Gangsterism and Jazz

erhaps the title of this article will come as a surprise. In essence, gangsterism and jazz have nothing to do with each other. But these two very disparate things have gone hand in hand and helped each other especially in the first half of the twentieth century.

Indeed, jazz music, repudiated in the first decades of its existence by the well-to-do white society, needed spaces and venues for its production and performance. These places, obviously, were not the respectable concert halls or the music-hall theaters of the big cities. These places were located in the underworld, usually in the ghettos or neighborhoods inhabited by the African-American population. However, the owners and managers of these venues, by the very nature of the business and its location, were people linked to the underworld and their business was always bordering on illegality. The first owners of this type of premises seem to have been of Irish origin and had little to do with the African-American community due to racial prejudices, so the clubs or dance halls where the musicians and the public were mostly black changed hands and ended up managed by those that had no problem in dealing with Black people and who, what’s more, loved the music they made. And who were these people? Well, there were two factions that were well disposed to accommodate jazz in their establishments. One was made up of small businessmen of Jewish origin and the other was that of the Italians linked to the branches of the Sicilian Mafia who had established themselves in the United States. All of them were unscrupulous businessmen, but they appreciated and gave space to jazz music and its performers.

Prohibition (1920-1933), which prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages, was the time of the rise of the gangsters who, on the sly, traded in alcohol. Their premises were filled with customers eager for alcohol or alcohol substitutes served there, and jazz was always present. Typical were the so-called speakeasies, establishments where alcohol was served clandestinely and which could only be accessed by means of a password that had to be told to those guarding the entrance. Here, too, jazz made its fortune. In Chicago at that time and under those circumstances, it can be said that the famous Al Capone was the great “patron” of jazz. In New York, luxurious clubs, such as the Cotton Club in Harlem, where Duke Ellington became known, were run by powerful gangsters. And the great era of jazz in Kansas City coincided with the term of office of the notorious TJ Pendergast, a corrupt mayor connected with the mafias that ran the city’s numerous jazz clubs, from which Count Basie’s famous orchestra emerged. It seems that almost all the important names in the history of jazz that became known in the first half of the twentieth century, had worked for these businessmen or managers who belonged to the category of what is called gangsterism.

(Bibliography: Le Jazz et les gangsters. Ronald L. Morris, 1980. Editions Le Passage, 2016)