Sittin' In at Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s with Jeff Gold

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Sometimes it is difficult to imagine Jazz without photography: they seem to compliment and complement one another.

You can close your eyes and listen closely to the music as it is being made on recordings or you can open them and look at photographic images of the musicians creating the music or, occasionally, do both.

Every so often a collection of photographs come along that enables you to see this dynamic in a totally different way.

Enter Jeff Gold’s new book - Sittin’ In Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s [New York: Harper Design, 2020] - which gives a new perspective on the music from the vantage point of the fans who went to listen to it in clubs located in various cities in the decades following World War II.

Jeff explains how this project all came about in the following -

INTRODUCTION

In my work as a music executive, historian, collector, and dealer I've had my fair share of crazy adventures, so sorting through the contents of a jazz collector's safe-deposit boxes in a closet-size room in a bank didn't strike me as particularly unusual. In the four hours I was there, I discovered many treasures that I coveted and eventually bought: concert tickets and handbills, autographs, contracts, letters, and other documents. But most interesting were the souvenir photographs from jazz clubs of the 1940s and 1950s. Each was in its own custom folder; the graphics were fantastic and so evocative of that classic era of jazz.

As I went through the boxes, I kept finding more photos—twenty-five, fifty, one hundred, and, eventually, more than two hundred—all mixed in with the rest of the collection. Some were well photographed, some were amateurish. But each had something to offer. Even before I finished., the thought struck me that the photographs would make a great book. If I hadn't seen pictures like these, I doubted many others had.

I bought all of them. Though the images were primarily of African Americans, some pictured white fans, and some showed mixed groups or white and Black people seated next to each other. There were couples on double dates, mothers and fathers with grown children, enlisted men and women in uniform, and even a picture of the Harriet Tubman Social Club. In a few, famous musicians—Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Art Blakey, Oscar Peterson, and Louis Armstrong—posed with audience members. There was plenty of alcohol, which wasn't surprising.

These quick snapshots were taken by each club's in-house photographer, developed on-site, and ready to be taken home at the end of an evening for a dollar, a cheap souvenir of a night out. Collectively, though, they are something altogether different, something important today—a visual record of a rarely seen and poorly documented world. An accidental history.

These pictures turn the camera around. We've seen photographs of these clubs before, of the performers onstage, the marquees, the lines outside. But rarely, if ever, have we seen the audiences, the fans, as we do here. And they are a critical part of what jazz pianist, composer, and educator

Jason Moran calls the "ecosystem" of jazz. Sonny Rollins told me that in small clubs like these, the audiences "sort of played with you. They're like part of the band."

If you're looking for a comprehensive history of jazz, this isn't it. The focus here is on something that hasn't been properly explored: American jazz clubs of the 1940s and 1950s—what some call the golden age—as seen through the lens of these audience photographs and related memorabilia. Moran says, "Seeing these images is powerful because we never document the jazz audience." The Library of Congress, for example, is home to more than 1,600 images taken by legendary jazz photographer William Gottlieb, only a tiny fraction of which picture audience members.

Almost all the souvenir photographs in this book date from the 1940s and 1950s. It doesn't seem many clubs had in-house photographers before 1940, and by the end of the 1950s, most of these clubs were out of business. As New York City was already well established as the jazz center of the world, the majority of the images here are from the city's clubs. But there were hundreds of other clubs in cities across America, and we are fortunate to have a representative sampling from many of them.

These photographs were made at a time when discrimination and segregation were the norm in the United States, and some of them document how "jazz was really where the racial barriers were broken down heavily," according to Rollins.

I am incredibly fortunate that Quincy Jones and Sonny Rollins, who played these clubs, agreed to speak with me about the culture, the fans, and so much more. I'm grateful to Jason Moran, who looked at these photographs through the eyes of a contemporary jazz musician and historian and shared his insights. Dan Morgenstern, a jazz historian without peer, shared his experiences as a patron of some of these clubs beginning in the late 1940s. And writer and cultural critic Robin Givhan graciously shared her insights on the photographs themselves. This book would have been a much lesser work without them.

I've included whatever information I could find about the clubs, musicians, photographers, and mostly anonymous fans. But in some cases, we have only the photos. As I study them, they continue to reveal layers of information. It is my sincere hope they do the same for you.

-JEFF GOLD

One of the highlights of the book for me was the section on the clubs in Greenwich Village in NYC. 

By the 1920s, Greenwich Village already had a small jazz scene, at clubs like the Cowboy and the Starlight Room. In the early 1930s, the Hot Feet Club speakeasy featured saxophonist Otto Hardwick's group, with Fats Waller. But it wasn't until 1937 that jazz in the Village began in earnest, with the opening of Nick's and, the next year, Cafe Society and the Village Vanguard.

In 1945, guitarist Eddie Condon opened his namesake club, which, like Nick's, presented primarily traditional and Dixieland groups. During the 1940s and 1950s, the same music could be heard in weekly jam sessions at the Stuyvesant Casino and Central Plaza. But in the 1950s, a new group of Village clubs began offering much more adventurous fare.

During the last few years of his life, Charlie Parker played regularly at the Open Door, a small, dark bar on West Third Street and Broadway. Cafe Bohemia featured modern jazz with groups led by Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and the Horace Silver/Hank Mobley Quintet. The newly emergent hard bop, a bebop offshoot that incorporated influences from gospel, rhythm and blues, and blues, began to take hold at various Village clubs. And in 1957, the Five Spot Cafe, a small storefront bar that held only seventy-five people, opened on Cooper Square, with the Thelonious Monk Quartet featuring John Coltrane. Two years later, the Ornette Coleman Quartet, from Los Angeles, brought avant-garde jazz to the club; its original booking had been for two weeks, but the group generated so much interest— and controversy—that it was extended to ten weeks. Musicians including Lionel Hampton, Leonard Bernstein, and the Modern Jazz Quartet came and were vocal in their support, but Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie were not won over; the latter was quoted in Time magazine as saying, "I don't know what he's playing, but it's not jazz.”

In 1958, the Village Gate opened on Thompson and Bleecker Streets., and for the next thirty-eight years, the club hosted shows by established artists like Coleman Hawkins and Duke Ellington and younger innovators like Coltrane, pianist Bill Evans, and Dave Brubeck.

Though most of the Village's jazz clubs closed long ago, the Village Vanguard, after more than eight decades, continues to be a center for jazz in New York City.

VILLAGE VANGUARD

178 Seventh Avenue

In 1935, law school dropout Max Gordon opened the first Village Vanguard in a basement on Charles Street at Greenwich Avenue. Gordon initially planned for his club to be a hub for local poets, but after he decided to add live music, the police department denied him a cabaret license, deeming the premises insufficient. He soon relocated to the former home of a basement speakeasy, the Golden Triangle.

The new location offered a mixed bag of poetry readings, comedy, cabaret acts, folk and popular music, dancing, and some jazz. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Vanguard booked some small swing groups and musicians, including Mary Lou Williams and Sidney Bechet. In her memoir Alive at the Village Vanguard, Gordon's wife, Lorraine, recalled that before she knew Max, "the biggest reason my pals and I went to the Vanguard, though, was because there were jazz jam sessions in the afternoons on Sundays. You could go hear Lester Young, Ben Webster, all the greatest jazz musicians for fifty cents at the door, or something like that."

Sensing jazz might be something to focus on, Max Gordon brought in more musicians, and as jazz began to shift from big bands to smaller combos, he hired a resident trio featuring clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton, pianist Eddie Heywood, and drummer Zutty Singleton.

In the late 1940s, Gordon ran into his future wife at a Fire Island bakery. Lorraine, then married to Blue Note Records co founder Alfred Lion, recognized Gordon. She approached him, suggesting he book Blue Note's

Thelonious Monk at the club, and he agreed. On September 14, 1948, Monk opened at the club. As Lorraine recalled: "Nobody came. None of the so-called jazz critics. None of the so-called cognoscenti. Zilch. Alfred and I sat there in a banquette at the Vanguard, and Thelonious got up at one point and did this little dance and announced, "Now, human beings, I'm going to play...." Max came running over to me in acute distress.... There was almost no audience. And Max kept crying, "What did you talk me into? You trying to ruin my business? We're dying with this guy."

By the late 1950s, Gordon was focusing primarily on jazz, and the Vanguard was thriving, bringing in countless important artists including Miles Davis, Art Blakey, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Charles Mingus, and Horace Silver. Bill Evans was a regular. John Coltrane's groups played the club numerous times, resulting in his classic albums Live at the Village Vanguard (1962) and Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (1966).

More than fifty albums have been recorded at the club, including titles by Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, guitarists Kenny Burrell and Charlie Byrd, drummer Elvin Jones, singer Betty Carter, pianist Junior Mance, and saxophonist Gerry Mulligan.

When Max Gordon died in 1989, Lorraine closed the Vanguard for a single night. She then reopened and continued to run it until her death in 2018 at the age of ninety-five. The Village Vanguard continues to present important jazz today.”