ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I know, I shouldn’t do this, but along with Australia Post, booksellers are warning us not to delay with orders for Christmas gifts, and so I’m going to tell you about a book I haven’t finished reading because I just know there are readers out there who will want to give or hint for this book.

Harlem Nights, the Secret History of Australia’s Jazz Age is a book for anyone interested in yes, of course, jazz, but also the history of Australia’s entertainment industry; the delayed take-up of modernism in the arts in Australia; the pernicious influence of the White Australia Policy beyond immigration issues; the impact of an unholy alliance of unionism and opportunist politics; and the surprising difference that could be made by just one man.  And for anyone interested in the politics of race and power…

And that’s just what I’ve absorbed from reading one-third of it.

This is the blurb from the back cover:

The 1920s were a time of wonder and flux, when Australians sensed a world growing smaller, turning faster-and, for some, skittering off balance. American movies, music and dance brought together what racial lines kept apart. A spirit of youthful rebellion collided with the promise of racial perfectibility, stirring deep anxieties in white nationalists and moral reformers. African-American jazz represented the type of modernism that cosmopolitan Australians craved-and the champions of White Australia feared.

Enter Sonny Clay’s Colored Idea. Snuck in under the wire by an astute promoter, the Harlem-style revue broke from the usual blackface minstrel fare, delivering sophisticated, liberating rhythms. The story of their Australian tour is a tale of conspiracy-a secret plan to kick out and keep out ‘undesirable’ expressions of modernism, music and race.

From the wild jazz clubs of Prohibition-era LA to Indigenous women discovering a new world of black resistance, this anatomy of a scandal-fuelled frame-up brings into focus a vibrant cast of characters from Australia’s Jazz Age.

Some may not know that I have a (very) minor role in broadcasting jazz on a community radio station.  The Spouse (whose impressive professional CV includes what started as a hobby i.e. being leader and arranger of the Australian Cotton Club Orchestra) has been presenting Swing and Sway on 3CR for decades, and he has recently stepped into the shoes of the late Ralph Knight who presented Steam Radio for over forty years. Since he’s also presenting a jazz program on Radio 3RPP in Mornington, and all this has to be prepared offsite since the pandemic, I have resumed doing the very occasional program to give him a break.  I mention this because my interest in jazz is specific to big band jazz of the 20s, 30s and 40s, and although this is heresy to aficionados, I prefer the melodic style and rhythms of British Dance Bands to hot jazz from America.  One of the aspects that I’ve found interesting in Harlem Nights is the way these differences have been framed in terms of race.

This fantasy of Blackness found voice in the literary prose of a generation of White bohemians and cosmopolitans who experienced Black music as a psychodrama where primitive ‘African’ musicians rescued ‘over-civilised’ White dancers from generations of Victorian sexual repression.  Black rhythm, in this formulation, was a brand of bodily and psychic liberation— a Freudian antidote for a generation of Whites crushed and constrained by the narrow rules of ‘correct’ behaviour.  But what felt and looked like ‘the new’ reprised old familiar themes, grounded in dubious theories of biologically inscribed racial difference.

Music critic Roger Pryor Dodge, for instance, believed that ‘Negro’ jazz players did ‘not consciously’ plot and compose, but derived their musical inventiveness from ‘uncontrolled frantic moments of ‘subconscious improvisation’.  In other words, an ability independent of artistry and skill but contingent on the spontaneous outpourings of an inescapably primitive Black essence.  (p.31)

Sonny Clay Band, Australia, 1928 (See image credit)

As O’Connell explains further in the chapter ‘The Jazzing Spheres’, when the Australian promoter of Sonny Clay’s Colored Idea subscribed to the fashionably cosmopolitan view that ‘jazz as played by a European’ and a ‘real Negro’ were ‘entirely different’ he was conforming to this primitivist fantasy.

‘It’s all in the syncopation,’ he explained.  ‘One, brought to America by the original African Negroes—is natural—the other, as acquirement, is artificial’. (p.76)

Today, we can see how racist that framing is.

As jazz made its way to Australia, entertainment promoters offered what they could get, constrained then as now by the cost of getting a large group of artists here and their willingness to travel so far.  In the 1920s, rivals Harry Muller and Bob Conkey had supplied two jazzy bands that generated money, created personal memories and deepened cultural engagement. 

But the cold economic truth of the Tivoli’s bottom line told a different story: shilling for shilling, the Southern [Black] Revue was just as popular but far more profitable than Henry Santrey’s [White] Syncopated Orchestra.  A paying audience was hungry for jazz music and dance, no matter […] if the performers were Black or White.

The revelation solved Henry Muller’s American conundrum.  The economic logic that made ‘Australia-time’ so unappealing to White vaudevillians did not apply to Black musicians who worked longer hours for less money and enjoyed fewer opportunities. With a Black review, Harry Muller could secure an up-to-the-minute, quality act, prepared to undertake the long journey across the Pacific.  (p.57)

And so he brought Sonny Clay and his band to Australia along with vocalist Ivie Anderson (who later sang with Duke Ellington).  But there was trouble.  Muller did not tell Clay that hostile officialdom was alert to their impending arrival; that the racial rhetoric had hardened under Prime Minister Billy Hughes, then broadened under his successor, Stanley Bruce; that there had been some fudging on the visa applications because the Musicians Union in an unholy alliance with some politicians had led to a situation where comedians, jubilee singers, and dance troupes toured Australia but not dance band musicians. Musicians of colour, that is.  The visa applications were for ‘colored theatrical artists’, not musicians.

O’Connell writes an engaging account of how it all went so horribly wrong.  It’s a broad brush, superbly researched account that takes in the social and political history of the period, and the book is an excellent accompaniment to Nicole Moore’s The Censor’s Library in the way that it shows how moralists and paternalists impacted on the messy contest of ideas at play in Sydney over the contours of modernity in Australia.  Isolated by geography and the limitations of communications in that era, Australians were denied access to international developments in entertainment and the arts, creating a cultural backwater that took decades to wash away.

Harlem Nights is not just a book about jazz…

Other reviews, from people who’ve read it all?  Although I haven’t read it yet either, the book was reviewed in a generous spread by Richard King in The Australian (which sent me on a so-far fruitless search at the library for his book On Offence, the Politics of Indignation, one for my post-Xmas wishlist if nobody gives it to me.) Alas, the review in the Australian Book Review is paywalled too.

Update 10/12/21 I have now finished the book and read through to the aftermath of the band’s deportation. It’s not an edifying story, not least because the police, for all their dirty tricks could not get a conviction on Clay or the young women who were said to be in such moral danger.  But the media didn’t let the facts get in the way of trashing reputations, and along with so many other aspects of this story that are unfair, it was Sonny Clay’s reputation that was damaged while the young women were humiliated.  That had long-lasting consequences for him in the United States, while the young women were pursued by the police and hounded out of Melbourne.

The book is available direct from MUP including as an eBook, and from good bookstores everywhere.

Image credit: Sonny Clay Band, Australia, 1928, by Sam Hood, from vintage print, Hood Collection part II State Library of New South Wales, PXE 789 (v.8) 1. https://archival.sl.nsw.gov.au/Details/archive/110095395,  via Wikipedia Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104892912

Author: Deirdre O’Connell
Title: Harlem Nights, The Secret History of Australia’s Jazz Age
Publisher: MUP (Melbourne University Press, 2021
ISBN: 9780522877649, pbk, 408 pages with some B&W reproductions of photos and texts; including an extensive index, notes, bibliography and acknowledgements.
Review copy courtesy of MUP.