[Dixielandjazz] “Cafe Society Swing” reviewed - by Will Friedwald

[Robert Ringwald]

Curtain Up on Progress
by Will Friedwald
Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2014
The story of Cafe Society -- the subject of an off-Broadway show playing at 59E59
through Jan. 4 -- reads like a morality play set against the background of the most
colorful period in recent history and featuring the greatest music that America has
ever produced. The nightclub existed from 1938 to 1949 (there were actually two running
simultaneously, on Sheridan Square and East 58th St.), and its history touches on
the Great Depression, the Swing Era, World War II, the civil-rights movement, the
red scare and the blacklist. Any list of the most prominent figures who passed through
Cafe Society would include Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford,
Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Paul Robeson. The club’s
story even has cameos by Richard Nixon and Carol Channing.
Barney Josephson (1902-1988), who owned and operated both of the clubs (and later
the Cookery on University Place), was at once a socialist and a capitalist, a buyer
for an Atlantic City shoe store who became a passionate jazz fan and maneuvered to
launch a club of his own. When salesmen took him to the Cotton Club in Harlem, he
was inspired to create an experience that was entirely the opposite: While traditional
nightclubs kowtowed to the wealthy, Cafe Society made fun of the upper crust (who
showed up in droves, nonetheless, and loved it). Traditional nightclubs gouged their
customers as much as they could; Cafe Society was a truly proletarian operation where
a working man could bring his date or wife and have a good time. While the Cotton
Club usually showcased African-American talent in the trappings of the old plantation
or a caricature of African civilization, Cafe Society eschewed racial stereotypes.
What was beyond radical was Josephson’s insistence on integration. Public places
were not legally segregated in the North (it was the law in the South until 1964),
but most clubs at the time were run by mobsters who made sure that blacks stayed
on the stage and were not welcome in the audience. Josephson, however, encouraged
what were then called “mixed” bands (featuring both black and white musicians) and
all races were welcome at the tables.
Cafe Society was the only venue in the world where Billie Holiday could have introduced
“Strange Fruit,” Lewis Allan’s impassioned plea for social justice that describes
the victim of a lynch mob in bone-chillingly vivid terms: “Black bodies swinging
in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” This was certainly
a daring move at a time when even members of President Roosevelt’s own party in Congress
refused to pass an anti-lynching bill he favored.
The new show, “Cafe Society Swing,” was written by pianist Alex Webb (who also serves
as musical director) and directed by Simon Green. It is based on “Cafe Society: The
Wrong Place for the Right People,” a memoir by Josephson and his widow, Terry Trilling-Josephson,
that was published in 2009, more than 20 years after his death. The production includes
three excellent singers -- Cyrille Aimee, Allan Harris and Charenee Wade -- and Evan
Pappas narrates as two different fictional characters. In the first act, he’s a journalist
looking to please his editor by coming up with a story condemning Josephson as a
red (Mr. Pappas had already played a reporter dealing with a lynch mob in the 1998
Broadway musical “Parade”); in the second, he plays the club’s bartender, who talks
about Josephson from an insider’s perspective. In between, the three vocalists sing
the numbers associated with the stars and habitues of the club: Holiday’s “What a
Little Moonlight Can Do” and “Strange Fruit” by Mrs. Wade; blues singer Josh White’s
“One Meat Ball” and Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” by Mr. Harris; Lena Horne’s “Stormy
Weather” and Lucienne Boyer’s “Parlez Moi D’Amour” by Ms. Aimee.
Mr. Pappas’s only musical number is “The Investigator’s Song,” a spoof of McCarthyism
written by Harold Rome for comic headliner Zero Mostel; the biggest surprise is a
four-part-harmony re-creation of the Golden Gate Quartet’s “Stalin Wasn’t Stalling,”
a pro-Russian, anti-Hitler jingle from World War II. The inclusion of blues, Gospel,
satire and chanson underscores how Cafe Society was never a jazz club in the modern
sense of the word, but featured an elaborate multitiered show -- more like an intimate
theatrical revue than anything being presented in a club today -- that also included
folk and world music, and copious amounts of comedy.
The new songs by Mr. Webb are sufficiently evocative of the era, although the modest
script with its sole actor can’t begin to do justice to the full dramatic impact
of the story and doesn’t depict the most harrowing scene in the Josephson book. That’s
the moment when the pianist Hazel Scott, one of the most successful of Josephson’s
discoveries and stars (and the one closest to him personally), not only fingers him
as a red but, with the encouragement of her husband, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, testifies
before the House Un-American Activities Committee that her mentor and benefactor
duped her into performing for the benefit of Communist causes.
The red scare put both Cafe Society venues out of business, but Josephson enjoyed
a last hurrah when, 20 years later, the Cookery became one of the major clubs of
the 1970s and he helped engineer the remarkable late-in-life stardom of the great
blues singer Alberta Hunter. A more conventional play or a film could perhaps tell
Josephson’s story more explicitly (Mr. Pappas would be a good choice to play him),
but it probably wouldn’t have as much good music as Mr. Webb’s show.
-30-

-Bob Ringwald
Bob Ringwald Solo Piano, duo, Trio, Quartet
Fulton Street Jazz Band
916/ 806-9551
Amateur (ham) Radio station K 6 Y B V

"Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand and wine in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!"