Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

But there were some records that could never have been played on mainstream radio in the war, or at any dance where white adults might chance to hear them. Bonnie Davis played the erotic teaser on ‘Don’t Stop Now’. Louis Jordan, part country bumpkin, part lyrical genius, channelled all the wit and panache of his race into ‘What’s the Use of Getting Sober When You Gonna Get Drunk Again’, anticipating the approach that would prove so successful for the Coasters fifteen years later. Most outrageous of all was Tampa Red’s plea to his woman, ‘Let Me Play With Your Poodle’, in which any canine references were purely accidental. (Three years earlier, Fats Waller’s equally juicy aside on ‘Hold Tight’ – ‘I want some seafood, Mama’ – had passed the nation’s censors by.)

  Since the summer of 1939, the music of black America had burst its banks in every imaginable direction, sending out waves that would reach around the world. In jazz, Art Tatum (‘Tea For Two’) and Coleman Hawkins (‘Body and Soul’) tossed away melody with an abandon that Louis Armstrong would have envied, exploring the distant harmonic potential of tunes that were already a familiar playground for their peers. Duke Ellington fine-tuned the swing genre (‘Take the “A” Train’) having sketched the blueprint for the film noir jazz of the 1950s (‘Ko-Ko’). Billie Holiday tantalised and disturbed in equal measure with ‘Strange Fruit’, the portrait of a society in which lynching was acceptable. It was greeted by the New York Post as the unofficial national anthem for America’s ‘exploited’ black population, and dismissed by one of her most vehement supporters, critic John Hammond, as ‘artistically the worst thing39 that has ever happened’. She redeemed herself in Hammond’s eyes via her deliciously restrained reading of ‘God Bless the Child’, which offered the sting of fine whisky against the sugary soda of Tin Pan Alley’s output.

  From today’s perspective, it’s difficult not to categorise the music of this era – to set up an artificial divide between jazz and blues, for instance, and then shepherd artists into genres that were only identified in retrospect. For its contemporary audience, this music was simply there to enjoy: a banquet of riches encompassing big bands, boogie-woogie piano romps, stately blues ballads, scratchy guitar blues from the Deep South, rowdy dance tunes and steel-guitar instrumentals. The ‘top favourite of hep Harlemites40’ in 1942 was the band of Jimmie Lunceford, which apparently swung harder than any other band on the circuit (not that their records reveal it today). The self-professed ‘World’s Biggest Little Entertaining Band’ was fronted by Louis Jordan: ‘They clown! They sing!41 They swing!’, their management boasted. With 1943’s ‘Five Guys Named Moe’, they matched their advertising, setting up a jumping rhythm and topping it with a babble of scat and jive-talk that Cab Calloway would have been proud to own.

  The blues ballad of the 1940s could be anguished or merely slow; sad, sentimental or at times no more than bland. But its simplicity stripped away the prettification that permeated Tin Pan Alley romance. It could also encompass bawdiness (Jimmy Rushing’s jibe at his woman’s ‘big fat rusty dusty’ on Count Basie’s ‘Rusty Dusty Blues’) and sophisticated wit. The latter was an early trademark of Nat King Cole, a jazz pianist and vocalist whose voice was so mellifluous that most of his audience missed the hip humour of his songs.

  It was Cole’s dream to lead a big band, but commercial necessity led him to create the King Cole Trio, utilising the unusual (for the time) instrumentation of piano, guitar and bass, and demonstrating that you didn’t need volume to swing. This was the music of a man who didn’t seem to sweat or worry, a man so cool that he could breeze through any situation and steal any heart. With songs such as ‘That Ain’t Right’ and ‘Straighten Up and Fly Right’, Cole created music that was both unashamedly black, full of street smarts and hipster slang, and also sufficiently mellow to ensure that nobody would move away from the jukebox. Just about the only white man who could compete with him was the lyricist and co-owner of Capitol Records, Johnny Mercer, whose ‘GI Jive’ was both a crude impression of the voice of black America and a loving tribute to its spontaneity.

  If Nat King Cole’s radicalism was subtle, other black performers signalled the path to the future with rockets and flares. Lionel Hampton recorded the instrumental that would become his anthem, ‘Flying Home’, in 1940, and then revised it in 1942, with saxman Illinois Jacquet honking away at a single note like a bloodhound shaking a rabbit. Lucky Millinder wanted a ‘Big Fat Mama’ in 1941, and organised a contest in Philadelphia to find the biggest woman in town. He cut half a dozen sides that year which squeezed all the momentum of swing into the tight formula of the twelve-bar blues, and then let it explode across the grooves. The titles spoke for themselves: ‘Ride, Red Ride’, ‘Shout, Sister, Shout’, ‘Apollo Jump’ and, most prophetically, ‘Rock! Daniel’. That key word was in the air: Billboard reviewed a show by the Original Carolina Cotton Pickers, and reported that their repertoire offered ‘wild swing in its raw stage42’ and was ‘loaded with original rock and stomp opuses’.

  In uncanny anticipation of what would happen a decade later with Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, it was the white bandleader Tommy Dorsey who compressed all this energy into a twelve-bar instrumental which seemed to sample the future – with a title that also seemed to come from a decade ahead: ‘Well, Git It!’ Here were most of the ingredients that would set boppers and jivers in motion: cacophonous drum rolls, horns squealing for attention, a propulsive rhythm and riffs that nobody could miss. It wasn’t subtle, or even original; but it opened up a road that could have led Dorsey to rock ’n’ roll immortality. Instead, he remembered his core audience. His grim fate was to wind up persuading adults whose first flash of passion had long passed to get back on the dance floor and pretend that they still felt the same about their now all-too-familiar spouse. For Dorsey, ‘Well, Git It!’ was both a novelty and a final fling of his distant youth (he was 36 when it was released). It would be left to the black originators to round up all those symbols, the ‘jump’, ‘shout’ and ‘rock’, and translate them into a fresh language for American youth.

  * * *

  fn1 British troops did not receive these V-Disk shipments, but POWs in German camps were sent Decca Portable Gramophones, and a batch of about thirty records. One prisoner wrote from Stalag XXB to Gramophone magazine in 1942: ‘A fit subject for a Bateman19 cartoon is the POW who wanted to listen to Bach. I personally have been told, in no uncertain terms, just where to go when attempting it. The war cry is “Give us Bing.”’

  fn2 When Dooley Wilson sang ‘As Time Goes By’ in the film Casablanca (1942), he was unable to exploit his brief moment of fame by releasing a record. Instead, the public had to choose between 11-year-old recordings by Jacques Renard and Rudy Vallee, both of which made the best-sellers lists.

  fn3 Not that this was the last industrial action by musicians in the 1940s. No sooner had the war ended than the AFM barred any US radio station from broadcasting programmes made overseas, ending a long-held reciprocal agreement with the BBC. Then the British Musicians’ Union refused to co-operate with the BBC without extra payments; and in 1948 the AFM launched another, less protracted, recording strike.

  fn4 The fashion spread around the world: in the Afghan capital, Kabul, young men wore zoot suits while their girlfriends remained veiled.

  fn5 The scenario was reversed when Billboard began to document the best-selling ‘Folk’ records, and discovered that rural whites had a secret passion for Nat King Cole and Louis Jordan.

  2

  1

  THE LINK BETWEEN narcotics and jazz had been forged in the 1920s. In Chicago, the clubs on the South Side resounded to the sound of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, while the audience selected their poison from a menu of bootleg alcohol and marijuana (alias ‘gage’ or later ‘tea’). In London, the West Indian drummer Edgar Manning played in a West End jazz band, when not dealing dope (marijuana again, though cocaine was also freely available). ‘It is significant3’, noted historian Catherine Parsonage, ‘that the image of jazz as presented in conte
mporary [1920s] songs is so consistent with the conventionally understood effects of drugs: addiction, swaying, hypnosis, craziness, abandon, excessive emotion, sexual desire and escapism. In addition, there were clear links between jazz and intoxicating substances due to the freedom of women to both take drugs and dance to jazz; activities which became symbolic of their post-war independence.’ The classical composer Constant Lambert, an early convert to jazz, pointedly described the music as ‘a drug for the devitalised4’, supplying emotional content for those steeped in repression. A psychiatrist from Johns Hopkins University went further, declaring in 1942 that jazz music had medicinal value in dealing with psychological problems, although its efficacy in dealing with physical illness had yet to be demonstrated.fn1

  For musicians, so Time magazine reported in 1943, marijuana ‘seems no more harmful6 than alcohol’ and ‘is less habit-forming than tobacco, alcohol or opium’. It even facilitated the playing of jazz: ‘It is no secret that some of the finest flights of American syncopation, like some of the finest products of the symbolist poets, owe much of their expressiveness to the use of a drug. The association of marijuana with hot jazz is no accident. The drug’s power to slow the sense of time gives an improviser the illusion that he has all the time in the world in which to conceive his next phrases. And the drug also seems to heighten the hearing – so that, for instance, strange chord formations seem easier to analyse under marijuana.’ Alcoholics, Time concluded, frequently died young, lost in delirium tremens – and any jazz fan could recall the tragic legend of Bix Beiderbecke, who drank himself to death at 28. But ‘vipers [marijuana users] frequently live on to enjoy old age’.

  Despite this recommendation, US police departments and the owners of clubs in ‘Swing Alley’, Manhattan’s 52nd Street, were unable to treat marijuana so lightly. Swing drummer Gene Krupa, fresh from boosting the US Air Force with patriotic songs, was sentenced to one to six years in San Quentin in 1943. His crimes were possession of two marijuana cigarettes, and recruiting a ‘minor’ to transport his drugs. (He eventually served just three months, and resumed his career untarnished.) Two years later, there were police raids all down 52nd Street, after reports that such clubs as the Three Deuces and the Spotlite were harbouring known ‘tea’ dealers. So regular was police harassment that the manager of the Spotlite eventually figured it would be less trouble to reopen as a strip joint.

  More problematic was the prevalence of heroin use amongst jazz bands. Members of the big swing bands not only had to endure the showman’s perpetual curse, of unwinding after hours of solid adrenaline; but they were also burdened with travel schedules that made sleep impossible and ensured only the artificially sustained could survive. Nobody claimed that ‘junk’ improved the music; indeed, the worst offenders were prone to ‘nodding off’ mid-set.

  When saxophonist Lester Young faced a court martial on drug offences at the end of the war, he was asked if he had come across any other jazz musicians who were using heroin. ‘Yes, all the ones I know7’, he replied. By the summer of 1947, there were regular ‘busts’ of jazzmen, and observers worried that it was only a matter of time before the scene claimed its first major casualty. Jazz critic Barry Ulanov demolished Time magazine’s argument: ‘One of the unmistakeable8 deficiencies of jazz and jazzmen is lack of intellectual discipline, poor musical education and equipment. Lacking the discipline and equipment to express the more complicated ideas ranging confusingly through their brains, they look for some way out, some expression for the impulse to large feeling and complex formulation. Hence the grain of happy escape and the leaf of easy dreams … Marijuana does not enhance musical performance in any direct physical way … Too often, because marijuana is not the magic potion its devotees expect it to be, tea-smokers go on to really nerve-breaking drugs, such as heroin … Under the effects of heroin, all moral restraint goes.’

  As a witness for the prosecution, Ulanov produced saxophonist Charlie Parker, one of the pioneers of the ‘strange chord formations’ that Time had mentioned. At a July 1946 recording session, Parker arrived under the influence of heroin, topped up by a quart of whisky. He completed the cocktail by swallowing six phenobarbital tablets, blew some erratic, edge-of-the-world solos, and stumbled back to his hotel. There he used the public phone while stark naked, not once but twice, and was locked in his room by the manager. Then smoke began to ooze beneath his door: Parker had set his mattress ablaze, and collapsed. He regained consciousness in time for a brawl with firemen and police officers, still naked, before he was coshed to the ground, subdued and escorted to jail. Doctors ruled that he was clinically insane, and so he was transferred to an asylum, where he kicked his habit and was released in February 1947. He immediately resumed his heroin use.

  He was still using when he gave Ulanov what he wanted: ‘I don’t know how I made it9 through those years’, he admitted. ‘I became bitter, hard, cold.’ Most of all, he regretted the impact his addiction might have on impressionable fans. His manifesto for the future was simple: ‘Let’s get straight and produce some music!’ In March 1955, he died at the age of 34; examining his body, the coroner assumed that he must be 60 years old.

  His tragedy was mirrored by that of Billie Holiday, who was raped as a child, raised in a brothel and a workhouse, and fronting name orchestras when she was just eighteen. Her first husband was a dope dealer, who encouraged her to become a junkie. She endured a series of ‘cures’, busts and court cases, which hooked her fans into the soap opera of her life. There followed a series of relationships with narcotics abusers, each of whom assumed he should be her manager. To cure her heroin addition, she became an alcoholic. ‘We try to live a hundred days10a in one day, and we try to please so many people’, she told a TV talk-show host. In the late 1950s, she steered the ravaged shreds of her voice on an exquisite path across a set of standards (the album released as Lady In Satin), and then spent two months in hospital, scoring junk all the while, until expiring from heart failure at the age of 44.

  As a human melodrama, Holiday’s career was rivalled only by the perpetually troubled cabaret star Judy Garland, who reached 47 before suffering an accidental overdose of barbiturates; by China’s most successful singer of the pre-Mao era, Zhou Xuan, who died aged 38 in 1957, after several nervous breakdowns; and by the remarkable French artiste, Edith Piaf. Raised in a brothel, a parent herself at 17, Piaf was plucked from the seediest bars in Paris by club-owner Louis Leplée at the age of 20. (Her 1957 hit ‘C’est à Hambourg’ reflected her familiarity with the life of a prostitute.) The following year, she was implicated in his murder, but escaped without charge. For the rest of her life, she floated from one male saviour to the next, many of whom met untimely ends. Like Billie Holiday, she channelled a lifetime of poverty and peril into her music. Her performances were soul-baring and heart-wrenching; her material, frequently self-written, starkly emotional. Many of her songs were built around short, almost abrasive musical motifs, as if mirroring her angular, skeletal frame, yet filled with defiance, like ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’. In her final years, she could no longer choose whether to kill herself with alcohol or pills. She played out her tragedy in charismatic appearances at the Paris Olympia: a recording of a 1960 performance remains as compelling a study of human frailty and pride as any music from the twentieth century.

  Such lives failed to dispel the glamour of addiction. ‘Any musician who says10b he is playing better either on tea, the needle or when he is juiced is a plain, straight liar’, Charlie Parker declared in 1949. ‘In the days when I was on the stuff, I may have thought I was playing better, but listening to some of the records now, I know I wasn’t.’ His actions spoke more vividly, and drugs became so closely entwined with the image of jazz – dope as an expression of bohemianism, dope as a way of handling the savage pain of the genuine artist – that through the 1950s and beyond, a habit was as glorious a way of proving oneself a jazzman as technical virtuosity or harmonic invention.

  Mistakes – that’s all rebop is11.
Man, you’ve gotta be a technician to know when to make ’em.

  Louis Armstrong, 1947

  I don’t think the public12 wants bop … it gets mighty boring … The public wants something it can whistle, sing and hum – something to dance to.

  Al Hibbler, singer with Duke Ellington’s band, 1949

  The jazz magazine Metronome, anticipating the imminent US victory over Japan in the summer of 1945, opined: ‘The advances bands have made13 during six years of war are so great that musicians who have been in the services for any part of that period will have to study hard and earnestly to come abreast of them. Harmonically jazz is not at all as it was in 1939; its colours are different, its resources are so much broader, that comparison with the music of that blissful era is ridiculous.’ The editor concluded: ‘This is the beginning of maturity for America’s greatest art. Jazzmen who are still in their musical infancy, childhood or adolescence will be left behind, as the art squares its shoulders, settles its stomach, alerts its brain, and accepts its adult responsibilities.’

  So jazz was now an ‘art’, not a form of entertainment; it carried a moral requirement to mature; it could no longer be a plaything, as it carried ‘adult responsibilities’. With those words, one of America’s most influential voices of jazz cast off the music’s mainstream appeal, and aligned it with the avant-garde – as a modernist voice to join cubist painting, surrealism, the stream of consciousness in fiction, the twelve-tone scale in classical music. It was late to the party, compared to the plastic and literary arts, but alive, at least, in a fearless terrain where all that mattered was to push further and harder and faster without concern for a destination.

  When Metronome was promoting ‘the advances bands have made’, it was not referring to music that 99% of America could possibly have heard. This voyage into the jazz unknown had taken place on 52nd Street and in Harlem, at late-night jam sessions, and occasionally on experimental recording dates. There was no hint of it on radio, or on the jukebox, or wherever dancers still gathered. Anyone who followed the jazz magazines would have known that something had changed – there was constant talk of ‘bop’, and ‘rebop’, and ‘bebop’, too – but the aural evidence had been obscured by the AFM strike, which left the two most important years in the development of the new sound undocumented.