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August 29, 2022
T. J. English's Playlist for His Book "Dangerous Rhythms"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
T. J. English's Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld shared a thoroughly researched and compelling exploration of organized crime's connection to jazz music.
Richard Price wrote of the book:
"With Dangerous Rhythms, T.J. English once again demonstrates that he is not only our premier chronicler of modern criminal organizations in the U.S.A, and beyond, but also a seductive storyteller, masterfully folding memorable anecdote after anecdote into this diligently researched account of the intersection of jazz and the mob over the last century."
In his own words, here is T. J. English's Book Notes music playlist for his book Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld:
“It’s got guts and it don’t make you slobber.”
-- A Chicago gangster explaining his love for jazz
There are few subjects better attuned to the creation of a playlist than the relationship between jazz and the underworld. The music enthralled the gangsters, who became patrons of the art form almost from its beginnings as a commercial venture. It was primarily a business relationship, with mobsters profiting from the ownership of honky tonks and nightclubs, the juke box racket, recording companies, and, in some cases, the management of major stars like Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Mary Lou Williams, and, of course, Frank Sinatra. Inevitably, the fact that jazz flourished in shady clubs amidst characters of ill repute worked its way into the music itself. The underworld helped to shape the contours of jazz in all its many phases. Here are some examples…
1. “Strange Fruit”/Billie Holiday – This haunting ballad shows how the legacy of lynching in America informed the music of jazz in ways that would ring throughout the ages. For African Americans, the violent reality of life in America was far more terrifying than the idea of partnering with gangsters. The average black jazz musician had more to fear from a white cracker or a policeman than they did an Italian mafioso.
2. “Tight Like This”/Louis Armstrong – Street corner jazz, with verbal riffing and an imperial trumpet solo that drove the gangsters delirious with joy. Music like this motivated the mob to move the music from the streets into the honky tonks and use it as the aural soundtrack and business undergirding of a budding underworld empire.
3. "Muggles”/Louis Armstrong – Muggles was the jazz slang term for marijuana, which Satchmo loved almost as much as the music. Listen to this song and you may catch a contact high.
4. “You Rascal You”/Louis Armstrong – The full title of this tune is ‘I’m Glad You’re Dead You Rascal You.’ Armstrong sang the song at Connie’s Inn in Manhattan on the occasion of the murder of gangster Dutch Shultz, who, unlike most gangsters, had meddled in the music business to an extent that many jazz musicians were happy to see him gone.
5. “Doctor Jazz”/Jelly Roll Morton – Morton was a pimp and also a legendary piano player at many famous bordellos in Storyville, the late, great vice district in New Orleans that played a major role in the creation of the music.
6. “Ballin’ the Jack”/Sidney Bechet – Creole musician/composers like Bechet and Jelly Roll played a major role in the origins of jazz in New Orleans, especially in its connections to Ragtime and Dixieland, two early strains of the music.
7. “Piney Brown Blues”/Big Joe Turner – The Blues informed jazz from the very beginning. In Kansas City, singers like Big Joe Turner turned the 18th and Vine District into one of the greatest jazz scenes that ever was, with all of it financed by mobsters in cahoots with the political machine of Irish Boss Thomas “T.J” Pendergast.
8. “Blues for Yolande”/Coleman Hawkins & Ben Webster – The sheer dark beauty of jazz, as practiced by lush tenor sax players like Hawkins and Ben Websters, seemed to capture the sexy, mysterious nature of the underworld, as well as illuminate the music’s bawdy, honky-tonk origins.
9. “Cry Me a River”/Ben Webster – Webster’s sax is the essence of jazz and the underworld, and this tune – melancholy, romantic, infused with the blues – personifies a style that could be called crying-in-your-drink jazz, which the hoodlums seemed to love (see also: Sinatra’s ‘One for My Baby’.)
10. “Blues After Midnight”/Earl “Fatha” Hines – Like Louis Armstrong, Hines was practically a mascot of the mob in Chicago, playing a residency for twelve years at Lincoln Gardens, a club owned by the Capone organization. This tune consists of a man at the piano, solo, in the late hours, bleeding the blues with great virtuosity. Jazz and the underworld personified.
11. “Little Joe from Chicago”/Mary Lou Williams – Williams wrote this song for Joe Glazer, the former pimp, Capone associate, and rapist of underage girls who became the most powerful talent manager in the history of jazz. Williams was managed by Glazer; she later grew to despise the man. That’s Mary Lou on piano.
12. “This Joint is Jumpin’”/Fats Waller – Nobody encapsulated the joy of jazz and the underworld as much as Fats, who knew how to lay it on thick whenever there were actual gangsters in the house. Chicago’s Al Capone was such a fan of Waller’s that his underlings once kidnapped Fats and had him play as a surprise at Capone’s birthday party.
13. “If You’re a Viper”/Fats Waller – A viper was a marijuana smoker, of which Waller was one. Weed and cocaine songs were part of the repertoire at any self-respecting club owned by the mob. As the lyrics say, “I dreamed about a reefer five feet long…”
14. “Swing, Brother, Swing”/Willie “the Lion” Smith – Smith was a master at the ‘rent parties’ in Harlem, impromptu shows where money was raised to pay the rent. These parties were often sponsored by local numbers runners, who were the worker bees of organized crime.
15. “Sendin’ the Vipers”/Mezz Mezzrow – Another weed anthem, this one composed and led on coronet by Mezz Mezzrow, who was a major marijuana dealer to other musicians. A good batch of weed was called ‘the Mighty Mezz,’ and a nice, fat joint was called a ‘Mezzroll.’ In 1946, Mezzrow published ‘Really the Blues,’ an explosive memoir that exposed the role of gangsters and drugs in the jazz scene.
16. “The Mooche”/Duke Ellington – Certainly one of the most glorious compositions to arise out the relationship between jazz and the underworld. Time and again, Ellington captured the heart of the matter, with music that was sensual, naughty, mysterious, and knowing. This one is my choice for the greatest jazz and the underworld composition of the Jazz Age (1920s), when illegal booze became the elixir that elevated jazz and the underworld into the stratosphere.
17. “Creole Love Call”/Duke Ellington – Another other-worldly masterpiece from Ellington, whose orchestra, in 1927, became the house band at the Cotton Club, owned by gangster Owney “Killer” Madden. This song veers from the raunchy to the ethereal, and insinuates itself into the subconscious, where random thoughts about murder and/or fucking might reside side by side.
18. “Black and Tan Fantasy”/Duke Ellington – A ‘black and tan’ was a nightclub with an interracial door policy that had no problem with race mixing. As Ellington knew, this is where the most daring jazz aficionadas dwelled, and he wrote music that was often a celebration of crossing over to the other side, physically, spiritually and rhythmically.
19. “Minnie the Moocher”/Cab Calloway – A balls-to-wall cocaine anthem that stands as one of the most raucous, infectious jazz/pop songs of all time. Few entertainers knew how to wind up on audience as effectively as Calloway, whose band, in 1930, took over from Ellington’s as house band at the Cotton Club and never looked back.
20. “Reefer Man”/Cab Calloway – Cab liked to smoke weed too, and so he sang about it. This one contains some motor-mouthed, street corner dialogue about the reefer man that sounds like something straight out of a Quentin Tarantino movie.
21. “Sing, Sing, Sing”/Benny Goodman – Composed by New Orleans jazzman Louis Prima, this orchestral masterpiece lit up the jazz universe like few other tunes would. A smash hit on the radio, overnight this music turned the Benny Goodman Orchestra from being viewed as a tame, white appropriator of jazz to the biggest bad ass on the circuit. This tune rides on a fevered, near-demented rhythm that drove audiences into a frenzy and made the underworld, by association, seem like the most exciting place on earth.
22. “Sleepwalker’s Serenade”/Count Basie – Swagger was a major element of music composed for the mob-controlled jazz clubs. Few knew this better than Basie, who performed music for the “big swinging dicks,” as the club owners and mob bosses liked to view themselves.
23. “Nature Boy”/Nat “King” Cole – With a voice smooth as silk, it’s hard to image that Cole started out not as a vocalist but as a piano player. As a kid, he adored the virtuoso stylings of Earl ‘Fatha” Hines, who he saw in his hometown of Chicago at Lincoln Gardens and other Capone-controlled club. Cole sang for the first time at a nightclub on 52nd Street in Manhattan when lead singer Billie Holiday couldn’t make the gig. He went on to play and sing in all the great vice districts where the music was played – from Chicago to Central Avenue (Los Angeles), New York, Havana, and Las Vegas.
24. “Peter Gunn”/Henry Mancini – Originally composed as the theme music for the television show of the same name, the song became a hit on jazz radio. With its ostinato of piano and guitar playing simultaneously, the tune took on a sinister aura, with the sound of the tenor sax occasionally crying out for help.
25. “Just a Gigolo”/Louis Prima – Born and raised in New Orleans, like all jazz locals, Prima adored Louis Armstrong and, though he was Sicilian and not African American, copied the Satchmo style so well that many who heard him on radio thought he was Black. A raucous, entertaining performer who walked the line (and occasionally fell into the abyss) between jazz and the underworld throughout his entire career.
26. “That Old Black Magic”/Louis Prima & Keely Smith – When Prima married singer Keely Smith, they formed an ultra hip and humorous act that was a favorite of mafiosi from coast to coast. The beast on tenor sax is Sal Butera, fellow New Orleanean, who played the instrument as if the cosmic universe were one big strip club.
27. “Wild Jungle”/Machito – Given the mob’s efforts in the 1950s to set up a base of operations in Havana, Cuba (successful until Fidel Castro and the Revolution came along and spoiled the party), Afro Cuban rhythms worked their way into jazz and altered the music forever. For a while, big orchestras like Machito and His Afro Cubans took the jazz scene by storm. The music was sultry, torrid and symphonically complex, an exciting new version of the symbiosis between jazz and the underworld that had now been cross-pollinating for decades.
28. “‘Round Midnight”/Thelonious Monk – Music situated in the dark, existential corners of the underworld could be quirky and obtuse. In this realm, the oddball stylings of Thelonious Monk make perfect sense. Imagine listening to this timeless composition at three in the morning in a dark club after having just killed someone and disposed of the body.
29. “Medley: The Afro-Cuban Suite”/Charlie Parker, Machito and His Orchestra – Music geared towards the underworld could also be dramatic and grandiose. Chico O’Farrill’s Afro-Cuban Suite, composed for the Machito Orchestra with Charlie Parker in mind, is a kind of jazz-and-the-underworld musical opus, on the scale of Wagner or Chopin, with the virtuosity of bebop and the soul of Latin jazz tussling in the sheets like a couple of lustful love birds on a weekend bender in pre-Castro Havana. On congas is Chano Pozo, who revolutionized the music with his complex rhythms, until he was murdered at the age of thirty-two by his weed dealer at a bar in Harlem.
30. “Black Coffee”/Sarah Vaughan – Just listen. The arrangement, the lyrics, and Sarah’s incomparable voice provide a female perspective on the interior longings of life on the emotional margins of the human condition. Or deep in the heart of the American underworld.
31. “Lullaby of Birdland”/Ella Fitzgerald – The song was intended as a carefree tribute to the famous nightclub, but, given the venue’s standing as perhaps the most mobbed-up club in history, its lyrical effervescence is ironic. Some gangsters of the era used to joke that “lullaby of Birdland” was another way of saying you were about to get whacked.
32. “Vagabond Shoes”/Vic Damone – His birth name was Vito Rocco Farinola, from Brooklyn. Like many Italian American crooners of his generation, his ethnicity put him in a tough spot with the local mafia. He proposed to the daughter of a neighborhood capo, then backed out of the proposal, which enraged the capo. There ensued a sit-down between the capo, the kid, and Frank Costello, capo di tuti capi at the time. Damone’s life was spared, but as a result he had to sing at every birthday or first communion party or wedding if asked by a wiseguy in good standing. At the weddings, he likely never got to sing tunes like “Vagabond Shoes,” which, if you listen between the lines, sounds like a song about a mobster perennially on the lam.
33. “Harlem Nocturne”/Illinois Jacquet – Luscious to the point of orgasmic, Jacquet’s saxophone takes the music deep into noir territory. This would be fertile terrain for jazz, which became the music of crime movies and film noir. Many jazz musicians thought that working in Hollywood might be a respite from the mobbed-up nightclubs, but then they learned about MCA, the mack daddy of management and talent corporations. MCA had roots that stretched back to the Jewish mob in Chicago, where a young lawyer named Sydney Korshak would make great headway in his career. Eventually, he would become “the fixer” between the mob, the entertainment business, and politics.
34. “Rags to Riches”/Tony Bennett – Joe Bari was the name Tony used at the beginning of his career. He was born Anthony Dominick Benedetto, but when wiseguy Ray Muscarella took over as his manager, the name was changed to Tony Bennett. Even after he was able to get out from under an onerous contract with Muscarella, Tony still felt like mobsters owned a piece of him. They loved his music, which is why Martin Scorsese reclaimed this song as a classic in ‘Goodfellas’.
35. “Beyond the Sea”/Bobby Darin – Walden Robert Cassotto (Darin’s birth name) was practically mob royalty. His maternal grandfather had been a mafiosi who died in prison a year before Darin was born. His father had done business with “the Boys.” Darin’s early patronage at the Copacabana owed mostly to his larger-than-life talent, but his family connections didn’t hurt either. Management at the club thought of Darin as their creation, which made it difficult when he sought to change his musical style. Nonetheless, he always filled the Copa, with half the audience comprised of mafiosi.
36. “Moanin’”/Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers – Though the relationship between jazz and the underworld was primarily a business arrangement, occasionally the music itself seemed to reflect the mood and ambiance of the underworld. Especially in the post-WWII years and into the 1950s, on 52nd Street and other locales around the U.S., jazz became especially hard-edged, no nonsense, swinging and bluesy, yes, but definitely not for the faint of heart.
37. “Children of the Night”/Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers – Blakey’s approach to the music was especially existential. If you listened carefully, the music took you to another reality and saved your sorry ass. You owe money to a loanshark? You’re in business with gangsters? You are a gangster and have been given the order to whack your best friend? Go to Club Downbeat, grab a stiff cocktail, and disappear into a bracing drumroll by the greatest bebop drummer of all time.
38. “One for My Baby”/Frank Sinatra – It’s fair to say that denizens of the underworld, like all humans to one degree or another, are broken people. Part of Sinatra’s popularity was that he spoke directly to these people; he touched their hearts. Of course, some hoodlums also went into business with Sinatra, and some felt they owned a piece of his skinny ass. The singer spent most of his career in jazz managing the ebb and flow of his slippery relationships with the likes of Willie Moretti, the Fischetti brothers, Sam Giancana, and others.
39. “Such Sweet Thunder”/Duke Ellington – Duke in the late-1950s still contained within his artistic temperament a profound understanding of the spiritual link between jazz and the underworld. If I were a gangster, I’d demand that this tune be played every time I walked into a room.
40. “Anatomy of a Murder”/Duke Ellington – Given the chance to compose the entire score for the Otto Preminger movie, Ellington took everything he knew about the dark side of the street and turned it into art, an arrangement he had been exploring for decades thanks, in part, to his underworld benefactors.
41. “Angel Eyes”/Hank Crawford – Some jazz tunes seem especially well suited to probing the allure of the streets, as seen through the haze of booze, weed or dope. Debauchery never sounded so damn good.
42. “Five Spot After Dark”/Curtis Fuller Quintet – The Five Spot in NYC was a rare jazz club in NYC not co-owned by the mob (there were a few other), but by the 1950s and early-1960s, the aesthetic of the relationship had been in place for so long that it permeated the music. No one knew it at the time, but there was a revolution just around the corner called rock-and-roll.
43. “Spanish Grease”/Willie Bobo – Latin vibes had influenced jazz going back almost to its origins (it was called “the Spanish tinge”), but after the mob’s dalliance in Cuba in the 1950s, Latin jazz became a standard aspect of the music. Much of this influence was to be found in the rhythmic qualities of jazz (the Afro-Cuban clave beat was now ever-present), but it also had to do with the street corner culture in el barrio, which was partly a Latinized version of African American culture in America’s most musically vibrant cities.
44. “El Watusi”/Ray Barretto – Used prominently in crime movies by Martin Scorsese (‘Who’s that Knocking at My Door’) and Brian DePalma (‘Carlito’s Way’), this tune is a hallucinatory trip down a dark alley, around the coroner, behind the curtain, where la gente gamble, drink, dance, shoot up, talk shit, and make love.
45. “Dr. Feelgood”/Stanley Turrentine – Jazz is never far from the blues, and the blues is nothing if not a celebration of bad choices and plans gone wrong. Soak in the music, lick your wounds, and get back out there.
46. “I Come from Jamaica”/Clifford Brown – Occasionally, jazz runs headlong into fevered, harmonically daring territory, as if the entire band just took a collective hit of cocaine. Weird sounds, odd vocals, torrid pacing all accentuate the feeling of a world out of control, which is what sometimes makes the underworld so seductive to those who dwell there.
47. “The Damned Don’t Cry”/John Coltrane Quintet – The greatest jazz-and-the-underworld composition of the post-WWII years, stark and devoid of pity. Sleek and tough. This is the music that the musicians and mobsters might have dreamed was possible when they first began this dance in the early decades of the 20th century.
48. “Killer Joe”/Quincy Jones – The underworld can also be cool and fun; it can swing and make your grandmother want to tap her toes. Let’s all groove to the beat of a sexy killer named Joe.
49. “Night Train”/Jimmy Forrest – This tune is commonly recognized as the greatest stripper anthem of all time, often copied but never as raunchy as the original by saxophonist Jimmy Forrest. Showmanship has always been part of jazz, and when it comes to the relationship with the underworld it is understood that gamblers, strippers, hookers, hustler, and gangsters need their own special soundtrack.
50. “Midnight Walk”/Elvin Jones – Jazz is an enduring American art form that has never stopped evolving and adapting to the demands of the marketplace. Its relationship to the underworld is part of its origin story and its musical essence. Although the relationship more or less ended with the decline and prosecutions of the mob in the 1980s, the legacy lingers on. It is heard most commonly in the type of jazz aficionadas of the music consider to be authentic and uncompromising. True jazz is for all time.
T.J. English is a noted journalist, screenwriter, and author of the New York Times bestsellers Havana Nocturne, Paddy Whacked, The Savage City, and Where the Bodies Were Buried. He also authored The Westies, a national bestseller, Born to Kill, which was nominated for an Edgar Award, and The Corporation. His journalism has appeared in Esquire, Playboy, and New York magazine, among other publications. His screenwriting credits include episodes for the television dramas NYPD Blue and Homicide, for which he was awarded the Humanitas Prize. He lives in New York City.
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