Van Vechten, Abbe Niles, Henry Osgood, Virgil Thomson, and Don Knowlton were contributing articles to magazines like Harper’s, Literary Digest, and New Republic. The Negro revues, with their jazz orchestras and blues vocalists, were playing to large and enthusiastic audiences along Broadway. (131–32)
The real rush to Harlem began about 1926, and by 1927 and 1928 it was one of the fashionable places in New York. The night life began to have some of the glitter that [Jazz Age] novels described. There were nightly radio programs from the larger clubs, the bands were getting frequent notices from the magazines and newspapers, and there was a noisy parade of musicians through most of the small clubs. (196)
[During the swing era, the] expenses of organizing and advertising a band were so high that the successful leaders had to enter into complicated financial arrangements with outside backers. Everything about the new bands cost money, from hiring soloists away from their present bands to buying uniforms and music stands…. Newspapers and trade magazines were flooded with press-agent releases. As the publicity grew more insistent, the personalities became more and more the centers of attraction. They were given nearly as much publicity as successful movie stars. If the promotion caught the public’s eye, the investment could be made highly profitable. Willard Alexander’s M.C.A. booking office handled the very slick and very expensive promotions of both Benny Goodman and Count Basie and realized a small fortune on the percentage of the bands’ gross take…. Behind the elegant face that swing presented to the public was a nervous, tensely competitive entertainment industry that was exploiting the new style. (242)
In short, a number of factors drew musicians to New York City, provided opportunities for them to perform in different parts of the city, and made the public aware of their activities. In addition to musicians, moreover, critics, publicists, venues, and fans played prominent roles. Together they entered a stage framed by the scene, commented upon it, and, through their actions, sustained and transformed it. The development of jazz, then, was not simply a function of developments in musical style; it was also a function of developments in the use of urban space—the peregrinations of European American “cultural tourists” to largely African American areas for entertainment, the continued movement of African American musicians (but not non-performers) to downtown performance spaces (which were presumably safer for middle-class white patrons), and the use of nascent broadcasting technologies both to attract audiences to those spaces and to allow them to experience, at least vicariously, what occurred in them without actually being present.4
Paul Chevigny’s Gigs: Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City (1991) shows how incomplete any history of the New York scene is without consideration of the municipal regulations that determined who could perform in the city’s venues, how many musicians and what instrumental combinations were permitted, and where venues could be located. These regulations, collectively known as cabaret laws (after the early twentieth-century venues that inspired them), imposed what now seem absurd strictures on venue owners. As legally defined in 1926, a cabaret was “any room, place or space in the city in which any musical entertainment, singing or dancing or other similar amusement is permitted in connection with the restaurant business or the business of directly or indirectly selling the public food or drink” (quoted in Chevigny 1991, 56). Anyone operating such an establishment was required to have a cabaret license. Initially, only venues were required to be licensed, but following the transfer of licensing functions to the police department in 1931, anyone who worked in a cabaret was required to be licensed as well. After 1940, both potential performers and regular employees of such venues were required to be fingerprinted and undergo police background checks. Depending on the results of the investigations, applicants were either issued identification cards signifying their suitability to work in cabarets or denied them in an effort to minimize the corrupting influence on cabaret patrons of “criminals and other undesirables … who come into contact with patrons under conditions conducive to criminality” (58).
The requirement of identification cards, Chevigny observes, was based on a preemptive logic that was not, at least according to existing records, supported by any actual cases of criminal conduct by musicians in or near clubs. Those musicians who were denied cabaret cards typically had criminal records, frequently for drug possession, though few, if any, arrests took place at performance venues. Rooted in fears about intimate contact between the public and (black) musicians or left-leaning comedians such as Lord Buckley, the cabaret and cabaret card laws were both paradoxical and hypocritical. As Chevigny (1991, 59–64) explains, the laws were arbitrarily enforced, so that Billie Holiday, denied a cabaret card after being convicted for narcotics possession and imprisoned in 1947, could still perform in concert in Central Park in 1948, and Frank Sinatra worked frequently at venues such as the Copa-cabana in the 1950s without ever obtaining a card.
Although the laws requiring identification cards were rescinded in 1966,5 other laws regulating the clubs continued to have an effect on jazz performers’ fortunes into the late 1980s. Dismayed by provisions in the city’s zoning regulations that forbade live performance in restaurants outside the areas where entertainment was permitted, lobbyists from Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) and later the owners of Greenwich Village coffeehouses convinced the mayor and the City Planning Commission to amend the existing laws in 1955 and 1961, to allow “incidental musical entertainment” performed by “up to three musicians, playing strings or keyboards” in restaurants (Chevigny 1991, 70–74). Because incidental entertainment could not feature horns or percussion instruments (including the vibraphone), in part to comply with noise regulations, this exception was damaging to venue owners who favored jazz but didn’t have the capital to obtain a cabaret license in addition to the other permits required to operate a business in New York City. As a result, many of them
tried to tailor their music to the … exception. The Burgundy Café … stopped using saxophones and began to emphasize the piano and hire singers. At Gregory’s, Warren Chiasson stopped playing vibraphone and switched to piano in the Chuck Wayne trio on Tuesday nights. Discovery, in 1985 a new place at Broome and Mercer Streets in Soho, took the ingenious approach of offering a trio of Reggie Workman on bass, Stanley Cowell on piano, and violinist Ali Akbar…. [But when] Bob Belden, a young saxophonist fresh from the big bands, tried to play his demonstration tape at the West End Bar … the management told him they could not hire sax players. Belden heard the same story at 55 Christopher Street, a small place in Greenwich Village. (84)
Chevigny chronicles the absurdity of the regulations and the varied legal strategies employed by the AFM, musicians, attorneys, and venue owners to have them overturned starting in the 1960s. Those efforts culminated in the incidental musical entertainment exception being ruled unconstitutional in January of 1988 by judge David Saxe, though actual change still lagged behind (86–131). The repeal of the laws was welcome, but Chevigny and a number of the people he interviewed felt that irreparable damage had been done to the scene. Indeed, the prospects for musicians seemed not to change markedly. Established performers, the very ones who could draw larger audiences, might have been less inclined to play in the venues that opened in the wake of the repeal of cabaret laws, preferring instead to devote their energies to teaching as well as performing in the dwindling number of clubs outside New York and in jazz festivals in the United States and abroad. Younger, less-established musicians perhaps benefited most from the repeal, for they found themselves with more opportunities to perform in restaurants in various parts of the city (154–66). For those reasons and many others, the economic climate for jazz venues was increasingly volatile in the 1980s and ’90s.
Some of the difficulties have a direct connection to many cities’ shifting toward neoliberal strategies to spur growth and derive tax revenue through the regulation of public space beginning with the fiscal crises of the 1970s (Sites 1997, 540). For much of the twentieth century and especially in the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States and other capitalist nations experienced unparalleled economic prosperity based on their ability to manufacture goods for domestic and foreign consumption (Harvey 1989a, 129). Indeed, the military and financial power of the United States led to the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, which “turned the dollar into the world’s reserve currency and tied the world’s economic development firmly into U.S. fiscal and monetary policy” (Harvey 1989a, 137). In this climate, ever more efficient, scientifically managed American corporations found