Harlem Stomp!

by Laban Carrick Hill

  The Dark Tower and other social events like it gave African Americans the opportunity to stand above whites by making them come uptown to their community. The implications of this was that whites would have to learn to fit in with blacks, and not the other way around.

  Geraldyn Dismond, society reporter for the black Interstate Tattler, vividly described one of the Dark Tower gatherings:

  A’Lelia Walker

  What a crowd! All classes and colors met face to face, ultra aristocrats, Bourgeois, Communists, Park Avenue galore, bookers, publishers, Broadway celebs, Harlemites giving each other the once over. The social revolution was on. And yes, Lady Nancy Cunard was there all in black (she would) with twelve of her grand bracelets. . . . And was the entertainment on the up and up! Into swell dance music was injects of African drums that played havoc with blood pressure. Jimmy Daniels and his gigilo hits, Gus Simons, the Harlem crooner, made the “River Stay Away From His Door” and Taylor himself brought out everything from “Hot Dog” to “Bravo” when he made high C.

  Interpretation of Harlem Jazz, 1925, Winold Reiss.

  STOMPIN’

  AT THE SAVOY

  MUSIC AND DANCE OF THE RENAISSANCE

  Put it this way. Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.

  — DUKE ELLINGTON

  THE JAM

  THE PARTY WAS ON, and Harlem was at the center of what F. Scott Fitzgerald came to call “The Jazz Age.” And the Harlem speakeasy was the epicenter of it all because that’s where the jazz was. Blaring trumpets, hot clarinets, and booming drums could be heard up and down Lexington Avenue. These sounds called people from the streets to come in, brush off their troubles, and dance! In the 1920s, jazz was dance music that made your foot tap and your hips sway. It was an exuberant, carefree music with a driving rhythm and a blistering melody. It was the kind of music that speakeasy owners loved because it kept customers dancing — which guaranteed they’d work up a giant thirst. (Speakeasies were places that sold alcohol illegally.)

  HARLEM’S JAZZ GENIUSES

  LOUIS “SATCHMO” ARMSTRONG, 1900–1971

  LOUIS ARMSTRONG got his nickname “Satchmo” because he had a big mouth. As a child he was first called “Dippermouth” and then “Satchelmouth,” which later morphed into a shortened “Satchmo.” In the 1920s, Armstrong changed the ensemble nature of jazz and turned it into a soloist’s art. He played so loudly and so uniquely that he single-handedly invented the improvised solo, while his vocal stylizations exhibited a new kind of rhythmic elasticity, called scat, that revolutionized jazz singing. Recordings such as The Last Time (1927), I Can’t Give You Anything But Love (1929), and Heebie Jeebies (1926) created a whole new kind of jazz in the twenties.

  DUKE ELLINGTON, 1899–1974

  EDWARD KENNEDY ELLINGTON moved to New York from Washington, D.C., to study art at the Pratt Institute, but it was jazz that lured him out of the classroom and into nightclubs. In 1918 he organized his own jazz band, and during the 1920s he performed regularly at all of Harlem’s hottest clubs, including five years at the famous Cotton Club. His influence was tremendous as a pianist, composer, and conductor. More than any other musician at the time, Ellington expanded on the narrowly conceived formalism of jazz to make it broader and more open-ended.

  “Louis Armstrong’s overwhelming message is one of love. When you hear his music, it’s of joy.

  . . . He was just not going to be defeated by the forces of life.”

  — Wynton Marsalis, jazz trumpeter

  A Selection from Langston Hughes’s 100 Favorite Recordings, The First Book of Jazz

  Back Water Blues

  Bessie Smith

  Columbia (1927)

  Christopher Columbus

  Fletcher Henderson

  Decca (1936)

  Dippermouth Blues

  King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band

  Brunswick (1923)

  I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter

  Fats Waller

  Victor (1935)

  Minnie the Moocher

  Cab Calloway

  Brunswick (1930)

  Memphis Blues and Others

  W. C. Handy

  Audio Archives (1912)

  St. Louis Blues

  Louis Armstrong

  Okeh (1929)

  The Mooche

  Duke Ellington

  Victor (1928)

  TEN BASIC ELEMETNTS OF JAZZ

  From The First Book of Jazz by Langston Hughes

  SYNCOPATION This is a shifting of the normal rhythmic stress from the strong beat to the weak beat, accenting the offbeat, and playing one rhythm against another in such a way that listeners want to move, nod heads, clap hands, or dance. Syncopation is basic and continuous in jazz, and upon it are built very complex rhythms.

  IMPROVISATION This is composing as one plays, or making up variations on old themes directly on the instrument being played rather than from written notes. The interest and beauty of improvisation depends on the talent and the ability of the individual performer. PERCUSSION The drums provide jazz with its basic beat, but the banjo or guitar, the string bass or tuba, and the piano also provide percussion. Any or all of these instruments may make up the rhythm section of a jazz band. Chords may be used as a beat to create harmonized percussion.

  RHYTHM In jazz this is not limited to percussion beats alone. The variations of volume, tone, and pitch may also be used in such a way as to give to a jazz performance additional accents of sound-rhythm, played against a variety of counter-rhythms supplied by the percussion.

  BLUE NOTES These are glissando or slurred notes, somewhere between flat and natural, derived from the blues as sung, and sliding into intervals between major and minor. Blue notes are impossible to notate exactly, but when written down on paper they are frequently indicated by the flatted third or seventh notes of the scale.

  TONE COLOR Jazz instruments may take on the varied tones of the singing or speaking voice, even of laughter or of groans, in a variety of tonal colorations. At one time different instruments may be playing different melodies.

  HARMONY In jazz, harmony makes frequent use of the blue note, the blue scale, the seventh and ninth chords, and the “close” harmony of the old barbershop style of chromatic singing, which is carried over into instrumentation.

  BREAK This is a very brief syncopated interlude, usually of two to four bars, between musical phrases — often improvised in unwritten jazz. Armstrong is famous for his breaks.

  RIFF This is a single rhythmic phrase repeated over and over, usually as a background to the lead melody. A riff may be used also as a melodic theme in itself.

  JOY OF PLAYING This is the element that gives jazz its zest and verve, its happy, dancing quality, that brings musicians of all races together in impromptu jam sessions. Here new musical ideas are born as the musicians play together for hours without written music — just for fun.

  CUTTING CONTESTS

  JAMES P. JOHNSON, “the Father of Stride Piano,” Willie “the Lion” Smith, and Thomas “Fats” Waller were just three of the great stride pianists of the twenties who specialized in what they called “orchestral piano,” which featured expressive, widespread chords juxtaposing the left hand’s loping style with the right hand’s melody. After gigs, these and other striders would produce dazzling up-tempo pyrotechnics on the piano as they competed in ferocious late-night cutting contests. William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholoff Smith, better known as Willie “the Lion” Smith, described these contests:

  Sometimes we got carving battles going that would last for four or five hours. We would embroider the melodies with our own original ideas and try to develop patterns that had more originality than those played before us. Sometimes it was just a question of who could think up the most patterns within a given tune. It was pure improvisation. You had to have your own individual style and be able to play in all the keys. In those days we could all copy each other’s shouts by learning them by ear. Sometimes, in order to keep
the others from picking up too much of my stuff, I’d perform in the hard keys, B major and E major.

  In these competitions striders would perform their most difficult and complex arrangements to see who was top dog. Only the most nimble hands survived these lightning-quick competitions.

  “It was pure improvisation.”

  — Willie “the Lion” Smith

  Fats Waller

  “At the Savoy Ballroom, social, racial, and economic problems fade away to nothingness.”

  — Amsterdam News

  THE STOMP

  Jazz wasn’t just music. It was music to dance to. Harlem nightclubs were the center of all the new steps — the Charleston, the lindy hop, the black bottom, truckin’, snakehips, the break, and more. This illustration by Miguel Covarrubias is of two dancers doing the lindy hop, one of Harlem’s dances that caught fire across America.

  OPENING NIGHT AT THE SAVOY BALLROOM

  WITHOUT QUESTION THE Savoy was the hottest, wildest, and most integrated dance club in Harlem — “The Home of Happy Feet.” On opening night, March 12, 1927, four thousand people — from kitchen mechanics to the Talented Tenth to white café society — descended to “trip the light fantastic,” to clap hands to the Charleston, to truck around the dance floor, and to swing out doing the ballroom’s own lindy hop. It was the lindy that morphed into the swing era’s jitterbug.

  The Savoy Ballroom, a low, white stucco building, spanned an entire block along Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st Streets. Patrons entered through a pair of double doors into a grand lobby dominated by a huge, cut-glass chandelier.

  Patrons paid from forty cents to a dollar to enter, ascended a mirrored stairwell up two flights, and were greeted by the rhythm of a big band. The music bounced across the blocklong dance floor — 50 feet wide and 250 feet long. At one end stood a raised bandstand. Unlike most dance clubs, the Savoy had two bandstands so that the music never stopped between sets. On opening night Fess Williams, cut in a diamond- and ruby- studded suit, led his Royal Flush Orchestra out onto the bandstand. Williams blew a hot reed on his clarinet while his band played driving jazz with a heavy rhythm. Later that evening the Savoy Bearcats swung into the groove, and after midnight Fletcher Henderson and his Rainbow Orchestra blew the doors off the place.

  THE SAVOY’S WEEKLY SPECIALS

  TUESDAY

  The 400 Club — only serious dancers allowed.

  THURSDAY

  Kitchen Mechanics Night — ladies admitted free.

  SATURDAY

  Square’s Night Out — white downtowners and wannabes.

  SUNDAY

  Glamour Night — movie stars, performers, and selected international elite.

  Over the next few years the biggest names in big-band jazz would set the dance rhythms at the Savoy — Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Fess Williams, Chick Webb, and King Oliver.

  “Out on the dance floor, everyone, dickty and rat, rubbed joyous elbows, laughing, mingling, forgetting differences, but whenever the music stopped everyone immediately sought their own level.”

  — Rudolf Fisher on the Savoy Ballroom

  HARLEMANIA

  BY THE MID-TWENTIES Harlem was the place to be for nightlife, and it remained that way until the Wall Street crash in 1929. A love of everything Harlem was just about everywhere, from the all-black Broadway revues downtown to Paris’s hot jazz bands. Harlem was on everyone’s mind — even whites, and not only the white supporters of the renaissance’s literature but also trendsetters such as Princess Violette Murat, Mayor James J. Walker, Lady Mountbatten, and screen star Harold Lloyd. It was fashionable to have played in the nightclubs and cabarets of Harlem. That did not mean, however, that whites wanted to socialize with blacks as equals. Consequently, a whole industry of white clubs arose, offering black exotica at a distance. These were the Jim Crow nightclubs in the heart of Harlem.

  Gangster Owney “The Killer” Madden, one of the most notorious criminals of the era, presided over the most famous of these establishments — the Cotton Club. Located on 142nd Street near Lenox Avenue, the Cotton Club opened in 1923, shortly after Madden completed a prison sentence for murder. Ironically, white socialites felt more comfortable rubbing elbows with a murderer than with the black working class.

  The Cotton Club had a log cabin exterior and interior and featured jungle décor. Bandleader Cab Calloway, who first performed there in 1930, described the club:

  The bandstand was a replica of a southern mansion with large white columns and a backdrop painted with weeping willows and slave quarters. . . .

  The waiters were dressed in red tuxedos, like butlers in a southern mansion, and . . . there were huge cut-crystal chandeliers.

  Once inside, white revelers could do the Charleston on the dance floor and watch the all-black revues from the safe distance of their café tables. The entertainment featured an extravagant mix of dancing, vaudeville, and the great Duke Ellington and his orchestra. These shows would often last for at least two hours, which was more on the level of a Broadway show than a nightclub performance.

  At the Cotton Club the chorus line was composed exclusively of “high yaller” female dancers who were under twenty-one years of age and over five feet six inches.

  In a still from a 1929 motion picture called Black and Tan, Duke Ellington and his orchestra preside over a stage show at the Cotton Club.

  “The chief ingredient was pace, pace, pace! The show was generally built around types: the band, an eccentric dancer, a comedian —

  whoever we had who was also a star. . . . And we’d have a special singer who gave the customers the expected adult song in Harlem.”

  — Dan Healy, singer, dancer, comic, and producer of the Cotton Club shows

  “Got the world in a jug, got the stopper in my hand.”

  — Bessie Smith, “Down Hearted Blues”

  Variety’s List of White Nightclubs in Harlem

  The Cotton Club

  Connie’s Inn

  The Nest Club

  Small’s Paradise

  Barron’s

  The Spider Web

  The Saratoga Club

  Ward’s Swanee

  Pod’s and Jerry’s Catagonia Club

  The Bamboo Inn

  The Lenox

  At Small’s Paradise, one of the top Jim Crow clubs, waiters danced the Charleston and spun their trays as they worked their way through the tables.

  With whites taking the A train uptown in unprecedented numbers, blacks felt exactly as Bessie Smith expressed in her classic blues song — that everything was under control. It did not matter that most whites were heading for the Jim Crow nightclubs from which blacks were excluded, because it was their music and their performers that the “ofays” came to see. (“Ofay” was a derogatory term based on the pig latin of “foe” and used by blacks to describe whites.) Harlemites reveled in this magnificent change in status after years of having been at best ignored and at worst lynched, but they didn’t overlook the fact that they were not being invited downtown. Many believed that the acceptance of jazz and the increased visibility of black culture were just the first steps in their becoming true citizens of the United States. For them, they had the stopper in their hand, and nobody was going to take it away.

  African-American performer Bert Williams in black face.

  HERITAGE UNBOUND

  BLACKS AND THE AMERICAN THEATER

  We wear the mask that grins and lies.

  — PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

  NO MORE MASKS

  April 5, 1917, is the date of the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American theatre; for it marks the beginning of a new era. On that date a performance of three dramatic plays was given by the Coloured Players at the Garden Theatre in Madison Square Garden, New York, and the stereotyped traditions regarding the Negro’s histrionic limitations were smashed.

  JAMES WELDON JOHNSON used this forceful language to describe three one-act plays written
by white playwright Ridgely Torrence. What made Torrence’s plays, The Rider of Dreams, Granny Maumee, and Simon the Cyrenian, so groundbreaking was the fact that they depicted African-American characters far removed from the “coons” of a minstrel show.

  A drawing of Simon the Cyrenian made by Djuna Barnes to accompany her review of Ridgely Torrence’s Three Plays for a Negro Theatre.

  American theater had traditionally portrayed African Americans in an extremely narrow way that had no real connection to black culture and its music, dance, or arts. Two stereotypes — Jim Crow and Jim Dandy (or Zip Coon) — dominated the white stage. Jim Crow was the rough, coarse barbarian who wore tattered clothes. Jim Dandy was a slick urban fop, slightly feminine and dressed to the nines. Both of these characters were created and played by white actors who were “blacked up” with burnt cork. In short, African Americans were portrayed on stage as either comic or pathetic. Overall, the stock black character was childlike, lazy, slow moving, and a victim of his bodily appetites. He was all mouth, gullet, and stomach. In fact, minstrels even made themselves up with huge lips suggesting a cavernous mouth.

  It was because of these bigoted depictions that Torrence’s one-act plays had such a powerful effect on American theater. Critics hailed the plays’ originality and even named two of the actors, Opal Cooper and Inex Clough, among the top-ten performers of the year. “Nobody who saw Opal Cooper — and heard him as the dream Madison Sparrow — will ever forget the lift his performance gave,” wrote Theatre Magazine’s Edith Isaacs.