John Hammond
Posted to www.marxmail.org on October 1, 2005
For background on an article on jazz and the left, I am
reading John Hammond’s memoir “On Record” that was written in 1977. Hammond, a
scion of the Vanderbilt family who was born in 1910 and died in 1987, was a
Columbia Records executive with sympathies for the left who “discovered” Billie
Holiday, Bob Dylan and many other major talents of the 20th century.
He wrote for the Nation Magazine in the 1930s and was on the board of the NAACP
for decades. He was sympathetic to the CPUSA, but—according to the memoir—never
a member. In fact he made sure that when the New Masses (the CP journal)
sponsored the legendary “Spirituals to Swing” Carnegie Hall concerts in
1938-1939, he made sure that the concert would not look like it had any
connections to the party. He also apparently was alienated by some typical
moves of the party, like turning on a dime around certain Stalin initiatives
like the peace treaty with Hitler, etc.
While the book is replete with fascinating information about
the cultural scene of the 1930s, the main thing that comes across is Hammond’s
insensitive personality. To start with, “On Record” consistently refers to
Black people as “Negroes”. This is 1977 we are talking about, not 1957. This is
obviously connected to a certain paternalism that Hammond
expressed from an early age. His hatred of racism, while commendable, was always
bred from a certain kind of “do-goodism” found in
wealthy white circles. This often leads to some really striking “wrong notes”
that are odds with his finely honed musical tastes. For example, in explaining
how the Spirituals to Swing concert was conceived, he says that he wanted to
present the entire gamut of “Negro music” from the sophisticated arrangements
of Count Basie to the most “primitive” blues singers.
If I ever had the opportunity to speak with John Hammond after reading this, I
would have tried to explain that there was nothing “primitive” about the blues.
As somebody who was bent on including Robert Johnson in the Carnegie Hall
concert (the musician had been murdered a few months earlier) and who
introduced Johnson’s recordings to the young Bob Dylan, he probably knew this. It
was just a poor choice of words and reflected a certain class bias.
More alarming, however, was Hammond’s
decision to allow class loyalties to get in the way of his relationship with
Billie Holiday:
“I couldn't wait to bring Billie Holiday to Cafe Society. It
was the perfect place for her to sing to a new audience with the kind of jazz
players who brought out her best. Unfortunately, her appearances were not the
success they could have been, and they proved to be the end of my association
with Billie’s career. She was heavily involved with narcotics, and she had
hired as her manager a woman from a distinguished family I knew well. I was
concerned that she and her family might be hurt by unsavory gossip, or even blackmailed
by the gangsters and dope pushers Billie knew.
“It was one of the few times in my life when I felt
compelled to interfere in a personal relationship which was none of my
business. I told the manager's family what I knew and what I feared. Soon afterward
the manager and Billie broke up, and Billie never worked at Cafe Society again.
I think she never forgave me for what she suspected was my part in the breakup,
but the woman who managed her is still my friend and I think she realizes now
the complications which could have arisen.”
The idea of sacrificing Holiday’s
career at the altar of a “distinguished family” stinks, to put it mildly. One
supposes that this was the Vanderbilt in him at work. Oddly enough, his mother
and father looked benignly on his civil rights activism, but neither they nor
he could ever descend from their Olympian heights to actually become part of
the social milieu that they were championing.
If one visits East 91st street
in Manhattan, the street where I
live actually, you can see visible evidence of how the Hammond
family lived. On 9 East 91st Street,
you will find the Russian Embassy. That building was where John Hammond was
born. It has a formal ballroom that can seat 250 people! In 1935, Hammond
held a concert party where Benny Goodman played Mozart with a string quartet.
You can get an idea of the size of this joint and how the invited Black
musicians might have felt from this anecdote whose bitter irony I suspect Hammond
did not fully appreciate:
“After the concert the audience was invited to a reception
on the fifth floor. The front elevator of the house held only half a dozen
passengers; I rode up with Fletcher [Henderson], Benny [Goodman], and three
other guests. Benny, relieved to have the performance over, appointed Fletcher
the elevator operator, a common occupation for Negroes in New
York department stores in those days. As Fletcher
opened the elevator doors at each floor, Goodman would announce, ‘Fourth floor,
men's and boy's clothes. Fifth floor, women's ready-to-wear.’”
As students of jazz history probably know, Henderson
was Goodman’s arranger and responsible for the distinctive sound that propelled
Goodman into stardom. But Henderson himself felt cheated. He felt that racism
interfered with his ability to fully exploit his talents. Indeed, the classic
anthology of Henderson recordings
is titled “Studies in Frustration”, produced by John Hammond himself.
Some of Hammond’s
memoir is unintentionally funny. For example, here’s how he describes the family
move from East 91st Street
in 1949. “Mother and father had sold the 91st Street
house and moved into a modest, sixteen-room apartment which occupied an entire
floor of 778 Park Avenue. Mother
had never lived in an apartment, but she managed.” This reminds me of the
famous but apocryphal exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest
Hemingway. Fitzgerald: “The rich are different than you and me.” Hemingway: “Yes,
they have more money.”