bebop and the truth know that the real thing happened up in Harlem, at Minton’s.43
Wonderful times with rooms and audiences, compared to respect among peers and the real thing—a distinct dichotomy produced in two very different cultural spaces. Harlem was a woodshed. It was a rite-of-passage experience in which bebop musicians came of age. Fifty-Second Street, on the other hand, represented the larger marketplace, the media, and commercial industry. With proper exposure on the Street, an artist could gain access to record contracts and prestigious concert bookings in halls that previously had been off-limits. A bebop musician’s career soon depended on having others manage or navigate this move. Thus, bebop’s journey to 52nd Street represented another important rite of passage: it became a mainstream business. The economic reality that bebop musicians could not sustain careers in Harlem is an important point to keep in mind while reevaluating the notion that bebop was somehow exclusively anticommercial.
Bebop musicians found themselves turning to audiences outside Harlem for wider recognition. They could not achieve lucrative careers away from the white publications or from downtown audiences. Furthermore, they could not help but care what critics wrote about their music, nor could they thrive economically without them. Miles Davis noted that critics became keenly interested in bebop only after musicians began playing on the Street, which provided them with money and media exposure. Nightclubs such as the Three Deuces, Kelley’s Stables, the Onyx, and the Downbeat Club became more important to bebop’s survival than Harlem clubs because of the economic opportunities available in midtown Manhattan.
Patrick Burke’s study of the Street’s social history represents it as a complex, contradictory space where one could find “the most conventional forms of racial discrimination and stereotyping” existing side by side with “a radical trend toward racial integration.” These clubs were among the first to feature integrated bands and audiences, and by the 1940s some of them had become the city’s first black-owned nightclubs.44 This social frontier in race relations highlighted the fear of miscegenation as once segregated audiences began to fill with black (and white) hipsters (or “zombies,” as they were also called). Zoot-suited, long-haired, and reefer-smoking, these black hipsters quite publicly undermined the Street’s entrenched “white bachelor subculture” by openly dating and showing authority over white women. As Burke points out, not all blacks and bebop musicians were hipsters on the Street, and some of the musicians were white. But the bebop movement was closely associated with this hipster subculture, and as Burke, Ingrid Monson, Robin D. G. Kelley, and other observers have noted, its reputation turned on troubling primitivist notions of black masculinity.45
As real or imagined sexual threats to white superiority, black bebop musicians became embroiled in a battle of subcultures, sometimes marked by violent episodes. Miles Davis, for example, recalls a specific kind of racial tension surrounding bebop’s Midtown move—one that was an age-old and volatile reason for Jim Crow in the first place. For him, the increased visibility of black male musicians dating white women in Midtown, together with the insider’s dress code and colorful vocabulary, fanned the flame of intolerance: “[Whites] thought that they were being invaded by niggers from Harlem.”46 Uptown invaded Midtown with a dissonant, polyrhythmic, and uncompromising vengeance. Indeed, bebop’s beginnings in Harlem’s insular woodsheds and heroic cutting contests, together with the language of conquest used to characterize its move to the commercial and sexual territories of the Street, sharpened the music’s experimental, masculinist edges. But bebop was only one side of a multifaceted world of black artistic experimentation at midcentury.
CRITICAL INQUIRY: JAZZ CRITICISM AT THE CROSSROADS
Although scholars have been among its most ardent advocates, the idea that jazz is an art music did not first emerge in the plodding pages of academic journals, but rather in a messy, noisy, free-for-all atmosphere in which musicians, critics, entrepreneurs, club owners, and publicists battled for cultural turf, prestige, and a slice of the commercial pie. Motivated to varying degrees by self-interest, artistic experimentation, and the politics of American social life, these historical actors established the jazz-as-art idea in what Bernard Gendron has called an “aesthetic discursive formation.”47
Jazz critics were especially dominant forces in these discourses—many of which borrowed from the western art music world—that laid the groundwork for jazz becoming serious art and, with that, a genre separate from other popular music styles. It should be noted that jazz criticism was a primarily white enterprise in the 1940s, and the bebop musicians themselves primarily African American.48 The amalgamation of social worlds is only part of the story’s complexity, however. Other aspects include primarily journalistic debates in which key ideas—usually