Jazz around 35th and Calumet spread to the Nest Club (later called the Apex), an after-hours spot where clarinetist Jimmy Noone played for many years beginning at 1:00 a.m. every night, right next door to the Plantation. The density of activity was part of the attraction, with customers wandering back and forth between the venues as the evening unfolded. Preston Jackson said it reminded him of latter-day Bourbon Street in New Orleans. In springtime the cabaret windows opened wide and the musical competition became more direct. Oliver sent a playful note over to Armstrong: “Close your windows or I’ll blow you off 35th Street.” “The fire department is thinking of lining 35th Street with asbestos to keep these bands from scorching passersby with their red hot jazz music,” quipped Peyton in the Defender.
In 1922 and 1923 Lincoln Gardens had tried to lure whites with a midnight ramble on Wednesdays, but the effort failed. Now, in the spring of 1926, the Sunset, Plantation, and Nest were hitting paydirt at 35th and Calumet. “All the white people, all the night lifers, the rich people from Sheridan Road and the big hotels would come out there on the South Side,” Armstrong remembered. The period’s term for this social phenomenon was “slumming.”53
The white draw depended on a felt sense of safety. The fact that the clubs were large and right next to each other was a plus since large numbers of patrons made the location feel secure, though problems are hinted at in a few reports. An unidentified article from November 1925 mentioned “undesirable characters” at the Plantation “whose actions have driven off practically all the white trade this café once enjoyed.” The writer counted four white couples and twenty African Americans on the night of his visit. An April 1926 article in Variety complained that white women and entertainers did not feel safe. “Although the Plantation Café makes a great play for the white trade and the performers, the performer is laying himself open to unpleasant publicity and trouble by being in attendance,” the writer asserted (“performers” meaning white professionals who were in town for a different job and stopped by on their days off).
African-American men acted as guides, taking whites for a stroll down to the corner of 35th and State, the main hangout for local blacks with round-the-clock buzz, to buffet flats, and to places of prostitution. The reputation of organized crime also helped make the area feel safe, ironically enough. Many accounts report that the Plantation and the Sunset were thickly bound up with organized crime, if they were not in fact run by it totally. The Sunset may have provided Armstrong’s first sustained exposure to gangsters and their ways, a world he would remain connected to for years to come, dealing with life-threatening situations along the way.
This was the era of prohibition, of course, and alcohol, the lifeblood of organized crime, was a big part of cabaret entertainment. “Outside the cabaret Negroes loiter in doorways, eager to supply you with any variety of liquor,” advised Variety in a review of the Sunset and the Plantation. “They ask $3 a pint for gin, but will consent to a lower price after bargaining.” A New Year’s Eve raid of both cabarets in December 1926 exposed a scene of 500 merrymaking men and women, “white and colored,” drinking heavily and dancing wildly. A quick investigation uncovered an alcohol storage depot at 338 East 35th Street, two doors down from the Plantation.
Kingpin Al Capone enlisted local blacks into his operation and had a reputation for treating them fairly. Milt Hinton and Lionel Hampton each had uncles who worked with Capone; Hinton described him as a “Robin Hood” type figure admired by the locals. “He had all the black guys, he’d sit down and talk to them, ‘I’m the boss, I’m running it, but you’re going to run the South Side,’” explained Hinton. “‘You’re going to make money as long as you buy your alcohol from me.’” Police were paid off and little intrusions like the New Year’s raid cleared up quickly.
Rivalries for turf control produced outbreaks of violence now and then, but the victims were usually other criminals; as one owner joked to a musician: “Buddy, don’t ever worry about anybody in this here joint because nobody in this here joint will hurt you unless he gets paid for it.” Ory told a story of hiding under the kitchen stove at the Plantation, smothered by the smell of fried potatoes, and Hines remembered hiding under the piano at the Sunset. “You had to have a certain amount of courage to work in those clubs,” said Hines.
But it was also possible to regard gangsters as a benign element, especially as a source for huge tips. Armstrong described Capone as a “nice little cute fat boy, young, like some professor who had just come out of college to teach or something.” On a slow night the gangsters might walk into a cabaret, instruct the manager to lock the doors, hand over $1,000, and announce that “this is our night.” They enjoyed mixing with the musicians and showgirls, everyone having a good time. Drummer Sonny Greer said that he could always rely on the gangsters to keep their word, an uncommon virtue in the music business.
Armstrong developed a special relationship with Capone, which is startling but not surprising given the dynamics of the situation. “Louis was very, very in with Al Capone,” said Cheatham, who claimed that he once got a job when Armstrong asked Capone to intervene. Capone was very fond of music. In one story he requested a number from Johnny Dodds, but Dodds didn’t know the tune. Capone took out a $100 bill, tore it in half, put one half in his pocket, and poked the other half into Dodds’s pocket, saying, “Nigger, you better learn it for next time.” That must have humiliated the dignified Dodds, who had refused to play in certain venues in New Orleans because of similarly offensive behavior. Most of the musicians were willing to overlook the occasional crude remark, and they remembered Capone fondly. Capone once sent two bodyguards to accompany Hines on a road trip, which Hines regarded as a favor. “They protected us because we kept their clubs open,” insisted Hines, but he probably also understood the implication that he “belonged” to the gangsters and that they would do what they had to do to secure their property.
Some jazz histories claim that the Sunset and Plantation were exclusively white, but it is clear that both places were integrated. It is often difficult to pin down in detail the social makeup of venues during this period. Policies changed over time, and one person’s experience could be different from someone else’s. But integration was one of the things that made Chicago’s South Side cabarets different from the elite cabarets in Harlem. The Cotton Club in New York City, the most famous black and tan of all, was rigidly segregated, with all staff black and virtually all patrons white, with the exception of a famous celebrity now and then. A different history and dynamic were in place in Chicago.
Evidence of black patronage at the Sunset and Plantation comes from various sources. There are a few interviews with blacks who went there. And the frequent mentions of both venues not only in the Defender and Heebie Jeebies but also in black newspapers from Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and New York suggest an integrated policy; any whiff of exclusion would have been quickly condemned, just as the Cotton Club was condemned. Defender columnist Salem Tutt Whitney made the rounds of South Side cabarets in July 1926 and was impressed by the Sunset and Plantation. Cabarets did not deserve their bad reputations, he insisted, for they were places where “one can be one’s self for a time; lay aside superficialities, traditions, customs and conventions… . Class lines and color lines are temporarily obliterated and democracy holds sway while the lights scintillate, the band plays and the dancers frolic.”
Buster Bailey explained that “all the places then were black and tan … in terms of race, everything on the South Side was all right.” Black society clubs occasionally rented out the Sunset for their gatherings. Armstrong even told a joke once about integration at the Sunset Café. An older couple is visiting from “way down in Galilee” (that is, the South). The gentleman wants to request Old Black Joe, so he stands up and calls out to the band, “Hey fellas, can you play …” But as he speaks he turns around and notices the integrated audience, which causes him to adjust: “Can you play Old Colored Joe up there?”
It was not segregation
but high prices that discouraged black attendance. That was how upscale cabarets tried to create an elite atmosphere, and the Sunset and Plantation were aiming for the top of Chicago. Patrons wanted to appear rich and glamorous, and the steep prices helped them do that. Even though an integrated experience was an attraction at these two venues, their success was based on the patronage of high-rolling whites. Fundamentally, they were places of white privilege. Whites arrived from distant neighborhoods—the rich people from Sheridan Road and the big hotels, as Armstrong remembered—so we need to raise the question: why did they come? It was certainly more than a thirst for peppy entertainment and bootleg booze.
So much was packed into white views about African-American culture that it is difficult to imagine a neutral observer, someone whose interest in black entertainment had nothing to do with race. White attitudes in the early twentieth century were conditioned by a system of thought known as “primitivism.” Primitivist thinking could be engaged as a highly developed ideology with a long history of extended reflection dating back to the eighteenth century and before, or it could operate more casually, as a cluster of vaguely defined attitudes. Either way, it was difficult to escape. It flourished as a way to articulate what whites regarded as racial differences of far-reaching importance.54
First of all, the primitivist view sustained a vivid sense of social-racial hierarchy. African Americans were inferior; that belief was a given. Even the most informed and sympathetic observers had trouble giving up the notion that African-derived cultures were lacking the fundamental qualities that made white society so obviously advanced; those less informed and less sympathetic noticed signs of inferiority everywhere they looked. These assumptions justified the meticulously controlled system of economic exploitation, with inferior schools and jobs, lack of voting rights, and so forth. Since we are dealing with expensive nightclubs in a city that bustled with economic growth, this attitude was not marginal. It is safe to assume that none of the big spenders at the Sunset experienced even a flash of doubt that every single African American working there was an inferior person, even if he or she did happen to be good at stepping fast, playing high, or singing with a lot of heart.
Dancers at a Chicago cabaret, 1941 (Library of Congress)
Specifically, they were deficient in reason, civilization, self-reflectivity, critical capacity, and control over emotions. These shortfalls were the cause of their apparent lack of progress, culturally, socially, politically, and intellectually. The only way for primitive people to break out of their simple and childish ways was to imitate Western models, which they did somewhat pathetically. Spirituals and ragtime were understood as classic examples of this primitive black imitation of white models.
But the alleged differences also included a mysterious set of advantages. Lacking reason, primitives had access to creativity; lacking the ability to calculate, they were spontaneous; lacking analytical skills, they were intuitive; lacking civilization, they were unrepressed; lacking cities, they lived in harmony with nature; and lacking the filter of the superego, they were sexy. In an enthusiastic review, written in 1926 for the Nation, novelist Mary Austin explained how Bill Bojangles Robinson’s splendid dancing could restore with its “primal freshness their [the audience’s] own lost rhythmic powers.” Robinson was able to accomplish this “only by the sincere unconsciousness of his genius,” his dance moves coming to him in dreams, Austin explained, “as inspiration has always come to tribal man.”
Even an observer as astute as Marshall Stearns, who made strong contributions to jazz history and was as sympathetic as anyone to the accomplishments of black musicians, could fall into this trap. Looking back in 1936, Stearns viewed the (white) Friars Society Orchestra of the early 1920s as having introduced “a new genre, characterized by an improvement in technique, less glissando to cover unsure attack, less vibrato to hide errors in pitch, less forcing, and inevitably less emotional fervor and intensity. It has always been the white man’s gain and loss, that with improved technique, less of the primitive emotion exists.” Stearns does what he can to soften the word, but “primitive” still jumps off the page. Primitive emotions went along with primitive thinking, primitive music, and primitive culture. If the concept is taken seriously, there is only one way to go from primitive: toward the supposedly more sophisticated emotions, music, and culture achieved in the West.
Due to what Austin called their “accumulated cultural rubbish,” advanced Westerners had trouble in some of the areas where primitive people excelled. African-American music and dance offered “release and return”—release from the burdens of civilization and return, however temporary, to primal freshness, or, as George Tichenor put it in a 1930 review of cabarets in Harlem, “a sort of primitive abandon which rises in the blood under pale skins and which centuries of expert tailoring and fashionable table manners have not quite dried out.” Thus formed a taut mixture of condescension and desire around this set of projections, a potent emotional mix that was available even to people who never read a book and didn’t spend much time thinking about cultural evolution or psychology. Condescension and desire went hand in hand: the cause of inferiority was also the cause of the attractive attributes. Lifted from the philosopher’s desk and placed in the texture of everyday American experience, primitivism produced both an absolutely unquestioned stance of dominance and a circumscribed opening for appreciation and imitation.
The dominating side of the equation was well tended by organizations like the U.S. Supreme Court, which monitored practices of “separate but equal,” and the Ku Klux Klan, which organized a steady stream of violence as a way to keep everyone alert to the consequences of violating the established social order. The Sunset was also designed to bring the social hierarchy of white supremacism to life, and it did this night after night. Every employee understood his or her place of inferiority. One night at the Sunset Armstrong encouraged the young white trumpeter Muggsy Spanier to play his (Armstrong’s) own solo for the tune Big Butter and Egg Man from the West. He knew that Spanier had memorized it, note for note, and Spanier was thrilled by his hero’s approval. But when Armstrong’s friend and bandmate Natty Dominique later did the same thing, he was scolded for copying: “Listen Nique, don’t do that. That’s a bad idea you have playing like I play,” Armstrong said. The difference in attitude is a small demonstration of the social dynamics of the Sunset.
The Sunset provided its guests with a reassuring enactment of white dominance, but what made it special was the mysterious and alluring side of primitivism. The cabaret charged high prices for the opportunity to witness and even participate in an impassioned display of African-American dance, music, comedy, and sexuality. What cultural historian Lewis Erenberg has called “vicarious bohemianism” was a strong part of postwar cabarets generally. Entering a cabaret was supposed to feel like walking into the living quarters of glamorous and risqué entertainers. A host or hostess welcomed the guests to their table. One of the entertainers themselves might be seated nearby and from there casually make an entrance onto the stage, which was at the same level as the seats, rather than elevated. The performers wandered around the room, greeted customers, sang for them, and flirted. Dancers, comedians, and chorus girls had skits that were designed to break down barriers between performer and audience. Cabarets offered their bourgeois guests a taste of leisure-time liberation, a “certain delicious wickedness,” as one writer put it, that was intensified by the thrill of bootleg booze. How much more intense that thrill could be when merged with the racial dynamics of the black and tans. “Black men with white girls, white men with yellow girls, old, young, all filled with the abandon brought about by illicit whisky and liquor music,” ran one breathless account from a white newspaper of a South Side venue.
In a sense, the Sunset and Plantation offered a magical collapse of distance. The clubs were located far away on the South Side where Negroes lived apart, thus intensifying the illusion that you were actually entering the living quarters of black ente
rtainers. The coveted tables were right next to the stage, putting patrons close enough to reach out and touch the performers. Cabarets were intimate spaces of safety and protection. Physical distance collapsed and so did cultural distance. An elite transformation of the African-American vernacular was on display, yet one could still jump up and join the Charleston contest. And if so inclined, there was no reason to stop the distance-collapsing magic short of sexual intimacy. Thirty-fifth and Calumet was primitivist heaven, Gauguin’s Tahitian paradise in the City of Big Shoulders. There was perhaps no other space quite so perfect as this one, with its combination of white hegemony and the skillful channeling of black primitivism into cultural forms like the Charleston, café au lait dancing girls, and Armstrong’s stunning solos.
“A whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in his analysis of the “jazz age,” and he didn’t have to say which race he was talking about. Sexual liberation was a major theme for the 1920s, with its short skirts, lipstick, and petting parties. “Jazz didn’t change the morals of the early twenties,” explained composer Hoagy Carmichael, “but it furnished the music, I noticed, to a change in manners and sexual ideas. Women wore less and wore it in a slipping, careless way on the dance floors.” Healthy sexuality meant full and responsive attention to the libido, and blacks were understood to be more in touch with their libidos than whites were. Thus sex was a huge part of primitivist pleasure at the black and tans, with black dance and music defining in a very public way what sexual liberation was all about.
Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism Page 26