125th Street Zombies
by Wrongtom
In August 1940, Mike Todd was running a jazz joint in Flushing Meadows on the outskirts of the New York World Fair. The previous summer he’d convinced the Fair’s president to stage his hit Broadway production of The Hot Mikado. The jazz re-imagining of Gilbert & Sullivan’s classic ran for 2 seasons, becoming one of the fair’s hottest attractions, during which, Todd opened his own nearby venue Gay New Orleans, introducing even more tourists and fair-goers to the jazz he grew up on back in Chicago.
Todd’s friend Mezz Mezzrow mustered up some cash and headed to the club on a “mellow, smiling, sun-drenched day.” At the backstage entrance, Mezz felt the long arm of the law, and a swift frisking led to one lucky cop discovering Mezz’s pockets were choc full of reefer.
Like Todd, Mezz was Jewish, but the cops questioned this when they escorted him back to Harlem to search his pad where they met his black wife ‘Johnnie’ Mae. They figured Mezz must’ve been light skinned, but discovering he was a Jew, they declared “the jerk’s a nigger lover!” and booked him as a “suspected vendor”, carting him off to Rikers Island where he spent the next couple of years.
Entering prison, Mezz discovered his friend Roy was in Block 6 — the “colored” wing — and approached the deputy. “I’m coloured” he insisted, “even if I don’t look it, and I don’t think I’d get along in the white blocks.” The deputy eyed him suspiciously, settling on his “nappy head” and packed him off to Block 6. Mezz was hip to the difference between white and black convicts. He described the white folks waiting to be incarcerated as “human junk-heaps” and “the walking dead”, knowing that “colored cons were different; almost any colored guy can land in jail, not just the soulless zombies.”
Mezz was 40. He was no newcomer when it came to prison. He’d spent his teens in reform school, and worked his way up through the mean street’s of Chicago’s northwest side where he’d hang with racketeers, prostitutes and jazz musicians. His gang’s spot was the corner of 35th and Calumet Ave. Mezz loved jazz, turning his hand to the clarinet, and befriending the likes of Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong who were making waves on the local scene. Never exactly revered for his clarinet skills, he made up for his shortcomings with chutzpah.
Shady money came in fast and loose, and Mezz helped finance recording sessions for Armstrong who he’d eventually follow to NYC. He landed in the thick of the Harlem Renaissance and its accompanying jazz scene where he wound up cutting records with the likes of Benny Carter, Chick Webb and Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith.
The latter earned his nickname fighting in WWI with the Buffalo Soldiers. On his return to New York, Smith developed a new frenetic piano style known as “stride”, popular in Harlem clubs and rent parties where he battled it out on the ivories with Fats Waller throughout the ’20s. Smith was a black Jew, raised in New Jersey, and wound up in Harlem where he not only found a community of black artists, writers and musicians, but also a welcome assimilation with the Jewish residents. Soon the Yiddish speaking pianist could also be found moonlighting as a Cantor in a Harlem synagogue.
Black Jewish congregations flourished in the ’20s, many of which were set up by afro-Caribbean immigrants who’s Jewish ancestors had traveled from Portugal and Spain in an often fruitless search for opportunity. Photographer James Van Der Zee captured a few as he trod the streets of Harlem between jobs as a portrait photographer. Zee’s images from the 20s and 30s were later showcased at the Met in his 1969 show Harlem On My Mind.
After years on the jazz circuit, Smith finally wound up on wax in the ’30s. His own group The Lion & The Cubs cut a few sides for Decca, and you can hear him alongside label mate and Hammond organ pioneer Milt Herth on various 10”s. Perhaps inevitably, Smith joined the Mezz Mezzrow Orchestra, recording a brace of singles including ‘Sendin’ The Vipers’. This was Mezz’s nod to violinist’s Stuff Smith’s 1936 song ‘You’s A Viper’ which immortalized the part-time clarinetist who was now doing such good business in Harlem that his name had entered the local lexicon. You no longer bought reefer from Mezz, you bought Mezz, and all good dealers sold Mezz. Or, as Stuff Smith put it…
Dreamed about a reefer five feet long
Mighty Mezz, but not too strong
You’ll be high but not for long
If you’s a viper
As Smith’s song pumped out of New York’s juke joints, just across the Harlem River, Louis Walcott’s family were packing their bags for a move from the Bronx, and up to Boston. His mother, Sarah Mae, hailed from Saint Kitts, his father, Percival, from Jamaica. He never met his biological father, and his step-dad had just died. Louis was 3, and a new life awaited him up north.
The Walcotts joined the Anglican church in the Caribbean neighbourhood of Roxbury, yet Louis enjoyed listening to Jewish Cantors, later admitting “I was struck by the Cantor and I’ve always loved the way they sing or recite the Torah.” He believed it might have been in his blood, speculating that his own father may well have been of Jewish descent.
A love of music soon blossomed when Sarah Mae gave him a violin which he’d practise in the bathroom because it “sounded like you were in a studio.” By the age of 12 he was touring with the Boston College Orchestra. By the time he’d left his teens, Louis ditched the instrument, picked up a mic, and dubbed himself “The Charmer”, carving his niche on the calypso scene which had swept over from Trinidad to New York, and was now spreading across the States. Tracks like ‘Don’t Touch Me Nylon’ and ‘Female Boxer’ were well received, and his version of Lord Intruder’s ‘Jumbie Jamboree’ — the first to relocate Intruder’s “Kingston cemetery” to New York — dropped almost a decade before calypso’s international star Harry Belafonte released his.
Belafonte was a few years Louis’ senior. Born Harold Belafanti Jr in Harlem, his mother, an Afro-Scottish Jamaican, had left the island for New York where she met Harold Sr, a fellow islander of Afro-Dutch-Jewish descent. In his memoir My Song, Belafonte identifies similarities between Caribbean immigrants and Jews in the US, claiming “American blacks called the islanders the ‘Jews’ of their community”. He continues “it was a knock tinged with anti-semitism, but there was more than a little truth to it. Like Jews, their aspirations were high… and if they couldn’t succeed within the law, they’d succeed outside it.”
Having grown up in poverty between Harlem and Jamaica, Harry had nothing but aspiration. He saw theatre as his way out, and took up nightclub singing to pay for his acting classes. Early shows saw the singer backed by the Charlie Parker Quintet featuring Miles Davis and Max Roach, and when his debut single ‘Lean On Me’ hit the shelves in ’49, swing was the order of the day, but a quick shift to the folk scene saw Belafonte enter the calypso market. He’d soon have a million seller with his 1956 LP Calypso. A version of Edric Connor’s ‘Day Dah Light’ became Belafonte’s signature song ‘Day-O’, later immortalized by Tim Burton and some handsy shrimp.
The Tarriers, a folk group led by aspiring actor Alan Arkin, by chance released a version of ‘Day Dah Light’ around the same time. Their single ‘The Banana Boat Song’ hit the charts in ’56 and got them on the bill of Fred F Sears’ celluloid cash-in Calypso Heat Wave the following year.
The movie was shameless calypsploitation which featured almost no one from the scene aside, at a push, The Tarriers and Maya Angelou who briefly worked the west coast lounge circuit, recording her LP Miss Calypso in ’56. She’d soon focus on writing, but not before recording with another prominent jazz Jew, Herbie Mann.
Calypso Heatwave’s tenuous plot of record company shenanigans links “the whole HOT story of the birth of the new sizzling carib-beat.”
New?
Calypso?
In 1957!?
The genre, in fact, made its debut on shellac way back in 1912 when Lovey’s String Band from Trinidad entered a studio in New York and recorded ‘Mango Vert’. Like jazz, calypso emerged as an integral part of Harlem’s sonic topography, it’s tradition as a local news service in Trinidad became a trans-Caribbean one, with records trading back and forth between the US and the islands, many of which were pressed in New York, others in the UK.
In Jamaica, where it’s own calypso-esque “mento” scene became popular with holiday-makers, a Jewish electrical store owner called Stanley Motta opened one of the island’s first recording studios in ’51. He began releasing mento singles on his MRS imprint, initially for tourist consumption, but word spread as records made their way to New York and London, and singers such as Laurel Aitken, Arthur Knibbs and Lord Foodoos found new audiences overseas. Foodoos even signed to Elektra in the US, releasing his own Calypso! LP in ’57 featuring ‘Day-O’ and ‘Jamaica Farewell’, perhaps in a misguided effort to show Belafonte’s fans where these hits originated.
Meanwhile, Marie Bryant, a jazz singer from New Orleans who’d cut her teeth in Chicago and Harlem clubs with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, found her way to London where she recorded calypso staple ‘Tomato’ for the British Lyragon label. It travelled back across the Atlantic, finding fans in both the US and the Caribbean.
Having kickstarted the Jamaican music industry, Motta returned to his electrical store, leaving production to the experts. His artists were now rubbing shoulders with the best of Trinidad’s calypsonians who came to New York in their droves throughout the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Lord Beginner, Attila The Hun and Growling Tiger were among the first wave.
Another Trinidadian, Lancelot Pinard, was of unusually wealthy stock for the calypso scene. His father, a government official, packed him off to New York to study as a pharmacist, but the young Lancelot jacked it in to become a singer, favouring classical and jazz. Band leader, and fellow Trini, Gerald Clark talked him into voicing some calypsos, and Sir Lancelot was born.
Touring the US, he caught the attention of Hollywood producers, most notably Val Newton who cast him in a succession of horrors for RKO, starting with I Walked With A Zombie in ’43. The roles were one dimensional, but these films introduced calypso to a whole new audience, with Lancelot often performing his songs as ominous narration, like ‘Shame & Sorrow In The Family’ from I Walked With A Zombie, which would become a hit for the college dropout, and later a ska and reggae standard, thanks to The Wailers’ version in ‘65.
Somewhere on the road, Lancelot befriended photographer Seema Weatherwax. Like Lancelot’s producer Val Newton, Weatherwax was a Russian-born Jewish immigrant, her family fled Ukraine during the pogroms in the wake of WWI. In the U.S. she joined the Film & Photo League, exploring art and activism, yet still found time to take press shots for Lancelot.
Some of these connections might sound fleeting or tenuous. It’s a complex subject transcending religion, culture, ethnicity and identity, but there was often an intrinsic link between black and Jewish artists, musicians, entrepreneurs and even hoodlums. Sometimes symbiotic, often mutually supportive. Belafonte’s activism was sparked by seeing his mother crying about the rise of Nazism. Sammy Davis Jr converted after his friend Eddie Cantor related the cultures and struggles of Jewish and black people. Louis Armstrong loved his Jewish neighbours from his childhood so much that he penned a memoir about his relationship with them, and dedicated it to his Jewish manager.
The Charmer’s relationship with his possible Jewishness is more problematic. He dropped music to focus on Islam, eventually running the NOI as Minister Farrakhan. He’s been accused repeatedly of antisemitism, yet fondly spoke of his interest in Cantors in recent years, and maintains he and the NOI have “always related well to Jewish people”. Meanwhile, Alan Arkin turned to acting after Calypso Heatwave. The absurdism of Jewish humour informs some of his greatest roles, from Yossarian in Catch 22, to Grandpa Hoover in Little Miss Sunshine, the latter of which bagged him an Oscar in 2007.
In recent weeks we’ve heard some of the worst tropes about Jewish people in the music industry. Shady managers and slippery club owners have remained lazy and dangerously offensive cliches for far too many years considering the roots of modern black music were replete with so many supportive Jewish people. So here’s to all the jazz and calypso Jews, not to mention all the vipers and zombies.
Bibliography:
Really The Blues by Mezz Mezzrow
My Song by Harry Belafonte
Jazz Jews by Mike Gerber
Black Star a BFI compendium edited by James Bell
Music On My Mind by Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith
The Charmer (The New Yorker article) by Henry Louis Gates Jr
