Dangerous Rhythms, page 37
Levy flattered Carter, assuring her that he wanted to use her to reestablish Roulette Records as the premier jazz label. He signed her to record an album for Roulette and also for her to sign new jazz acts to the label.
By now, Mo Levy was a known entity, like Joe Glaser and other gangster/businessmen, his reputation having preceded him. Betty Carter knew what she was getting into. “Morris Levy and I have a kind of handshake agreement,” she told DownBeat magazine. “He respects what I’m about . . . I’m personal with the man I’m with, if he says ‘no’ we fight and holler—he respects me enough to know that I will holler—and I know he’ll holler. I’ve listened to him holler. But that is what I want. I’d much rather have it out in the open, on top, than underneath.”
In a way, Carter was acknowledging a trend in the music business that was part of a larger trend in American life. Mo Levy may have been a thug, but at least he was down to earth and real. Large corporations were taking over many aspects of American commerce—certainly in the music business, where most record labels were now owned by large multinational corporations. Compared to MCA, RCA, or Warner Brothers, Levy’s Roulette Records was a mom-and-pop operation, a place where decisions were made by real human beings based on individual tastes, not market studies or faceless executives. Were some of these mom-and-pop operations controlled by the mob? Sure, maybe they were. But even the mob was now seen as something of a mom-and-pop operation.
Ever since the American mobsters had lost control of Cuba and were humiliated by a ragtag collection of bearded communists, the image of the mob as a ubiquitous power whose reach was limitless had been dealt a serious blow. The idea, once advanced by Lansky, Luciano, Costello, and others, that they could establish an organization with far-reaching international power had been brought down to earth. In the 1960s and 1970s, la cosa nostra returned to its roots. The gangsters most revered by the rank-and-file—Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Gigante, and, later in the 1980s, John Gotti—were proletarian mob bosses who stayed close to home. They hung out in local social clubs and engaged in criminal rackets that were rooted in traditional organized crime going back to the earliest days of the underworld.
Mo Levy was cut from this same cloth. He presented himself in the manner of an old-time neighborhood hood. He may have been a gangster, but he was also a human being, not a faceless, corporate executioner. Of course, there was in all of this much magical thinking. Being a gangster was not a coat you wore, then took off and put in the closet. Gangsterism was a way of thinking, a business imperative, a beast that needed to be fed.
In December 1976, Roulette Records issued Now It’s My Turn, an album that was recorded in a studio by Betty Carter and her trio. Carter was surprised to discover that the album also included live recordings from 1969 that had been made illegally by a recording engineer and sold to Levy. If that weren’t shady enough, Levy did not credit Carter as the composer on her three original songs; he had assigned credit to his own publishing company.
Carter had an amazing ability to hit the high notes, which she no doubt did when she heard about Levy’s betrayal. She terminated her relationship with Roulette Records and disassociated herself from the album, even telling fans at one of her performances not to buy it.
For a musician to have to disavow his or her own product while onstage before an audience of their followers was a testament to the current state of the business under Mo Levy and others.
In 1979, Carter sued Levy on various counts, including his flagrant theft of her publishing rights. Two years later, the boss of Roulette Records was made to pay an unspecified amount as part of a settlement.
There would be more lawsuits by artists against Levy and other moguls in the years ahead. The days when a gangster/businessman could willfully and without recompense screw over a musician would no longer stand. Musicians were now inclined to fight back.
14
Twilight of the Underworld
For the mafia in America, the decade of the 1980s was something of a final curtain call. Federal prosecutors had discovered the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the name of which was not easy to remember so they just called it RICO. This was possibly a nod to the gangster classic Little Caesar, where the main character (played by Edward G. Robinson) was named Rico, and his final line in the movie, after being fatally shot, was “Is this the end for Rico?”
RICO was devastating for the mafia, at least as it had existed for the previous eighty years, with a ruling commission based in New York City and affiliated families in urban areas all around the United States.
RICO had been on the books since 1968, but it took more than a decade for prosecutors to figure out how to use it effectively. For the first time, federal law allowed the U.S. Justice Department to prosecute criminal organizations as an “ongoing criminal conspiracy.” As “predicate acts,” prosecutors were able to use crimes that had already been tried and adjudicated. And they were able to indict multiple conspirators as part of the “continuing enterprise,” using crimes committed by one defendant to implicate another. It was a watershed development for criminal justice in America.
RICO laws were not used to directly address the relationship between the mob and the jazz business, but what occurred was even more damaging: RICO was used to destroy the framework by which the relationship existed in the first place.
In Las Vegas, in a series of trials, federal prosecutors exposed the link between criminal financiers and the casinos. The entire structure crumbled. Consequently, large corporations moved in and purchased the casinos, changing the tenor of the city. The gambling and strip clubs remained, but entertainment in the casinos was now geared toward the whole family, not just the high rollers. Instead of Louis Prima, you got Wayne Newton.
In most midwestern industrial cities—Kansas City, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Chicago—mobsters were taken down in major prosecutions aimed at separating organized crime from labor unions, especially the Teamsters.
On the East Coast, the unthinkable occurred: In “the Commission trial” of 1984, heads of the Five Families and the entire ruling structure were prosecuted and taken down, with the defendants put away for life.
The fortunes of jazz and the underworld had always run on parallel tracks. In the 1960s and 1970s, when jazz declined as a significant percentage of the country’s entertainment dollar, the mob found other fish to fry. By the time of the major mob prosecutions in the 1980s, there was no relationship. For the mob, whatever was left of jazz as a business was no longer worth exploiting.
For the people whose lives played out against this backdrop, however, the separation was not so clear and simple. The connection between the music and the mobsters was primarily a business proposition, but it was also more than that. There were other entanglements: spiritual and existential. The story wasn’t over yet.
Mary Lou’s Mass
In the spring of 1981, Mary Lou Williams, at age seventy-one, was in declining health. Life had finally caught up with her—and what a life it had been. She had lived through many of the great jazz eras, starting with her youth in Smoketown, her time on the road with the Clouds of Joy, Kansas City during the Pendergast era, playing piano on 52nd Street during the heyday of that scene, and everything since.
Back in the 1960s, she thought she was done with jazz. For more than ten years, she stayed away from the business. And then something happened. Unexpectedly, she had a spiritual epiphany.
It occurred in Paris, in 1970, when she visited the grounds of a Roman Catholic church. All her life, she had experienced visions and mystical premonitions, but this was different. In her diary, she wrote, “I found God in a little garden in Paris.”
Upon her return to the States, Williams became a devout Catholic. And she started playing the piano again. For Williams, the challenge became to integrate her love of jazz with what she saw as her spiritual calling. This was not as difficult as it might seem. Mary Lou had always seen the music in spiritual terms. “Jazz is healing to the soul,” she often said. “Jazz grew up on its own here in America. It grew out of the work songs and the psalms of the Black people here . . . It’s the suffering that gives jazz its spiritual dimensions. That’s what our jazzmen today have forgotten. Only out of suffering is a true thing born . . . Yet I have faith that jazz is strong, the roots are deep.”
In the early 1970s, Williams started playing publicly again, though she was selective about where she performed. She met with Barney Josephson, who had opened a new club in Greenwich Village called the Cookery, on University Place near Washington Square. Josephson was the former proprietor of Café Society, one of the rare clubs that had resisted falling under the sway of mobsters. It was at Café Society that Billie Holiday debuted “Strange Fruit.” The club was politically progressive and racially integrated. Mary Lou played there herself in the 1940s.
Josephson wanted Williams to play a regular ongoing residency at the Cookery, which she agreed to do, playing there steadily for six years.
She took on a new manager. Again, her goal was to integrate her spiritual calling with the music, and so the person who became her manager was an unorthodox choice. Father Peter O’Brien was a young Jesuit priest and part-time pastor at the church where she had chosen to be baptized upon her recent conversion into the Catholic faith. O’Brien could not have been more different than Joe Glaser, her former Pimp Daddy. The priest devoted himself to advocating for Mary Lou, making sure she was given the treatment accorded her status as a living jazz legend.
Mary Lou had a dream. Ever since her religious conversion, she had been working on music and lyrics for a full liturgical service scored to jazz. It had never been done, and her new manager, Father O’Brien, wasn’t sure it could be done. Mary Lou’s Mass, as it became known, would evolve over the course of years before O’Brien was able to secure full authorization from the papal ministry for the mass to be staged in churches around the United States and even the world.
The mass was part of Williams’s belief that jazz needed to be elevated out of the basement clubs run by mobsters, where alcohol, drugs, and sexual transactions were part of the draw, and performed in concert halls, conservatories, and cathedrals. Jazz was an art form, and it needed to start being treated like one.
Officially known as Music for Peace, Mary Lou’s Mass had its debut in April 1970 at St. Paul’s Chapel, at Columbia University. But this was only the music itself. It would be four more years before it was performed as part of a church service proper, which would take place triumphantly at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, in the heart of New York City. Mary Lou introduced the mass by saying, “This is the jazz gospel.”
For Williams, the mass was a kind of cleansing. Each time it was performed, she washed off the muck and the mud and stepped into the light. She continued to showcase her proudest creation at museums, concert halls, and churches around the world.
In 1977, she was hired to teach music and jazz history as an artist in residence at Duke University, in North Carolina. For the first time in her life, she had a steady income, a permanent place to live, and health insurance.
On May 8, 1981, Williams celebrated her seventy-first birthday. A few months earlier, she had been diagnosed with bladder cancer. She was told she didn’t have much more time to live; she was bedridden and approaching her final days.
Two days after her birthday, the president of Duke University came to her bedside to present her with the Trinity Award, which was given to the best-loved faculty member. Williams later told a friend, “That touched me more than any award I’ve gotten since I’ve been playing.”
Said Father O’Brien, “There were no complaints, no self-pity, and no anger. She was spiritually coherent, even great, as she was dying . . . At the very end, she told me she could hear the music, but she couldn’t reach the keys anymore.”
Mary Lou left instructions that after her death—which occurred at ten o’clock on the evening of May 28—all her holdings and future earnings would go to the Mary Lou Williams Foundation. Mary Lou’s goals for the foundation were stated in its certificate of incorporation:
To conduct activities which are exclusively charitable, literary and educational . . . including the advancement of public knowledge of the art of jazz music by teaching the same in all its forms to children between the ages of six and twelve, individually and/or in groups, enabling them to perform before audiences, and giving them the opportunity to hear jazz in concert and studio performance.
Mary Lou assigned the duties of director of the foundation to Father Peter O’Brien.
Middle Passage
From the early 1970s into the middle of the 1980s, many of the biggest names in jazz passed on to join that great orchestra in the sky. Louis Armstrong (1971), Mezz Mezzrow (1972), Kid Ory (1973), Willie “the Lion” Smith (1973), Eddie Condon (1973), Ben Webster (1973), Gene Krupa (1973), Duke Ellington (1974), Cannonball Adderley (1975), Erroll Garner (1977), Stan Kenton (1979), Charles Mingus (1979), Bill Evans (1980), Mary Lou Williams (1981), Thelonious Monk (1982), Art Pepper (1982), Cal Tjader (1982), Sonny Greer (1982), Earl “Fatha” Hines (1983), Count Basie (1984).
The music persevered as these jazz originators became part of the dearly departed, leaving behind tales of triumph and woe.
One of the more complex legacies was that of Satchmo. Before he died, Armstrong had been rejected by some young African Americans as being far too acquiescent to the mobster overseers of jazz. He was referred to as an Uncle Tom, as was Sammy Davis Jr. and other Black musicians who came out of the vaudeville tradition, where entertaining the masses sometimes involved the lampooning of Black culture—the Stepin Fetchit image of the subservient Negro. In the post–civil rights era, this was an image that left a sour taste in people’s mouths. In Armstrong’s case, part of the critique involved his relationship with Joe Glaser, the gangster/manager who, based on his success with Armstrong, went on to manage many of the greatest Black jazz musicians in the midtwentieth century. In some ways, the Armstrong-Glaser relationship became instructive, an example of the relationship between jazz and the underworld at its most complicated and perverse.
There’s no question that Glaser and his company, Associated Booking, did remarkable things for Armstrong and his career. As arguably the most popular figure in the history of the music, Armstrong achieved unprecedented longevity, primarily because of his talent but also due to his infectious smile and ingratiating personality. Glaser supposedly was the one who suggested to Armstrong that he grin and clown it up for his white audiences. The white audiences loved it, the Black audiences not so much. By the end of his life, the trumpet master felt alienated from his own people.
Satchmo never specifically blamed Glaser for this, but he had other reasons to be miffed with his longtime manager.
In June 1969, Glaser suffered a stroke and, at the age of seventy-two, expired at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan. In the weeks and months following his death, Armstrong, who was himself in waning health, paid tribute to his former manager. On a television talk show, Louis said, “When that bad colored boy down in the honky tonks [a reference to Slippers, the bouncer at Matranga’s] . . . the first thing he said was, ‘You get you a white man to put his hand on your shoulder and say, “That’s my nigger.”’ For me, Joe Glaser was that man.”
The sense of ownership—the evocation of the slave-to-slavemaster relationship—is what did not sit well with some, and, apparently, it had also eaten away at Armstrong.
According to George Wein, longtime jazz impresario, producer of the annual Newport Jazz Festival, and a friend of Armstrong’s, the jazzman was unsettled. In 1970, one year after Glaser died, Wein and his wife went to Armstrong’s modest home in Corona, Queens, to interview him for a short documentary that Wein was making to be shown at the Newport festival. Off camera, Armstrong spoke more openly with Wein than he ever had publicly. Of Glaser, he said, “When we started, we both had nothing. We were friends—we hung out together, ate together, we went to restaurants together. But the minute we started to make money, Joe Glaser was no longer my friend. In all those years, he never invited me to his house. I was just a passport for him.”
Shortly before Glaser’s death, Armstrong had learned about his last will and testament. In the will, Glaser had bequeathed Associated Booking not to Louis Armstrong; he bequeathed a percentage of the company to Sidney Korshak, the former Capone mob lawyer and MCA legal honcho who had loaned money to Glaser decades before so that he could start his company.
“I built Associated Booking,” Armstrong told Wein. “There wouldn’t have been an agency if it wasn’t for me. And he didn’t even leave me a percentage of it.”
There was in the musician’s rancor a touch of naivete. In life, he had chosen Glaser as his overseer because the former pimp and convicted rapist had the heart of a gangster. Now that Glaser was dead, Louis was startled to learn that his manager behaved like one as well.
Armstrong visited Glaser on his deathbed at the hospital. With his lifelong manager incapacitated and unable to communicate, Armstrong sat in a wheelchair and pondered the nature of his own mortality. He moved his chair closer to Glaser’s bed. As he told it to Wein, he leaned over close to the ear of his former manager and whispered the words that would be the final communication between the two men. The words were: “I’ll bury you, you motherfucker.”
Capo di Tutti Capi
Frank Sinatra sat before members of the Nevada Gaming Control Board with a confident smirk on his face. The year was 1981. Sinatra was older now, sixty-five to be exact. His youthful toupee had been traded in for one that, in keeping with his current vintage, was silver and combed forward in the front. It made him look like an aging version of Nero, the Roman emperor whose reign was associated with tyranny and debauchery. Frank’s features were thicker now, and he carried himself with a world weariness that seemed to say: I’m Frank Sinatra, I’ve seen it all, and I don’t give a damn what you think.
