Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street (review)

In jazz lore, New York City’s 52nd Street ranks among the most storied centers of activity and popularity, rivaling other such legendary localities as Basin Street in New Orleans, New York’s Harlem and Greenwich Village, and Chicago’s South Side. For a roughly twenty-year period, the two blocks of 52nd Street between Fifth and Seventh avenues teemed with dozens of nightclubs, in which many of the finest jazz musicians appeared, several at the apex of their careers. Audiences of both races mingled in the clubs and on the streets—a social kaleidoscope of interaction, tension, cooperation, and hostility, with a balance of radical progressivism and unyielding traditionalism. This is the setting under which ethnomusicologist Patrick Burke frames his penetrating and highly readable study of the musical and sociological scene during 52nd Street’s heyday as a focal center for jazz musicians and enthusiasts.

At first glance, this book may resemble other location-specific jazz histories such as Central Avenue Sounds, edited by Clora Bryant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), about the heart of Los Angeles’s African American music scene, or the predecessor to this book, Arnold Shaw’s 52nd St: The Street of Jazz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), formerly titled The Street that Never Slept: New York’s Fabled 52d St. (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971). Yet Burke’s approach moves beyond the scope of these chiefly oral histories, and departs as well from standard jazz histories that discuss linear evolution of styles. He also avoids more essentialist viewpoints of historians and critics who delineate racial elements in the music itself, or categorize playing styles as either in black or in white traditions. Rather, he incorporates the ideas of Radeno and Bellmen’s ethnomusicological framework, as he “traces the ways in which its [i.e., jazz’s] musical culture both confirmed racial ideologies and alluded to new possibilities” (p. 5).

Burke paints the 52nd Street jazz scene between 1930 and 1950 as a dynamic of varying musical and racial interaction, with simultaneous cooperation and tension, integration and exclusion, tolerance and prejudice, radical change and embracing of traditional ideologies. The nightclubs were the first in the country to feature racially integrated bands and, by the mid-1940s, black ownership and management of venues. Lest the reader assume, however, that 52nd Street represented the utopian ideal of peaceful coexistence between the races, Burke illuminates a high degree of harassment by police and audiences, stereotyping, exoticism, condescension, and amplification and distortion by the press.

Despite the inherent difficulty in locating documentation about nightclubs due to their transitory and temporary nature (archives of bars are unheard of), Burke’s research is thorough and exhaustive. He has gleaned information from an abundance of newspaper and magazine clippings; transcriptions of previous oral histories; his own interviews with club owners, audiences, critics and musicians; and heretofore unpublished writings. He unearths recordings from the era, several of them rare or unreleased studio takes. The endnotes are thorough and frequently lengthy, although the omission of a systematized bibliography is a slight inconvenience for scholars.

The ascendancy of 52nd Street runs parallel to the growth of Midtown Manhattan as the key cultural and economic center of New York City. Depression-era fun seekers with a sense of transgression took refuge in the dozens of speakeasies that provided bootlegged liquor. Although descriptions of activity within speakeasies understandably lack written primary source information, there is plenty of testimony that much music and dancing took place within them, and many prominent musicians were frequent customers, relaxing and presumably jamming in these illegal watering holes after legitimate engagements. After the repeal of Prohibition, one of the few locations that remained in operation was the Onyx Club, a white-owned establishment where predominantly white musicians continued to congregate. Here they held regular jam sessions, fostering a semi-exclusive club in which camaraderie and musical experimentation took...