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S01E01 - "Running Wild" (The New York Cabaret Laws)
299 Plays1 year ago
We introduce our new podcast, the first season of which aims to examine the development of new music in New York in the first half of the 1970s.
We then skip back to the period following the repeal of Prohibition to discuss the restrictive effect of the 1926 Cabaret Laws which massively affected how small music clubs were able to operate in New York, and the personal impact of the regulations on artists such as Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and Thelonius Monk. We also consider how the administrative reforms introduced by progressive Mayor John Lindsay removed some of the more destructive effects on performing musicians.
Books:
Paul Chevigny: "Gigs: Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City"
Songs:
Fats Waller - "Aint Misbehavin'" / Billie Holiday - "T'Aint Nobody's Business If I Do" / Thelonius Monk - "Blue Monk" (Live at The Five Spot 1968) / Zoot Sims - "“Lover Come Back to Me” – Live at The Half Note NYC 1959
EMCK
Recommended
Transcript
Exploring Alternative Music Histories
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Season 1, Episode 1 of Real Gone. We are a new podcast aimed at discussing alternative music histories. We're going to focus on specific cities during certain periods of time and try to examine the social and political conditions that have driven the creation of new music and art.
1970s NYC: A Musical Backdrop
00:00:15
Speaker
We're going to spend these next few episodes in New York City discussing primarily the progression of new music around the first half of the 1970s. In this first episode we're going to set the backdrop for the city at that point in time and then run through the legacy of the 1926 cabaret laws which massively impacted how jazz music in the city was played for most of the 20th century and also how clubs playing dance music were regulated.
Preview of Upcoming Episodes
00:00:39
Speaker
In the second episode we'll move on to discuss some of the musical and organizational innovations in experimental jazz
00:00:45
Speaker
notably those taking place in the loft jazz scene, and how those developments fostered a spirit of artistic independence for local musicians. In later episodes, we'll examine how legal reforms enhancing gay representation in New York bars and nightclubs dovetailed with the emergence of disco, how mixed media art venues like The Kitchen and the artistic colonisation of Soho consolidated the downtown experimental arts scene, and finally, how the establishment of DJ culture in the Bronx led to the birth of hip-hop.
Social and Political Climate of 1970s NYC
00:01:22
Speaker
It's difficult to paint a pretty picture of New York City in the early 1970s. The social and political upheaval of the late 1960s throughout the United States had not left NYC unaffected, and there were no shortage of social issues or transformative events for the city to grapple with during this time. The Stonewall riots on 20 June 1969 had exposed the vulnerability of gay people in a city where clandestine social congregation was still a necessity, and even then, overly dependent on mafia protection and police corruption.
00:01:52
Speaker
The Christopher Street Liberation Day march on June 28, 1970, the first gay pride parade to take place in US history, with 2,000 marchers in attendance, marked the anniversary of the infamous police raid and subsequent riots that occurred one year earlier at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar located on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. The 1970 march represented a turning point gay representation in mainstream American society.
00:02:17
Speaker
The hard-hat riots at Wall Street on Bloody Friday, yet the May 1970, saw high school and college students subjected to an organized attack by hundreds of local construction workers, many of whom had been working on the construction of the World Trade Center in the Financial District. The students had organized the public rally to protest the killings of four students at Kent State University only four days before by the Ohio National Guard during a campus protest against the Vietnam War.
00:02:43
Speaker
Reactionary construction workers, unaccepting of anti-war protests in the previous days, flag burning by anti-war demonstrators, and Mayor John Lindsay's decision to fly the American flag at half-mast in New York, out of respect to those killed at Kent State, broke through the thin police line of the student protest, and attacked students and office workers with their hard hats and other weapons, including tools and steel toe boots. Riding construction workers then attacked buildings near City Hall,
00:03:09
Speaker
and stormed the newly built Pace University Building, smashing lobby windows, assaulting students and professors. The fact that Pace was a conservative, business-oriented school did not seem to matter, the motivation of the attack being an assault on any person or institution seemingly unsympathetic to their more patriotic American viewpoint. Parallels between Bloody Friday and the January 6th Capitol riots were easily drawn.
00:03:32
Speaker
that these attacks went largely unchallenged by the supervising police and President Nixon's invitation of the hardhat union leaders to the White House days later underlined the massive generational gulf in attitudes to the ongoing involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War and the disconnect between the young residents of the city and those local authorities charged with protecting them.
00:03:52
Speaker
The death of 43 men during the Attica Prison riots in September 1971 exemplified the racial tensions that had gone well beyond boiling point throughout the country and the increasingly militaristic methods of addressing them employed by the US government, in this case represented by New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller in consultation with President Richard Nixon.
Impact of Industrial Decline and Crime
00:04:12
Speaker
There were severe effects from industrial decline in the city during this period, with 1 million manufacturing jobs lost since 1945, 500,000 of them since 1969. Dereliction, particularly in downtown Manhattan, was widespread. The city's already high unemployment rates increased, and many middle class families, more than 820,000 people in total, migrated to the suburbs in search of employment, and in many cases to escape the escalating crime rate.
00:04:40
Speaker
leaving a hefty dent in the city's tax base at a time when public funds were urgently needed. By 1975, much to the dismay of the Board of Tourism, local police were handing out flyers to new arrivals at NYC airports titled Welcome to Fierce City, a survival guide for visitors to the city of New York. Crime, especially violent crime, had been increasing rapidly for years. The number of murders in the city had more than doubled over the past decade.
00:05:05
Speaker
from 681 in 1965 to 1690 in 1975. Car thefts and assaults had also more than doubled in the same period, rape and burglaries had more than tripled, and robberies had gone up an astonishing tenfold. The feeling that residents were living in a real-life Gotham city, where the social order was breaking down, was only reinforced by the violent dystopian cinema of the Warriors, Death Wish, Taxi Driver, The French Connection, and Escape from New York
00:05:35
Speaker
The pressures of economic stagnation and the looming threat of bankruptcy, climaxing in the fiscal crisis of 1975, led to massive cuts in municipal services throughout the 1970s, including public transport, sanitation, health and educational programs.
Cultural Creativity Amid Economic Austerity
00:05:50
Speaker
Budget cuts fell heaviest on the city's public workforce. In May 1975, Mayor Abe Beam announced severe reductions in salaries, pensions and a dramatic change in working conditions, along with redundancies for 52,000 city workers. More than one-sixth of its public employees, with policemen, firemen, teachers and sanitation workers among them,
00:06:11
Speaker
widespread union protests followed, with garbage men on the two day wildcat strike leaving 48,000 tonnes of trash to percolate in the June sunshine, and many of the 7,000 teachers laid off, marching in protest with signs that read, Fear City, Stink City, and now Stupid City.
00:06:29
Speaker
Economically, it would take some time for the city to recover, and the late 1970s represented a period of severe austerity for many. The reconstruction of New York as a global hub for financial services and corporate management was some years off, but in the meantime, the city was about to undergo nothing short of a cultural revolution. The physical dereliction of downtown Manhattan allowed creative musicians, filmmakers and other artists to effectively colonize the abandoned commercial space.
00:06:56
Speaker
steady migration of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants to New York City throughout the 1960s, together with African Americans migrating from the southern states during and after the Jim Crow era helped create an ethnically diverse city and enriched its musical culture. The bureaucratic licensing restrictions placed on nightlife throughout New York prompted a community of visionary souls to create their own underground night world with free musical expression and dance music as its twin driving forces.
00:07:23
Speaker
The 1970s was a period of relentless creativity in music and art throughout New York. Outsider artists and marginalized minorities created their own venues of artistic and social interaction. Disco and dance music espoused the notion of the dance floor and nightclub as places of community and personal freedom, with racial diversity as a catalyst for radical sonic innovation and the concepts of joy and love being communicated as a communal experience.
00:07:48
Speaker
The emergence of LGBT culture and the consolidation of the gay rights movement, the elevation of the DJ and remixer to the status of credible musical artists, and the establishment of art and nightlife as an effective bridge between different sectors of society were further signs of a new culture and a city being reclaimed. The music and art of the time was catalyzed and amplified by the city itself, and able to grow organically with the efforts and influence of the unique characters emerging from within and arriving from abroad,
00:08:17
Speaker
at a time when the monolith of MTV had not yet come into orbit, and the efforts of the major labels to control musical output was more easily supplanted by independent pioneers and boots on the ground and dance floors of both public and private. The creativity of that time and the inventiveness of the music arguably remains unmatched in American popular culture.
Birth of Diverse Music Genres and Club Culture
00:08:36
Speaker
This period saw the birth of disco, salsa, punk, art rock, electro, hip-hop, mutant disco, new wave, no wave, drone, the creative expansion of pop, rock, avant-garde jazz, neo-minimalist music, and the establishment of club culture and alternative art as credible and permanent features of the cultural landscape. For all its manifest dangers, creative people flocked in New York like Moss do a light bulb during the 1970s, attracted by its constantly shifting dynamics and irrepressible energy.
Cabaret Laws and Their Cultural Impact
00:09:24
Speaker
Before we get to the 1970s, we're going to spend some time looking at how legislative changes imposed on York during the period following the end of prohibition affected its performing musicians. That last piece of music was Fats Waller, Playing Ain't Misbehaven, recorded in 1929 shortly after the introduction of New York's Cabaret Laws.
00:09:44
Speaker
New York's reputation as the cultural centre of the United States during the 1950s and 60s did not mean this was the easiest place in the world to be an artist, particularly a black artist, or to see live music, or to dance. Despite the abundance of incredible music and art in this period and throughout the 1970s, this was not a city, at least a governmental level, that made it straightforward for artists to succeed or nightlife to flourish.
00:10:08
Speaker
Much of this difficulty can be attributed to the legacy of the city's 1926 cabaret laws, which facilitated a broadly conservative and, in practice, racist approach to how live musical performance and social dancing were policed in New York. The law set closing hours at 3am and prohibited dancing by more than three people in any New York room, place or space that sold food or drinks, unless that space had a cabaret license.
00:10:34
Speaker
This requirement may sound innocuous, were it not for the fact that obtaining a cabaret license was extremely difficult, often impossible due to the expense of applying the cost and practical difficulty of implementing measures to satisfy various governmental regulations and the limited number of areas that would qualify for cabaret use under the city's inflexible zoning rules. Essentially, licensed clubs could not exist legally outside of certain areas traditionally zoned for commercial use.
00:11:02
Speaker
While various amendments were made to the law over the years, the core regulation survived amazingly until 2017, at which point it was still illegal for more than three people to dance in any unlicensed New York space. The difficulty of procuring a cabaret license is evidenced by the fact that in 2017, only about 127 of the city's more than 12,000 clubs and bars actually had cabaret licenses. This is not to say there was no dancing or live music in New York City throughout the 20th century,
00:11:31
Speaker
The cabaret law meant that club operators often lived a precarious existence, constantly subject to random raids and often closures, depending on the extent to which the law was being enforced by the authorities at any given time. The cabaret law was initially enacted in 1926 at the behest of Mayor Jimmy Walker, with the supposed intent of helping police regulate speakeasies during prohibition when the consumption of alcohol was illegal.
00:11:56
Speaker
This coincided with the peak of the Harlem Renaissance, a rich period of black American music and literature. The use of the word cabaret as a term for classifying York's historic supper clubs is indicative of the manner in which such venues fell short of the more esteemed classification of theatre. This meant the criteria for theatre licensing was not deemed suitable, and new regulations were therefore deemed necessary.
00:12:19
Speaker
By the time the city began regulating cabarets in 1926, actual cabaret clubs had mostly been eradicated by prohibition. When the city passed its licensing ordinance, it was essentially licensing speakeasies. Some were as elegant as the more famous historic cabarets, but most venues were basic joints with music and dancing.
00:12:41
Speaker
Part of the motivation behind the 1926 law was to challenge the racketeers operating those seedier venues. Significantly, places of entertainment in large hotels, where music and dancing also took place, were exempted from the requirement to obtain a cabaret license. Many saw this as racial and class discrimination.
00:12:59
Speaker
with the city seemingly happy not to restrict activity at more respectable upper-class locations, as opposed to dingy speakeasies and Harlem music clubs, the focal centre for jazz in the city at that point. The tune of jazz and tabloid entertainment is a phrase expressly referred to in the Aldermans' commentary which accompanied the 1926 legislation.
00:13:20
Speaker
In practice, the cabaret law was used as a vehicle for arbitrarily targeting and closing down Harlem Jazz Clubs, which primarily catered to an African American audience, but also saw white and black people congregate together. Many saw the law as a means for the city authorities to expunge this form of social interaction.
00:13:38
Speaker
It's difficult to argue against this viewpoint when one considers that the law not only effectively banned dancing in unlicensed nightclubs, but also limited permitted instruments to strings, keyboards and electronics and systems, leaving out jazz stables like wind, percussion and brass. In addition, it prohibited more than three musicians from playing at one time, provisions that impacted Harlem jazz clubs and jazz bands the most.
Racial and Class Discrimination in Jazz Clubs
00:14:02
Speaker
Under the cabaret law, music was not permitted at unlicensed bars at all until 1936, when the law was amended to allow radio and piano playing. The conservative sentiment behind the law is apparent from the report attached to the original legislation, where it expressly states, there has been altogether too much running wild in some of these nightclubs, and in the judgment of your committee, the wild stranger and the foolish native should have the check re-in applied a little bit.
00:14:29
Speaker
It is well known that the wild strangers are not at all interested in our great museums of art and history, in our magnificent churches and public libraries, our splendid parks and public monuments. Your committee believes that these wild people should not be tumbling out of these resorts at six or seven o'clock in the morning to the scandal and annoyance of decent residents on their way to daily employment.
00:14:49
Speaker
In 1931, the administration of cabaret licensing, with the exception of zoning and fire safety functions, was handed over to the NYPD. Police authority was applied as an instrument of control over not only musicians but all cabaret club employees, including waiters and kitchen staff.
00:15:07
Speaker
In 1943 the government added a sinister new amendment mandating that NYC musicians and staff working in licensed premises obtain a so-called cabaret card in order to perform or attend work. This required that they undergo fingerprinting and questioning by the NYPD. Cards were denied to people deemed not to be of good character and it was unlawful for clubs to hire staff who did not have a cabaret card.
00:15:31
Speaker
Black jazz musicians were deeply affected by these regulations. My right to pursue my chosen profession has been taken away and my wife and three children who are innocent of any wrongdoing or suffering wrote Charlie Parker in a letter to the New York State Liquor Authority after his card was revoked over a heroin charge in 1951.
00:15:49
Speaker
Parker's card was reinstated in 1953, but he died in 1955, partly from conditions related to stress and self-destructive tendencies built up during his two years without a card. Many other Jahaz legends, including Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk and Billie Holiday also had their cabaret cards suspended, often due to drug use. Monk had his cabaret card revoked in 1948 after an arrest for marijuana possession,
00:16:14
Speaker
again in 1951 after a narcotics arrest with pop-piano pioneer Bud Powell, and yet again in 1957 after an altercation with a Delaware State trooper. Monk, who experienced difficulty with life outside of music, did not recover his card for six years after this last arrest, and only then with the assistance of influential friends, only at this point did he launch his famous quartet at the five spot. How many other brilliant musicians fell through the cracks during these years due to some irrelevant offence?
00:16:44
Speaker
Miles Davis had recorded his classic album, Kind of Blue, at the Columbia 30th Street Studios in New York in April 1959. The stellar lineup of musicians supporting him on that album included saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, Penis Bill Evans, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb.
00:17:02
Speaker
Tragically, this line-up was dissolved due to an altercation between Miles and the police one week after the album's release. After being assaulted by police outside his own show at Birdland on 25th August 1959, and being placed in the local precinct cells over bogus charges of disorderly conduct, Miles Davis had his cabaret card suspended, meaning Miles was unable to play live with his kind of blue line-up.
00:17:24
Speaker
Even for musicians as reputable as Thelonious Monk or Miles Davis, finding somewhere to play live in public during these periods of suspension was virtually impossible. Their form of post bebop jazz was not the type of music that large theatres were concerned with for the most part, so the ability to perform in small music clubs was essential.
00:17:44
Speaker
Maxwell Cohen, a lawyer who campaigned for the repeal of the cabaret card requirement in the 1950s, pointed to the original motivation behind the regulation as being anti-radical. It was a presidential directive in 1939 for governmental departments to prepare a list of persons adverse to the security interests of the United States. The unions, particularly the Waiters Union, were considered to be dominated by communist sympathizers
00:18:09
Speaker
Police became involved in passing on the qualifications of waiters and chefs to help break strike action. Any criminal offence, even offences committed as a minor, meant a person could not work. The cabaret licensing system could then be, and was often, used as a means of weakening the unions as and when needed. The Workers Union, represented by the Bowdoin firm, with New York Civil Liberties firm as an amicus curae friend of the court,
00:18:35
Speaker
sued to eliminate the fingerprinting and identity card requirement on the grounds that these measures were beyond the legal powers of the police commissioner. However, state courts had no difficulty in upholding the regulations. They often cited the main incentive for doing so as being, supposedly, the protection of patrons within the cabaret clubs from the corrupting influence of potentially criminal employees.
00:18:57
Speaker
The alcoholic beverage control law enacted after prohibition forbade employment in a bar of anyone convicted of a felony or other offenses, including narcotics offenses. Paul Scheveny, a New York lawyer who was partly responsible for significant modifications to the cabaret laws during the 1980s,
00:19:14
Speaker
Noted how, the racist impulse to control the supposedly degrading abandon of black music was thus absorbed into a vaguer purpose, more acceptable to contemporary tastes of shielding patrons from undesirable influences. The intangible goal of moral virtue was invoked to unreasonable analogical ends.
00:19:34
Speaker
Musicians and audience members experienced identity card requirements as a denigration of the music they created and listened to. The implication was that there was no freedom of expression for these artists to perform. Billie Holiday was denied a cabaret card for a narcotics conviction and prison term in 1947. You may ask the question, what threat did she pose once released? The city was concerned with her criminal record but seemingly uninterested in the value or positive effect of her artistry.
00:20:02
Speaker
The stupidity of this restriction seems even more farcical when one considers that Billie Holiday, or any other artist with a similar criminal record, could perform in a venue classified as a theatre, or even an outdoor venue such as Central Park, where Billie performed in 1948. Theatres and public parks were obviously not intimate venues, which implies that cabaret laws represented a more concentrated attempt to prevent close contact between performer and audience in the more congested atmosphere of a music club.
00:20:29
Speaker
The common question at the time was why do music club performers have to be treated like gangsters? If I should take a notion to jump into the ocean Ain't nobody's business if I do
00:20:58
Speaker
I go to church all Sunday, then cabaret all day Monday. Ain't nobody's business if I do.
00:21:14
Speaker
The Cabaret Card regulations speak to a deeper truth about black musicians in America, and in a way validate the perception of jazz musicians as perennial musical outsiders, even revolutionaries. This was the mindset for many black artists as more militant ideology was forged throughout the 1960s. As stated again by Paul Cheveny, the city's rules governing the lives of musicians, together with the nature of the places where the music was played,
00:21:39
Speaker
only exemplified, indeed legislated, that status. And many musicians lived that status, making it a part of them. If they played complex and difficult music, and played it as they pleased, they paid the price for it. They rejected and were rejected by the square world.
00:21:54
Speaker
In the late 1950s, the movement to disband the cabaret card requirement gained momentum.
Abolishing Cabaret Card Requirements
00:22:00
Speaker
Local 802, the New York branch of the American Federation of Musicians, lobbied for a state bill to deprive the NYPD of its power to deny a cabaret card if the applicant was accepted under the standards of the State Liquor Authority. By this time, the city had solidified, almost fossilized its ideology, which justified regulations as a means of combating the supposedly corrupting influence of music clubs.
00:22:24
Speaker
Governor Rockefeller vetoed the bill after the Mayor appealed for him to do so. The Mayor's hand forced by the imposition of the Police Commissioner, who cited the peculiar problems in New York City concerning cabarets.
00:22:37
Speaker
Richard Lord Buckley was a hip comedian hired by promoter Joe Termini for a stint at the Jazz Gallery in St Mark's Place. Buckley obtained a cabaret card without having admitted a prior arrest for marijuana possession and another for public drunkenness. When police became aware of this and picked up his fingerprinting record, they stormed the Jazz Gallery, as if thwarting a bank robbery.
00:22:58
Speaker
and ordered Buckley to leave the stage mid-set, the ultimate heckle, without even giving him a chance to finish his show. Buckley was told he would be granted a cabaret card if he performed at a police function, an honour legion dinner, and paid $100 to the Deputy Commissioner, which he dutifully did. This assurance was never honoured, and Lord Buckley died of a stroke before his application for a new cabaret card was granted.
00:23:21
Speaker
The hypocrisy was obvious. Buckley was deemed legally unfit to perform his own show because of historic offences, but the NYPD had no moral concerns about him performing at one of their own benefits. In November 1960, Nina Simone, Quincy Jones, the Village Gate nightclub, and dissidents in the Musicians' Union filed a lawsuit against the Cabaret licensing system in the Supreme Court, again with the services of lawyer Max Cohen.
00:23:47
Speaker
Their unsuccessful efforts triggered a reactionary crackdown on major jazz venues such as the Copacabana, the Stork Club and El Morocco. All these clubs had their licenses suspended, albeit temporarily, for employing unlicensed workers.
00:24:02
Speaker
In the early 1960s, with the progression of the Cold War, the New York Times and the establishment media began to take the popular arts in America more seriously, with more attention and publicity given to reviews and performance. In spring 1961, Congressman and later Mayor of the city John Lindsay commented on a proposed transfer of administrative authority for cabaret licensing from the NYPD to the Department for Licensing at the direction of then Mayor Robert F. Wagner.
00:24:30
Speaker
Lindsay considered the requirement for work permits to be an unreasonable exercise of the city's police power. In 1966, Congressman John Lindsay became Mayor of New York City and brought with him a more positive agenda for popular culture and urban life that was in stark contrast to the approach of his predecessors during a time when the emphasis was being placed on suburbanisation following the expansion of the automobile industry.
00:24:55
Speaker
You may remember John Lindsay from his appearance in the brilliant 2020 documentary Summer of Soul about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. The overwhelming sense of goodwill shown by the audience to Lindsay is evident on screen. Lindsay expressed the determination to eliminate the fingerprinting requirements and the cabaret card requirement generally. A task that had proven so difficult for outsiders turned out to be relatively straightforward for the new mayor to resolve.
00:25:20
Speaker
In pressing the City Council to pass a bill to abolish the requirement that musicians and cabaret staff undergo fingerprinting registration, the Mayor's Office soon realised that none was needed. The requirement for fingerprinting had commenced as the result of a 1940 administrative decision.
00:25:35
Speaker
and just as easily was removed by Mayor Lindsay's order. When the bill to ratify the Mayor's decision to eliminate the licensing requirement for music club employees came up in City Council in 1967, the Licence Commissioner highlighted the dubiousness of prior assertions that these restrictions somehow served to protect the safety of the public. Also mentioned was the indignity which had been imposed on musicians, dancers and club workers affected by the cabaret licensing system. The bill passed with only one vote in opposition,
00:26:05
Speaker
A telegram from Frank Sinatra was read out at the City Council meeting, critiquing the demeaning requirements that New York has imposed on its entertainers. Credit to old blue eyes, Sinatra had refused to play alive in the city, in the prime of his career, until the requirement for artists to carry a Capraet card was scrapped.
00:26:24
Speaker
The abolition of the Cabaret card system was an example of how a shift in social attitudes and administrative practice without even the need for legislative reform could affect real change. The Cabaret card system simply disappeared without even the necessity of a legal ruling to establish that it was unconstitutional in the first place. However, despite small victories such as the removal of the Cabaret card requirement, the stringency of Cabaret licensing led many venues to close in the next few decades.
00:26:51
Speaker
The elimination of music clubs was often prevalent, where more powerful economic motivations were at play in terms of the intended redevelopment of specific parts of the city.
Economic Challenges and Club Closures
00:27:01
Speaker
On 1st August 1953, it was reported that one side of 52nd Street had been purchased in a land deal, together with music club leases, in order to develop a skyscraper. On 4th August 1953, the Three Juices on 52nd Street was raided by police and its books and permits seized.
00:27:19
Speaker
Its cabaret license was suspended on the 8th of August for failure to keep a proper list of employees, two of whom had been working without cabaret cards. On the same date, this same exercise was enacted against another 52nd Street Jazz Club, the Moulin Rouge. The five spot was a successful jazz club on the Bowery.
00:27:37
Speaker
run by brothers Joe and Iggy Termini since 1956. Thelonious Monk's Quartet, featuring John Coltrane, enjoyed a six-month residency at the venue in 1957. This was also the location of Ornette Coleman Quartet's New York debut in 1959. A proper vintage jazz club.
00:28:11
Speaker
The five-spot move to St. Mark's Place in the East Village in 1962, with a significant decline in the popularity of live jazz during the 1960s. The terminis had let their cabaret license lapse and chose to run the venue instead as a restaurant. When they reapplied for a license in 1974, their application was declined.
00:28:29
Speaker
They ran the club in a non-licensed basis for two years, and eventually closed in 1976. The terminis had been unable to satisfy the updated requirements of the Fire Department, Buildings Department, and the Licensing Department itself, by then part of the Department of Consumer Affairs. The treatment of the terminis in this instance demonstrated what lawyer Paul Scheveny refers to as, at best, the city's ignorance, and at worst, its contempt. This period during the early 1970s, when the five spots sought to re-establish itself as a live music venue,
00:28:59
Speaker
coincided with the rapid growth of discotheques in New York City. The structure of the licensing bracketed music with dancing for the purposes of licensing and zoning. The size of the new discos and the revenue generated by those venues which signaled the ultimate divorce of dancing and live music meant that most clubs could deal with the strict requirements of the cabaret laws while many jazz clubs could not.
00:29:21
Speaker
The licensing authority drew no clear distinction between music-only clubs like the Five Spot and discotheques like Le Chardin and Studio 54. City officials seemed unconcerned with the notion that some smaller financially fragile music venues could create outsized cultural value for the city and were therefore deserving of a more nuanced regulatory approach.
00:29:43
Speaker
The damaging effect of the strict regulatory approach taken by the city towards cabaret-licensed applicants in smaller venues was eased somewhat in the mid-70s when the city's fiscal crisis led to budget cuts, particularly in the Department of Consumer Affairs. Practically speaking, this resulted in some type of acceptance that music clubs should not be classified as cabarets, the absence of dancing being significant. Inspectors were given discretion to relax the application of strict codes where there was not seen to be any real nuisance to the local residents.
Jazz Musicians’ Creative Adaptations
00:30:13
Speaker
It was in these circumstances that experimental jazz flourished in the abandoned industrial lofts of downtown Manhattan, specifically the areas around Houston Street and Broadway, that would eventually become known as Soho, Noho, Tribeca, and also in the East Village. With more adventurous musicians facing an uphill task in finding jobs at local clubs, and with the requirements around maintaining those clubs becoming more complicated,
00:30:35
Speaker
Artists and listeners sought out and created new non-traditional venues that departed from the standard form of jazz venues that had existed in the first half of the 20th century. The artists operating these venues often did not apply for licenses and managed the venues in such a way to ensure that the licensing system was not invoked against them.
00:30:53
Speaker
For example, few of these venues sold alcohol or food in order to avoid the trappings of the cabaret definition. Robust enforcement against smaller music venues for even minor violations by the Cabaret Licensing Authority would re-emerge in the early 1980s when the city's fiscal crisis eased. But the 1970s represents a curious window in time after the rigidity of the post-prohibition period where the presentation of jazz music was able to take on an exciting new form.
00:31:23
Speaker
Between 1957 and 1965, Thelonious Monk and many other musicians like him, Charles Mingus among them, were able to secretly attend places like the 6th Avenue Law Department of Life magazine photographer Eugene Smith to rehearse and workshop ideas. This was effectively a jazz speakeasy, as the commercial zoning of the building situated in New York's Flower District meant that use of the space for residential purposes and as a place of musical performance was illegal.
00:31:52
Speaker
The brilliant 2015 documentary, The Jazz Loft According to W Eugene Smith vividly captures this scene and quietly espouses the DIY community aesthetic that the musicians present adhere to as a means of cultivating and expressing their talent.
00:32:22
Speaker
The use to which Eugene Smith put his apartment was consistent with the approach of artists operating within the New York Jazz Loft scene of the 1970s, populated by the likes of Hornet Coleman, Sam Rivers, Rashid Ali and Anthony Braxton, and was an early indicator of the more organized independent spaces to come, such as the Avant-Jazz Bass Studio Rivbe, the experimental light and sound installation Dreamhouse, created by Lamont Young,
00:32:46
Speaker
and later the mixed media performance space of the kitchen, frequented by Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Arthur Russell and many more.
00:32:55
Speaker
By the early 1970s, the creative energy was flowing, and throughout the city, pockets of vacant loft space left in the wake of widespread de-industrialization were available for artists to develop and manifest their ideas. The repurposing of industrial space was also seized on by promoters and DJs that operated nightclubs in the pre-disco era, with David Mancuso's Loft, Nicky Siano's Gallery, and later Larry Levan's Paradise Garage helping to establish the format for how people to this day experienced dance music
00:33:26
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Next time we're going to discuss the growth of the New York jazz loft seen in the early 1970s, and how these artist collectives managed to develop a musical infrastructure for independent artists in the city.