South End Shout

Front matter

Bostons Forgotten Music Scene in the Jazz Age

ROGER HOUSE

BOSTON'S FORGOTTEN MUSIC SCENE IN THE JAZZ AGE

Contents

Member Institutions Acknowledgments

Introduction—Rediscovering a Lost Jazz Scene 1. Before the Jazz Age: Boston’s Black Music Culture 2. How James Reese Europe Brought Jazz to Boston

3. Frederick Douglass Square: Rise of a Black Business District

CHAPTER ONE Boston’s Black Music Culture

The Black community of the Massachusetts Bay Colony took root in the North End in the mid-seventeenth century. The sector was known as “Little Guinea,” though likely pronounced as “Ghana” by the transplanted Africans in recognition of the medieval region of origin for many. The waterfront district provided easy access to the maritime needs of seamen, dockworkers, artisans, and servants— such labor enabled by enslaved men and women. Little Guinea, much like the densely populated Black enclaves in other colonial settlements, was a laboratory for cultural creation in a new land. Africans used rituals of song, dance, and prayer to preserve elements of traditional culture—continually refreshed by influxes of newcomers to this emerging seaport in the slave trade—while assimilating the culture of the Yankee maritime. While Little Guinea was hardly a vision of song and dance ritualism like Congo Square in New Orleans, it nonetheless offered a space for music creation. Some evidence of the efforts of African transplants to preserve principles of cultural continuation can be found in the ceremonies and festivals of the time. Robert Farris Thompson, for example, describes elements of West African philosophy expressed in the arts and culture of transplanted Blacks in the New World. Samuel Floyd investigated the melding of an African American dance and spiritual style from the many ethnic cultures of Africa, and Portia Maultsby explored the preservation of creative principles in the music of African Americans. Of course, such rituals expressed in dance, arts, cuisine, fashions, and music were prevalent in the South, where dense populations of Africans lived in seaport regions of Georgia and the Carolinas. Such factors enabled carnivals like the Jonkonnu (pronounced John Canoe) to take root in North Carolina and Virginia in the early nineteenth century. This festival appears to have spread through ports of call between North Carolina and Jamaica among other West Indian colonies.'

The Massachusetts Black population in 1790 was about 5,400 people, and it was a free population since slavery was outlawed by judicial decree in 1783. While this was a small group overseen by a large white majority population, Africans still had space to devise cultural practices to express their sense of common identity. Such was the case for free Black settlements across the colonies of the north as some communities adapted Euro-American holidays and Christian celebrations in ways that reflected African traditions. The New York festival known as “Pinkster” originated as a Dutch colonial ceremony in New York’s Hudson River Valley and became a popular annual event in northern Black communities in the eighteenth century. The merriment included parades in costume, the crowning of a festival king, and a cacophony of drums, fiddles, banjos, and “original Congo dance as danced in their native Africa.” There were also “Negro election days,” a ceremony practiced in seaport communities from New England to the West Indies. Participants selected kings and governors in rituals that resembled the traditions of West African monarchs. In these events, musicians played fiddles as people sang, clapped, and danced; along the way, announcers heralded the virtues of the candidates for ceremonial office. Historian James Horton noted, “The music, the dance, the language, the food, and even the strutting, shaped a common cultural style.”3

It is unclear whether such activities occurred in Little Guinea, but as a seaport in the international slave trade, it was quite likely a space rife with musical influences of West African transplants and with Anglo-American influences. More research is needed to excavate the musical culture during this colonial era—in particular, evidence of likely chorus music such as men’s and women’s a cappella groups and religious choirs, as well as the probable songs and dance routines for waterfront work and entertainment such as sea chanteys, folk songs, fiddle music, players of the accordion, percussion spoons, sticks and mallets, and other popular instruments of dock workers, deck hands, and seamen in the colonial period.

Evidence of a desire to sustain an African-centered identity was apparent in the names selected for the social clubs and community organizations. Fraternal lodges were generators of much cultural activity in the Black communities of Boston, New York, and other urban centers as they provided spaces for affirming rituals and events. The best-known society in Boston during the early republic was the African Masonic Lodge. Founded in 1787, this most significant Black collective of shared interest began with thirteen founding members who held a concern in promoting the ideas of self-sufficiency, mutual support, and community development. The African Masons served people in need by supplying firewood in the winter, food to the hungry, cash to members without jobs, and loans to Black merchants.*

The pioneer leader was the Methodist minister Prince Hall. Born in Bridgetown, Barbados, circa 1748, Hall was the son of a white English leather worker and a free mixed-race woman of African and French descent. He emigrated to Boston as a young man and found work as a seaman. His ensuing travels fostered an understanding of the common experiences of Africans in the Americas. He served with the Colonial Army during the American Revolution and promoted civil rights in Massachusetts after the war. Such experiences ignited a Pan-African identity and advocacy—in June 1797, he delivered one of the earliest antislavery speeches in the city. Speaking at the Masonic lodge, he pointed to the Haitian insurrection against their colonial enslavers in 1791, commending the uprising for demonstrating the resolve of Black people to be free. (The insurrection played a role in forcing revolutionary France to abolish slavery in 1794, but events would require a war for complete Haitian independence in 1803.) Hall supported a “back to Africa” venture for people seeking to create a new life in the West African colony of Freetown, which had been founded in Sierra Leone by abolitionists as a place for Africans who had remained loyal to their British owners during the American Revolution.

The African Masons were renamed the Prince Hall Masons after his death and continued to serve as a role model for fraternal orders in other seaport communities during the maritime era. Such societies were important for hosting cultural events for a people that enjoyed relative freedom in the state by 1790. Among the other social orders were the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society in 1832, the New England Temperance Society of People of Color in 1835, the Daughters of Zion in 1845, and the Female Benevolent Firm in 1850. In Boston, there was also a chapter of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, founded by the Jamaica-born seaman Peter Ogden in New York in 1843. The Odd Fellows hosted the annual Soiree Musicale festival with concerts and a parade in full regalia. In addition to the fraternal orders, the churches of the community sponsored musical events—in fact, it was common for musicians to be members of the same church and fraternal bands. And the African Baptist Church of Boston supported a seven-piece orchestra and choir and provided rehearsal space for musicians.°

After more than a century of residence in the North End, Black residents began moving to the West End in the early nineteenth century. The growing population of free people wanted to be closer to jobs at the wharves, streetcar lines, and markets near the waterfront and Scollay Square. The West End, which constituted about 3 percent of the area’s population, became the major neighborhood for the estimated 2,000 Africans living there, many of whom had escaped from slave plantations. The Black quarter of the West End rented rooms and stables between Cambridge Street and the north slope of Beacon Hill. Some Black people tried to preserve a sense of African identity in this seaport community in the late decades of the slave trade; outsiders, however, labeled it with the derisive moniker “Nigger Hill.” After the Civil War, the community grew with an influx of newcomers from the Northeast and South, and its culture became more secular and recreational. In the West End, as in other urban areas of Black presence, there were groups forming musical clubs, vocal groups, and marching bands for performances in the streets, saloons, and stage. Robert Woods, a Yankee reformer who researched the neighborhood in the early twentieth century, noted, “The West End has ever been the great habitat of the colored race in Boston, and in spite of the exodus of the past few years to the South End, to Cambridgeport and the suburbs at the North, many yet remain.”

After the Civil War, many Black communities had access to inexpensive musical instruments used by army bands and marching brass bands to support the troops. The end of the war made these items redundant and available to interested persons. The access to a broad range of orchestra instruments led to the improvement of musical expression beyond its well-developed choral music. By the late nineteenth century, the rise of syncopated instrumental music was noted in the minstrel stage productions, and was an early form of jazz heard in the South End.

The proximity of the Black sector to the helter-skelter of Scollay Square had its benefits and drawbacks. Among the benefits was the network of transit points, theaters, and shops that provided jobs and services for people in the neighborhood, while among the drawbacks was the area’s reputation for disorder because of the behavior of sailors and members of transient populations who frequented the saloons, brothels, and burlesque theaters. Woods documents a community comprising law-abiding Black families, show business workers, and numerous residents with backgrounds of petty crimes and vice. The West End location had 88 saloons that primarily served patrons from other areas; these outsiders were those responsible for the brunt of drunk and disorderly behavior, robbery, and prostitution in the back streets and alleys.’

The Scollay Square theaters featured traveling minstrel shows for the entertainment of predominately white male audiences. These were the years when white actors wearing blackface makeup dominated the stage, before authentic Black actors were allowed into the industry. This period of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century was a time of hardening rules and beliefs in Jim Crow America. It was also when the distinctive “ragged” beats of syncopated music became notable in Black popular music. Ragtime emerged around the 1890s and was introduced to the minstrel stage by Black stage shows and “coon songs.” The theaters in Boston’s downtown and South End hosted the Harlem minstrel team of Bert Williams and George Walker and inspired one local composer of such songs: James Vaughn.

Born about 1870, Vaughn attended the Rindge Technical School in Cambridge, where he starred on the football team. His family was part of the movement of Black people from Boston to Cambridgeport after the Civil War. Striving families found a supportive environment in the neighborhood, whose residents included the first Black woman school principal in the state, Maria Louise Baldwin, who lived at 196 Prospect Street.’ In the 1890s, Vaughn played the piano for theater patrons at a society club and was admired for his renditions of the “Cake Walk” and other syncopated dances, even as critics denounced ragtime as the sounds of illiterate musicians playing waltz music incorrectly.” In 1900, Vaughn and Alex Rogers composed the song “Sultan of Zulu,” which was commissioned by Williams and Walker and established a long-term relationship with the company. From 1902 to 1909, Vaughn collaborated as a songwriter, music composer, conductor, and musical director for stage productions. Working with Alex Rogers, he composed music for the minstrel songs “It’s Hard to Find a King Like Me,” “When Sousa Comes to Coontown,” “When the Moon Shines,” and “Me and de Minstrel Band,” among others. Surviving pressings of the minstrel standards of Williams and Walker include “My Little Zulu Baby” in 1901 for Victor Monarch and “Nobody” in 1906 for Columbia."

Vaughn also contributed to the Williams and Walker production of In Dahomey, the first all-Black musical comedy to play on Broadway. The creative team included Jesse A. Shipp, Will Marion Cook, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the show premiered in February 1903 at the New York Theater, where it ran for fifty-three performances. In Boston, the show was featured at the Globe Theater on Washington Street, a 1,500-seat house in the theater district, and may have attracted special attention because of the local storyline: it featured two befuddled Boston detectives searching for a silver casket meant to be shipped to Africa but gone missing. Among the popular songs were “On

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Emancipation Day,” “My Dahomian Queen,” and “When Sousa Comes to Coontown” (lyrics by Alex Rogers and music by James Vaughn and Tom Lemonier).

The September 1908 production of Bandana Land was another popular minstrel show to which Vaughn contributed. It played at the Orpheum Theater on Tremont Street—one of the largest theaters in the city at 2,500 seats—with a cast of seventy-five actors and a thirty-piece orchestra as the Globe announced “The Orpheum Opens Its Season Tonight with ‘Bandana Land setting for high-society gatherings, the Orpheum was serving as a

Once a theater for working-class minstrelsy by 1900. Vaughn, along with Cecil Mack, Alex Rogers, Jesse A. Shipp, and Will Marion Cook, composed suggestive odes like “In the Right Church but the Wrong Pew” and “Bon Bon Buddy.” The shows attracted a racially diverse following and even included fans among the Yankee Brahmin elites. One Globe reviewer wrote that “It is a unique position that

Williams and Walker occupy in Boston—that of being a fad of the society people.””

The stigma of minstrel buffoonery burdened the ability of actors and producers to establish an affirming Black theater, according to Hubert Harrison, a Pan-African intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote and lectured on the intersection of race, culture, and the theater in the Jazz Age. Harrison argues that the Black theater was trapped in the quagmire of minstrel perceptions, and as a result, comedy was the default genre; it took the most creative productions to craft subplots, songs, and music that expressed ideas to affirm the Black experience. While actors like Bert Williams and George Walker were able to become international stars, they were still trapped in a box of demeaning racial perceptions. “Nobody” is one example of a minstrel song that speaks to the experience of such tribulations, composed in 1905 by the Bert Williams songwriting team; it would become an audience favorite.” In the song, the character poses a series of challenges and dangers encountered and each time asks who will come to his aid—and the answer is “nobody.” The humor builds as the obstacles mount without rescue, such as, “When wintertime comes with its snow and sleet / And me with hunger and cold feet / Who says ‘Here’s two bits, go and eat’??—Nobody.”*

Black musicians tried other measures to challenge their marginalization in the musical theaters of Boston. In 1906, for example, community leaders organized a symphony orchestra named the Victorian Concert Orchestra, which operated from about 1913 to 1924 under the direction of violinist, composer, and conductor Clarence Cameron White. White was born in Clarksville, Tennessee in 1880 and studied at Howard University and the Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College. In taking up the violin, he tapped into a tradition of string music beginning with the traditional string bands of West Africa. In 1908, he did advanced study in London under the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor before arriving in Boston to open a music studio in 1910. Under his direction, the Victorian Concert Orchestra blended classical elements with spirituals and folk songs; he also used the orchestra to promote the works of other Black composers. One of White’s notable compositions was the series of musical inspirations The Bandanna Sketches. Each sketch explored a theme of the African American experience: “Chant (Nobody Knows de Trouble I’ve Seen),” “Negro Dance (Sometimes | Feel Like a Motherless Child),” “Lament (I’m Troubled in Mind),” and “Slave Song (Many Thousand Gone).” He composed the suite From the Cotton Fields with the songs “Cabin Song,” “ published by the Carl Fischer Company of New York and performed by acclaimed violinist Fritz Kreisler and Irma Seydel.’

On the Bayou,” and “Spiritual.” His compositions were

The Victorian Concert Orchestra reflected the classical music aspirations of Black professional musicians in a city where the symphony orchestras were closed to them. The audience for the Orchestra performances is undocumented but probably members of the civic and cultural organizations of the Black middle class. Among these were musicians, women’s clubs, church groups, fraternal societies, soldiers on leave, and so forth; in addition, there was likely a segment of Yankee society and white musicians that attended the concerts. After a 1928 visit to Haiti, White infused a Pan-African theme in his art song compositions. One such work is the opera Ouanga in recognition of the Haitian spiritual practice of vodou, a polytheistic faith that draws on principles of traditional West African religion and elements of Catholicism. The 1931 score chronicles the story of Haiti’s first president, the revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The composition earned White a commendation for Composer of Outstanding Merit by the American Opera Society of Chicago. There apparently survives no recorded legacy for the Victorian Concert Orchestra; however, there are recordings of Clarence Cameron White playing violin solos with symphony orchestras.

In the early twentieth century, Boston began to attract musicians from the society orchestras of Harlem. Among the most notable were the brothers John and James Reese Europe—examples of divergent pathways in a musical family that converged in the South End. The Europe family lived in Washington, DC, and exposed their children to the highbrow musical influences available in the city. John, born about 1875, was the older brother by five years and worked hard to establish a reputation as a pianist. In 1900, he moved to New York City to work as the house pianist at the Little Savoy, a swank club owned by Barron Wilkins on West 35th Street in the Tenderloin district. Set in an old Black quarter of the city, the Little Savoy was touted as “the most important spot where Negro musicians got acquainted with the wealthy New York clientele.” James, born in February 1881, studied violin as a teenager, and was advised by the composers Harry Burleigh (the father of spirituals) and Hans Hanke of the Leipzig Conservatory of Music."

By 1900, Black musicians found the music industry of New York City more welcoming than other cities in the Northeast. The musicians’ union Local 310 was relatively accepting of the better-trained Black instrumentalists, primarily trained to read classical music and play the popular dances favored by white audiences. On the other hand, the majority of Black musicians trained to play jazz, blues, dance music, and the songs of the minstrel stage were largely shut out of the union and lucrative theater and dance hall venues largely controlled by union contractors. Still, with a large Black community located in the midtown district, musicians found ample work in the dance halls, restaurants, theaters, and summer resort ball rooms.” The society bands and theater performers in the New York scene also performed for dances in New England cities such as Hartford, Newport, Salem, and Boston.

Several years after John moved to New York to pursue a career in music, he helped his brother relocate to the city. By 1905, according to Maud Cuney Hare in her pioneer 1936 history Negro Musicians and Their Music, they were involved with a small group of about twenty players known as “The Memphis Students.” They gathered at the Marshall, a Black-owned café and hotel in Harlem managed by Jimmie Marshall, to talk shop and ways to advance their careers." James Reese Europe was the first president and was hired to direct the music for the minstrel companies of Bert Williams, George Walker, Robert Cole, and J. Rosamond Johnson. By 1910, the brothers were among the cofounders of the New York Clef Club, an organization to promote the occupational interests of as many as 135 musicians. It served the function of a union, hiring hall, and booking agency for Black musicians. John performed in bands and variety shows produced by the club, such as the Marshall Trio ragtime band that included Anthony Tuck on mandolin and William Patrick on vocals. Pianist Eubie Blake, also a member of the Clef Club, recalled John as a great pianist of head arrangements; however, his reluctance to use sheet music made it diffcult for other musicians to substitute for him—an issue that would prove to be a challenge during his years in Boston.”

In 1910, the Clef Club organized a symphony orchestra under the direction of James Reese Europe. It incorporated early features of the big band section arrangements as well as piano recitations of the minstrel and concert hall compositions of Harry Burleigh, Will Marion Cook, and Will Vodery. The club served the dual purposes of fraternity, labor exchange, hangout for musicians, and concert hall. To an extent, the club addressed the classical music activities of Black professional musicians before the market for jazz was fully developed. As such, the 100-member “symphony” reflected the aspirations and the limits for Black musical opportunity. The orchestra made its debut at the Manhattan Casino in Harlem on May 27, 1910; the performance was part of a larger event and Europe had prepared thirty minutes of music. The audience for the symphony concerts is unclear; however, it is possible to speculate from the use of the venue for other popular Black entertainment events.

The Manhattan Casino was located at 280 West 155th Street, north of the boundaries of early Black Harlem, but accessible by subway. Around 1910, the casino became a popular site for the tournaments of Black church basketball teams. The most prominent churches used the venue as the fans of the teams outgrew their spaces—especially when out-of-town teams or white teams came to play. Among the middle-class audiences for such events were Black fraternal members and Post Office clerks. Churches with basketball teams included St Philip’s Episcopal Church, Mother Zion A.M.E. Church, Abyssinian Baptist Church, St. Mark’s Methodist Church, and St. Mark’s Catholic Church, among others. As such, it is likely that the Clef Club concerts also drew on audience from such institutions. The first symphony concert was considered successful and led to biannual concerts for a while.”°

In May 1912, the orchestra performed the historic Concert of Negro Music at Carnegie Hall to raise money for the New York Music School Settlement for Colored People. The concert showcased Black folk songs, anthems, ballads, art songs, and syncopated “ragtime” dance music, and was well received by New York society. The success prompted a second concert at Carnegie Hall in February 1913 and a ten-day tour in November to the Academy of Music in Philadelphia; Albaugh Theater in Baltimore; Howard Theater in Washington, DC; City Auditorium in Richmond; and Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia. Under James Reese Europe's guidance, the orchestra intermixed folk instruments such as mandolins, banjos, and harp guitars with regular instruments of symphony orchestras such as the trombone and French horn in novel solo and ensemble arrangements.” The reception was overall positive: one review of the Howard Theater concert noted a turnout of about 2,000 people and praised the “precision, verity of expression, and technique that made the cultured audience gasp with surprise.” However, another reviewer questioned the novelty acts and desired a stronger demonstration of Black mastery of the European classics. In that regard, the reviewer was disappointed in a program that resorted to folk songs and instrumentation rather than traditional classical arrangements: “The music was typical of the light, happy-go-lucky Negro, but there are those among us who are trying to master the classics in music as well as along other lines, and to say that the program satisfied this class would be gainsaying the truth.”

Europe was aware of such criticism and countered with an argument on the merits of an orchestra music with roots in the African American culture: “Any white leader of a symphony orchestra would doubtless laugh at the way our Negro Symphony Orchestra is organized,” he said, adding, “We have developed a kind of symphony music that, no matter what else you think, is different and distinctive, and that lends itself to the playing of the peculiar compositions of our race.”

During the same period, James Reese Europe also established a reputation as the leader of a society ragtime band for ballroom dances and records. In those years, he produced novelty compositions and recordings as the conductor of “Europe’s Society Orchestra”’—work that probably generated a good deal more income than the symphony concerts. The band comprised musicians from communities in the North and South: Ford Dabney and Leonard Smith, piano; Cricket Smith, cornet; Edgar Campbell and John Russell, clarinet; Tracy Cooper, George Smith, Walter Scott, Allie Ross, James Van Hooten, and William Tyler, violins; Buddy Gilmore and George Jenkins, drums; and five unknown banjo and mandolin players.** The band played jaunty dance compositions at upscale nightclubs and dance halls and was among the first Black society orchestras to record for the major labels of Victor, Pathé, and Perfect—and the first to release ragtime songs that sold well.

Europe was in a position to take advantage of innovations in sound recording that enabled the music catalog of “race records.” The mass distribution necessitated the marketing brands of ragtime, jazz, gospel, and blues as well as syncopated ballroom dance music.” In 1911, for example, clarinetist Wilbur Sweatman recorded “Down Home Rag” as a piano roll issuance. In 1913, Europe arranged a version of “Down Home Rag” as a “turkey trot” for the Victor label; it was considered a pioneer record in the era of social dancing. The tune was distinguished by a frenetic volley of stringed instruments, crashing cymbals, tuba bass, and responsive vocals in the imitation of a turkey holler. Most notably, white audiences in Boston would have recognized the James Reese Europe song arrangements as the music director for the ballroom duo of Irene and Vernon Castle. In 1914, the society band recorded the popular dance tunes “Castle Walk,” “Castle House Rag,” “Congratulations Waltz (Castles’ Lame Duck),” and “You’re Here and I’m Here/One Step” by J. D. Kern for the Victor label. His band excluded the banjo and mandolin when recording the foxtrots and waltzes that the Castles used in their studios to teach the popular dances of the day.”°

By the war years, James Reese Europe had eclipsed his older brother John in the national industry. However, John had established his own reputation in Boston and led a ragtime band at the newly opened Copley Plaza Hotel in Copley Square near the intersection of Huntington Avenue and Dartmouth Street, where railroad tracks separated the affluent Yankee Back Bay from the working-class Black and ethnic South End. For business travelers, the hotel was within walking distance of Back Bay Station and Trinity Station with connections to industrial centers to the south— like Providence, New Haven, and New York—and to the west—like Springfield, Albany, and Buffalo. The hotel hosted ballroom affairs for New Englanders on holiday as well as college dances.

John worked in the hotel as a band member and ragtime pianist during a period when most privately owned Boston accommodations were racially segregated—by custom rather than by law. John was alleged to have had a drinking problem and would binge to the point of incapacitation. When James learned of his brother’s episodes, he tried to help out by asking pianist Eubie Blake to go to Boston to cover for the lush. Over time, Blake memorized John’s piano routines well enough to replace him on short notice. In 1919, the New York Sun reported that John Europe still “plays in a large Boston hotel.””” Clearly, James Reese Europe was no stranger to the emerging scene in the South End and could rely on his brother’s name recognition to pave the way for the debut of his jazz orchestra.

Mechanics Hall hosted the second concert of the James Reese Europe Orchestra in 1919.

Chapter Two

The James Reese Europe Orchestra brought the spirit of jazz to Boston in the spring of 1919. His collections of musicians melded the styles of marching bands, ragtime syncopation, folk music, and solo improvisations into a modern sound for the postwar era. Europe, who early won regard as the conductor of a society band, organized a martial band that infused the music of war with the rhythms of Black aural expression. Since 1917, when the outfit deployed to France, the Harlem conductor had worked mightily to engage the brass band with audiences in the US and French armies as well as the French public. By 1919, when his band and army unit were demobilized, Europe had won acclaim in the national and international press as the “Jazz King.”

His ninety-piece brass band was deployed to France for a fifteen-month engagement as part of the 369th Infantry of the American Expedition Force. Known as the “Harlem Hell Fighters” for their ferocity on the battlefield, the outfit—once disparaged by their own war department—helped France to stop the German advance and to appreciate orchestral jazz. In the chaos of war, the martial band introduced the beauty of syncopated marches and captured the imagination of the public. Indeed, Europe served as an ambassador of jazz, and his accomplishment opened the door to concerts in France for other early jazz bands, such as Will Marion Cook’s New York Syncopated Orchestra. Like James Reese Europe’s band, Cook’s band brought the modern music of the Harlem scene to highbrow European audiences in 1920. Such orchestras helped to gain recognition for jazz as the new sound of a cosmopolitan people—a feat that had eluded a generation of writers and painters in Harlem.