In postwar America, an epidemic of heroin addiction swept the world of jazz. Greats who developed a habit included John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker. Nowadays, jazz has an ambivalent reputation as “America’s classical music.” Americans under 40 are likely to consider it PBS stuff that not even their parents listened to—their grandparents, maybe. In the early postwar years, jazz had a different reputation. The music defined the counterculture, an identity powerfully reinforced by its association with heroin.
Drugs wrecked many jazzmen’s lives. Contrasting with the current addiction crisis, fatal overdoses were rarer, as the product was weaker. (In every year since 2009, more Americans have died from drug overdoses than car crashes.) But the older epidemic was catastrophic, too, when measured in terms of stifled promise.
When heroin hit, jazz’s day was already beginning to fade. The emergence of rock and roll and Motown would soon devastate jazz musicians’ ability to earn a living. After the 1960s, there would be no more superstars on the level of Coltrane and Miles. The music ceased to develop as rapidly and successfully as it had in previous decades, much of the action shifted toward revivals of older forms, and the audience contracted. The musicians didn’t appreciate how little time they had left, and they failed to make the most of it, partly because so many couldn’t shake their addiction to drugs.
Jazz aficionados constitute a left-leaning community and always have. Thus, the literature tends to treat the jazz-heroin epidemic mainly as a story of racism (then still highly prevalent in American society), of musicians’ desperate efforts to self-medicate the associated trauma with narcotics, and of senselessly harsh drug laws. But the real story is less straightforward. It concerns the harm that addictive drugs do, the social factors that drive addiction, and the promise that culture holds as a means of appreciating American history’s confounding tangle of highs and lows.
New York was postwar America’s jazz capital and its capital of drug commerce and consumption. Had New Orleans, another port city, become a heroin hub in the 1910s, Dixieland jazz doubtless would have been as associated with drugs as was bebop, the leading postwar jazz mode. Policing the narcotics flow into New York Harbor posed many of the same challenges that agents now face on the Mexican border. Not all that drug traffic was destined for points inland. Estimates made at the time by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics found that half of all heroin addicts in America around the time were New York–based. Of that cohort, a substantial share were in Harlem.
Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a different place from the rural communities devastated by opioids in the twenty-first century. In the current crisis, widespread drug addiction is seen as an effect of decline. In Harlem back then, widespread drug addiction was seen more as a cause of decline. Numerous observers, such as novelist Claude Brown, noted the startling abruptness with which heroin overtook Harlem and jazz in the postwar period. At mid-century, Harlem was teetering, though the cultural capital that the community had built up during its fabled renaissance in the 1920s had not been wholly exhausted and was being replenished, at least somewhat, by the ongoing Great Migration. Some jazz legends were Harlem natives, such as Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell, and Jackie McLean. Those born elsewhere got there as quickly as they could. “You ain’t nothing till you come to New York,” said Coleman Hawkins, a Missourian. New York was where ambitious musicians felt they needed to be. Many also felt they needed to use.
The late 1940s and 1950s were the peak era of heroin consumption for jazz musicians. In The Making of Jazz (1978), historian James Lincoln Collier claims that as many as three-quarters of all musicians used heroin during this period. As for the rate of bona fide addiction, researcher Charles Winick, in a study appearing in the journal Social Problems in 1959, found that, of about 360 jazz musicians he was able to interview properly, 16 percent were “regular users” of heroin. Projecting that rate to New York as a whole meant 700 to 800 working jazz-musician addicts based in the city in 1955. Four out of the six musicians on Kind of Blue (1959), the best-selling jazz album of all time, were heroin addicts at some point.
Some bristled at the jazzman-addict stereotype, and concerns unquestionably ran strong within the jazz community itself. In November 1950, leading trade magazine DownBeat sounded the alarm with the article “Dope Menace Keeps Growing”:
[Heroin] is demolishing the professional as well as the personal careers of the addicts themselves, many of whom cannot be spared from the ranks of working musicians because of their talent. . . . Most important of all, the example set by musicians who are addicts and who also are well known, is a wrong influence on younger musicians and on youngsters who may become musicians.
Critics, some prominent musicians themselves, and other advocates pleaded that the public association with narcotics was harming jazz’s reputation. Jazz was coming off the period of its widest popularity—the big-band era—but a drop-off was imminent, and it would be especially pronounced among blacks. From the beginning, black jazz musicians encountered some of the most strenuous opposition to their lifestyle and craft from their own communities, which tended to be socially conservative. Whites had always constituted a significant share of clubgoers and record buyers, but the proportion was never as overwhelming as it became during the last decades of the twentieth century. The 1950s were when jazz truly lost its black audience.
Sordid anecdotes abound. Pree, Parker’s two-year-old daughter, died at the height of his fame because the family had no money for health care. “A fraction of the money [Parker] spent on drugs would have obtained for Pree the finest medical attention,” writes biographer Ross Russell. Art Pepper, author of the junkie memoir Straight Life (1979), was a saxophonist admired for his sublime tones; he resorted to glue huffing in San Quentin when deprived of heroin. Booking agents avoided small remote cities if band members couldn’t score there. You can’t be any kind of musician, let alone a great one, if you don’t have an instrument because you pawned it to buy drugs or had it stolen by someone from the malign crowd you’re running with. Evans, a pianist, lost the use of his right hand for a time because he damaged a nerve shooting up; trumpeter Chet Baker had his embouchure busted in a drug deal gone wrong.
Musician-addicts made themselves prey to exploitation by club managers, record-label owners, and other unscrupulous operators on the business side of things (to say nothing of pushers); they found themselves spurned by more reputable agents, managers, and promising collaborators and kicked out of ensembles or not even considered because of a reputation for unreliability. They faced travel restrictions imposed by parole officers and eviction troubles, and their unstable behavior strained already precarious family arrangements. If outright overdose claimed fewer lives than today, the stresses of addiction killed off many indirectly before their time, when their powers were still with them. Many lost their cabaret card, the live-music performers’ license issued by the New York Police Department. Several jazz greats, including Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Art Pepper, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, and Jackie McLean, spent time behind bars for drugs and drug-related charges.
It’s poignant to read about the also-rans, the minor figures whom we know less about than the greats. Some might not have amounted to much even if they hadn’t used. Others, however, seem to have enjoyed the respect of their peers, yet left barely any legacy in recordings or critical appreciation. They peer out nearly mute through jazz history like shades from the underworld. In Saxophone Colossus, his recent biography of Rollins, Aidan Levy profiles a few, including Ike Day, a Chicago-based drummer who inspired superlative praise from the many famous players he knew and influenced: he was “just a terror,” according to Max Roach; “like nothing you’ve ever heard,” said Art Blakey. These and other testimonies are most of what we have to go on about Day’s style, since he recorded little before succumbing to drug-related health problems in his early thirties.
Other addicts weren’t involved in playing jazz but nonetheless got caught up in the epidemic’s social contagion. The Beats, in particular, found the heroin-jazz nexus seductive. Histories of drugs in America portray the Beat generation as a vector that spread the idea that using illegal drugs was something normal for middle-class people to do. Jazz wound up defining drug culture just as much as drugs defined jazz culture.
Addiction, in any era, is attributed to many risk factors, one of which is having not much else going on in your life. “You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction,” William S. Burroughs writes in Junkie (1953). That may describe the lives of many addicts in the contemporary American landscape. It did not characterize someone like Miles Davis in the late 1940s, who, before he got deeply into heroin, was in the artistic vanguard and knew it. Miles and his colleagues always had something to recover for. Weren’t they devoted to their art? Why did they jeopardize it?
The drug’s appeal came down to status. Using heroin was a way to prove that you belonged to an edgy set. The beboppers felt that desire especially keenly. Bebop (originally “modern jazz” ) is the jazz form most closely associated with heroin. Bebop combined both technical virtuosity and authenticity, qualities that stemmed from the late-night jam-session culture from which it arose. Bebop represented jazz’s high-modernist period, marking a great leap forward, eventually leading to the postmodernist abstractions of free jazz but without going all the way into tedium. Bebop did more than the swing and Dixieland sounds that it supplanted to give jazz its reputation as high culture. As appealing as big-band swing was (and still is), had jazz’s development stopped there, it is doubtful that its reputation as “America’s classical music” would be as secure as it is now.
That was all in the future, though. In their day, the members of the bebop generation liked to be regarded as outsiders. “Bebop was invented by the cats who did get out of the army,” says the protagonist of the film Round Midnight (1986), played by Dexter Gordon and based on Bud Powell and Lester Young. Beboppers drew a sharper distinction between the modes of entertainer and artist than did predecessors like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.
Bebop musicians played at a fast tempo, often with wit and whimsy, but not much sentimentality. One appeal of bebop lies in its emotional restraint, which sets it against the romantic strains of certain varieties of nineteenth-century classical music and, certainly, saccharine pop songs. (The heroin addict nodding off, too, displays a limited emotional range.) But the main connection between playing bebop and taking heroin was that both were seen as the mark of an unconventional spirit. In critic Nat Hentoff’s view, “Heroin, in short, became the ‘in’ drug more because it was so defiantly anti-square than because of any relationship between the music as such and the effects of the drug.”
Jazz was city music, and all the cities associated with its rise—Kansas City, New Orleans, Chicago—had a reputation for being “wide open.” A working jazz musician maintained nighttime hours, traveled a lot, and was sporadically employed—all qualities associated with looser living. Long before heroin arrived on the jazz scene, alcoholism was rife and sent several jazz greats to an early grave. But boozing had far less status appeal than heroin.
One senses that white musicians experienced status concerns with particular acuteness. Insecurity seems evident on Evans’s face in almost every photograph of him. The Winick study reported that two-thirds of musicians who were “occasional or regular” heroin consumers were white. It was a white trumpeter, Red Rodney, who made the definitive statement about the drug’s status allure: “[Heroin] was our badge. It was 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. Every ambition. Every desire. Everything.”
One peer-pressure effect that crossed racial boundaries was the influence of alto saxophonist Charlie “Yardbird” or “Bird” Parker. Bird’s life offers strong evidence that such a thing as an “addictive personality” exists. Single-minded in his devotion to satisfying his various appetites, he was found to be psychopathic by at least one psychiatrist. What Bird’s family and colleagues saw as callous disregard for their well-being has been spun by some later commentators as reaction to racism’s trauma. Many also excused Parker because of his artistic abilities, the reputation of which has only grown over time. The combination in one man of Carnegie Hall and skid row created a potent attraction. The conventional wisdom, as quoted in Ross Russell’s biography Bird Lives! (1973), was: “To play like Bird, you have to do like Bird!”
Jazz is an improvisatory art form that requires great powers of concentration, and many musician-addicts said that heroin helped them with that. Bird’s powers of concentration were legendary, though whatever role drugs played there may have amounted to nothing more than staving off withdrawal. Many outstanding jazz musicians were nonaddicts; Bird’s contemporaries Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown come to mind. But countless others drew from Bird’s example the lesson that the true artist will reject boundaries in his personal life. The kind of person likely to commit himself wholly to his art, convention be damned, is the same kind likely to commit himself to his habit. Bird’s “fabulous yellow Roman candle”–like lifestyle (to borrow a phrase from Jack Kerouac) led to his early death, in 1955, at just 34. He was mistaken for someone in his mid-fifties by the coroner. In another, indirect measure of the reach of Parker’s influence, jazz’s heroin era began to wind down after his passing.
Two lessons might be drawn here: one pertaining to drug culture; the other, to culture more generally.
First, comparing the jazz-heroin epidemic with America’s current opioid epidemic reveals how much, in the current case, we’re dealing less with status and more with brutal economic and chemical realities. Understanding any drug epidemic requires making two analytic distinctions: first, between the position of new users and that of established addicts, and second, between the underlying qualities of the drug or drugs in question (rush, euphoria, fear of withdrawal, cost, convenience to acquire) and social factors such as peer pressure. In the more traditional structure of epidemics, like the jazz-heroin one, social factors drive the peaks and troughs. They push usage levels up higher than the product’s quality alone would achieve. People start using not just because they like the drug but because of the circumstances they find themselves in. This is bad news, of course, but it has a silver lining: in modern America, new fashions and fads tend to burn themselves out. In the case of such epidemics driven heavily by social pressures, hope persists that drug-usage levels will recede eventually, even if other methods at fighting the plague, such as interdiction, prove ineffective. For those in the postwar jazz scene, using was a declaration of independence of sorts, something that artists did, and also many of those claiming to appreciate the art.
This status element, so powerful in the jazz-heroin epidemic, is less evident in the opioid crisis. In the drug scourge that America now faces, the cheapness, availability, and sheer euphoria-inducing power of the product are the driving forces. Throughout the many years that the opioid epidemic has persisted, cultural observers have yet to identify a “fentanyl chic.” Unlike heroin, fentanyl has few nicknames (I’m aware of only two: “fetty” and “blues” ); no songs celebrate the drug. Fentanyl has claimed some celebrity victims (Prince, Michael K. Williams), but it boasts no celebrity addicts, à la Parker or Burroughs. Histories of the modern epidemic’s twists and turns focus on the rapid changes in drug quality and production techniques. Changing fashions won’t save us this time.
As for the second lesson: jazz is one of America’s greatest cultural achievements, representing the nation’s polyglot culture at its finest. Black musicians born under Jim Crow, riffing on show tunes written by Jews whose families had fled Old World oppression just a few decades prior: this was, and is, jazz. America’s main cultural destiny was to steward the achievements of Europe, which it did by buying up lots of paintings and sheltering countless Jewish academics, writers, artists, scientists, physicians, and musicians fleeing the Nazis. But it also had to make its own contribution with an art form that was highbrow and unique to it. Jazz, as an artistic expression of ordered liberty, is as distinctly American as the Russian novel, Italian opera, and British lyric poetry are to their respective national contexts. Unlike so much art and culture being pushed nowadays, jazz, particularly in its golden-age variety, has never been something that Americans were told they’re supposed to like because it’s the politically appropriate thing to do.
Jazz appreciation is therefore a civically meaningful endeavor. The heroin tie-in, for its part, reflects the complexity of the American national saga. Much lip service is now paid to the idea that history is messy, that the low must be balanced against the high. That advice is only selectively heeded, though. Many teachers, at both the K–12 and college levels, wouldn’t be troubled much if their students came away from their schooling knowing nothing about the Doolittle raid or how many national liberation struggles were inspired by the American Founding Fathers. What would really trouble those teachers would be if their students didn’t learn about the Japanese internment camps and that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson held slaves. Maybe culture offers a more promising way forward, in appreciating such complexity, than a strictly political chronicle can provide. Jazz history teaches that the American epic combines greatness and sordidness, and that those elements are sometimes hard to separate.
Top Photo: Saxophonist Charlie Parker, whose life offers strong evidence for the existence of the “addictive personality” (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)
