My blog on Bird was brief, emphasizing his music. Bird had run-ins with police, and so did many other jazz musicians. The instrument of police control was the infamous cabaret card. The occasions and excuses for this particular form of oppression was often drugs, but it could be many things. The card was a license to perform issued by government. This practice ended in 1967. I haven’t looked into what has replaced it, if anything. Nate Chinen has an article on the “police state” operation of the cabaret card in which he informs us: “A cursory background of the legislation would note that New York cabaret licensing began as early as 1926, expanding in 1940 to make identification cards mandatory for entertainers, as part of a campaign to sanitize (and, by some accounts, deradicalize) the city’s nightlife. To get one of these cards, renewable every two years, a musician had to go to the police department’s license division to be photographed and fingerprinted—a process that by its nature could evoke the stigma of criminality.”
The article writes “Parker was merely one of the card’s more expressive victims; its punitive restrictions also plagued Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, J.J. Johnson and Jackie McLean. A more comprehensive list could surely crowd the remainder of the page.”
To get his card back after it had been revoked, Parker had to beg simply to be able to play music: “Among the many curios in jazz’s epistolary record is a letter from Charlie Parker to the New York Liquor Control Board, dated Feb. 17, 1953. ‘My right to pursue my chosen profession has been taken away, and my wife and three children who are innocent of any wrongdoing are suffering,’ Parker writes.’ … I feel sure that when you examine my record and see that I have made a sincere effort to become a family man and a good citizen, you will reconsider. If by any chance you feel I haven’t paid my debt to society, by all means let me do so and give me and my family back the right to live.’
4:09 am on September 20, 2012
