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ISSUES:

MUSIC

RACE

CULTURE

Number ten: that beboppers put down as "commercial" people who were trying to make money is 50 per cent a lie, only half true.  We all wanted to make money, preferably by playing modern jazz.  We appreciated people who tried to help us ? and they were very few ? because we needed all the help we could get.  Even during the heyday of bebop, none of us made much money.  Many people who pretended to help were really there for a rip-off.  New modern jazz nightclubs like the Royal Roost, which had yellow leather seats and a milk bar for teenagers, and the Clique were opening every day, all over the country.  Bebop was featured on the Great White Way, Broadway, at both the Paramount and the Strand theatres.  We received a lot of publicity but very little money.

People with enough bucks and foresight to invest in bebop made some money.  I mean more than just a little bit.  All the big money went to the guys who owned the music, not to the guys who played it.  The businessmen make much more than the musicians, because without money to invest in producing their own music, and sometimes managing poorly what they earned, the jazz businessman always became the owner and got back more than his "fair" share, usually at the player’s expense.  More was stolen from us during the bebop era than in the entire history of jazz, up to that point.  They stole a lot of our music, all kinds of stuff.  You’d look up and see somebody else’s name on your composition and say, "What’d he have to do with it?" But you couldn’t do much about it.  Blatant commercialism we disliked because it debased the quality of our music.  Our protests against being cheated and ripped off never meant we stood against making money.  The question of being politically inclined against commercialism or trying to take over anything never figured too prominently with me.  The people who stole couldn’t create, so I just kept interested in creating the music, mostly, and tried to make sure my works were protected.