Naturally, crass labor exploitation led to the creation of unions of musicians to bargain collectively for improved wages and working conditions. Virtually from the inception of the new music, artists sought to organize unions, though Jim Crow often foiled their best efforts. Johnny De Droit, bandleader, born in 1892 in New Orleans, was a staunch union man since with their adequate protection “[you] know how long you’re going to play and how much you’re going to get. Before the union was organized,” he said, musicians “had to wait thirty to sixty days before they got their money.” His father organized the union as a result. Absence of a strong union led artists into problematic situations, such as recording under various names to escape adhesion contracts with record companies.100 During the First World War era, the union sought to shape the sound of the new music by mandating that one of every five instruments had to be a string instrument, since it was thought that those who played same were thought to be not getting enough work.101
Union organizing was taking place in the era of Jim Crow, which meant unions organized on racial lines. It was in late 1943 that Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People contacted James Petrillo, the leader of the American Federation of Musicians. There were 673 locals or branches, he said, in the United States and Hawaii, and thirty-one in Canada (also part of the 673 total). Of these, thirty-two were designated as “so-called ‘colored’” and of the remaining 641, eight had subsidiary locals thereby admitting Negroes to a limited second-class membership. At that juncture, only two branches—those in New York City and Detroit—admitted Negroes to full membership. This inequity, White lamented, delivered “great economic loss” to African Americans and, perhaps not coincidentally, “caused competition between colored musicians and white musicians tending to lower scales for both.”102 The authorities went to great lengths to enforce Jim Crow rigidity. In 1944 in Gadsden, Alabama, unionized musicians in the band of Fletcher Henderson—a prominent African American musician—refused to allow three musicians defined as “white” to play alongside him unless they blackened their faces with burnt cork.103
But then as the anti–Jim Crow movement took flight, an impetus was created to merge these separate bodies of segregated unions of musicians. However, this often meant Black musicians relinquishing their treasuries and headquarters and being swallowed whole by often insensitive larger unions composed of Euro-Americans, often meaning a net loss for African Americans and souring many on the very notion of “racial integration.” This, in turn, benefited the Nation of Islam, which, in any case, was often a lonely voice opposed to what became a disastrous experiment in desegregation.104
The debilitating of the organized left did not leave musicians unaffected. The trumpeter Bunk Johnson, born in New Orleans in 1879, migrated to San Francisco, where he found that the “white” union barred him and other Negro musicians from playing at numerous sites. But then Harry Bridges, left-wing leader of a stevedores’ union, who was accused of being a Communist and was threatened more than once with deportation to his native Australia, offered Johnson assistance and told the union that if they did not change course he would seek to organize a competing union. Admittedly, however, Bridges’s démarche was unusual.105
The weakening of unions and the stubborn persistence of white supremacy was a theme, at any rate, of the historical trajectory of the music. Reinforcing these pestilent trends was the profit that inhered—for some—in this process. By 1973, the producer and impresario John Hammond was seeking to convince CBS Records, an industry giant, to reissue a two-record album of the music of Teddy Wilson. This progressive pianist, once known as the “Marxist Mozart,” because of his political predilections, made these recordings in the 1930s and, said Hammond, “was paid a hopelessly inadequate flat fee for recording without artist royalties…. We have, of course, made a fortune on many of the Teddy Wilson reissues featuring Billie Holiday without paying Wilson anything whatsoever.”106
Thus, those who hired these musicians often did quite well for themselves, and this list includes Ahmet Ertegun, the man of Turkish origin, who became captivated with the music of Duke Ellington at London’s Palladium in the early 1930s and went on to found Atlantic Records, recording such stalwarts as Dizzy Gillespie, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Charles Mingus, and John Coltrane. By 1989, he was on a first-name basis with the uber-banker David Rockefeller, whom he entertained at his lovely estate in Bodrum, Turkey, along the picturesque Aegean Sea. Numerous U.S. politicos also partook of his gracious hospitality there.107
It has been said of chess grandmasters that to reach that exalted status presupposes ineptitude in everything else, not least because of the time commitment required to excel. Assuredly, to gain mastery on their instruments required a like manner of time by musicians, which left little time for labor organizing or even attending to the “business” of “show business.” According to trombonist J. J. Johnson, the saxophonist John Coltrane was a “practice-aholic,” a man utterly devoted to mastering his horn. And this descriptor could be applied to those not as famous as the Philadelphian.108 His fellow saxophonist, Charlie “Bird” Parker, was said to practice almost fifteen hours daily.109 The bassist Ron Carter admitted to practicing eight hours a day.110
THE SECOND WORLD WAR, as we shall see, brought enormous changes to the enormous music industry, not least the shellac restrictions that limited production of recorded music on discs. This placed a premium on the value of live performances, but in 1943 Walter White of the NAACP complained to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York City about the revocation of the license of the Savoy, a club where innovative music was being concocted by (mostly) African American artists. This was “unwise,” said White as he scoffed at the purported justification for the revocation: U.S. soldiers were contracting sexually transmitted diseases there. This could have happened at the Waldorf, he countered, referring to a posh Midtown hotel. He objected to the companion idea that “white people cannot patronize the Savoy,” which was actually a brazen attempt to enforce racist segregation since the authorities also objected to the notion that “colored and white people dance together” at the Savoy: this objection hindered dancing and contributed to the companion idea that the music played should be for listening.111 On the other hand, White, a cultural commissar of sorts, earlier had welcomed the “inducement to Negroes to study music as art rather than as entertainment which can be commercialized,” endorsing the turn toward jazz as a concert art rather than music for dancing.112
Still, Charles Buchanan of the Savoy was in high dudgeon about the prospect of shuttering what he termed the “world’s finest ballroom” situated at 140th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem.113 Complicating matters was a “confidential” report from the FBI warning that the U.S. Communist Party, in the process of electing the African American leader Ben Davis to the New York City Council, was “very much concerned about the closing of the Savoy” and were “taking up the cudgels.”114
DESPITE THE FREQUENT AND REPETITIVE announcements of the demise of the music we call jazz, it has persisted. In 1980 the musician and entrepreneur Dr. Billy Taylor ascertained that a “well-produced hard bop record or a reissue by a respected artist earns back production costs with U.S. sales of 5,000 to 10, 000 within one year.” Considering that the vocalist and guitarist George Benson was then selling “over a million units” gave a hint of the profits to be made when it was thought the music was withering. Grover Washington, Jr., the saxophonist, routinely sold a half million units, while the group Weather Report fluctuated between these two figures. Dexter Gordon, McCoy Tyner, Woody Shaw, and Bobby Hutcherson were then reaching 50,000 to 100,000 units. A few decades earlier Theolonius Monk, Bill Evans, and John Coltrane were capable of selling 100,000 records in the United States alone. Though his music was often scorned, Atlantic Records was pleased with the sales of Ornette Coleman, as was Blue Note subsequently. Their music was derided at times as well, though Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor sold albums marketed by Arista that approached 20,000 in sales in the United States alone. It was not unknown for Keith Jarrett to sell 400, 000 records, with each unit selling for $16. Success in the area of 40,000 to 60,000 had been attained by Gary Burton and Jack De Johnnette. Fantasy Records survived for years on the music of Dave Brubeck, then backed