Living with Jazz

While most first-time visitors wanted to see the Statue of Liberty (arriving by ocean liner, I'd already seen it) or the Empire State Building, I wanted to go to Fifty-Second Street, that legendary block of jazz clubs I'd read so much about. It wasn't much to look at from the outside, though the names on the various marquees and sandwich boards made me drool. History tells us that by the spring of 1947, the street was well into its decline and fall, and to be sure, there were signs touting strippers and comedians. But having Sidney Bechet, Charlie Parker, and Billie Holiday all on the same block wasn't shabby.

I soon discovered that it was possible to hear a lot of music from outside the clubs, if their wasn't too much traffic noise and the doorman didn't chase you away. Eventually I learned how to nurse a beer through several sets of music by drinking from the bottle, which was opaque, instead of from a glass, which the bartender could easily spot when empty, or, if I wanted to stick around all night, to tip the bartender well on the first transaction, after which he'd leave me alone with my empty bottle.

As an unintended result of the Nazi occupation [of Denmark, where Morgenstern lived at the time], jazz became more popular than ever—a phenomenon universal to countries under the Hitler jackboot. In France, Django Reinhardt enjoyed the greatest acclaim of his career, and even in Germany, there were clandestine groups of jazz fans who'd meet to listen to records. Jazz was anathema to the Nazis. who considered it a mongrel affront to Aryan "culture," the product of an unholy alliance between Africans and Jews. But to those who hated the Nazis, jazz stood for freedom, for democracy, and for the spirit of America, which, especially after Pearl Harbor, seemed to embody hope for a better future.