Nevertheless, one of the most influential reactions to the kind of normalized exploitation to which musicians were routinely subjected was spearheaded by the bassist and bandleader Charles Mingus,62 born in 1922: he sought to form a company to distribute his recorded compositions. But it was then that Morris Levy, who operated the iconic Manhattan club known as Birdland and who looked and talked like a Hollywood thug besides, warned the corpulent composer about gangsters, that is, those like himself: “These people, they’ll kill your wife, they’ll kill your mother, they’ll kill your babies.”63 Mingus’s partner, Max Roach, recalled later that “we would have to take pistols to Boston, to collect” since “they’d hold on to the records.” His interviewer, Amiri Baraka, responded that the stiff opposition to this initiative was because the powers that be “didn’t want that concept of musicians trying to run their own affairs”—and “the Black thing made it worse.”64 Thus, by 1955 the predictable had occurred: “There is a great deal of interest in Debut Records,” the joint Mingus-Roach enterprise, said the message from Rochester, New York. “The only catch is, of course, there is no place to buy them.”65
A pioneer in seeking to take control of the music was the saxophonist, flutist, and clarinetist Gigi Gryce. His attempt to establish a publishing company and record label was aided by a lawyer better known for assisting radical causes, William Kunstler. Bruce Wright, yet another activist Manhattan lawyer, also served him. His comrade, the similarly engaged bassist Reggie Workman, recollected that Gryce was “pressured by somebody in the publishing field.” That is, they “threatened him in some way that he became paranoid,” compelling Workman to “leave him…. He’d be so nervous … this twitching nervousness that got worse and worse.” Gryce was forced out of the business by powerful interests, “possibly with underworld connections,” according to one analyst. “He and his family were harassed, threatened and intimidated,” leaving Gryce “clearly terrified,” engendering the reaction that drove Workman from his side.66
Levy was not unique. Sam Giancana, a leading mobster, like many of his comrades, invested heavily in Las Vegas, which after 1945 became a major site for hiring musicians. His lover, Judith Exner, observed that he was poisoned with racism and fought the Black Power upsurge of the 1960s that sought to encroach on these gangsters’ sinecure in the entertainment industry; thus, he announced regularly that “he hated all niggers.”67
Hence, as a result of the pestilence to which they were subjected routinely, musicians were compelled to engage in various kinds of self-help as a simple matter of survival. Trumpeter Roy Eldridge, born in 1911, was among those who carried a gun—this was in the 1940s; his comrade Artie Shaw recalled that Eldridge “saw himself as traveling through a hostile land and he was right.”68 Clark Terry was of like mind. “All the cats from St. Louis,” he said, “carried a shank … a knife. So did I.” This was in the early 1950s.69
In case a weapon was not nearby, some musicians also developed a taste for boxing. Percussionist Stan Levey, who played alongside luminaries like Charlie Parker, was a boxer of some skill. The point made in his biography is that “Fighting and drumming are both all about hitting and timing,” though this hardly explains the boxing skill of Wallace Roney, the Philadelphia-born trumpeter, born in 1960, nor does it shed light on Levey’s recollection of pianist Red Garland born in Dallas in 1923 sparring combatively with perhaps the greatest boxer of them all: “Sugar” Ray Robinson.70 The pugilistic acumen of trumpeter Miles Davis is well-known.71 Davis’s musical tribute to the late heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, has been emulated by the recent musical salute to Muhammad Ali by trombonist Craig Harris.72 The masculinist environment of the music business shaped this combative response, but, as well, musicians (especially drummers and trumpeters) often had quick hands and supple fingers, along with sharp reflexes, all of which made for often forceful encounters with foes.
There was also collective enterprise. Early on, Negro-owned recording companies included Sunshine Record Company formed by Johnny and Reb Spikes in 1921; Leroy Hurte’s Bronze Records in 1940; and Leon and Otis Rene’s Excelsior, then called Exclusive, in Los Angeles.73 In 1961, the musician Harold Battiste formed a record label, inspired by the Nation of Islam and their self-help philosophy. The fact that he received a mere $125 for playing saxophone on the blockbuster hit by Sonny and Cher “I’ve Got You Babe” impelled him further: “That’s all,” he said disgustedly.74
The writer Ishmael Reed has argued that the Nation of Islam was a “competitor” of the traditional Italian and Jewish-American branches of organized crime.75 It is well known that the First World War–era movement led by Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey served as predicate to the rise of the NOI in the 1930s, and that earlier Pan-African movement was not unknown to musicians. “Garveyites were prevalent,” says the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, born in 1930, when he was growing up in Harlem.76 Drummer Panama Francis, born in 1918 in Miami, said, “I played my first gig—it was on the Fourth of July at the UNIA Hall in 1931,” the initials signifying the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Garvey’s vehicle.77 Trombonist Roy Palmer in the early 1920s led a 35-piece band of the UNIA in Chicago.78 Paul Barbarin, the drummer born more than a century ago in New Orleans, said that the Onward Brass Band of which his uncle was a member were adorned with plumed hats akin to those worn by Garveyites.79
The hegemonic influence of mobsters in the music business combined with weak unions to deflect class consciousness and accentuate the normative white supremacy. Inevitably, musicians, agents, club owners, and the like from this Euro-Americans community became involved with the new music that was developing. Nick LaRocca, a cornetist and trumpeter born in New Orleans in 1889 and of Italian ancestry, claims to have made the first recording in the jazz idiom in 1917 and, besides, has argued that the music is not indebted to African American culture. (Of course, Italians—especially Sicilians who were represented heavily in New Orleans—had close cultural ties to North Africa and did not leave this behind upon landing in Louisiana.) By 1936, discordantly he had begun to refer to the style of music known as “Dixieland” as “strictly a white man’s music.”80 He also takes partial credit for popularizing of the very term “jazz.”81
By 1937, LaRocca was cited for the proposition that “white man’s music started jazz,” emphasizing the “tremendous importance the white man played in originating swing.”82 By 1958, he was singing the same tune, downplaying Negro contributions to the music and claiming that “we’re … the pioneers.” He stoutly argued, “I’m [not] prejudiced against the Negro,” while adding, “I don’t believe in giving the Negro credit for something he didn’t do.” As his native New Orleans was being buffeted by hurricane force anti–Jim Crow winds, he castigated “mixing … if God meant him to be white, or meant any other people to be different, he would have made us all one color…. this is plain common sense.” For if “these niggers” or—correcting himself—“Negroes came to New York … they would have been thrown [out] on their ears, not shoved out the door, but thrown out bodily … that’s how ignorant the Negroes were…. The Negro has never invented anything new,” he claimed, particularly a form of music that has swept the planet. “Take [Louis] Armstrong away from ’em and they’ll go back to Africa,” he included in an incoherent flourish.83 That same year, 1958, his fellow Italian-American musician Johnny Lala, trumpeter and pianist who had played alongside Al Jolson—he of “blackface” infamy—adopted what might be considered the Dixie moderate viewpoint in conceding that, yes, the Negroes may have made the music but “whites improved on it—you understand.”84 By 1961, he was still banging on in the same vein, reportedly “angered” with the idea that the music whose creation