Read an Excerpt
Nine
Jazzmen and Black Artists
The visitors to the National Jazz Museum, occupying a small hall on the top floor of a building in Harlem, receive a warm welcome because they are rare. If, in addition, they are knowledgeable enough to ask a few questions about Freemasonry, they will stupefy their hosts as it is still not common knowledge that Nat King Cole, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and many others were lodge members.
The histories written about jazz do not mention the Masonic membership of many musicians, although there may be some exceptions. The same is true for the biographical sketches posted by American National Biography.(2 ) We are in Raphael Imbert’s debt for the first books on jazz and Freemasonry.(3) Not only did he attempt to take a census of Freemason jazzmen, but he also deeply analyzed the spiritual dimension of jazz, which has heavily influenced American society since its golden age in the 1920s and throughout the twentieth century.(4) This does not mean, he says, “that there is some kind of masonic jazz. Or rather, there are no musical masonic rituals that can be identified as jazz.”
He breaks down the spiritual dimension of jazz into three tendencies: “religious, mystical, and metaphysical.”(5) He demonstrates that the religious dimension is an abiding presence for these musicians, much more than for most European musicians. In fact, the attitude of the American churches, which in most cases supported the fight against slavery and the civil rights movement, just like the lodges of Prince Hall, explains the attachment of many black masons to the religious tradition.
I am not going to focus on the “spiritual” dimension of the bond between jazz and Freemasonry as much as the social aspects. In fact the so-called Royal Art and the art of music have coupled harmoniously toaccompany the social rise of a large number of artists from poverty who also had to conront a society that was still strongly gripped by racial discrimination.
The Racist Context and Social Ascent of Jazzmen
Several of these musicians were born in dire poverty. In his autobiography, Satchmo,(6) Louis Armstrong describes the wretched condition in which his family lived in New Orleans during the years 1910–1920, in a neighborhood where violence and prostitution got on well with each other. As a teenager, he was sent to a juvenile home for firing a shot in the air to defend himself against a criminal threatening him. He also was a small-time pimp until he was able to make a living from his concerts.
His father, a worker in a turpentine factory, abandoned him at an early age, and he rarely saw him. It so happens that his father was a member of the Oddfellows, the mutual-aid society that often included the same members as the Prince Hall lodges. Armstrong recounts with pride how the Prince Hall lodges took part every year in the great parade as Grand Marshal.(7) Armstrong explains that all the clubs paraded in New Orleans: “The Oddfellows, the Masons, the Knights of Pythias (my lodge).”(8) He says he was also a member of the Tammany Soul and Pleasure Club.(9)
It is certain that these societies or clubs played a similar role to that of the Masonic lodges by affording their members social recognition that was all the more valuable as they were often of humble extraction and the victims of racial discrimination. At the end of the First World War, while playing concerts in New Orleans, Louis Armstrong was still obliged to deliver carts of coal in order to make a living.
Membership in Freemasonry conferred a guarantee of respectability and good morality. This was of such import that Dizzy Gillespie wrote in his autobiography that he was not initiated because he was living with a woman out of wedlock and had neglected to mention it to the lodge members, who learned of it on their own.(10)
Chicago attracted many jazz musicians such as Nat King Cole, whose family had decided to move there in 1923, when he was just four years old. The city, all the same, was not a haven from racist behavior, including that of “colored” people who wanted to assimilate completely into white society as shown by this incident that Nat King Cole experienced:
Once in Chicago, I sat down on a bus next to this light-skinned black lady, and she turned to me and said: “You are black and you stink and you can never wash it off.”(11)
These remarks, which were all the more hurtful coming from a black woman, left an indelible impression on Nat King Cole. Later, when the musician had successfully broken into an artistic milieu that was largely white, he had to confront many forms of discrimination or at least some unpleasant incidents. When he tried to buy what was a veritable palace--a fourteen-room home--in one of the most bourgeois neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Hancock Park, a homeowners’ association tried to oppose it by suing the seller. A year later, the B’nai Brith,(12) a Masonic-like Jewish organization, published a report denouncing the organizations guilty of discrimination against Blacks. Among them they cited the Hancock Park Homeowners Association that had harassed Nat King Cole and his wife.(13)
When Nat King Cole neglected to pay his taxes, his Cadillac and house were confiscated and the musician barely managed to hold on to his property by negotiating a repayment plan for his fiscal debts. Finally, during a concert tour in the South, he was physically attacked by four people in the middle of a concert in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. His assailants were arrested and convicted thanks to the support of the mayor of Birmingham and the determination of the judges, who were outraged by this openly racist assault.(14)
