Dangerous Rhythms, page 3
It all sounded good to Little Louis. He went to work at Andrew Pons’s honky-tonk and established a following there.
Armstrong was with Pons late one night closing up the honky-tonk when he noticed a gaggle of rough-looking characters across the street. The men were Black, and they seemed to be looking in the direction of Pons’s saloon with hostile intent.
Louis knew that Pons was enmeshed in some kind of dispute with a rival businessman in the district named Joe Segretto. Rumor had it that Segretto was affiliated with the Matranga family. Everybody in New Orleans knew about the Matrangas. On the street, their name was often whispered. The mafia had been entrenched in New Orleans for decades, and the Matrangas were the premier mafia faction in the city. They were respected in some quarters, feared in others. There had been many murders attributed to mafia wars in the city. Even Little Louis, who had been away at the Waif’s Home in recent years, knew that you did not want to be on the wrong side of the Matrangas. If you were running a honky-tonk or dancehall in the district, it was not unlikely that you would have to deal with the mafia. Andrew Pons knew this, but he refused to go along.
Armstrong noticed one of the men across the street raise his arm and—bang. He fired off a shot in the direction of Andrew Pons and Armstrong. Louis felt the bullet whiz past his head, and he froze.
“Well I’ll be goddamned,” said Pons, as the men across the street fired more shots, “those Black bastards are shooting at me.”
Pons whipped out a revolver and returned fire. The other gunmen ran, and Pons chased after them, a volley of shots back and forth ringing out into the dark night.
Armstrong had not moved. A flock of bystanders ran up to him and asked, “Were you hit? Are you hurt?”
Turning his head slightly to look at the concerned citizens, Louis said nothing. Then he fainted.
I thought the first shot had hit me . . . When I came to I could still hear the shots coming from Howard and Perdido and the cries of the colored boys. They were no match for [Pons]: he was shooting well and he wounded each of them. When he stopped shooting he walked back to his saloon raging mad and swearing to himself.
Louis had not been hit. He went home that night, happy to be alive. As he noted in his memoir, “I continued to work in [Pons’s] honky-tonk, but I was always on the alert, thinking something would jump off any minute.”
To Armstrong, the incident became a cautionary tale. It had not escaped his notice that the gunmen were Black, likely hired shooters for the Matranga family. This was disturbing, the mafia contracting out jobs to local hoodlums. Somehow, to Louis, this seemed unfair. How were you supposed to know who your enemies were if you couldn’t tell by the color of their skin? Among other things, this suggested to Little Louis that the world was a more complicated place than he had imagined. And also more dangerous. He very easily could have died. “It was days before I got over the shock,” he noted.
From this point onward, Armstrong realized there was something he would need if he were to have the long career in jazz about which he dreamed.
Protection.
Kingdom of Jass
It wasn’t until 1917 that the word “jazz” entered the nomenclature of the city of New Orleans through the local press, and even then it was initially spelled “jass” in the newspapers. By then, this style of music had been cooking for at least two decades. No one had been able to assign a name to this ongoing musical fermentation because it was in such a vibrant state of transformation. Fans of the music weren’t sure if what they heard one week was related to what they had heard the week before. The music was building upon itself, adding new chord changes, patterns of syncopation, instrumentation (the trumpet hadn’t even entered the picture yet), accents, and shadings on a near daily basis. For a phenomenon like this to take place, with musicians regularly listening to and influencing one another, a certain locality to exhibit the music and somehow turn it into a viable commercial venture was required. Thus was born a district so notorious that many, to this day, refer to it as the most legendary red light district that ever was.
Storyville, as the district became known, was not designed specifically to showcase this new musical form that was rising from the gutters to emanate from street corners, parks, basements, rooftops, and honky-tonks. That, as it turned out, was a happy accident. The district was created primarily as a way to contain and control vice in the city. The most ubiquitous endeavor in this regard was prostitution.
By the late nineteenth century, whorehouses of many levels and varieties were commonplace in New Orleans, and they were spread throughout the city. This created problems for the city’s businessmen and promoters. Wrote Al Rose in Storyville, New Orleans, his definitive history of the district: “The financial stability and social welfare of the city were seriously threatened by the wide dispersal of harlotry. Specifically, real estate values were seriously disrupted by the unpredictability of the ‘moral’ development of neighborhoods. A man might purchase a home for his family on a quiet street today and find himself neighbor to a brothel tomorrow.”
Not everyone in the city liked the idea of a centralized vice district. The tight sixteen-block radius that comprised Storyville had, in fact, been created as a compromise with reformers, who would have preferred to see prostitution completely outlawed in the city. But the world’s oldest profession was so deeply entrenched in New Orleans, such a significant aspect of the city’s history and culture, that it was an irrefutable fact of life. The man who led the charge to stamp out prostitution and other forms of vice was an alderman named Sidney Story. As a compromise, Story was the one who put forth the ordinance in 1897 that led to the creation of a district. He did so reluctantly as a means to, as he put it, “lessen the blight” of vice throughout the city. For his troubles, his detractors forever after referred to the district as “Storyville.” Much to Story’s consternation, the name stuck.
Along with everything else, the alderman hated jazz, which he saw as a musical component of the city’s criminal underworld.
The district, located in the northern reaches of the French Quarter, was already home to many honky-tonks, dancehalls, and bordellos. The creation of Storyville did not involve constructing new buildings or altering the city landscape in any way. What was new was that, within the district, prostitution was now allowed. The de facto legalization of this previously illegal practice inevitably gave rise to new levels of permissiveness in the area. Gambling parlors and drug dens became commonplace, and the district’s honky-tonks and saloons became the central breeding ground for a new class of criminal hustler in the city.
For such an environment to thrive, organization was required. No one was yet using the term “organized crime,” but everyone understood that for a district such as Storyville to reach its maximum commercial potential, it needed a potentate, or boss, who could bestow power, secure the necessary city licenses to run a business in the area, and settle disputes. There were few people who had the kind of skills and reputation to serve in this capacity. The man who eventually filled the role was Thomas Charles Anderson.
Anderson was born on November 22, 1858, and raised in the neighborhood known as the Irish Channel. He was the son of Irish and Scottish immigrants, and his beginnings were humble. Born in harsh poverty, from early on in life he showed a proclivity toward social interaction as a means of advancement. His first known job, as a preteen, was selling copies of the Daily Picayune newspaper on street corners. This was the same job through which Little Louis Armstrong set out into the social universe. These two men, Anderson and Armstrong, born in poverty in separate parts of the city, would come to play an essential role in setting a course for the relationship between jazz and the underworld—not only in New Orleans, but, by extension, all around the United States.
Anderson was ambitious: By the time he was a teenager, he had advanced to serving as an errand boy for the brothels in his neighborhood. These were not the grandiose bordellos of Storyville and the French Quarter but rather chippie joints patronized primarily by Irish immigrants who had been lured to New Orleans to dig the city’s system of levees and canals. The women who worked in these establishments required opium and cocaine to smooth the edges of their day; young Tom Anderson made regular runs to the local pharmacy to obtain these items, both of which could be legally purchased at the time in specified doses.
As a hustler on the make, Anderson rubbed elbows with some shady characters, but he also cultivated a parallel existence. He knew Irish cops whom he met in front of the city’s main courthouse while peddling newspapers. They liked the young kid with his mop of reddish-brown hair and sociable manner, especially when he played a role in the arrest and conviction of a local thief. Having witnessed an act of petty thievery on Basin Street, Anderson pointed out the thief’s hiding place for the cops and even agreed to testify in court. He received a small financial reward for his services but, more important, established himself as a friend of the system.
By the late nineteenth century, Anderson had begun his legitimate career path as a bookkeeper for an oil company. But a young man with his drive and ambition was not destined to serve as a mere employee for someone else. Together with a partner, he became the proprietor of his own small oil company, which sold everything from salad oil to axel grease and whose motto was “The Only Independent Oil Company Not Controlled by Trusts or Monopolies.”
By now Anderson was a man about town. He greased his hair and parted it in the middle, and he sported a luxurious handlebar mustache, which was de rigueur among the city’s sporting men. He married early (at age twenty-two), had a child, and then lost his wife to typhoid fever. Now a widower, he put his child in an orphanage and began what would become a lifelong pursuit: the seduction and conquest of some of the city’s most renowned madams.
The manner by which Anderson elevated himself to become boss of the city’s underworld was a classic tale. It was a pattern that would play out in many U.S. cities in the early twentieth century. In some ways, it is the story of the mob itself: how organized crime evolved to become such a force in modern urban America.
The use of the term “mob boss” is believed to have originated in New York City, in the infamous Five Points district, but it was based on a phenomenon that was unfolding in a number of American cities. It all started with what became known on the street as a “mob primary.”
An aspiring political leader would stand on a soapbox or overturned milk crate and orate about the events of the day. Eventually, if all went well, he would attract a following that would become the basis for his running as an alderman or other candidate for public office. This person was often a saloonkeeper who was willing to offer a free drink, a sandwich, a cellar mattress on which to sleep, or all of the above, in exchange for the pledge of a vote. The type of person to most benefit from this sort of handout was usually a rough character—a bum, a homeless person, a thief, or a gangster. Thus, the mob boss, or mobster, became the leader of a less than savory constituency that was, nonetheless, powerful enough to sway local elections.
The arrangement worked both ways. By aligning himself with a rising and powerful mob boss, the street hoodlum was now also a mobster. He was “connected,” part of a system in which he now had a vested interest. Ostensibly, he would now have the kind of protection, or “juice,” that was necessary for him to operate a vice business, such as a house of prostitution, gambling den, burglary ring, or any manner of quasi-criminal enterprise popular throughout the underworld.
This symbiotic connection between the upperworld of politics and business and the underworld of vice and crime would become the foundation for organized crime in America. It also became the nexus of interests that launched the career of Tom Anderson.
In 1892, Anderson opened a restaurant and bar strategically situated at 12 Rampart Street, at the entrance to what would soon be known as Storyville. The place was called Anderson’s, and it would become a structure as familiar as any in Storyville. Located directly across from the Rampart Street train station, the bar was literally the first thing a person saw when they disembarked, and Anderson’s became known as “the gateway to Storyville.” It was the first saloon/cabaret in the United States to be illuminated by electric lights. With more than one hundred light bulbs in the ceiling, plus an electric lighted sign outside, Anderson’s was a monument to Thomas Edison and a promise of things to come: vice and politics arm in arm under the brilliant, man-made radiance of American ingenuity.
For Big Tom, the bar was the culmination of all the relationships and alliances he had cultivated as a street hustler, businessman, and backroom politician. The bar was an immediate success. Anderson’s sold plenty of beer, rye, and whiskey, and it became a central gathering place for the mob in New Orleans. Pimps, mafiosi, off-duty cops, political figures, and others who walked the fine line between the upperworld and the underworld became its favored clientele. And then there was the music. According to Sidney Bechet:
[Anderson] had practically everything there, card rooms, bar, a hop room—and he had music. Sometimes you’d hear accordion, guitar, mandolin, sometimes bass, maybe a violin; other times you’d hear someone singing there. It wasn’t a whorehouse but you’d hear whorehouse music there.
Over the following decade, Tom Anderson’s influence and base of power continued to grow. He acquired a financial interest in a lavish bordello at 172 Customhouse (Iberville) Street operated by one of the most renowned madams in town, Josie Arlington. It was rumored that they were lovers. Anderson opened two more saloons, one called Anderson’s Annex (later renamed the Arlington Annex in honor of Josie), and the Astoria Club, on South Rampart Street in the city’s Negro section, soon to be known as Black Storyville. If all this wasn’t enough, in 1904, after Storyville had been in existence for seven years, Anderson was elected a representative of the Fourth Ward in the state legislature. He became a ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee and a member of the Committee on City Affairs. In the Fourth Ward, which included Storyville, his power was ubiquitous. Many began referring to Storyville as “Anderson County.”
Big Tom was no absentee landlord. He loved to socialize, and his establishments became important showcases for “jass,” or jazz, in its crucial period of incubation as a national art form.
By 1910, there were more than sixty honky-tonks, dancehalls, or private clubs that showcased live music in the district. The musicians were almost exclusively Black, but the clientele was mixed race. From the beginning, jazz became identified as race-mixing music, an unusual development, perhaps unprecedented, where Blacks and whites came together to celebrate what was an authentically African American form of expression. The clubs were all owned by white men. And the type of men who owned the clubs were often associated with vice—prostitution, gambling, opium and cocaine, unfettered drinking, and whatever else could be used to help turn a profit.
The music, and what it represented, was not loved by everyone. In polite society—meaning white society—jazz was sometimes characterized as a threat. An editorial in the Times-Picayune, dated June 17, 1917, was unequivocal in its disdain.
Why is the jass music, and, therefore, the jass band? As well ask why is the dime novel or the grease-dripping doughnut. All are manifestation of a low streak in man’s tastes that has not yet come out in civilization’s wash. Indeed, one might go further, and say that jass music is the indecent story syncopated and counterpointed. Like the improper anecdote, also, in its youth, it was listened to behind closed doors and drawn curtains, but, like all vice, it grew bolder until it dared decent surroundings, and there was tolerated because of its oddity . . . It behooves us to be last to accept this atrocity in polite society, and where it has crept in we should make it a point of civic honor to suppress it. Its musical value is nil, and its possibilities of harm are great.
The naysayers could do little to impede the popularity of the music. The more polite society sought to stigmatize the culture of jazz, the more popular it became among people looking for that rare item: an authentic experience that was not being dictated to them by government fiat, the church pulpit, a judge’s bench, or some other mechanism of social control. To those who loved the music, jazz was real. For others, it represented that most American of prospects: a business opportunity.
Jelly Roll Blues
In 1910, Tom Anderson opened a new bordello adjacent to Arlington’s Annex; it was run by Hilma Burt, one of the district’s more ambitious madams. According to master pianist Jelly Roll Morton, “Hilma Burt’s was on the corner of Customhouse and Basin Street, next door to Tom Anderson’s Saloon—Tom Anderson was the king of the district and ran the Louisiana legislature, and Hilma Burt was supposed to be his old lady.”
Burt was indeed Anderson’s “old lady” (mistress)—one of many, perhaps, but enough of a main squeeze that he outfitted her with one of the swankiest bordellos on Basin Street. Noted Morton:
Hers was no doubt one of the best paying places in the city and I thought I had a very bad night when I made under a hundred dollars. Very often a man would come into the house and hand you a twenty- or forty- or a fifty-dollar note, just like a match. Beer sold for a dollar a bottle. Wine from five to ten . . . Wine flowed much more than water—the kind of wine I’m speaking about I don’t mean sauterne or nothing like that, I mean champagne, such as Cliquot and Mumm’s Extra Dry . . . I’m telling you this tenderloin district was like something that nobody ever seen before or since.
Born on October 20, 1890, as Ferdinand LaMothe, Jelly Roll Morton came from Creole stock. He claimed to have a French lineage in New Orleans going back four decades, but Morton had the reputation of being a fabulist. He didn’t need to embellish: According to the public record, and those who knew Morton, his life and personality were the stuff of legend. In 1938, when the musical anthropologist Alan Lomax tracked down and interviewed a mostly forgotten Jelly Roll Morton about his life and career for the U.S. Library of Congress, Morton claimed to have invented jazz. It was a provocative statement that stirred up much resentment and led many to view the pianist as an egoist, but the fact is that Morton, as much as anyone, could lay claim to such a bold assertion.
