Transcription
If you've ever been asked for your ID while buying alcohol or walking into a bar, you know showing it feels like second nature. Now, imagine getting carded on your way to work. That’s what jazz musicians faced at one time under a New York City law that changed the course of jazz history.
I’m talking about a special form of ID called a cabaret card. Without one of these, it was illegal to perform in any establishment that served food or alcohol alongside entertainment. Translation: almost every jazz club in New York. The New York Police Department granted and revoked cabaret cards at its whim, and even the biggest icons of the '40s, '50s and '60s lost their cards at some point.
Charlie Parker was one of them. He'd struggled with drug use since the '30s, and police took his cabaret card on a narcotics charge in 1951, leaving him out of work for more than a year. Now, there’s something you’ve gotta understand here: New York was the center of the jazz universe in those days, and Bird was one of the most important — if not the most important — musician on the scene. He was co-authoring a new style of jazz called bebop, and it propelled him to become one of the most prominent jazz players of his time, headlining bills left and right and working with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. There was even a nightclub named after Bird.
But despite all this, in the height of his popularity, the police took away his livelihood. And for a jazz musician in New York, if you didn’t play the club circuit, you didn’t eat. So, he left his family and hit the road, gigging in small towns across the U.S. and inevitably playing with lesser rhythm sections that were not up to speed on the music he invented years earlier. His substance abuse persisted on the road, and Parker spiraled into a deeper depressive state.
In an attempt to reinstate his cabaret card, he wrote a letter to the New York State Liquor Control Board, which read:
[Charlie Parker] My right to pursue my chosen profession has been taken away, and my wife and three children who are innocent of any wrongdoing are suffering. ... If by any chance you feel I haven’t paid my debt to society, by all means let me do so and give me and my family back the right to live.
[McBride] "The right to live." If this letter proves anything, it’s the power police wielded over musicians with this one, seemingly innocuous law.
Originally, regulations only applied to the clubs themselves. In the 1920s, Prohibition era speakeasies were some of the few places in America where races mixed together socially, all to the tune of the city’s best jazz acts. But the music had a reputation as this “counterculture negro racket,” a vehicle for debauchery.
[Laurette Taylor] Jazz, the impulse for wildness that has undoubtedly come over many things besides the music of this country, is traceable to the negro influence.
[McBride] Some even considered jazz a danger to the general public, that it would turn good-natured citizens into hedonists, especially those exposed to mixed-race dance floors. To propose a new order, the New York Board of Alderman called a meeting on Dec. 7, 1926.
[Alderman] Your Committee believes that these ‘wild’ people should not be tumbling out of these resorts at 6 or 7 o’clock in the morning to the scandal and annoyance of decent residents on their way to daily employment. Favorable action is recommended.
[McBride] That night, the city passed a law that imposed a 3 a.m. curfew and outlawed dancing in clubs without a special cabaret license. Let’s back up a second. They made dancing illegal! And while the law applied across the city, most of the dance clubs that stayed open until dawn were the jazz clubs.
To make matters worse, the city eventually gave licensing authority over to the New York Police Department, who required that everyone working in the nightlife scene had to carry personal “Cabaret Cards” in order to perform for New York’s upstanding citizens, and the police determined for themselves who was of character. For musicians, the fates of their careers now laid in the hands of the police, and it made matters a little more complicated.
Let me explain. To get your own card, you had to line up at the police station to be photographed, fingerprinted, interviewed — the whole nine. Any prior record usually meant your application was denied, and they sent you on your way, empty-handed and ineligible to earn your livelihood. Of course, you could appeal the decision to the courts, if you could afford a lawyer, and sometimes the police took cash bribes, but a lot of musicians didn’t have that kind of money.
And for those who were issued a Cabaret Card, it could be revoked for any run-in with the cops, no matter who you were. Billie Holiday lost her cabaret card after a drug arrest in 1947. Some think police had been looking for the chance to remove her from the spotlight after her rise to popularity singing the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” to white audiences, awakening them to racial injustices in the US.
♪ "bearing strange fruit" ♪
She served a year in jail, and police still wouldn’t reinstate her card. The ordeal kept her from nightclub stages for more than a decade.
Thelonious Monk has a similar story. His card was taken from him three times, all from drug charges, one of which was on the back end of profiling. He and his white manager were approached in their Bentley while parked in a motel parking lot by Delaware State police. A white woman traveling with a black man was reason enough for altercation, and both were arrested after police found marijuana in the car. But Monk, being one of the few musicians with the rank to pull it off, was able to get his card back through bribes and friends in high places. During the years without one, he gigged on the fringes and made unbilled appearances deep in the boroughs. He even used an alias at the time: Ernie Washington.
And that’s all these musicians could do without eligibility to perform in New York: gig outside the city, fly beneath the radar, or stop playing altogether. It was a devastating blow to the jazz community, an instrument of discrimination.
But there came a major turning point in 1960. White comedian Lord Buckley was performing at the Jazz Gallery when, in the middle of his monologue, police dragged him off the stage. He had failed to cite two minor arrests, both more than 10 years prior, on his cabaret card application, invalidating his permit and making his performance technically illegal. Forced from his livelihood, Buckley suffered a stroke and died only three weeks after his arrest, much to the outrage of the arts community.
To add to fuel to the fire, Frank Sinatra refused to apply for a card in protest of the system. And yet, he’d performed at the Copacabana, a scandal printed in front-page headlines, and one that sparked one of the largest police investigations in New York City’s history. One thousand officers inspected almost 2500 clubs, which revealed more unlicensed workers in even the most popular clubs, including comedian Joey Adams and Ukrainian singer Sophie Tucker. And still, after all this, mayor Robert Wagner reported no substantial evidence of corruption, and the cabaret cards remained in effect for six more years until they were finally overturned in 1967 under new governance.
As for Charlie Parker, he finally did get his card back in 1953 but died only two years later at 34-years-young. The coroner estimated his age to be almost double. Of course, years of depression and substance abuse did a number on him, but almost certainly the loss of his career in New York added to the weight of the world for Bird.
With stories like Charlie Parker’s, you gotta wonder, what might have happened in jazz history had it not been for the cabaret licensing system? Obviously, Bird's heroin habit drove him closer to death, but how would he have fared if he hadn’t been forced out of New York to earn his wage? If bebop developed in an incubator between Bird and Dizzy Gillespie, just think about the costs of keeping these musicians apart. Imagine the collaborations Billie Holiday and Thelonious Monk might have found for themselves; How would the music sound different today? In a corrupt legal system designed to purify New York’s nightlife scene, all it took was the power of a little piece of cardstock to change the music forever.