Dangerous Rhythms, page 9
Both the machine and the mob made their presence felt. Tom Pendergast, though not a purveyor of the clubs or the music, was beloved, as he was believed to be “a friend of the Negro” and the man who made it all happen. The person who served as Pendergast’s face in the district was Felix Payne, the ward boss, gambler, and newspaper publisher.
In January 1929, while the jazz scene in Kansas City was at its peak, city dwellers woke up to the following headline: “FELIX PAYNE KIDNAPPED.” The newspaper was the Kansas City Call, a rival of Payne’s newspaper, the American. Whereas Payne’s paper extolled the virtues of mafioso Johnny Lazia as a legitimate businessman and contributor to the district, the Call was no friend of the machine, and it loved to tweak Payne. This particular story was juicy. Payne had been abducted by “racketeers” as he eased his Packard into the garage behind his home at 26th Street and Woodland Avenue. He was blindfolded, hustled into a waiting car, and driven to a warehouse. He was robbed of $800 in cash, $3,000 in cashier’s checks, and forced to strip down to his underwear. The kidnappers eventually released Payne. He wandered nearly naked through the city’s Central Industrial District until he came to a flagman’s shanty, where he telephoned someone at a gambling club on 12th Street; they came and picked him up.
Payne claimed that it was all a misunderstanding among friends. Most of his anger was directed at his bête noir, the Call, for its salacious coverage of the event. In an open letter to the publisher, Payne wrote: “I was making or earning dimes in Missouri, blacking boots, hopping bells, carrying dishes, shooting craps, promoting clubs, saloons, shows, prize fights, baseball teams, carnivals, amusement parks, barber shops, poolhalls, and railroad excursions when you were playing lemon pool and running down wild women to bring to Kansas City.”
The kidnapping of Payne sent a chill through the district, and many of the musicians started carrying guns.
Eddie Durham, who played guitar for the Moten orchestra, remembered, “Everybody in Bennie Moten’s band had guns . . . The reed section all had automatics, and the voice section all had revolvers . . . I had a .45.” Count Basie had never seen so many weapons. “Everybody carried a gun,” he said, including “machine guns.” Some band members wore bulletproof vests. The Count may have been only slightly exaggerating when he claimed that patrons would “shoot at each other, and if you played a song they didn’t like, they’d shoot you too.”
The interplay between the musicians and the hoodlums was sometimes complicated. In later years, in oral histories of the era, some musicians spoke of the hoodlums with affection and nostalgia. Alto saxophonist Buster Smith, who was a mentor to Charlie Parker, spoke for many when he said, “All of them big clubs were [run by] them big gangsters, and they were a musician’s best friend. They give you a job and something to eat. And work regular. We didn’t know nothing about their business, they didn’t know nothing about ours, all they want us to do is play the music and keep the crowd happy.”
Eddie Durham eventually moved beyond the Moten band and, through his pioneering virtuosity on the electric guitar, played with all the Kansas City bands. He found the influence of the mobsters to be almost comforting.
I played at one place . . . a mobster come in with his big white hat on and his four bodyguards. The boss come in and said, “All right, Johnny, check the hardware.” These guys would take a machine gun . . . all the guns, lay ’em on the piano . . . They had it pretty well controlled. Only thing was . . . one particular night, some fight started. Not between the gangs, something else. I left [the club], jumped out the window and went home about one o’clock. Come three o’clock, knocking on the wood . . . was the triggerman. “Come on, he wants you back there.” Got in the car. Felt good . . . nothing’s going to happen to you. I got a friend . . . Those guys paid you double for anything you ever done in Kansas City. They never owed a musician a nickel. The gangster always protected; they would always treat everybody right. If you touched a musician or one of the girls, you’d go out on your head. Nobody ever harassed musicians.
The man Durham worked for was Ellis Burton, who, like Felix Payne and Piney Brown, served as a go-between with the Black musicians, the mobsters, and the machine. Burton owned the Yellow Front Saloon, a notoriously tough honky-tonk. He was short, round, and dark-skinned. Though he rarely smiled, he was, according to Sammy Price—a Delta blues piano player originally from Texas—practically “a godfather to the musicians.” Remembered Price,
I’d had a problem in Kansas City with a police officer. The guy was interfering with me, you know, that thing where a guy just don’t like your looks. So I told Ellis about it. Ellis sent for the man. This man was a policeman and everybody shivered when you called his name . . . Ellis Burton never looked a man in the eye. He always had his hat down so that he’s looking at your lips and nose, and you can’t see his eyes. He said to this man, “If you interfere with Sammy Price anymore, forget those favors that I used to do for you.” And the guy left me alone.
The mob controlled law enforcement, and it also had great influence with the criminal justice system. As in New Orleans, where the Matranga family got Louis Armstrong and other musicians out of jail through payoffs to judges, Kansas City was, if anything, even more corrupt in this regard.
“They would raid us occasionally,” remembered Booker Washington, a popular trumpet player, “but no sooner do they take the people down, there was always a bond waiting for them to get out . . . Burton had his connections . . . I stayed downtown for about ten minutes, come on back, start all over again . . . He had a strong hold politically to even operate that place.”
It’s not hard to see why the musicians idealized the mobsters. The underworld provided opportunities for the jazzmen in Kansas City unlike anything outside the big cities of Chicago and New York, where similar music scenes were flourishing, with a similar symbiosis between the musicians and mobsters.
The Devil and Bennie Moten
Since the early 1920s, the best and most firmly established band in town was the Bennie Moten orchestra. Moten was a local product, Kansas City born and raised, and he came to epitomize the 18th and Vine era because of his musical prowess and also his affiliation to the Pendergast machine. He remained a force in the jazz world until he died, tragically and unexpectedly, at the age of forty, during a tonsillectomy operation gone wrong.
Among other things, Moten and his band were the first Kansas City group to record a 78 record, which they did under the auspices of OKeh Records, Inc. Record sales were minimal in the early 1920s, but a number of Moten’s recordings by OKeh and later Victor (formerly the Victor Talking Machine Company) became treasured by musicians and other serious jazz aficionados, as they were the first examples of the Kansas City sound to be immortalized on discs.
Moten became known for pioneering what was called “riffing,” playing a series of chords and repeating it over and over to an orgiastic crescendo. Moten himself might riff on the piano, or someone else in the band would apply a similar technique.
Over the years, the Moten band acquired many of the best musicians in town. Moten was known to have pilfered the cream of Walter Page’s Blue Devils, a ferocious band out of Oklahoma City that regularly toured the Territories and became legendary as the preeminent force in the informal, late-night showdowns, known as “Battle of the Bands,” which took place in Kansas City and elsewhere around the country. The great Count Basie played piano with the Blue Devils, until he was lured to Kansas City by Moten. After Moten’s death, the cream of his band became the nucleus of the Count Basie Orchestra.
In the mid-1920s, Moten incorporated into his band tenor saxman Lester Young, Walter Page, Oran “Hot Lips” Page (no relation to Walter), the sublime vocalist Jimmy Rushing (“Mister Five by Five”), and Basie. Moten was able to offer these men certain amenities that were beyond the scope of the Blue Devils. There was the district, a steady source of employment, and Moten paid better—he had a recording contract and a touring schedule that was as robust as any band west of the Mississippi. Furthermore, he played a style of music that was exciting to the best young musicians.
Moten had another advantage: He was in tight with Boss Tom.
“Bennie was a businessman first and last,” said trumpet player Hot Lips Page, one of the original members of the Blue Devils. “He had a lot of connections out there, and he was a very good friend of Pendergast . . . Through contacts of this kind, he was able to control all of the good jobs and choice locations in and around Kansas City. In his day, you might say he was stronger than MCA.”
Moten always dressed sharp. On a weekly basis, he was seen coming in and out of Pendergast headquarters at 1908 Main Street. Bennie was on a first-name basis with the boss, who saw the bandleader as the kind of dependable, upwardly mobile Negro who was a shining example of what the machine could produce.
The source of this relationship—in fact, the source of Moten’s power in general—was his role as a founding member of the Black musicians’ union. Officially known as Musicians’ Protective Union Local 627, and on the street as the Colored Musicians’ Union, the organization started in 1917 with twenty-five members. By the late 1920s it was one of the largest musicians’ unions in the United States, with over three hundred card-carrying members.
Though Moten was never the actual president of Local 627, to the musicians in the district he might as well have been. He ran Paseo Hall, a large performance venue owned by the union that was located at the bustling corner of 15th Street and Paseo. When the hall opened in 1924, it booked mostly white acts. Moten saw the hall as an ideal venue for Black bands and a Black, dance-oriented clientele. The eight-piece Moten band played there on Thursday and Friday nights, and Moten rented the hall out for $50 on other nights.
Among other things, Bennie was a tireless self-promoter. In 1928 and 1929, the Bennie Moten orchestra toured the big cities—Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia—as an ambassador for the Kansas City sound. In the annals of jazz history, the sleek pianist, composer, and bandleader did more to establish Kansas City as a beacon of jazz than any other musician.
In Tom’s Town, Moten walked a fine line between being a sugar daddy to the musicians and a flunky for the machine. To work as a musician in town, an instrumentalist needed Kansas City’s version of a cabaret card. The man to see about securing a card was Bennie Moten. Among musicians, there were many stories about cats who had their cards suspended, or revoked, or could never get one because of one perceived violation or another—or simply because they didn’t have an “in” with the right people. Getting a cabaret card was not easy; it involved complete and total capitulation to the Pendergast machine.
Many trade unions in Kansas City and surrounding Jackson County were beholden to Pendergast in this way. Generally speaking, the machine put forth and elected city officials who were pro-union and would protect their interests. For musicians and the venues that employed them, this was a determining factor in how much they would be required to pay in taxes and local fees, and as a buffer against zoning ordinances or rules that might make it prohibitive for a nightclub to exist in the first place. These were the sort of municipal and business realities by which a friend in high places could make or break a musician or nightclub owner’s prospects for making a living.
To secure this sort of advantage, there was a trade-off. To become a member of Local 627 and receive a cabaret card—which made it possible for a musician to work—it was understood that on election day you would vote the Pendergast ticket, straight down the line. It was imperative that the machine could count on Local 627 for a certain number of guaranteed votes in local and state elections. The musicians’ union was not unique in this regard. This was how patronage worked in Kansas City and other urban centers where political machines did their business. The machine took care of its constituents in exchange for a guaranteed electoral tally on voting day.
A musician could complain, noting to his or her shop steward—or anyone else who would listen—that this was not a very democratic system. Few complained. In Kansas City, you accepted life as it was, not how you wished it to be. The town was booming with employment opportunities for musicians and club owners in a way that outpaced most other cities. Nonetheless, it came at a price. Working within the parameters of the era, to gain access to employment you bartered away a piece of your soul. You traded away your right to vote in exchange for the right to work, all of which was controlled by a higher power. In this sort of arrangement, your freedom—as a citizen and a human being—was limited and controlled by outside forces. For better or for worse, that cabaret card was your pound of flesh. To function as a musician in Kansas City, you were owned by Boss Tom and the Pendergast machine. This also meant that you were owned by the mob.
Rim Shot
In the 1930s, with the Great Depression having taken hold throughout the United States, Tom’s Town continued to thrive. While the stock market crash of October 1929 and a general economic malaise over the next decade hit the music business hard (the sale of phonograph players tanked, and the recording of music virtually came to a halt), you wouldn’t know it if you were out for a night on the town in Kansas City. If anything, with dwindling economic opportunities overall, the nightclubs in Kansas City became even more of a bonding mechanism between the mobsters and the musicians.
There were signposts, however, that the Pendergast era might be heading toward a reckoning. The incident that seemed to augur rough days ahead was what became known as the Union Station Massacre, still remembered as a seminal event in the city’s history.
On the morning of June 17, 1933, at the city’s architecturally majestic and always busy centralized train station, Frank “Jelly” Nash, a notorious criminal and prison escapee, was being transported by the FBI from Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he’d been captured, to Leavenworth prison in Kansas. It was the intention of the seven-man law enforcement entourage transporting Nash to put him in a car outside Union Station, where they would drive the final leg of the trip to Leavenworth.
Nash had friends in the underworld, including a few who intended to use his transfer in Kansas City as an opportunity to spring Nash from custody. Three men, including the notorious outlaw Pretty Boy Floyd, had been hired for the job.
As Nash was being led outside the station to the waiting vehicle, the gunmen opened fire. There was a ferocious shootout. Before it was all over, four lawmen—two local cops and two federal agents—and Nash were killed in the melee. The gunmen all got away but were eventually captured while hiding out in Kansas City.
The carnage was shocking, even in Tom’s Town, which had experienced more than its share of gangland mayhem during the years of Prohibition. Four cops shot dead in broad daylight, with women and children and other innocent bystanders forced to duck for cover. In the later investigation of the crime, it was revealed that John Lazia had played a role in providing refuge for one of the gunmen while he hid out in town. This led to a higher than usual level of public scrutiny of Lazia and his many political connections, including his cozy relationship with Pendergast.
The massacre turned the tide of public sentiment against the city’s dark matrix of underworld alliances. If Lazia had not yet figured out that the glory days were over, he did eight months later, on Valentine’s Day, 1934, when he was found guilty of tax evasion. His ownership of the Cuban Gardens nightclub raised some questions: Who paid for its construction? How was it financed? How much income did it generate? These became central topics of discussion at Lazia’s trial, where he was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months in prison. While awaiting appeal, he was out on bail.
Lazia’s problems made him vulnerable, and in the underworld, being vulnerable is like having a disease. Nobody comes around; you lose your juice. And sometimes you lose your life.
That summer, Lazia and his wife, Marie, were in the back seat of a car as it pulled up to the curb in front of the stately Park Central Apartments, on Armour Boulevard, where they lived. Lazia got out first and was helping his wife out when, like a tap dancer working the boards, the incessant rhythm of a Thompson submachine gun lit up the neighborhood, followed by the dull thud of two shotgun blasts. Lazia had the presence of mind to push his wife back into the car and tell the driver, “Get her out of here,” thereby saving Marie’s life.
It was believed that Lazia was shot by mob rivals who sensed that he was weak and no longer the monumental figure he had once been.
The mafia boss languished in the hospital for a couple of days, and then he died. According to his personal physician, who was standing at his bedside when he passed, his final words were: “I don’t know why they did it. I’m a friend to everybody. If anything happens, notify Tom Pendergast, my best friend, and tell him I love him.”
T. J. Pendergast was going to need the love. In 1937, with his health beginning to show signs of wear and tear, he was indicted by the same IRS office that took down Lazia. Pendergast, a lifelong gambler who bet on the horse races nearly every day of his adult life, had neglected to pay his taxes or fully account for his income. Not only that, losses at the track had cost Pendergast so much that he illegally transferred proceeds from a government project to cover his gambling debts. In 1939, the unthinkable came to pass: Boss Tom was indicted, convicted, and sent away to prison on tax-evasion charges. He served his time, was released, and then died shortly thereafter.
Through all of this, Kansas City’s Jazz Age soared. The word most often used to describe the scene was “joy.” Jazz, as expressed, expanded, and expounded upon in Kansas City, was a historical force of nature, but it could not survive the fall of the machine. With the murder of Lazia and the shaming of Pendergast, the entire concept of the wide-open town was called into question. New rules were set, reform ordinances passed and enforced. This particular example of unbridled musical expression was over, but beyond Kansas City, in other places across the land where jazz was being played, the party was just getting started.
