Music: Uptown Boogie-Woogie

Manhattan has many a hotspot, many a white-tie joint, but few nightclubs in which a connoisseur of jazz would care to be found. Two years ago a mild-mannered little Trenton, N. J. shoe-store owner named Barney Josephson (no kin to Author Matthew Josephson) opened a subterranean nightclub in downtown Manhattan. He wanted the kind of place where people like himself would not be sneered at by waiters, cigaret and hat-check girls, or bored by a commercial girl show. He called it Café Society, and turned loose some excellent comic artists (among them Peggy Bacon, William Gropper) to plaster its walls with jibes against cafe socialites—who returned the compliment by staying away. Nevertheless, Cafe Society made money. Its clientele was mostly 1) left-wing intellectuals, 2) jazz addicts. For Proprietor Josephson placed the joint’s musical policy in the reverential hands of John Henry Hammond Jr., arch-hierophant of U. S. jazz. High Priest Hammond made Cafe Society one of the three or four spots in Manhattan where good jazz could be heard, popularized that most esoteric of forms, the ritualistic clatter-bang of boogie-woogie pianism.

Last week Barney Josephson opened an uptown branch of Café Society, smack in the heart of the swank East Side, next door to the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. On the nightclub’s two-story-high walls. Artist Anton Refregier painted soft-toned satirical murals.

The music at uptown Café Society was nothing new to its downtown habitues. Two of the boogie-woogie players, Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis, pounded two pianos. Teddy Wilson, rippling, inventive jazz pianist, played in his own orchestra and in a trio with Clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton and Drummer Yank Porter, who moons, mugs, smiles ecstatically while he beats it out. The Golden Gate Quartet swung spirituals. Sultry, curvesome, Trinidad-born Hazel Scott, who was trained by a teacher from Manhattan’s crack Juilliard School, played Bach and Liszt on the piano, first straight, then hot. The authentic afflatus descended upon Café Society on its opening night, when a pale young man, one of the guests, stepped up with a clarinet. It was Benny Goodman, just recovered from long illness (sciatica). When he sent out Somebody Stole My Gal, pure, liquid, brilliant, the place rocked.