High Notes: The Role of Drugs in The Making of Jazz: Merrill Singer, PHD Greg Mirhej

High Notes:
The Role of Drugs

in the Making of Jazz
Merrill Singer, PhD
Greg Mirhej
ABSTRACT. This paper examines the role played by illicit drugs, espe-
cially marijuana and heroin, in the historic development and evolution
of Jazz in the United States during the twentieth century. In addition to
an assessment of the extent of drug use and kinds of drugs used by Jazz
musicians and singers, the impact and costs of drug use on the lives of
people in Jazz, and the changing patterns of drug use during several eras
of Jazz production, the paper contextualizes drug use among Jazz per-
formers and societal response to it in light of prevailing ethnic inequalities
and critical medical anthropological theory. doi:10.1300/J233v05n04_01
Merrill Singer is Director of Center for Community Health Research at Hispanic

Health Council, Senior Research Scientist in Department of Anthropology, University
of Connecticut, and Director of Community Connections Core of Center for Excel-
lence in Elimination of Health Disparities among Latinos, University of Connecticut
and Hispanic Health Council.
Greg Mirhej is Director of Operations at Center for Community Health Research at
Hispanic Health Council, Hartford, CT.
Address correspondence to: Merrill Singer, PhD, Center for Community Health Re-
search, Hispanic Health Council, 175 Main Street, Hartford, CT 06106 (E-mail:
anthro8566@aol.com).
The authors would like to thank Pam Erickson for her helpful comments on an ear-
lier draft of this paper and Doug Goldsmith for his suggestions on additional reference
material.
This paper was written as part of a larger examination of emergent and changing
drug use patterns in American society supported by the grant, “Building Community
Responses to Risks of Emergent Drug Use” awarded by the Centers for Disease Con-
trol and Prevention.
Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse, Vol. 5(4) 2006
Available online at http://jesa.haworthpress.com
© 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1300/J233v05n04_01 1
2 JOURNAL OF ETHNICITY IN SUBSTANCE ABUSE
[Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Ser-
vice: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <docdelivery@haworthpress.com>
Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc.
All rights reserved.]
KEYWORDS. Heroin, marijuana, jazz, drugs, music
INTRODUCTION
In his celebrated, uncompromising autobiography, Jazz alto saxophonist

Art Pepper (1925-1982) vividly recalled (Pepper and Pepper 1994:43):
I was hanging around with [tenor saxophonist] Dexter Gordon

[1923-1986]. We smoked pot and took Dexedrine tablets, and they
had inhalers in those days that had little yellow strips of paper in
that that said ‘poison,’ so we’d put these strips in our mouths, be-
hind our teeth. They really got you roaring as an upper: your scalp
would tingle, and you’d get chills all over, and then it would center
in your head and start ringing around. You’d feel as if your whole
head was lifting off. I was getting pretty crazy, and right about that
time, I think, Dexter started using smack, heroin.
With these words, Pepper suggests the intimate connection that devel-
oped early on between the use of drugs, especially heroin and mari-
juana, but a wide array of other illicit and licit mind-altering substances
(especially stimulants) as well. So close has this bond been at times that
it is impossible to tell the story of Jazz without reference to the subplot
of drug use and its impact on the lives of Jazz musicians and sing-
ers. Famed Jazz composer, band leader, and performer Duke Ellington
(1899-1974) asserted (Ellington 1976:6): “Music is my mistress and she
plays second fiddle to no one else”; but for many jazzmen, music often
took a backseat to drug addiction, at least for periods in their life, and at
other times the two were so meshed that they might be said to be the
twin sides of a complex whole. Drugs, as James and Johnson (1996:93)
correctly state, have at times been “hopelessly interwoven in life on the
bandstand.”
In assessing Jazz in historic and cultural context, Ward and Burns
(2000:vii) accurately refer to it as America’s music, “the only art form
created by Americans, an enduring and indelible expression of our
Merrill Singer and Greg Mirhej 3
genius and promise.” More darkly, they (Ward and Burns 2000:vii) also
observe:
Jazz has been a prism through which so much of American history
can be seen. . . . And so Jazz necessarily becomes a story about
race and race relations and prejudice, and about minstrelsy and Jim
Crow, lynchings and civil rights. . . . Jazz is about sex, and the way
men and women talk to each other and conduct the complicated
rituals of courtship. . . . It is about drugs and the terrible cost of ad-
diction and the high price of creativity.
Drug use and its health and social costs are not peculiar to Jazz, other
musical forms also have their history of consumption and consequence
(Fachner 2003). However, it is our assertion that the specific nature of the
relationship of drugs to music varies by genre. In rock n’ roll, the drugs/
music nexus is colored by a quest for fun and a rebellion against conven-
tional middle class boundaries. This theme is well captured in the slogan
“sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll,” a generational call to celebratory excess
and exuberance, a theme also found in contemporary Rave music and cul-
ture. By contrast, in Hip Hop, there is often a rougher edge to the
drug/music relationship, with many gold-necklaced rappers claiming a
past history of hard-edged street drug dealing and use. While the “party/
sex” theme is as strong in Hip Hop as in rock n’ roll, the sex is more con-
quest than celebration and the drugs, which are often portrayed as a lubri-
cant of social connection or displayed as a marker of outlaw status, rarely
if ever have the spiritual or transcendence motif found at times in the lyr-
ics of rock n’ roll (Schensul et al. 1993). Drug use, like sex, became a
badge of Hip Hop bravado, displayed for effect. The drug/music rebellion
of Hip Hop, moreover, is not against conventional values per se but
against the hurdles that must be overcome to achieve acceptance and ma-
terial success. In Jazz drugs are found to occupy somewhat different con-
ceptual space than in other genres of popular music and to evoke a
different set of meanings than those expressed in other musical traditions
(all of which are united, nonetheless by their historic separation–at least
during their rebellious origins–from music forms found more acceptable
by conventional society).
It bears mentioning that some feel the drug/Jazz connection has been
overplayed, especially in the mass media. Tenor saxophonist, Sonny
Rollins (1930-), who at age 75 has achieved legendary status as a Jazz-
man (Ratliff 2005), for example, complains (Nisenson 2000:38):
When some writers interview me they spend half the time talking
about my drug addiction. That only lasted for a few years and it
was a long time ago. But these guys seem obsessed with that part
of my life.
Unlike Rollins, however, for many in Jazz, drugs have had a much
more intense and enduring impact on their lives and their music, hence
on the genre generally. While bits and pieces of this story have been told
in biographies and autobiographies of Jazz performers and in general
histories of Jazz, the purpose of this paper is to provide a more compre-
hensive assessment of the particular role drugs–especially marijuana
and heroin–have played in Jazz, and through this jagged-edged prism to
see more clearly the nature of America’s music and the social contexts
that produced it. Specifically, based on a review of several “drug eras”
in Jazz (Johnson and Manwar 1991; Johnson and Golub 1998; Singer
2006a)–intervals characterized by the emergence, spread, and regular
use of a drug in a group or location–this paper examines the relationship
of drug use to musical form over time from the perspective of critical
medical anthropology (Baer, Singer, and Susser 2003; Singer and Baer
1995). Three drug eras in Jazz are identified: (1) the period from the turn
of the twentieth century until World War II, a period that might appro-
priately be called the era of marijuana; (2) the period just before the war
until the mid-1960s, a period characterized by widespread heroin addic-
tion and polydrug use; and (3) the period since the mid-1960s, an era
marked by the fading of Jazz’s hard drug legacy. While these phases
have areas of overlap, each has its own unique drug-related features and
behavioral patterns.
From the perspective of critical medical anthropology, a drug era is a
period of time marked by “an intertwined complex of political-economic,
cultural, and . . . social psychological factors” (Singer 1992, 1999:50)
that gives rise to an identifiable configuration of drug use patterns. Po-
litical economy refers to the dominant set of social relations–and their
expressions in the political and economic arenas–that characterize a so-
cially stratified group. Social inequality, including unequal access to
things of social value (such as material goods, social statuses, and expe-
riences)–as expressed through social classes, ethnic discrimination, and
sexism–are critical influences on behaviors and experiences in society.
As Agar and Reisinger (2002; Agar 2004) stress, however, factors like
poverty, social oppression, anomie, and drug availability do not directly
cause a new drug era in all of its numerous features and dynamics. Each
particular drug era has its own trajectory, its own dynamics, and its own
set of actors (Singer 2006b).
In other words, in addition to political-economic influences, the spe-
cific nature of any drug era is shaped by a set of social and situational
“contingencies and connections” (Agar 2004:411). These terms refer to
the arrangement of intertwined historic context factors, such as the set
of drugs in use prior to the takeoff phase of a new drug era, drug distri-
bution groups and their connections with regional, national and interna-
tional illicit distributors, drug-related policy and policing practices, and
the configuration of racial/ethnic and other minority social groups, and
the nature of their social relations.
Finally, there is culture. This term is used to refer both to the ideas and
beliefs of a social group but also to their norms and values. Of concern in
this regard is what here is termed the “Jazz/drug subculture.” As defined
by Johnson (1973:9), a drug subculture is a set of “conduct norms, social
situations, role definitions and performances, and values that govern the
use of illegal drugs and the intentional nonmedical use of prescription
drugs.” In the case of concern here, it refers to drug- related behavioral
expectations (conduct norms), beliefs and desires (ideas and values), role
definitions, and social situations that came to be embedded in the world of
Jazz performance and experience and in the interpersonal social relation-
ships that are the foundation of the world of Jazz.
By examining these three domains–political economy, historical
context (i.e., contingencies and connections), and culture–we find in
the relationship of drug use to America’s music further validation of Kee-
sing’s (1987:166) insight that not only behavior but cultural beliefs and
symbols “must be situated historically, [and] assessed through the lens
of a theoretical perspective that critically examines their embeddedness
in social, economic, and political structures.” This is the goal, with ref-
erence to the role of drugs in the making of Jazz, of this paper.
JOINT VENTURE:
MARIJUANA AND JAZZ IN YEARS BEFORE
AND AFTER CRIMINALIZATION
New Orleans: The Cradle of Jazz
In their sweeping history of Jazz, Ward and Burns (2000:2) stress

that it was created “by people routinely denied the most basic benefits of
being American. It grew up in a thousand places but could only have
been born in New Orleans . . .” Why New Orleans? In the 19th century,
New Orleans was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, the
American Marseilles, with a population of diverse origins and a melting
pot of cultural currents. While a city cross-cut by several social hierar-
chies (oriented by and ethnicity and class), that juxtaposed Black slaves
in shackles and wealthy Black freemen in imported suits, it was a place
where ethnic and cultural differences rubbed shoulders daily. It was also
a place of diverse and extensive public music, exemplified by mourn-
ful funeral parades, minstrel shows comprised songs of slave origin pre-
sented by Whites in blackface, and strolling street performers of diverse
heritage. Black orchestras routinely played at dances for both Black and
White audiences. In Southern’s assessment (1983:131), at the turn of
the 19th century New Orleans “was undoubtedly the most musical city
in the land.”
Congo Square, a flat grassy area on the northwestern border of the city,
sported slave dances on Sundays to the beat of drums and stringed instru-
ments of Africa origin and to polyrhythmic songs of mixed ancestry. In
Storyville, the best-known red light district in New Orleans, if not the
country, customers were greeted by piano music played by Black musi-
cians in a lively style unlike anything heard in the homes and concert halls
of proper society. Moreover, annual Mardi Gras celebrations filled the
city with Black music, dance, and limit-challenging celebration.
It was in the rich cultural and musical milieu of New Orleans that
three separate folk musical traditions met and melded to form Jazz. The
first of these was ragtime, a syncretic product of syncopated improvisa-
tion (called “ragging”) among Black pianists and other performers who
borrowed from various sources including European folk music and
slave spirituals to produce a lively music for public dances. Character-
ized by broken chords and a jaunty rhythm, ragtime established deep
roots in New Orleans in its many inexpensive cafes, saloons, dance
halls, and honky-tonks, as well as in the celebrated New Orleans musi-
cal street parade. The music of the urban poor, ragtime contained the
pent up energy of a people held back and kept down.
Blues was the second musical source for the birth of Jazz. In the
colorful words (Ward and Burns 2000:15) of New Orleans clarinetist
Luis “Big Eye” Nelson (1885-1949): “Ain’t no first blues. The blues al-
ways been.” The first professional blues singer, however, was Gertrude
“Ma” Rainey (1886-1939), a touring minstrel performer when, traveling
through the mid-west and south, she first heard folk singing in the plain-
tive blues style. Captivated by the heart-wrenching poignancy of loss,
abandonment, hard luck, abuse, and grief that characterizes this musical
form and the life experience of an impoverished and mistreated against

population, she adopted it into her shows (and took public credit for la-
beling it the “blues”) (Baer and Singer 2002).
The last folk source of Jazz emerged from the Holiness churches that
began to appear in Black communities in the 1890s. In their church mu-
sic, the Holiness congregations adopted an array of musical instruments
including tambourines, drums, pianos, cornets, and trombones to per-
form adapted versions of Baptist songs, with the intent of making joyful
music to praise the Lord. Not only did the church offer a stage for public
performance, it also provided a supportive training and proving ground
for generations of Black performers, some of whom became premier
contributors to the American Jazz repertoire.
Through the creative mingling and fusion of these three folk music
traditions, Jazz emerged. Incipient Jazz musicians took the blues notes
and piano-based ragtime syncopation and mixed them with the brass in-
strumentation and texture of Holiness church music. Initially, Jazzmen
directly appropriated the plaintive voice of the blues, but expressed it
instrumentally by using scooping, sliding, and similar mechanical ef-
fects. All of these found their expression and were woven together in
improvisational jam sessions among incipient Jazz musicians who at
first had little idea of the influential road they were erecting on the
American musical landscape. In later years, pianist and composer (and
sometime gambler, pool shark, fight promoter, and pimp) Jelly Roll
Morton (1890-1941) would assert (Ward and Burns 2000:25) “It is evi-
dently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of
jazz . . . and I, myself, happen to be [its] creator in the year 1902.” Cer-
tainly, Morton’s Black Bottom Stomp, with its complex melody, sud-
den breaks, stop-time passages, frequent instrument shifts, and driving
tempo, is a stellar example of incipient Jazz composition. Contrary to
Morton’s boastful claim, however, musicologists recognize no single
Jazz inventor, but rather view this musical mode as the product of many
hands and many minds, reflecting a deep and broad musical heritage
(Southern 1983).
From its varied roots, Jazz blossomed into something new and some-
thing different. Distinctly Black and American in its origin, it grew into
a genre that received global appreciation and adoption. Fed by the suf-
fering of an oppressed population that was denied equal standing in
society, Jazz would rise far above its back alley genesis to become
America’s richest musical gift to the world, a gift that, because of its
Black origin, often found greater appreciation abroad than in the land of
its origin.
Smoking Muta and Making Music
Specifically, it was in New Orleans’ infamous houses of prostitution,

rowdy saloons, and low-down honky-tonks that Jazz came into exis-
tence, and it was in these same settings that the inventors of this novel
musical form encountered and embraced drug use. Like the coca leaves
chewed by high elevation farmers in South America, marijuana–use of
which was legal at the time–offered a means for poorly paid musicians
who were leading a hand-to-mouth existence to play for long hours and
cope with their bone-weary exhaustion. Muta, as the drug was known in
New Orleans in the late 19th century, also was seen among musician us-
ers as an aid to focus and creativity. Marijuana, they believed, helped
them to feel their music in a new way and to enhance their artistic imagi-
nation. Writing of his first exposure to marijuana, White clarinetist Milt-
on Mezzrow (1899-1972) recalled (Mezzrow 1990:48):
The first thing I noticed was that I began to hear my saxophone as

if it was inside my head. . . . Then I began to feel the vibrations of
the reed much more pronounced against my lip and my head
buzzed like a loudspeaker. I found I was slurring much better and
putting just the right feeling into my phrases. I was really coming
on. All the notes came easing out of my horn like they’d already
been made up, greased and stuffed into the bell, so all I had to do
was to blow a little and send them on their way, one right after the
other, never missing, never behind time, all without an ounce of
effort.
Red (1916-), a Black tenor saxophonist interviewed by Courtwright, Jo-

seph and Des Jarlias (1989:234-235), noted the ubiquity of marijuana
when he began performing (soon after completing high school):
Marijuana was . . . very common among musicians in the big

bands. In all bands, in all categories. Marijuana to me is just like
the next-door neighbor. I’ve been aware of marijuana, known
about it, most of my life. I was introduced to it, I guess, my first job
out with a little hometown band.
In short, as succinctly summarized by clarinetist and bandleader Artie

Shaw (1919-2004), Jazz “grew up on marijuana” (Ward and Burns
2000:357). Reflecting further on the use of the drug specifically among
Jazz musicians, Shaw (Hanley 1938:8) added, “Swing music, it appears
to me, seems to need some stimulant, it requires extreme cleverness of

its performers; perhaps some get that stimulant from marijuana.”
As Jazz spread to other parts of the country, so too the Jazz/marijuana
connection. After World War I, for example, Jazz made its way from
New Orleans up the Mississippi River to northern, and later to western,
cities and towns. By the 1930s, upriver cities like Pittsburg sported nu-
merous Jazz clubs like Paradise Inn, Hummingbird and Derby Dan’s.
On paydays, workers from the steel city’s many mills made their way to
small clubs lit by a single 25-watt red bulb. They came to hear and dance
to the lively music of local and visiting Jazzmen who played from 9 pm
until 5 am for food and drink. At these intimate gathering spots mari-
juana joints “sold for fifteen cents or a quarter, depending on their
strength and dancers did the slow drag through the dimly lit night” (Ken-
ny 2000:155).
Not everyone saw the integral role of marijuana in Jazz in a positive
light however. Dr. Frank Gomila, the New Orleans’s public safety com-
missioner during this era, began to view the use of marijuana in the
Black community, generally, and among Black musicians, specifically,
as a dangerous vice in need of immediate and firm social control. He be-
lieved that much of the crime in the city was directly connected to mari-
juana use and pointed to a publication by the New Orleans Prosecuting
Attorney in the American Journal of Police Science (Stanley 1931) and
to studies on the dangers of marijuana use by local physicians to support
his assertion (e.g., Fosser 1931). Gomila recognized, however, that re-
stricting Black access to the drug would be difficult because awareness
of its desired effect were widespread, “especially among the negro pop-
ulation. Practically every negro in the city can give a recognizable de-
scription of the drug’s effects” (Gomila 1938:29). He believed that tons
of marijuana were being processed for sale in warehouses and other
buildings throughout New Orleans.
At the state level, the president of the Louisiana Board of Health, Os-
car Dowling, held a similar view and argued for the rapid criminal-
ization of marijuana use. He wrote to the governor of the state, John
Parker and to the Surgeon General of the U.S. urging state and federal
action against marijuana (Musto 1987). While the Surgeon General
wrote back in agreement with Dowling, no federal action was taken.
Dowling’s campaign was bolstered by the arrest in New Orleans of a
White musician for forging a physician’s signature in order to get mari-
juana imported from Mexico. Dowling responded by telling the gov-
ernor that marijuana was a powerful narcotic that caused delirious
hallucinations and stupor. The governor, in turn wrote to the national
Prohibition Commissioner, John Kramer, claiming that marijuana had

to be controlled because it caused people to “go crazy and wild” (Musto
1987:218-219). The New Orleans Morning Tribune, in an effort to
boost sales, got on the antimarijuana bandwagon as well by running a
series of sensationalist articles with banner headlines. One article, titled
“School Children Found in Grip of Marijuana Habit by Investigators,”
reported that school age youth under the age of 15 were buying the drug
from street peddlers. The article was based on interviews conducted
with sixty children who reported that they were aware of marijuana and
where it could be purchased. Moreover, all of those interviewed said
that they had tried the drug. The reporter failed to mention that all of the
children were Black or Mexican (Abel 1980), suggesting how wide-
spread the drug was in Black and other minority sections of the city.
Thus, contrary to the assertion of music historian Harry Shapiro (2000:
46) that, “In the early 20’s, marijuana . . . was known almost exclusively
to musicians,” it would be more appropriate to add “and the impover-
ished communities they came from.”
Ultimately, White fear of drug-fueled rebellious Blacks finally led
New Orleans to enact a local ordinance criminalizing possession of mari-
juana in 1923 and the state of Louisiana followed suit four years later.
The popularity of the drug among Jazz musicians continued un-
abated. In fact, by the 1930s what came to be called “reefer songs” were
extremely popular in the Jazz world. This subgenre, primarily written
by Black musicians and most commonly performed for Black audi-
ences, developed a national following in segregated and impoverished
urban Black communities. Among the most popular tunes in this cate-
gory were Louis Armstrong’s “Muggles,” Cab Calloway’s “That Funny
Reefer Man,” Milton Mezzrow’s “Sending the Vipers,” and Fats Wal-
ler’s “Viper’s Drag.” The later song contained the lyrics: “Dreamed
about a reefer five foot long/Mighty Mezz but not too strong/You’ll be
high, but not for long/If you’re a viper.” The frequent appearance of the
term “viper” in this music resulted from it being adopted by Jazz musi-
cians to refer to people who smoked marijuana, perhaps because of the
similarities in the sound of a hissing snake and taking a drag on a mar-
ijuana joint. The slang term Mezz, which initially came to mean high
quality marijuana and later was generalized to refer anything consid-
ered genuine, was derived from Milton Mezzrow’s name because he
had access to the best Mexican marijuana. In Mezzrow (1990:94) per-
spective, marijuana use produced better music than alcohol consump-
tion.
Besides, the lushies didn’t even play good music–their tones be-
came hard and evil, not natural, soft and soulful–and anything that
messed up the music instead of sending it on its way was out with
us. We members of the viper school were for making music that
was real foxy, all lit up with inspiration and her mammy. The juice
guzzlers went sour fast on their instruments, then turned grimy be-
cause it preyed on their minds.
Beyond those created by the leading lights of early Jazz, numerous

other reefer songs, including “Viper’s Moan,” “If You’re a Viper,”
“Texas Tea Party,” “Smokin’ Reefers,” “Golden Leaf Strut,” and “Mary
Jane,” were written by lesser known Jazz composers. Notably, by this era,
Jazz musicians were professionally recording their music and reefer
songs were recorded at major musical studios such as Columbia, Victor
and Brunswick (Abel 1980). According to Cronin (2004), reefer songs
“celebrated a new social hero,” the “cool cat” whose street reputation
rested not on the achievement of conventional goals but on transcending
conventionality in music, partying, and drug use. For some, making Jazz
and smoking marijuana became a way of life (Curry 1968).
Louis Armstrong, The Viper
As the list of composers of reefer songs suggests, many of the biggest

names in the early years of Jazz (and long after) were regular marijuana
users. Most notable, perhaps, is New Orleans-born Louis Armstrong
(1901-1971), the Jazz musician Geoffrey Burns (Ward and Burns 2000:
88) has called “the most important person in American music.” Raised
on the tough but colorful streets of Storyville, a place of commercial
sex, violence, drug use, and music, Armstrong, whose own mother
turned to prostitution to support her family, had early exposure and in-
volvement in all the seamier sides of life, as well as to White contempt
and dismissal, but, amazingly is remembered around the world with
awe as a force for hope and promise. On the ramshackle street where he
grew up, the small rectangular houses had no running water and lacked
adequate sanitation. Later he would write about his childhood, “You
must realize it was very shaky . . . during my days growing up in New
Orleans. You had to fight and do a lot of ungodly things to keep from
being trampled on” (Ward and Burns 2000:40).
Learning to play the cornet while incarcerated (for shooting off a gun
in public) in the Colored Waif’s Home, Armstrong’s first musical jobs
were playing the blues in honky-tonks in various short-lived three man
bands in Storyville. Expected to play all night long, Armstrong, like the
other musicians in this exacting milieu, learned the value of marijuana
in sustaining him through the night playing his horn. Consequently,
Armstrong viewed marijuana or “gage” as he called it, as “a sort of med-
icine” (Jones and Chilton 1971:98). Further, as he would later affirm, to
Armstrong, marijuana was “an assistant, a friend, [and] a nice cheap
drunk” (Ward and Burns 2000:184). He was a dedicated, daily user and
even overruled his often pushy manager on the question of giving up
weed. Armstrong introduced many fellow musicians to marijuana, telling
them that it was an “herbal medicine.”
Despite his difficult start in life, Armstrong’s unparalleled musical
genius was ultimately recognized and he was dubbed “the King of the
Trumpet.” Before long, he left New Orleans to perform in New York,
Chicago and elsewhere around the country. Then in 1931, while head-
lining at Frank Sebastion’s New Cotton Club in Culver, California,
Armstrong and fellow musician Vic Berton (1898-1951) were arrested
by narcotics agents for possession of marijuana while smoking the drug
during an intermission in the club’s parking lot. As Armstrong (Jones
and Chilton 1971:122) recalled:
Vic and I were blasting this joint–having lots of laughs and feeling
good enjoying each other’s company. We were standing in this
great big lot in front of some cars. Just then two big healthy Dicks
(detectives) came from behind a car nonchalantly–and said to us,
we’ll take the roach boys.
At the time, marijuana panic was at fever pitch in California, indeed

in all areas of the country with large legal and illegal immigrant Mexi-
can populations–“who tended to use marijuana as a drug of entertain-
ment or relaxation,” including Armstrong’s home state of Louisiana,
public “fear of marijuana at the time was intense” (Musto 1987:219).
With the Great Depression, anti-Mexican hostility soared, leading to
ever more strident claims about the corrupting evils of marijuana.
In a telling bow to the stardom he had already achieved, after he was
arrested, the police–who admitted to him they were big fans of his radio
program–allowed Armstrong to go back into the Cotton Club to finish
his second set, then whisked him off to Los Angeles City Jail. Facing a
six-month sentence as well as a thousand dollar fine, Armstrong spent
only nine days in jail before being handed a suspended sentence and re-
lease from custody, possibly because of underworld connections to the
judge overseeing the case. He soon left the Los Angeles area for Chi-
cago, although before doing so he spent an evening getting high on mar-

ijuana with a White musician who had brought the drug to the club in a
burlap sack. Recalled Armstrong (Jones and Chilton 1971:94).
He said “Louis this muta . . . came from out of the back yard where
the chickens trampled all over it, so it should be well seasoned.”
He and I went to the hotel over on Central Avenue, rolled up our
sleeves, cleaned it real beautifully and rolled up one [joint] a piece.
We dragged on down halfway to a ‘roach’ and he was right. When
we got on down there we could taste the cackling, the crowing and
the other things those chickens did. Beautiful.
Later that year on a Southern musical tour, Armstrong was arrested

again, this time in Memphis for violation of Jim Crow laws. Armstrong
was locked in a cell with Sherman Cook, his valet, who announced to
his boss that he was carrying a large, neatly wrapped joint. Eyeing
Cook’s prize, Armstrong announced “We can’t be in any more trouble
than we are in right now” and, like many prisoners before and since, got
high behind bars (Ward and Burns 2000:188). Later that evening,
Armstrong was bailed out on the condition that he play a live radio per-
formance advertising a local theatre. On the air, Armstrong dryly dedi-
cated a song to the Memphis Police Department and then mischievously
performed “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You.” The po-
lice who were in attendance to keep an eye on him missed Armstrong’s
sardonic jab and thanked him for the dedication.
Criminalization of Marijuana: The Beat Goes On
During the period 1915-1937, as many as 27 states passed laws crim-

inalizing the use of marijuana. Ultimately, the antimarijuana campaign
came to a head in the passage of the national Marijuana Tax Act. The
bill was strongly pushed by Harry Anslinger, the first Commissioner of
the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and the man who is seen as the father of the
long-fought U.S. War on Drugs. Anslinger had a special distaste for
Jazz and Jazz musicians, not only because of their involvement with
marijuana but also because of their public rejection of mainstream val-
ues and lifestyle. During Congressional hearings on the Marijuana Tax
Act, Anslinger refer to “satanic voodoo jazz” and warned that mari-
juana would make White women want to have sex with Blacks. Further-
more, he described marijuana users as being violent and insane. He even
claimed to be able to differentiate good Jazzman from bad ones on the
basis of whether they played what was written on a musical score or sa-
tanically improvised parts of their performances (Sloman 1998). In the
aftermath of the law’s passage, Jazz leaders like Louis Armstrong re-
ported that the penalties were just now too great to continue smoking
the drug and he gave it up. However, this was not so generally. In his au-
tobiography, Bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) reported
(Gillespie and Frazier 1979:98):
When I came to New York in 1937, I didn’t drink nor smoke mari-
juana. “You gotta be a square muthafucka!” Charlie Shavers [1917-
1971] said and turned me on to smoking pot. Now, certainly, we
were not the only ones. Some of the older musicians had been
smoking reefers for 40 and 50 years. Jazz musicians, the old ones
and the young ones, almost all of them that I knew smoked pot, but
I wouldn’t call that drug abuse.
Adds Gillespie’s biographer, Donald Maggin (2005:107):
Dizzy never came close to being addicted to any substance, but he
enjoyed alcohol, large cigars, marijuana, aromatic pipe tobacco,
and an occasional hit of cocaine.
Similarly, in the years after the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act, Mal-
colm X, prior to his conversion to Islam, made his living selling match
stick-size joints of marijuana to Jazz musicians (while dodging narcot-
ics detectives). In his autobiography, he noted (Malcolm X 1965:99):
In every band, at least half the musicians smoked reefers. I’m not
going to list names; I’d have to include some of those most promi-
nent then in popular music, even a number of them around today.
In one case, every man in one of the bands, which is still famous,
was on marijuana.
As these examples suggest, even the passage of laws severely pun-
ishing those caught in the possession of the drug did little to damage the
deep, symbiotic bond uniting marijuana and Jazz. It is fair to say, in fact,
that while smoking reefer helped create the cool, unflinching image of an
intensely committed musician living and playing at the dangerous edges
of society, Jazz, as an ultimately celebrated if daring musical form,
helped to give marijuana use its reputation as a rebellious drug adven-
ture. It was this reputation that fostered the transition of marijuana use
during the 1960s and 1970s into a core ritual of the White, middle class
youth counter culture and to propel the broad polydrug use transition
characteristic of that era (Singer 2006a). Ever since, marijuana has re-
mained the most widely consumed illicit substance in American society.
Marijuana has been called a “stepping stone” drug because, even
though most people who try it do not go on to use more powerful and
physically addicting drugs, those who do come to consume such drugs al-
most always use marijuana before moving on to include other illicit sub-
stances in their drug repertoires. So do, through the years, many of the
most celebrated of Jazzmen. While, not surprisingly, various drugs have
been sampled by individual Jazz performers, after marijuana heroin has
been the hard drug of choice beginning with its first significant appear-
ance on the Jazz scene during and immediately after World War II.
THE CRUEL MISTRESS:

HEROIN FLOWS IN THE VEINS OF JAZZ
Heroin Hits
The celebrated author, Claude Brown, best known for autobiogra-

phy, Manchild in the Promised Land, provides a vivid account of the ar-
rival of heroin on the streets of the American inner city in the middle of
the twentieth century. Brown was introduced to drug use through friends,
especially a group of older boys whom he idolized. They first taught
him how to roll and smoke joints. When they moved on to heroin use,
which, among other names was called “horse” at that time, he sought to
emulate them. For several months during 1950 all he could think about
was his intense craving for heroin:
Horse was a new thing, not only in our neighborhood but in Brook-
lyn, the Bronx, and everyplace I went, uptown and downtown. It
was like horse had just taken over. Everybody was talking about it.
All the hip people were using it and snorting it and getting this new
high. . . . I had been smoking reefers and had gotten high a lot of
times, but I had the feeling that this horse was out of this world.
(Brown 1965:109)
Ultimately, he got his chance to try heroin:
I couldn’t believe it was really happening. I almost wanted to break

out and laugh for joy, but I held back, and I snorted . . . Something
hit me right in the top of the head. It felt like a little spray of pepper
on my brain. . . . Everything was getting rosy, beautiful. The sun got

brighter in the sky and the whole day lit up and was twice as bright
as it was before . . . Everything was so slo-o-ow. (Brown 1965:
110-111)
Saxophonist, Jackie Mclean (1932-)–known to his Jazz friends as

“Jackie Mac”–shares Brown’s perception of the sudden, intense impact
of heroin just after the World War II (Ward and Burns 2000:357-358):
Heroin came on the scene like a tidal wave. . . . I mean, it just ap-
peared after World War II. And I began to notice guys in my
neighborhood nodding on the corner, and so we all began to find
out that they were nodding because they were taking this thing
[we] called ‘horse.’
Among the hippest of the “hip people,” Jazz musicians and singers were
quick to pounce on the new high, Jackie McLean among them. He re-
calls (Nisenson 2000:39):
A lot of musicians used it . . . It was especially hard for musicians

to exist in those days, so a lot of musicians sold themselves down
the river under the influence of narcotics because they had to have
that bit of money to get along.
As record producer Michael Cuscuna (Ward and Burn 2000:427) recog-

nized:
Anyone who thinks that it’s easy to go onstage every night, three
hundred times a year, and create something new, will never get the
toll that it takes to be a jazz musician.
McLean remained addicted for 18 years. Later (1959-1960), however,

he acted in the off-Broadway play “The Connection,” a cautionary tale
about Jazz and the hazards of drug abuse and went on to a still active ca-
reer as an educator and the founder and artistic director of the Jackie
McLean Institute of Jazz at the University of Hartford.
Sonny Rollins, a friend of MacLean in New York, also got addicted
at mid-century. He notes (Nisenson 2000:39):
Dope was flooding everyplace at the time, but it was especially

ubiquitous in the show-business life. I don’t think that Jackie
[McLean] and Art Taylor [1929-1995] and the other guys would
have gotten into it if we had not been getting involved in show
business. We were not gang-bangers. We came from fairly mid-
dle-class people, with middle-class aspirations and all of that . . .
We started off with pot and then got involved with the heavier
drugs.
In retrospect, Rollins also recognized another factor that drew him to

drug use, and to the drug-related armed robbery and parole violation
that would send him twice to prison on Rikers Island: role modeling.
Like most of the young Jazz performers entering into the field at mid-
century, drug use among those they admired influenced their own will-
ingness to use. Especially influential in this regard were virtuoso saxo-
phonist Charlie Bird Parker (1920-1955) and singer Billie Holiday
(1915-1959). Parker, in particular, has been blamed for setting a nega-
tive example, through his prodigious drug use, that influenced a large
number of Jazz performers of his generation “who lost several produc-
tive years, or in some cases their lives” following in his wayward foot-
steps (Carr et al. 2004:605). So impressed were they with his sound that
numerous musicians “wanted to play like Bird, play with Bird, be around
Bird” (Korall 2002:9). Years later, irascible bassist Charles Mingus
(1922-1979) would record a tune that satirized those who tried to copy
Parker called “If Charlie Parker was a Gunslinger, There’d be a Whole
Lot of Dead Copycats.” Notes Rollins (Nisenson 2000:39):
We greatly admired Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, and maybe

to some extent that affected us, too. So that is what got us into it,
more than what was happening on the streets of our community.
Like these musical rebel heroes, Rollings and his peers saw in drugs a
way of expressing the depth of their commitment, right or wrong, good
or bad, to their music (Nisenson 2000:38):
Using drugs was, in a strange way, a negation of the money ethic.

Guys were saying, “I don’t care about this, I don’t care about how I
dress or how I look, all [I] care about is music.”
Put simply, Parker “made heroin hip” (Korall 2002:9) as track marks
along one’s arm “became a member’s insignia” of coveted insider status
(Chambers 1998:137).
Like McLean–and despite his inclination to downplay the toll of drug

abuse on his life and music–once Rollins overcame his drug habit, this
experience strongly influenced him in subsequent years. Initially, fol-
lowing residential treatment for his addiction at the federal hospital in
Lexington, Kentucky, Rollins doubted his ability to resist the pull of
drugs and he was afraid to return to social environments–including Jazz
clubs–that had been part of his prior drug-driven lifestyle. Additionally,
he worried that his widely respected improvisational skills might be de-
pendent on him being high on drugs. Playing before an audience, con-
stantly subject to failure and rejection, always at risk of embarrassment
among one’s peers and respected role models, performers like Rollins
questioned their ability to overcome their fears and self-doubts without
the pain-deadening power of heroin. Ultimately, Rollins prevailed, how-
ever, and returned successfully to his musical career, but his subsequent
unblemished character was markedly influenced by his awareness of
the depths to which he had fallen.
The extent of the Jazz/heroin connection during this era was assessed
by psychologist Charles Winick (1959). In the late 1950s, he inter-
viewed 357 Jazz musicians on their own drug use patterns and those of
their fellow musicians, and later reported on therapeutic approaches
with addicted jazzmen (Winick and Nyswander 1961). In his study,
Winick found that 82% of the Jazzmen in his sample had tried mari-
juana at least once, 54% were occasional users, and 23% were regular
users. Additionally, over half (53%) had tried heroin, 24% used the drug
occasionally, and 16% used it on a regularly basis. In response to his
questions about the appeal of drugs, Winick found that there was peer
pressure to use drugs in some bands. Other reasons for use according to
his respondents were: (1) experiencing a collective feeling of group ex-
citement produced by sharing music and drugs; (2) a way to cope with
personal problems; and (3) a physical boost on long road trips when a
band would finally arrive at a point of destination after an all-day bus
ride and have to perform all evening. As pianist Billy Taylor (1921-)
(Playboy Panel 1960:43) commented during a 1960 panel on drugs and
Jazz organized by Playboy Magazine:
One thing that drives guys either to drink or to dope is the one-
nighter. You make impossible jumps. You’re working with big
bands–so you work tonight in Bangor, Maine, and you’ve got a
one-nighter scheduled right after that gig, and you have to get in
the bus and go out to Minneapolis. You’re driving to the gig, and
then you’ve got to drive all day and you barely make it in time for
the one-nighter. You’ve been sitting up in the bus; the only time
you have off is to go to the john or get something to eat, and you’re
dirty, you’re sweaty, you’ve got to go right on–and the people are
all freshly shaved and freshly showered, all the girls look nice and
you feel like a dog. And the spotlight is on you–and you need a
shave, you feel terrible, you don’t want to go near anybody be-
cause you feel you smell like a ram. And this kind of thing, when
you do it night in and night out–it’s understandable why a musi-
cian would want to find some “out,” some sort of relief, to make
him feel good, too.
OF LIVES AND DRUGS
There is no denying that jazzmen have paid a terrible price because of

drug . There is no more poignant place to begin an evaluation of this is-
sue than the life of Charles Bird Parker, “one of the most striking per-
formers in the history of Jazz, and one of the most influential” (Carr
et al. 2004:605).
The Bird: At Home with Heroin
Charlie Parker, who during his short life gained revered status among
many other Jazz performers, was known for his pioneering use of har-
monics, free improvisation, use of strikingly complex, discordant note
structures, instrumental dexterity, and general musical daring. As a re-
sult, Parker became “a figure of legend. Much larger than life” (Korall
2002:9). Along with Dizzy Gillespie, he was an inventor of bebop, the
controversial and hence, for younger musicians, extremely exciting
“stepchild of jazz” (Russell 1996:174). Indeed, beyond its driving style
and innovative rhythms, it is likely bebop’s radical challenge of conven-
tional Jazz forms as well as the behavioral conventions of the broader so-
ciety, that most appealed to the many younger Jazz musicians who
became drug addicts during the 1950s.
Parker’s own involvement with drugs long predated the 1950s. He
grew up in Kansas City, where he dropped out of high school to focus
on his music. At the time, in the mid-1930s, Kansas City was a Jazz cen-
ter, especially for saxophone players. Parker knew all their names and
their music and he sought to emulate them. At age 14, he began to sneak
into clubs so that he could listen to the Jazz and watch the jazzmen ma-
nipulate their instruments in creative jam sessions. It was also during
this period that he began his long and fatal dance with psychotropics.
The first drug he tried was nutmeg, which, in sufficient quantity can
produce mind-altering effects (as it damages the stomach lining). Mari-
juana came next. It was readily available to Parker and his young teen
friends, and it was inexpensive. Even cocaine could on occasion be ac-
quired. Parker’s appetite for new drug experiences continued to grow,
even as he began to find work and eventually fame as a musician.
Before long, Parker was introduced by a friend to heroin. To his satis-
faction, he discovered (Russell 1996:140) that
His physiology, uniquely resilient in so many ways, could tolerate

heroin far better than most. Junkies were usually detached and
on the nod. They had no appetite for food, far less for sex . . . Char-
lie experienced none of these reactions. His appetites went un-
checked.
More importantly, during these very early years of his musical career,
Parker realized that drugs helped him cope with the gap between his
own needs for recognition and the low-level positions–playing cut-rate
clubs–open to him as a teenage musician, even a prodigy with his obvi-
ous natural talent. Over time, Parker’s drug-dependent lifestyle began
to harden “into a mold that he would never succeed in breaking” (Rus-
sell 1996:141). While heroin became his mainstay, Parker experimented
with a wide variety of drugs, using one to modify the unpleasant effects
of another. Self taught pianist Hampton Hawes (1929-1977)– who him-
self served a five year prison bid for heroin possession–reported one
evening seeing Parker chain-smoke marijuana, consume a handful of
Benzedrine tablets, and drink down eleven shots of whiskey, all before
shooting up heroin and then getting onstage and performing in his usual
powerful fashion (Ward and Burns 2000). Through all of this extremely
heavy drug use, Parker’s reputation as an unmatched Jazz performer
continued to grow.
By the time that the heroin lanes between Europe (where it was being
manufactured from poppy sap harvested in Asia) opened up after the
war, and high-quality white power heroin began to rain down upon the
teeming streets of New York and other U.S. cities, Parker had achieved
the unparalleled stature that would allow him–very likely against his
wishes–to play the role of pied piper on the road to heroin addiction.
Overtime, however, Parker’s own ability to tolerate his massive drug
appetite began to overwhelm his music. In 1947, Parker joined Dizzie
Gillespie, and Ella Fitzgerald (1918-1996)–who was to play the great
hall 26 times in her life–and others in a concert at Carnegie Hall. Ted

Reigs, who was assigned the task of bringing Parker from his hotel
room to the concert hall, found the bathroom door locked and ultimately
had to break it down. Parker was passed out in a drug stupor in the tub.
With assistance, Parker was dried, dressed and whisked by cab to Car-
negie in time for the concert, in which he played strong, as if all was
well. Finally in 1955, at only 34 years of age, Parker’s unrivaled ability
to withstand the damage drugs were doing to his body faltered. He died
as he watched band leader Tommy Dorsey (1905-1956)–who had once
accused beboppers Parker and Gillespie of being musical communists–
on TV while staying with an admirer on his way to a performance in
Boston. The doctor who attended to him in his final days assumed,
based on his appearance, that Parker was between 50 and 60 years of
age.
Parker, of course was not alone. Heroin in particular has been a grim if
indiscriminate reaper in Jazz. The list of Jazz singers and musicians who
have died of substance abuse–including Chet Baker, Sonny Berman
(1924-1947), Tommy Dorsy (1905-1956), Billie Holiday, Serge Chaloff
(1923-1957), Art Pepper, Fats Navarro (1923-1950), Richard Twardzik
(1931-1955), and Freddie Webster (1916-1947)–unites celebrities and
journeymen, women and men, Black and White. For some, like John
Coltrane (1926-1967), the negative effects of heroin addiction took their
toll just as they were first coming into their own as musicians, for others,
like Andy Kirk, Jr. (1898-1992), it forced them to abandon their faltering
Jazz careers all together.
A Lady (Lives and) Sings the Blues
While certainly not the only woman in Jazz to succumb to heroin,

Billie Holiday was the most prominent and the most influential. A “gold-
en girl in a man’s world” (Giddens 1998:369), Holiday became the
singing voice of Jazz in the same way that Parker became its instrumen-
tal genius. Then, in a fateful misstep, in 1942 Holiday married a drug
dealer, and was soon using heroin to sooth her sadness and disappoint-
ment at the state of her troubled marriage. Lady Day, as she was known
in Jazz circles, grew up in the Baltimore area, a place that today is an
epicenter of a new wave of heroin use. Daughter of Jazz guitarist Clar-
ence Holiday (1898-1937)–who was rarely at home and not a father fig-
ure for her–Billie (who selected this nickname because of favored
actress–Billie Dove) endured a childhood that was anything but a holi-
day. Sexually assaulted at age ten, she spent time in a home for way-
ward youth for somehow causing her victimization. The apartment

building she lived in was home to a brothel and, after dropping out of
high school, Billie made money cleaning the rooms of the commercial
sex workers and doing odd jobs for them. It was in the brothel that she
first heard the records of blues singer Bessie Smith and the Jazz perfor-
mances of Louis Armstrong, both of which helped to shape her own mu-
sical style.
At age 12, Holiday moved to Harlem and within a year was working
as a prostitute. Rejecting the advances of one would-be customer, she
was turned into the police and spent four months behind bars. At age 15,
she found her first singing job, at a late night saloon. Within a few years,
after performing at various clubs around the city–including the Apollo
Club to rave reviews–she was hired by Artie Shaw and became the first
Black singer in a White band. Because of oppressive Jim Crow laws,
however, she could not always travel on the bus with her coworkers,
and while they would enter clubs through the front door, she was forced
to go around back. She could and did perform at Café Society in Green-
wich Village, a club that sported ethnically mixed audiences and bands.
It was here that she unveiled her hit song “Strange Fruit,” written for her
by Abel Meeropol (under the pseudonym of Lewis Allen)–the union ac-
tivist whose family raised the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
after they were executed. The song tells the tale of the lynching of Black
people, the strange fruit hanging from southern poplar trees. The sharp,
gripping contrasts that carry the song are well captured in the line:
“Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh and the sudden smell of burning
flesh.” Holiday’s motivation for singing such an overtly political song
were not rooted solely in her outrage at the treatment of Blacks in the
south. In her view, Black oppression did not stop at the Mason-Dixon
line or even at the bandstand. As she once commented,
You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your

hair [the latter being her personal trademark] and no sugar cane for
miles, but you can still be working on a plantation. (O’Meally
2000:129)
It is not exactly known when Holiday began to use drugs, but it ap-
pears that even as an early teenager she was dabbling in the use of mari-
juana. Arthur, one of the heroin addicts interviewed by Courtwright,
Joseph, and Des Jarlais (1989:154) for their oral history of narcotic use,
reported regularly smoking marijuana with Holiday during the 1930s:
I knew Billie when she started out singing at the Hot-Cha Club,
134th Street on Seventh Ave. . . .We was all smoking pot. We used
to smoke, then put the pot behind the sun visor of the car, and sit.
The car didn’t even have a radio in it. She has a little Victrola and
used to play records in the car.
With her first husband Holiday moved on to smoking opium. By the
early 1940s, she had graduated to heroin injection. Addiction followed
quickly and her music suffered. She began missing performances, be-
came quarrelsome, and watched all of her money go for drugs. Then in
1949, Holiday was arrested, charged with narcotic possession, plead
guilt, and was sentenced to a year in prison. As a result, she lost her cab-
aret card and was banned, upon her release from the women’s prison in
Alderson, West Virginia from performing in any venue in New York
City that served alcoholic beverages–a fate that befell Thelonius Monk
(1917-1982) as well a few years later–including all of the clubs in which
she previously had headlined. Concert halls were still open to her and
ten days after returning to New York she performed to a packed house at
Carnegie Hall.
Her drug addiction, however, continued, as did the tension it intro-
duced into her relationships with friends and fellow performers. Often
she would appeal to friends for money to buy drugs. Soon, the number
of people she could depend on began to dwindle. As Holiday knowingly
observed, “In this country, don’t forget, a habit is no damn private hell.
There’s no solitary confinement outside of jail. A habit is hell for those
you love. And in this country, it’s the worst kind of hell for those who
love you”(Carter 2005). Complicating Holiday’s problems, she was
swindled out of most her earnings and received little if anything for the
records she recorded. As a result, she was near penniless in the later
years of her life.
Holiday once said:
Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do

anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you–and kill you the
long, slow, hard way. (Carter 2005)
Her words proved prophetic. In 1959, on her deathbed, narcotics

agents arrested her. By age 44, the Angel of Harlem–as she was dubbed
in the 1987 song by U2–was dead. She was buried at Saint Raymond’s
Cemetery in the Bronx, New York. In his autobiography, Miles Davis
(1989:236) noted:
It just kills you and that’s what happened to Billie and Bird; they
just gave in to all the shit they were doing. Got tired of everything
and just checked out.
JAZZ, ETHNICITY, AND DRUGS
Indisputably, the roots of Jazz lie in Black musical and cultural tradi-
tions and Black experience in the New World. Its branches, however,
have brought forth some brilliant white fruit. Indeed, Whites have been
attracted to Black music of various forms since the time of slavery, an
era during which slaves were required periodically by some slave-own-
ers to exhibit their traditional and newly fashioned songs and dances for
the entertainment of White folk. By the time of the minstrel shows of the
nineteenth century, White performers had taken to expropriating Black
music for public performance–in blackface–for White audiences. So
too with Jazz. As early as 1927, this affinity was captured on film in Al
Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, one of the first talking motion pictures. Over
the years many white musicians have been inspired by and dedicated
their lives to Jazz. Their presence dates to the early years of the genre.
Not surprisingly, all of the racial tensions of the wider society have
found their expression in the world of Jazz. The particular manifestation
of racial conflict in Jazz, however, has turned as well on questions of le-
gitimacy (Is Jazz a Black musical form that cannot be fully grasped by
Whites who lack the experience of being Black in America?) and recog-
nition (Who is to be credited and rewarded for producing America’s
music?). As Miles Davis (1989:405-406) has asserted:
In Europe and Japan they respect black people’s culture, what we
have contributed to the world. . . . But white Americans would
rather push a white person like Elvis Presley, who is just a copy of
a black person, than push the real thing. . . . But that’s all right be-
cause everyone knows that Chuck Berry started that shit, not Elvis.
They know Duke Ellington was the “King of Jazz” and not Paul
Whiteman [1890-1967]. . . . For example, when he was alive Bird
never got his due . . . [F]or most white [music] critics, Jimmy
Dorsey [1904-1957] was their man. . . .
Still, Davis was well aware of the resentment some Black musicians
felt towards Whites in Jazz. In the late 1940s, Davis began to pull to-
gether the band that would record the successful bebop album “Birth of
the Cool,” a recording Davis described as “an all-black thing” (Davis
1989:119). One of the musicians he hired was alto saxophonist Lee

Konitiz (1927-) a White musician.
Then a lot of black musicians came down on my case about their

not having work, and here I was hiring white guys in my band. So I
just told them that if a guy could play as good as Lee Konitz–that’s
who they were about most, because there were a lot of black alto
players around–I would hire him every time . . . When I told them
that, a lot of them got off my case. But a few of them stayed mad
with me. (Davis 1989:117)
Over the years, Konitz was to hear this complaint many times. Addi-
tionally, his style of playing Jazz was often criticized for “being white.”
Miles Davis, for example, believed that playing behind the beat, Kontiz’s
trademark, was a “white characteristic” (Zwerkin 1998). Konitz coun-
tered (Zwerkin 1998:1):
It’s a pain in the neck. I’ve been apologizing in some way for not
being black all my life. Like am I bluesy enough to be authentic? In
fact, I’m just playing variations on a theme. They are neither black
nor white. I hope they are beautiful, and I think I’m getting better
at it.
Konitz was a big influence on alto saxophonist, Art Pepper, who was
also said to “sound white.” Pepper, who was well aware of the cruel rac-
ism of White society, including his own father, felt discriminated against
at times in Jazz circles. In his autobiography (Pepper and Pepper
1984:114), he recalled an incident in which some friends overheard two
Black musicians who were playing in Pepper’s band making fun of him.
When he confronted one of these individuals, he was told (Pepper and
Pepper 1986:114):
“Oh fuck you! You know what I think of you, you white mother-
fucker?” And he spit in the dirt and stepped in it. He said, “You
can’t play. None of you white punks can play!”
However, great or small racial tensions were in particular times and

places within Jazz, in one significant way musicians like Miles Davis
and Art Pepper were painfully alike, both became addicted to heroin
(and both used an array of other drugs as well), Davis in 1949 and Pep-
per the following year. According to Davis (1989:130):
I wasn’t never into that trip that if you shot heroin you might be
able to play like Bird. I knew a lot of musicians who were into
that . . . What got me strung out was the depression I felt when I got
back to America [after living in France]. That and missing Juliette.
Pepper (Pepper and Pepper 1986:198) also attributed his involvement

with heroin to psychological issues, especially the relief it offered from
an “an inability to have confidence in myself and in my playing,” the
loneliness he suffered being on the road away from his wife, and the
need to quiet a set of demons that had long haunted his psyche. Like so
many others before him, Pepper (Pepper and Pepper 1986:186) falsely
told himself “I could be the one who could do it [heroin] and still be
alright.”
In the end, both Miles and Pepper suffered intensely because of their
drug habits. Notes Davis (1989:136):
Shooting heroin changed my whole personality from being a nice,

quiet, honest, caring person into someone who was the complete
opposite. I’d do anything not to be [dope] sick, which meant get-
ting and shooting heroin all the time, all day and night.
Similarly, Pepper (Pepper and Pepper 1986:240) recalled:
Each time I got [dope] sick there was more and more fear and hate,
knowing I was trapped and I couldn’t stop, knowing I was going
back to jail, I was full of animosity and so jealous and all I wanted
was a lot of money, man, so I could lay up and really drown myself
in heroin, saturate myself with it, so I wouldn’t feel or see, so I
wouldn’t cry or die. All I wanted was lots of money so I could
make myself totally oblivious to everything.
As a result of their addictions both men wound up in prison, both recog-

nized that their music and personal relationships had suffered badly be-
cause of their drug use, and both fought to be free of drugs. While Davis
was finally able to stop using heroin–“Then one day it was over, just like
that” (Davis 1989:170)–Pepper never really succeeded, although, like
Davis, he was able to rescue his career in the years prior to his death.
In the end, like in American society generally, race in Jazz remains an
issue, a potential point of tension (sometimes overt, often just out of
view), and a factor, very likely, in why Blacks continue to be a bold and
energetic source of new musical forms: to maintain an outlet for a distinc-
tive Black experience in a context in which musical success produces ar-

tistic diffusion and in which the sources of Black musical creativity (as
well as White musical creativity) is of ethnically mixed origin. In chroni-
cling the life of Dizzy Gillespie, for example, Maggin (2005) argues that
a catalyst of Gillespie’s fêted creativity was the fanatical racism that
shaped many aspects of his life from boyhood onward, including endur-
ing the White lynching of fellow Black high school band member Bill
McNeil, being forced by a gun-wielding bigot in South Carolina to dance
in the street or be shot, and being attached by a carload of White thugs in
Philadelphia. Whites who have entered into the world of Jazz generally
lack any sort of equivalent experience. They have, nonetheless, been able
to draw on their own personal woes and their love of Jazz as a musical
form as engines for their own creativity.
THE CONTEMPORARY SCENE
With the emergence of the Beatles and the so-called English inva-
sion, events that led to a spectacular jump in the popularity of rock mu-
sic, the popular appeal of Jazz began to decline.
Desperate jazz musicians took jobs wherever they could find
them–in cocktail lounges, studio orchestras, playing background
music for the movies, backing rock ‘n’ roll performers on records.
(Ward and Burns 2000:431)
Some left for Europe–which provided no salvation for musicians like
Chet Baker (1929-1988), who fell to his death from a hotel window in
Amsterdam while under the influence of heroin and cocaine; others left
the music business altogether. For a time, some thought that saxophon-
ist John Coltrane (1926-1967) would be the modern day Charlie Parker
in terms of the influence of his music. Ironically, like Parker he too be-
came addicted to heroin, but also got involved in other drugs, like LSD,
made popular by the 1960s/70s drug transition. In 1964 Coltrane and his
quartet recorded “A Love Supreme,” one of the most widely sold Jazz
albums ever made. By 1966, however, Coltrane’s stature began to slip,
as his music changed and its avant-garde experimental tone–which
sounded shrill to many listeners–became less popularly appealing. He
died of liver cancer the following year. Coltrane was noted for having
been influenced by Indian music, which developed a sudden western
following during the 1960s. Miles Davis too began to have influences
during this period that took him beyond the traditional boundaries of
Jazz. In 1969 he had a best-selling album, called “Bitches Brew” that

celebrated the fusion of Jazz with rock n’ roll. Davis’s commitment to
Jazz lessened with each of his subsequent albums. The year Davis’s hy-
brid fusion album appeared also saw a significant decline in the popular
appeal of the Newport Jazz Festival, further marking the falling off of
Jazz. Then in 1975, Davis stopped recording (although he returned to
music six years later). He observed (Davis 1989:352), “Fewer and
fewer black musicians were playing Jazz and I could see why, because
Jazz was becoming the music of the museum.” Underlying Davis’ com-
ment were the deaths of Louis Armstrong in 1971 (the home he was
born in New Orleans having been demolished in 1964 to build a police
station) and Duke Ellington in 1974; the remaining giants of Jazz were
fading. By 1960, Dizzy Gillespie (The Playboy Panel 1960:40) observed:
A lot of our most talented jazz musicians are dead. And the youn-
ger guys know that narcotics might not have been the main reason
for their deaths, but it led to most of the deaths.
At this moment of transition, with police pressure at an all time high,

the reputation of Jazz damaged by its social connection with drugs, and
recognition of the price that had been paid apparent to the new genera-
tion of musicians, the drugs/jazz connection unraveled. As Nat Aderly
(1931-2000) concluded in 1960, “The fad is over” (The Playboy Panel
1960:41). As a marker of the changing times, a number of jazzman
helped to form the Musician’s Clinic in New York to provide therapy
for drug addicts.
New Jazz musicians have appeared–some of noted ability–but the
audience for Jazz is now comparatively small and more White than
Black. Further, a globalization of Jazz has occurred leading to a shift in
its center of gravity outside of the African American community. Also,
America’s music is far less American today than in the past. A perusal
of Downbeat magazine–which has covered Jazz for decades–having
helped expose the heroin wave of the 1950s, and is still published,
would leave one guessing about the Black roots of this musical tradi-
tion. Many U.S. cities lack a single radio station that plays Jazz. Drug
abuse, however, continues to be an issue in some sectors of the circum-
scribed Jazz world. But there is also an antidrug sentiment in light of the
heavy costs Jazz has paid for its agonizing encounter with drugs. Drum-
mer Carl Allen (1961-), among others, has emerged as a spokesperson
for Jazz Against Drugs, which focuses on drug prevention among youth
while celebrating the cultural heritage of Jazz music. Similarly, Mildred
Nichols, mother of Jazz guitarist Wilbert Longmire (1950-), was a lead-

ing force in the grassroots group Fighting Against Crack Trafficking
(FACT) until her death in 2005.
Most notably, in the contemporary period Jazz is no longer a center
of countercultural drug use; it is not hip to use drugs in Jazz, if anything,
given Jazz’s drug legacy, the opposite is true. During the 1960s and 70s
drug transition, the drug legacy of Jazz, in fact, passed first to rock n’
roll, and more recently Hip Hop has emerged as the musical epicenter of
illicit drug use. Indeed, each of these genres, in turn, replaced Jazz as the
rebellious center of musical creativity. In the aftermath of the British
rock invasion “jazz clubs were beginning to empty and shut down. Only
a couple still presented jazz all the time, most mixed it up. The glory
days were gone” (Santero 2000:248).
Rock n’ roll, like Jazz before it, suffered grievous losses to drugs, in-
cluding stars like Jimmi Hendrix who was influenced by Jazz early in
his life. Hip Hop also has lost several of its key innovators but to vio-
lence rather than to drugs. Heroin, however is not the drug of choice in
the Hip Hop social milieu, rather high-dosage THC marijuana (called
“bud” among other street names), and more recently ecstasy, are most
likely to find their way into rap lyrics and lifestyles. Thus, while the
connection between mind-altering drugs and socially edgy music lives
on, the musical location of this relationship has migrated across genres.
In this, an enduring social role of drug use in American society as a cul-
turally constituted counter force to conventionally and prevailing social
structures (and inequities) is revealed.
CONCLUSION: CRITICAL ASSESSMENT

OF THE DRUG/JAZZ CONNECTION
The CMA Perspective
It is the argument of this paper that the particular nature of the fateful
encounter between Jazz and psychotropic drugs cannot be accounted
for in terms of a simple theoretical approach. Rather, we employ a broad
theoretical framework–critical medical anthropology (CMA)–that is
designed to explore macro-micro linkages between the dominant struc-
tures of political economy and on-the-ground historically situated health-
related behaviors, beliefs, and experiences of those involved. The CMA
perspective developed in the early 1980s among a group of medical
anthropologists–several of whom had a special interest in substance
abuse–who had become uncomfortable with the way health issues were
being analyzed by the existing array of theoretical models with in the
discipline. Missing from such analyses, they believed, was adequate at-
tention being paid to the impact of social inequality and the exercise of
differential levels of power in society on health-related beliefs and be-
haviors (Castro and Singer 2004; Farmer 1999).
With regard to the impact of drug use on health, for example, critical
medical anthropologists (Baer, Singer, and Susser 2003; Bourgois 2004;
Singer 2004, 2006; Waterston 1993) began to ask questions like: what is
the role of the multinational corporation with its vast advertising appa-
ratus, ability to influence government policy, and control of scientific
knowledge about how to manipulate the chemical properties of its prod-
ucts as well as people’s attitudes about and patterns of consumption?
How do social inequality, structural violence (e.g., poverty, racism), so-
cial marginalization and stigma, and resultant social suffering contrib-
ute to the appeal of drug use? What impact do state institutions of social
control (e.g., the police, the courts, prisons), dominant social ideologies
and values (e.g., the American cultural emphasis on achievement and
personal responsibility for success and failure), and social networks of
support and coping have on drug use? What role has racism and racial
stereotypes played in public attitudes about substance abuse and in the
enactment of public drug policies? What are the broader social func-
tions and consequences of the War on Drugs? How can we account for
noticeable trends in the rise and fall of particular drug use patterns?
But, beyond the structural level, CMA, as an anthropological per-
spective, is intensely concerned with variation across local cases or pe-
riods of time, and the agency of individuals and groups in creating the
belief systems, social organizations, and activities in which they par-
ticipate, including drug use as a social activity. In other words, while
strongly focused on the macrostructural level, the CMA perspective avoids
a narrow, reductionistic approach to explanation. Central to CMA is the
development of analyses that closely assess the individual and the social
group engaged in day-to-day processes of decision making and action,
while identifying the impact of local and extralocal political and eco-
nomic forces, such as the exercise of power by dominant groups in soci-
ety, on the ideas, options, and contexts that define human social life and
experience. For example, writing on the issue of unwanted pregnancies
among Euro-American women in southern California from within a
CMA perspective, Ellison (2003:324) points out that the “dense inter-
play of agency and social forces . . . underscores that women are, ineluc-
tably, neither free agents nor passive victims.” So too Jazz musicians
and singers.
Political Economy of Ethnicity, Class and Gender
These general points help to frame the importance CMA places on the
macro level of political economy. In case of drug use in Jazz, it is evident
that the reigning class structure and intertwined racial caste system of the
U.S. had a significant impact on shaping the life worlds of the inventors
of Jazz, and those who continued to reinvent it along the way. Denied ac-
cess generally to other life options, the early jazzmen played to survive,
often at a meager level. The racial consciousness poured into Jazz was in
no small measure a response to the experience of poverty and racial dis-
crimination, including denial of proper recognition and reward for this
musical innovation. Further, social forces like class structure and racial
bigotry significantly limited access to many life paths while leaving cer-
tain areas more open to Black employment. One such opening was in the
realm of public entertainment (which was acceptable, perhaps, because it
involved performing for the enjoyment of others, symbolically affirming
the existing social hierarchy). As their struggles with racism, Jim Crow
laws, low pay, oppressive contracts, police surveillance and other indig-
nities affirm, and, as well articulated by Billie Holiday in her reference to
musical performance as another plantation, the boundaries of the world of
Jazz and the daily experience of those who inhabited that world for many
years was shaped in ways large and small by the existing structure of in-
equality.
Sexism was also a factor. Generally speaking women addicts have of-
ten had a tougher time than men as social expectations on women are dif-
ferent. The consequence, as played out in the life of Billie Holiday,
among others, is telling. In sum, while political economic factors did not
narrowly determine the emergence of Jazz or its specific features, it helped
to influence its development in a particular time and place among a group
of people who shared elements of a complex cultural heritage and set of
life-experiences on which they drew creatively to forge something im-
pressively new, and something that continued to evolved and change over
time in response to changing life circumstances.
Political economy was not merely context, however, it had direct im-
pact on content as well, in part, through the influence of drugs. Drugs,
we have argued (Singer and Mirhej n.d.), had two significant encoun-
ters with Jazz. The first primarily involved marijuana, which had two
important impacts on Jazz. First, from the perspective of the early
Jazzmen, it helped them to cope with the structurally imposed burdens

of discrimination, poverty, and oppressive working conditions. Second,
it helped them to define themselves not as unappreciated artists whose
creativity, energy, and hard work helped to make others rich, but as hip
social outlaws, who lived on the edge and successfully and stylishly ex-
ploited the margins of society. One of their self-selected totemic sym-
bols, the viper–which found its way into numerous Jazz tunes–was aptly
chosen in light of its wider cultural meanings as a trickster, seeker of
truth (and challenger of blind faith), source of danger and power, and
unbowed social outcast (Biedermann 1994). The second Jazz encounter
with drugs involved heroin (although an array of other drugs was also in
use). Many of the social motivations and cultural meanings embedded
in marijuana use among Jazzmen diffused into the use of heroin. In a
new era in which Black resistance to oppression was rising, as were
Black expectations and resulting frustration and anger, heroin use repre-
sented a radical break with mainstream society, just as bebop–the strain
of Jazz favored by those who embarked on heroin use at mid-century–
represented a break with previous conventions in Jazz.
Social Contingencies and Connections
Within the political economic framework described above, a range of

social contingencies and connections were critical to the particular turns
and nuances of the Jazz/drug relationship over time. One of these con-
tingencies was availability. In both the initial adoption of marijuana
among Jazz performers at the turn of the twentieth century and the sub-
sequent step into heroin use at mid-century, drug availability was criti-
cal. In both cases, the supply was abundant, and sales were concentrated
in the Black community. Indeed, there is a long history of illicit behav-
iors being centered in ethnic minority communities, even though many
of those who may partake of these unsanctioned activities (e.g., drug
use, commercial sex, gambling) are visitors from primarily White neigh-
borhoods and suburbs (Singer and Mirhej 2005). As James and Johnson
(1996:16-17) observe, beginning early in the twentieth century:
African American communities increasingly became the place

where whites practiced their vices. During the Prohibition era,
many African American clubs sold illegal whiskey, and law en-
forcement officials often ignored alcohol and other drug sales in
these communities. Whites came to African American communi-
ties to hear African American music, to party, to patronize houses

of prostitution, and to gamble.
Limited in their access to legitimate forms of entrepreneurial activity,

enterprising individuals from the Black community began to explore il-
licit business enterprises. One result was the development of connections
with suppliers of illicit substances, especially the mafia, which controlled
illicit alcohol distribution during Prohibition and spearheaded the effort,
at the end of World War II, to smuggle in massive quantities of heroin
from Europe. Sale of heroin was centered in the Black and Puerto Rican
communities, locations less likely to draw police attention or attract
mainstream societal concern. Indeed, the social response to the resulting
drug epidemic among urban Blacks and Puerto Ricans was muted; cer-
tainly the spread of addiction among minorities was not declared a na-
tional emergency nor was it cause for a national War on Drugs.
Another contingency factor emerged from race/ethnicity relations
within Jazz. Tension in this arena may well have contributed to drug ad-
diction among White musicians intent on proving their metal as legiti-
mate Jazzmen. A somewhat similar pattern may have emerged among
those Black Jazz performers who came from more middle class back-
grounds. In both cases, addiction was an undeniable act of total commit-
ment. While individual musicians and singers no doubt had personal
reasons for using drugs, including managing a painful set of memories
born of troubled childhoods or punishing parental or romantic relation-
ships, drug use among Jazzmen was a social activity, a lubricant of so-
cial interaction and a source of social cohesion. As the many and
frequent conflicts within Jazz bands and their regular break-up reveals,
there was intense emotional pressure among jazzmen–borne of low sal-
aries, rivalries for scarce performance dates, the need to be on the road a
lot of the time, and other pressures of public performance–for which
sharing drugs was one folk solution. As one musician summarized it in
Art Pepper’s autobiography (Pepper and Pepper 1986:118): “It’s a peer
thing.”
The Jazz/Drug Subculture
Within the political economic context described above, drug use, as

noted, served simultaneously as a culturally constituted coping mecha-
nism–a folk medicine used both to “psyche” oneself up for a public per-
formance and to heal (or at least endure) the hidden injuries of race and
class oppression for Jazzmen–and a subcultural badge of transcendent
success (i.e., as a marker of membership in the “hip” Jazz world, a status

that functioned as a substitute for conventional success in mainstream
society). Through Jazz, several generations of Black men and women
have been able to make the public statement: You can hold me back, you
can beat me down, but I am not defeated, indeed through Jazz and drug
use I can transcend society’s harsh stereotypes and cruel judgments and
enter a different realm with its own rules, roles, and renown. Referring
to marijuana use, Milton Mezzrow reported that his personal motto was
“Light up and be somebody” (Mezzrow 1990:212). In the words of bebop
trumpeter Red Rodney (1927-1994)–who spent most of the 1950s in and
out of jail on drug charges but was able to finally make a musical come-
back in the 1970s (Ward and Burns 2000:358):
Heroin was our badge, . . . the thing that made us different from the
rest of the world. It was the thing that said, ‘We know. You don’t
know.’ It was the thing that gave us membership in a unique club,
and for this membership we gave up everything else in the world.
Another important cultural component that helped to drive the im-
pact of drugs on the world of Jazz was the emergence–in response to
marginalization from the dominant society–of what might be called the
“rebel-musician addict” motif. Dedicated fully to his music, impervious
to the slings and arrows of the surrounding racist society, unbounded by
conventional rules, especially those concerning drug use, and exhibit-
ing in his music advanced skill, inherent style, and unlimited courage,
this new culturally constructed hero figure found embodiment in Char-
lie Bird Parker. He became a legend among his peers, a role model they
followed in music and in drug use.
A third component of the Jazz/drug subculture was the cultural belief
among performers that their ability to produce cutting edge Jazz was de-
pendent on their drug use. Commenting on drug use by Art Pepper,
Hersh Hammel (Pepper and Pepper 1986:88) noted that he “began to
feel he could not play good enough unless he was on heroin.” This folk
belief was common among Jazz performers during this period. Drugs,
they believed, helped them to transcend the petty, insulting, and mean-
spirited features of the material world. Further, performers came to be-
lieve that drugs provided them the impetus to push the boundaries of
music convention.
Most people did it for the drive that they would get out of it. They
would be able to play more way-out music. (Courtwright, Joseph,
and Des Jarlais 1989:238)
As a result of these subcultural conceptions, drugs and good Jazz came

to be seen as inherently connected as two intertwined paths that led to an
altered state of cultural consciousness. For insiders, drugs symbolized
power, transcendence, camaraderie, and style, for outsiders, however, it
was cause for the stigmatization of Jazz as evil and threatening.
Subsequently, building separation from its drug-centered past emerg-
ed as a new value in Jazz as musicians finally were able to overcome
their drug habits and resume their musical careers. In the place of drug
values, jazzmen in recovery often expressed sentiments learned in drug
treatment and 12-step fellowship programs.
Using the theoretical approach of critical medical anthropology, we
have analyzed the prominent place of drugs in Jazz not as a pathol-
ogy–individually or collectively–of jazzmen but rather as an unhealthy
condition that is molded by the implementation and enforcement of laws,
by the character of class and racial relations in society, and by the efforts
of the oppressed to cope with (or even transcend) the hidden or not so
hidden injuries of racism, classism, and other forms of social bigotry
and structural violence. Today, the heart of drug use in Black music has
shifted from Jazz to Hip Hop, just as it previously shifted from earlier
forms of Jazz to Bebop. As Miles Davis (1989:220) observed, “every
time has its own style.” While musical forms have evolved, drug use
and its consequences remain, suggesting the nature of the political econ-
omy that contributes to a continued search for a drug solution to its neg-
ative psychosocial effects.
Undeniably, Jazz is about far more than drugs, as are Hip Hop and
rock’n’ roll. Beyond drugs, Jazz is about the desire for profound musical
expression, the troubled relations of ethnic groups in American society,
the conflicted affairs of men and women, and the individual, often, diffi-
cult life experiences of its performers and audiences. While Jazz has deep
roots in drug use, and has been appreciably influenced by the use of vari-
ous mood-altering substances (while influencing societal attitudes about
the use of those substances), it has transcended drugs as it has tran-
scended Black and even broader American experience and appreciation.
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Zwerin, Mike (1998). Sons of Miles. Culture Kiosque website: http://www.
culturekiosque.com/jazz/miles/rhemile21.htm (Accessed 3/05/05).
Received: 10/05/06
Accepted: 05/01/06
doi:10.1300/J233v05n04_01

High Notes: The Role of Drugs in The Making of Jazz: Merrill Singer, PHD Greg Mirhej

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High Notes: The Role of Drugs in The Making of Jazz: Merrill Singer, PHD Greg Mirhej

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High Notes:

The Role of Drugs

Merrill Singer is Director of Center for Community Health Research at Hispanic

KEYWORDS. Heroin, marijuana, jazz, drugs, music

In his celebrated, uncompromising autobiography, Jazz alto saxophonist

I was hanging around with [tenor saxophonist] Dexter Gordon

New Orleans: The Cradle of Jazz

In their sweeping history of Jazz, Ward and Burns (2000:2) stress

form and the life experience of an impoverished and mistreated against

Smoking Muta and Making Music

Specifically, it was in New Orleans’ infamous houses of prostitution,

The first thing I noticed was that I began to hear my saxophone as

Red (1916-), a Black tenor saxophonist interviewed by Courtwright, Jo-

Marijuana was . . . very common among musicians in the big

In short, as succinctly summarized by clarinetist and bandleader Artie

to me, seems to need some stimulant, it requires extreme cleverness of

Prohibition Commissioner, John Kramer, claiming that marijuana had

Beyond those created by the leading lights of early Jazz, numerous

Louis Armstrong, The Viper

As the list of composers of reefer songs suggests, many of the biggest

At the time, marijuana panic was at fever pitch in California, indeed

cago, although before doing so he spent an evening getting high on mar-

Later that year on a Southern musical tour, Armstrong was arrested

Criminalization of Marijuana: The Beat Goes On

During the period 1915-1937, as many as 27 states passed laws crim-

THE CRUEL MISTRESS:

The celebrated author, Claude Brown, best known for autobiogra-

Ultimately, he got his chance to try heroin:

I couldn’t believe it was really happening. I almost wanted to break

on my brain. . . . Everything was getting rosy, beautiful. The sun got

Saxophonist, Jackie Mclean (1932-)–known to his Jazz friends as

A lot of musicians used it . . . It was especially hard for musicians

As record producer Michael Cuscuna (Ward and Burn 2000:427) recog-

McLean remained addicted for 18 years. Later (1959-1960), however,

Dope was flooding everyplace at the time, but it was especially

In retrospect, Rollins also recognized another factor that drew him to

We greatly admired Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, and maybe

Using drugs was, in a strange way, a negation of the money ethic.

Like McLean–and despite his inclination to downplay the toll of drug

OF LIVES AND DRUGS

There is no denying that jazzmen have paid a terrible price because of

The Bird: At Home with Heroin

His physiology, uniquely resilient in so many ways, could tolerate

hall 26 times in her life–and others in a concert at Carnegie Hall. Ted

A Lady (Lives and) Sings the Blues

While certainly not the only woman in Jazz to succumb to heroin,

ward youth for somehow causing her victimization. The apartment

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your

Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do

Her words proved prophetic. In 1959, on her deathbed, narcotics

JAZZ, ETHNICITY, AND DRUGS

1989:119). One of the musicians he hired was alto saxophonist Lee

Then a lot of black musicians came down on my case about their

However, great or small racial tensions were in particular times and

Pepper (Pepper and Pepper 1986:198) also attributed his involvement

Shooting heroin changed my whole personality from being a nice,

Similarly, Pepper (Pepper and Pepper 1986:240) recalled:

As a result of their addictions both men wound up in prison, both recog-

tive Black experience in a context in which musical success produces ar-

THE CONTEMPORARY SCENE

Jazz. In 1969 he had a best-selling album, called “Bitches Brew” that

At this moment of transition, with police pressure at an all time high,

Nichols, mother of Jazz guitarist Wilbert Longmire (1950-), was a lead-