Martin Torgoff on Jazz, Race, The Beats & Drugs

any type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners, Well, today's episode is fairly close to my heart. It's on the subject of jazz and drugs and race and the beats. My guest today is Martin to Goof. He's an award winning journalist and author. He's a documentary filmmaker. He's an Emmy nominated television writer, director and producer. Uh. He's got two books of great relevance to the subject and also to

my life. The first one was a book called Can't Find My Way Home about America and the great Stoned Age to two thousand and we'll talk about that a little bit, but we're really focusing on a book that he published a few years ago called Bop Apocalypse, Jazz Race, the Beats and Drugs. So, Martin, thank you so much for joining me today on Psychoactive. Thank you for having me Ethan. It's always interesting and fun to talk to you.

I think when we think about the origins of jazz and drugs and especially marijuana, there's no place to start but with Louis Armstrong. So Louis Armstrong and marijuana. Martin talk about Louis Armstrong, how special and incredible he was, and and his connection to marijuana. What always fascinated me about this subject was that marijuana appears on the streets of New Orleans at just around the same time that

jazz begins to percolate. So they were always there together, um you know, and it was always a kind of symbiotic relationship from the very beginning. Like you're talking around nineteen eleven. So by the time, um, you know, Armstrong is a teenager in New Orleans, that entire culture has been just beginning to really coalesced in a very significant way. What happens is that the artists begin making their way up the Mississippi River to Chicago, and in a way,

the marijuana follows them. So in a way you can like follow the story of marijuana, want to and jazz together with Louis Armstrong up to Chicago where it begins to blossom at the Lincoln Gardens with his creativity up there, and then it goes down to Kansas City, it goes across to Harlem, and that's really the beginning of it. So Louis fell in love with jazz and fell in

love with weed. I mean, jazz came first. Uh, he did not turn on until he got to Chicago, and all of the musicians of the time talk about his love affair with it. So he's he's his powerful figure. But marijuana, I mean, was there any way which marijuana was a negative in his life or was it all positive? Not in his life? Not in his life, And he would talk openly about, you know, the many ways that he characterized it as a positive impact on his life.

One of the really amazing things about looking at um all of these jazz artists, the many different ones and their journeys through the use of different substances, is how from the very beginning you can see people who were able to use it in a positive way and set boundaries about it and those who um, who weren't who had a very different um kind of relationship with the substances that became problematical really the difference between use and abuse in you know, and and it's very kind of

organic application, right, But with marijuana it typically was not a negative in the way, whereas heroin became a very much more mixed story in subsequent decades. Right, yes, yes, you know, I mean absolutely. It wasn't like he was a propagator, um, a soletizer for it, because that wasn't the case. But he was just honest about it, and you know, he believed that it was positive to a lot of people. His relationship with it always kind of embodied his kind of genial, live and let live kind

of attitude about life. You know, his kind of enjoyment of things. You know, he was a really beautiful man. You know, you sort of look back and you look at his smile. He had a philosophy of life that was really positive. He had a philosophy of America that was really positive, and you know, his relationship with the

weed was really very much embroidered into that philosophy. I remember one time meeting um, somebody who had been in charge of his U s I a U S Information Agency tour in Africa maybe in late fifties early sixties. I remember describing to me what it was like, you know, because he was not going to travel anywhere without his weed, and she had to make sure that that was not

going to be a problem as they crossed borders. But he was determined, and in a way, it was a small world around him that I think made sure Louis Armstrong was not going to spend another day in jail, even though marijuana was inna you know, part of his everyday life experience. Yes, Um, he was literally the first

celebrity marijuana bust in American history. It happened in Los Angeles, and um he was actually set up, and um, when he came back to Chicago, he was really worried that it was going to, um have a negative impact on his career. And it didn't. And the reason that it didn't was because by that time, the people who were listening to jazz were really beginning to coalesce into a whole culture, into a viper culture. Um, you know, in in Harlem, around places like uh, you know, the Savoy Ballroom,

and it was more widespread. I mean, it certainly wasn't, you know, a mainstream thing. Obviously that didn't happen until you know, the mid to late length nineties, sixties and seventies. But there were enough people who were, you know, listening to jazz, going to see jazz, buying jazz records, who were aware of marijuana, and you know, they weren't going

to hold that against him by any means. I think you write in your book that he sat down he wrote a letter to President Eisenhower telling him that marijuana should be legal. So he was not inhibited about expressing his views on that thing. You know, No, No, he wasn't inhibited at all. So the question that rises with marijuana is why the connection between marijuana and jazz. I mean, at one point, you quote Norman Mailer is saying he

couldn't think of one without the other. But for the musicians themselves, what was it that made it um, that made marijuana special. Well, for one thing, it was just there, you know, and it was just a part of their lifestyle. I think it was Dexter Gordon, the great saxophonist, who who called jazz lifestyle as music and um by the same token you could call the beat generation lifestyle of literature, and marijuana was was an integral part of that lifestyle.

So so it was just there, and from the very beginning it was obvious to the people that smoked it and played the music that you know, there were aspects of the marijuana experience that resonated powerfully and creatively for them in playing it, in playing it alone, and in playing it with each other, so that it became a part of the experience ense of performing it, and it

became part of the experience of recording it. Well, you know, in the book, I mean you talk about some of these I mean, it was all subtle and nuance and as you say, interwoven. The cause of relationships are hard to identify, but that sometimes marijuana gave some players, you know, a sense of courage if they were a young musician coming up, and would able them to just feel that much more confident, which would shape their jazz because feeling

confident was better in performance than not. You talk about maybe it helped to reduce inhibitions and therefore, you know, led to greater improvisation and experimentation. Uh. You talked about some of these writers saying that they could. Actually it wasn't they played better, but that they could hear better. Here one another better, right, I mean, I mean that element.

Never mind the fact that it was preferable to all the other psychoactive substances like alcohol and heroin, which we'll get into shortly, in terms of one's health and not giving people a hangover and staying healthy for a lifetime. You know, there are so many different opinions about it. I mean, for example, John Hammond, who was you know, like a major figure in the jazz culture of that

era in terms of like producing the music. He hated the presence of weed in the lifestyles and the musicians because he felt that well, for one thing, it made them liable for persecution, but also he felt that it played havoc with their sense of time. And a lot of musicians would disagree with him about it. I mean, he wasn't a smoker, so he wouldn't have known. You know. At one point, I was reading something that Charles Baudelaire wrote about the effects of hashi, you know, Charles Baudelaire,

the French poet. He called it a mirror that magnifies, yet only a mirror, And I found that to be very very useful in considering the relationship between you know, the substances and the musicianship. These musicians were all unbelievable artists. They were disciplined, they practiced endlessly, you know, their entire lives were devoted to their art form. And I don't think that marijuana, you know, in and of itself, you know,

made any of them innately better musicians. Um. You know, it couldn't like put talent uh there that wasn't already there. But what it could do was it could amplify that talent in different ways. And I think I think that the answer is like somehow contained in that kind of thesis. I'll tell you that even today, when I find myself now is things are opening up post pandemic. I find myself going to jazz clips in New York more and

more frequently. And what they I like to do is to like take a little finally grammedable before I go, and it just enhances the appreciation and especially my ability to appreciate some of the more out there improvisation. M Yeah, I think you know, you hear it over and over again. I mean I think it just opens your musical mind, uh, there's just something about it. As Mesro, there was a musician who fell in love with the blues, fell in love with weed, and he and was himself, I mean

when he played clarinet or something. Yeah, he was. He was a clarinetist. But there in his book Really the Blues, there is a passage in which he describes the first time that he ever smoked and went out on the on the bandstand to play. And to me, it's one of the most resonant pieces of writing that I've ever come across about, you know, the potential of taking a musician's mind or a listeners mind and just kind of like opening it. Um. It's really it's really a remarkable

piece of writing. If you want, I'll read you a little a little passage of what he wrote about. This is him, um, going out to play under the influence for the first time. The first thing I noticed was that I began to hear my saxophone as though it were inside by head. But I couldn't hear much of the bend in back of me, although I knew they were there. All the other instruments sounded like they were

way off in the distance. I got the same sensation you'd get if you stuffed your ears with cotton and talked out loud. Then I began to feel the vibrations of the read much more pronounced against my lip, and my head buzzed like a loudspeaker. I found I was slurring much better and putting just the right feeling into my phrases. I was really coming on. All the notes came easing out of my horn like they had already

been made up, greased, and stuffed into a bell. So all I had to do was blow a little and send them on their way, one right after the other, never missing, never behind me, all without an ounce of effort. The phrases seemed to have more continuity to them, and I was sticking to the theme without ever going tangent. I felt like I could go on playing for years without running out of ideas or energy. And that's uh,

that's it. Well, you know, it's interesting. At one point, you know, you talked about Alan Ginsburg, the great poet, the one who wrote the you know, the poem Howell, which is, you know, perhaps the most famous poem American poem writter in America in the mid twentieth century, or maybe even the entire second half of the twentie century, but him being very influenced not just by jazz, but by mes Mesro's book that he was it was formative

for him. Yeah, he found it in the the Columbia bookstore when he was a student at Columbia, you know, in the forties, and he was very, very interested in experiencing marijuana. And that book was like the Rosetta Stone for him because it showed him that it emerged from a whole cultural sensibility in the United States, and that really began his whole lifelong interest in um learning about drugs, learning about their origins, learning about their cultural origins, understanding

the spiritual connotations of them. You know, the beats were so uh amazing because that's a literature in which the writers were imbued with the experiences of these substances. At the same time as they were trying to find a new form that was like jazz, they were trying to write like the jazz musicians were playing. So you have a literature that's imbued and catalyzed by the experiencing of these substances, about these substances, in which you have writing

for you know, a popular audience. Really in this country for the first time about these substances. So it's it's just it's groundbreaking from all of those different aspects. Well, he's talking the book about you know, some of these early before they become famous, they're going up to the jazz clubs in Harlem and elsewhere. You talk about Lester Young, who will get to in a moment um, you know, giving Jack Carroll at his first joint um. So yeah,

definitely changed his life for sure. Yeah, yeah, it did, it really did. Just to go back to the jazz for a second, just talk about Lester Young nicknamed Praz you know him and the saxophone to some extent, begins to redefine jazz in the thirties and he's somebody for whom also marijuana is important in his life, although he's unfortunately caught up in other drugs, notably alcohol. But I think at one point you say he may have been the most influential of all jazz musicians, which surprised me

a bit. But explain why it was his style that was really so influential as well as his unique musicianship. He was such a singular personality. Um, you know his background, he you know, he came from this band, that um, this musical family, and he was very sensitive and he was very devastated by his experiences of the racism of that time. He also was really really in love with weed.

What it did for Prez was it pulled him into himself and it allowed him to create his own kind of insulated musical world in which he kind of became this very singular personality. So that was his impact. He drew people into that, like that little bubble that he wove around himself, and in that bubble was his incredible, fertile creativity and also his sensibility, his unique sensibility. I mean, he really was the inventor of pool as it came to be known in the thirties and forties and fifties.

I mean, you can almost trace it back to this one individual in his demeanor, in how he walked and how he talked, his invention of of jive, his use of these words that became um, you know, like staples in the vernacular. I mean, he was so unbelievably inventive in every possible way. We'll be talking more after we hear this ad. You mentioned some of the expressions that he probably coined. I got it. Made I got eyes

for that copycat. Even the Big Apple is the nickname from New York, the word crib for one's home, the word bread for money, and would even end sentences of conversations by saying you dig I mean, and then of course the expression cool as in that's cool man. So once again, as with Louie Armstrong, whether they originated or popularized, but you know, it's a formative influence in American culture, not just through their music, but even through their own

way of talking, of speaking of creating new language. And also it's interesting to consider, uh, you know, the impact of the weed on his musical style because it was so emblematic really of his personality. He was kind of like very very laid back in his tone. It was a very sweet tone, and he would just kind of like lay back and then all of a sudden, just in the most tasteful way, just completely take over the music and just elevate it to this very very unique place.

And that was how people kind of saw him. He was kind of a very laid back guy. He was very shy. He was like a laggard, you know, he was just kind of like hang there and then like draw you in and then just take you somewhere. And his relationship with Billie Holiday was one of them, you know, really signature creative relationships of that entire era in the music. Well we'll get into Billie Holliday shortly, but once again to jump forward into the beat, I mean for Alan Ginsberg.

Ginsburg you say was strongly influenced by Lester Young, and notably I think his songs I got rid them Let's hear a little clip and Lester leaps in Let's hear a clip. So talk about that connection, Martin, between Lester Young and his influence on Alan Ginsberg. Well, you know, Carolac was the real jazz aficionado of the early beats, and he um, of course, who was turned on by Lester Young. You know, he started going to the jazz clubs and he's the first one to write about jazz

of of those guys. And you know, he and Allen were very close and they would listen to the music together, and Caro Wac was the first one who became imbued with this notion of writing the same way that the

jazz musicians played. He would listen to Charlie Parker and he would listen to Lester young, and one of the things that he really began to see was that they played in these long lines, these kind of like long unbroken lines in which one idea would like initiate like unleash another idea, and then another idea and then another idea, in this kind of endless progression of unfolding of like ideas and melodies and with and there would be breaks, and then the breaks would be used creatively to kind

of contextualize something else. And you know, Carolac would like get stoned and he would listen to the jazz and then he would like to think about how he could, um, you know, right in the same way. So some of his earliest attempts of writing um were um you know,

like long improvisations. Really, I mean his whole creation of the manuscript for On the Road, for example, which he did like putting this giant roll of paper and putting it in a typewriter and just sitting down and like literally like twenty three days straight just like churning out this manuscript which became this like incredible novel called On the Road. Alan in his development in his poetics, was always looking at Caro Wac and going wow, wow, Wow, I wonder if I can do that with my poetry.

And when he sat down, Uh, he was living in North Beach at the time, in San Francisco, and he, you know, he sat down to write how. Carol wac had been living in Mexico at that time and he had created this this long poem called Mexico City Blues and he sent it to Alan, and Alan, you know, started writing How, trying to do it along that kind of like long saxophone line, and that's the entire first

movement of How is written exactly. It was almost like he was trying to channel Lester young Um, like sitting down and blowing. So the whole first movement of How

is like you know, him just like blowing on a saxophone. Really, you know, this brings us to the next great revolutionary and jazz, Charlie Parker and be back Jazz and Charlie Parker as somebody who's using drugs from the time he's in his young teens, Charlie Parker, a man of fantastic appetites, Charlie Parker who just keeps using more and more drugs and keeps getting more and more creative in his music until a breaking point comes, so, I mean a lot

of your book obviously, the title is Bebop Apocalypse Charlie Parker was Mr Bibop. Tell us about Charlie Parker and about the relationship between drugs and his music. Well, he was unique because he was so um musically driven and ambitious from a very young age, and also from a very young age he was just as driven to use and abuse pretty much everything he could get his hands on.

And he was a genius musician, you know, addicted for the first time as a teenager, even before he left Kansas City to you know, hop the freight train that would bring him to Chicago and then eventually to New York and then eventually to fame. We talked extensively about Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong, lifelong user of marijuana, who set pretty strong boundaries about things that he would do and

things that he wouldn't do. He, for example, did not like alcohol, and he wouldn't like cross that boundary into the use of alcohol. He really really did not like hard drugs and he never crossed that boundary into hard drugs. Charlie Parker Bird, as he would of course become famously known, He not only had no boundaries about music, but he had no boundary about his use of substances. Not only would he use everything, but he would make an ethos

of it. And he was so brilliant musically that that boundaryless ethos about his substances became inextricable from his you know, just boundary breaking musicianship and genius. So that's what set those two geniuses apart from each other in terms of their relationship to substances. Um. That's the best way I could describe it. Yeah, you know, at one point you describe there's a song, um, and let's hear a clip

from it, Loverman. This song became part of the legend of his genius of Charlie Parker say something about Loverman. You know, it's it's so interesting because he became an addict as a teenager, and then when he got really musically ambitious, he decided that he was going to get clean.

So when he jumped that freight trade out of the Kansas City freight yard and you know, to to begin his musical Hobysey Um, he kind of understood that he needed all of his discipline and all of his energy towards that goal and he kind of like, you know, he put down, he put down narcotics at that point, and then he came to New York and um, you know, he hooked up with the small inner nucleus you know

that would form the Seminole Bebop group. You know that all played in Mittens in the you know, the early to mid nineteen forties, and it was a small group of guys and Mintens was the Jazz Club. Yeah yeah, but it was a small subterranean in setting up at Harlem and all the like the musicians who were interested in exploring this new form of jazz would kind of gather there after their gigs, and Bird was one, and Dizzy Gillespie was another, Kenny Clark, Max Roach on drums,

and Felonious Monk, you know, the great pianist. He was a part of that group. He really became the spark plug, like the creative spark plug of that new form of the music. And just as that was happening, he fell back into his use of narcotics and got really really strung out, strung out in a way that he had

never been strung out before. So like right at the peak of that he was playing in a group with Dizzy, and Dizzy decided that he was going to take his band out to the West Coast to showcase the music the first time at a place called Billy Burghs. And it was a big deal. Um. You know, all the people who were in the know about jazz out there. They they showed up because the buzz was about this new form and and this guy Bird. And so he got to Los Angeles. It was a new place for him.

He didn't know where to cop and he immediately got in trouble and he became extremely unreliable because he was always out scouring the town um looking for a fix. And that was when Dizzy decided, okay, you know this is not working. He dropped him from the group, brought the rest of the group back to New York and Bird was left out there in Los Angeles, high and dry, badly strung out, and he ended up um like living

with the trumpet player Howard McGhee um. And it was McGhee who got Bird a deal with this guy Ross Russell to go in and have this recording session. And when he went in to record these songs, he was very very very badly strung out and One of the songs that he recorded in that session was Loverman, which had been a billy holiday song, and he played it and he just like really really on the edge, and he just he did what he what he always did. He just went for it and the track was recorded

and that was when Bird had his breakdown. You know, he goes back to the hotel. He and he ended up um in Camarillo in the uh the mental institution there. And when he got out, that was when the track was released, and he came back to New York and you know, he was healthy again and he formed this group Miles Davis was a part of then, even I mean he's just about barely can get it together. But it turns out to be one of his great recordings. Well,

he never liked it himself. He understood, you know, the kind of shape that he was in it when he recorded it. But the impact that it had on his musical community was powerful because by then everyone kind of knew about his lifestyle. And he came, you know out, and he went back to New York and played at the Royal Roost and his band just tore it up. He was like at the top of his game and that's when really his legend began. And so this track comes out and they hear this man who now everybody

knows had been a junk and is a junkie. And what they hear is this statement of this artist like essentially playing his pain. And they were terrible, terribly, terribly moved by it, just by the pathos of it and by his commitment to his art, and somehow the fact that he was a dope feed um, you know, it just created this aura of this kind of dark romanticism. Really at one point might use his phrase, I don't know you're quoting somebody else, but saying that with the heroine,

I mean, and everything else that was going on. It wasn't just heroin, because Charlie Parker many others, they were using a lot of stuff. They were Sometimes there was a lot of alcohol. Sometimes alcohol was a dominant drug. It was wed, of course, but they're also bends, a dream. There might have been other stuff, but in some level

they were playing their lifestyle. I think you put it that way for better or works, Uh, you know, you describe another moment to I think it's Norman Grants, the jazz producer is putting on jazz at the Philharmonic, and Charlie Parker is supposed to be there, Um, you know, he's trying to score. Finally shows up and I think the song was sweet Georgia Brown. Yeah, yeah, what happened there? Well, he just like you know, he comes on stage and and blows everybody away. Let's hear a clip of that.

So that and the rest of it blew people away that evening, huh, and he was totally high as it, but pulling it together. Well. The thing that people don't really get about, um, you know, Heroin is that these guys were not shooting dope to get high and go on stage and play. Um. You know, if you shot dope, you would go on the nod. Um. You know, that's not really where they wanted to be when they played. What Heroin did was it made them what they called straight,

they called it getting straight. It kind of stabilized them really, um, you know, it's that's one of the misconceptions that you know, people have about heroin and jazz is that, you know, when these guys were addicted, you know, they would shoot dope and like you know, get on the stand and like be high out of their minds. And play. No,

that's not what was going on. What was going on was that this drug, which had created this metabolic need for it um, was being satisfied and and so that's what would allow them, you know, the kind of stability be anchored, you know, back again in their music, in their creativity. You remind me, Martin, of years ago I read the biography of Stan Getz, who was the great um White jazz saxophonist, and what it described it there

was his addiction to two drugs, heroin and alcohol. But its story, I told, was that alcohol was the drug that turned him into an asshole, and that screwed up his playing and messed up everything you know in his life. That with heroin, it wasn't the drug itself. It was the need to score, to find a place to score, to get the money together, to find a place to use, to do all that and then get to his gig

in time. And it was to some extent, not the drug, but the illegality of it, the criminality of it um, which might have been in some respect it's part of the enticement for a whole bunch of rebellious personalities who were pioneers in jazz. But that was also the destructive,

harmful element of it. And I think what you described by Charlie Parker as well, right, Um, another point you described, there's another protege of Charlie Parker, Jackie McLean, who I think was one of your key sources because he was still alive and available when you write in his book, and I think you quote Jackie McLean saying, you know, Harold was kind of a working drug for Yeah, for a lot of them, it was. I mean, you know,

it's very complex, um when you think about it. I mean, these were brilliant musicians, highly evolved, highly sensitive people devoted to this art form, devoted to like really pushing it, and a lot of them believe that, you know, it had not only creative capacity but socio cultural racial ability to bring people together. And yet the irony was that it was making them vulnerable to prosecution and the element

of racism. You know, of course not all of the musicians were African American, you know, but um, a lot of them were. And they're the whole role that Heroin played in as an anodyne to the racism of that time, and and what these people had to endure is also a significant factor, I believe. So they were all very

different people having different experiences. And in Jackie's case, who's a wonderful man, by the way, it took him twenty five years to get clean and he would never have been able to do it without method on and that that was his bridge to you know, getting clean from heroin was through use of in another opiate. So it was a very complicated thing. I just to give the audience here a sense of how pervasive this was, I mean,

it really happens. I think the heyday of Heron and jazz is really from nineteen forty seven to nineteen fifty seven,

give or take a few years here or there. But at one point, one of the famous jazz critics that entoff, he goes to the Newport Jazz Festival of nineteen fifty seven, and he surveys over four hundred jazz musicians from New York City and asked them about their drug use and with marijuana, he finds, according to people who self reporting, eighty two percent say they've tried marijuana, fifty four percent say they've used that occasionally, twenty three percent say they

do so regularly. With heroin, fifty three percent said they tried at twenty four percent say they used it occasionally, in sixteen percent say they use it regularly. And separately, there was another jazz historian, Lincoln Collier, who claimed he thought that up to seventy five percent of all jazz musicians used heroin during the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties. So this is a period when heroin was becoming a

little more prominent in the black community. And Claude Brown and his famous Bookman Child in a Promised Land writes about what happens in the late forties and the fifties where heroin does get take off, but the vast majority of the culture is not using it. So this really is a subculture of jazz greats and jazz great wannabes

who are also using heroin. And of course many people put the blame on Charlie Parker about how many musicians would listen to Charlie Parker play in a way that nobody had ever played before, and it seemed almost impossible. And you know, oh, it must be because he shooting heroin. And if I become a Heroin user, I can be more like my hero, Charlie Parker, and maybe I can

play more like Ken. I mean, there's some truth to that, I guess Martin writes that people you know kind of either let down their guard visa the heroin or even went into it. Because Charlie Parker was the infamous heroin using jazz great yes, UM, and he recognized that and he was deeply unhappy about it. Bird was um a

very complex uh human being. UM. And you know that's one of the challenges of you know, writing about people like Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, these mythic figures who um you know, at the same time became addicts and their myths essentially um become their stories, you know. And as you mentioned, this is like happening on stage, but the backdrop is something that's happening, you know, to an

entire community really up there in Arlem. You know, you mentioned Claude brown Um writing about that manchild and Promised Land. I had the honor of interviewing Claude brown Um for my books before he passed away. And one of the things that really um comes across is how these individuals, um, these artists became really really prominent and heroes really to the community up there, and UM, you know, their lifestyles

became inextricable from their accomplishments as as artists. So really what you have for the first time is a group of individuals who become role models for UM, a phenomenon of heroin use in a community at large, UM, a community that finds itself in the cross hairs really of forces in which you know, the lives of these musicians is really just one thread really where so much else is going on, you know, about crime in public policy and racism and things like that, and that's when the

whole thing becomes extremely complex and in its own way tragic. Let's take a break here and go to an ad. You also bring out something else there, which was specifically about bebop. I mean, your book is called Bebop of Popplix and Charlie Parker is a key figure in it, and you talk about bebop music to some extent um kind of intersecting with heroin. But also it's the type of music that reflects and that manifests the feeling of resentment that's so many black people feel, especially after World

War Two. Of people had served in the army in World War Two, served in the military, coming back and then being thrown back into Jim Crow America, and even

the racism in the in the Northern States. And then you have, of course the great evil you know, human being throughout all this period, Harry Anslinger, who becomes the founding director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in thirty and rules that agency for thirty two years until nineteen sixty two, who is by all accounts a racist, right um, and who somebody is initially focused on heroin, but by the mid thirties begins to focus on marijuana, the demon drug,

and the era of reefer madness and really conflating you know, the whole fear of white women having sex with black men in the role of drugs and music and all of that. So say more about bebop and racism and heroin and net interweaving of those elements with the revolution within the jazz community. Um, it was a revolutionary kind of music. I mean, it evolved from swing, but it turned swing on its head really and there were people who hated it as a result of it, jazz critics

and jazz musicians. So the music itself was considered to be um subversive, and so on top of that you have it being played by these individuals who were very very aware of that and also aware of the fact that, um, you know, they were African Americans and that the music was to them. They saw it as a vehicle to express um you know. There they're absolute awareness of and

condemnation of the racist society that they lived in. A lot of the people who are who are jazz lovers of that time were very very sympatico with that entire sensibility, and Slinger from the very beginning understood that this was

a subversive culture socially and raciully. I mean when he decided to, um, you know, conduct the entire anti marijuana crusade, he was compiling a list of jazz musicians and his idea was that with the marijuana law of seven, he was going to go after all of these jazz musicians and basically, you know, further into isn't so from the very beginning there was this sort of adversarial relationship between the jazz community and and Harry Innslinger and the Federal

Beeau of Narcotics. In a way, that's where the culture war over drug use in this country really really begins. So it's couched in this racism. From the very very beginning, you have, you know, this phenomenon of you know, what's

called the Great Harlem heroin Epidemic. You know, some people have a problem with the use of the word epidemic, but it's used to express the fact that you have, for the first time, you know, this community which is really really suffering from addiction, heroin addiction on a level

that's never really been experienced before in American society. So while you have that happening, you have these laws being put into effect so that, um, people who are addicted, there's only one thing that can happen to them, you know, them to be thrown into prison and buried, you know, for decades. At the same time, you have what is really the first popular movement to try to medicalized, to try to take heroin addiction and bring it back to

the purview of you know, people in the medical community. Durminding, I should say, Olso Martino, at the beginning of this thing, I wanted to actually, for the first time I ever dedicate an episode of Psychoactive to somebody, and that person is doctor Professor John P. Morgan. As professor at City College, he taught the mixed undergraduate graduate medical program there. But he was one of the America's great drug experts, the

one who coined the term opio phobia. He was probably the most frequent expert business on drug cases for the defense in America. But he was also an extraordinary ethno musicologist who had a library of thousands of songs and and also somebody who had like audiographic memory, where he actually had in his head the lyrics of of thousands of songs that had drug references in that. He passed away at a fairly young age, But I would like

to dedicate this episode to him. And I know you mentioned him in your book you acknowledge his role in helping inform you as you were writing about this. Yeah, he was an amazing man. I mean, I you know, I'm very grateful to you, by the way, for when I really really started delving into the whole um subject of drug culture. You know that ended up in you know, my two book books and the various documentary and television surians.

I've done it of opening up that whole network of those people who had a huge impact on me, and he was certainly one of them. I mean, he was a great lover of jazz, and he was incredibly knowledgeable about it, and at the same time that he was like so obviously incredibly knowledgeable about drugs from you know, from a scholarly and medical point of view, at the same time that he was aware of, you know, the

sort of cultural dimensions of it. And I think that's really appropriate that you would dedicate this, hyeh, this episode to him. Yeah, okay, well to John to Dr John P. Morrigan. So Martin, you know, just going back, so we get into the fifties and Miles Davis who becomes a chief figure it has his been John Coltrane, and John Coltrane, who really, of all the as great is the one

that has the most personal impact on me. But I noticed in writing you know, Coltrane goes through this terrible period of heroin and alcohol really messing him up in in a in a in a significant way, and he then finally goes through this experience that he describes as a spiritual awakening where he puts it all behind him, and that unleash is you know, one of the most extraordinarily creative periods in the history of all of jazz.

But I noticed in reading about this that you wrote about John Coltrane's transformation, and there was something personal in it. I don't know if you specifically said in the book, but I remember when you came to see me, you said, Ethan, you know, I'm somebody who's had my struggles with drugs and I had to, you know, put them behind me. But I'm also somebody who gets it about all the

positive ways that drugs play in life. So what to just explain a little more from a personal side, how the story of John coltraneans um spiritual awakening as he comes leaves his heroin addiction and alcohol adiction behind him. What it meant to you? Well, I mean I come to this subject as someone who pretty much crashed and burned on drugs and had to, you know, get clean

and sober at the age of thirty seven. And initially my whole interest in this subject became about trying to understand its impact on me and trying to sort it all out. And then I began to sort of think about, Okay, what was its impact on my generation? And then I began to think about, well, what was its impact on my country? And in my experience of recovery, of the

recovery culture. You know, I was kind of thinking about, you know what Bill Wilson had to say, you know, the founder of alcoholics Anonymous, and his uh correspondence with the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Young, in which they began to postulate about how what they call the spiritual awakening could transform the landscape of the addict and the alcoholic, and how that was, as they saw it, like the

most beneficial, the most advantageous. That would kind of like give the addict and the alcoholic the best shot at, you know, living a different life that was not consumed by the destructive impact of these things, um by addiction and all the kind of side effects of being addicted to whatever it was that you can be addicted to.

M So, you know, when I really began to um look at the transits of these different musicians through addiction, what really really leapt out at me was Coltrane's experience and him directly referring to what happened to him to him leaving Heroin behind as a spiritual awakening, Because what happened to Coltrane with it, he had tried numerous times to kick and he couldn't do it, But finally he reached the bottom, and he went to, you know, sequester

himself away, and he basically shut himself up in a room for a couple of weeks, and he told people, you know, only just bring me water. Um, you know, I'm going to stay in this room, and what's ever going to happen to me is going to happen to me.

And at some point during the experience, and when he was suffering from the agony, the physical agony of withdrawal from Heroin, of how he called out, he reached out to a higher power of his understanding and ask for help and asked for this terrible experience to be lifted

to be removed from him. And he he writes about it, and he basically says that he experienced the piece a kind of inner peace, and also at the same time, he asked his higher power to be able to use his gift, to use his art in a way that would spiritually uplift people. And that was his entire approach

to his art as he left Heroine behind. So that when you were listening two that wonderful track, that amazing his version of My Favorite Things in which he picks up the soprano saxophone in essence what you were hearing is that love, that expression of that love, of that awakening that he was experienced as a result of that.

And it's really amazing because, I mean, Cultrane's music is actually used in you know, the numerous churches, you know, the same way that the music of both and you know St. Matthew's Passion would would be used in a church. And it's for a reason. It's because that music is just completely about his relationship with his church in San

Francisco still in existence. So it's uh, you know, in fact, it's funny disc of jazz, um and drugs without discuss a jazz musician who in the nineteen fifties is described as quote unquote the most famous drug addict in America UM and who was simultaneously one of the perhaps the greatest jazz vocalist in American history and global history. And

that's Billie Holiday. I mean, somebody who liked Charlie Parker struggles with all sorts of drugs and although heroines, you know, as a UM, somebody for whom the drugs seemed to have UM I think probably thinks and speaks politically about the war on drugs. So you have a lot about Billie Holiday in your in your books, say something about her that stands out? Oh God, where did begin with Lady Day, someone whose life was shrouded in myth in

the very beginning? Well, how about how about let's just hear a ve clipped from her one of the most famous songs, Strange Fruit, so the cheese that's strange true, blot on leaves and let it. Strange Fruit was a song that Billy began performing at Cafe Society in the late dirties when she came down from Harlem to like really become just an absolute phenomenon um, you know, in the first like really important downtown inter racial jazz club.

And you know, I'm sure you know that it's a song about lynching a guy by the name of a Mire. Paul wrote the lyrics and her musical director there at Cafe Society gave it to her when she began performing it. And the thing about Billie Holiday that was so unique was here with someone who just instinctively understood how to take a composition and translate it, transform it, express it um as a deeply personal, deeply moving uh piece of art and have that impact on the also had an

impact Onstlinger. I think it's the first time he really becomes aware of Billie Holiday, because that, you know, is uh. It's one of the really maybe the one of the earliest, if not the first, really great protests song against racial injustice. Yes, yes, it was the first time that someone had used UM an art form, really a popular art form, to make a statement about lynching and racism in America. It was transformative, really, and yes it was a bold political statement. Her record

label at the time would not release it. She had to find another record label to release it. And and yes, that was what brought her on the radar screen of Harry Anslinger, you know, of the FBI, of the New York Police Department, and of course in her case, it would make her vulnerable to UM prosecution because of the fact of her relationship to drugs, specifically her heroin addiction.

So from the very beginning from on, she had to do walk this type brobe really between her public legend and you know, these forces that we're going to use that to try to bring her. You know, from very early on, she decided that one of the ways she was going to deal with this very difficult situation, this very dangerous situation where she was just going to talk about it, and she was really one of the first

people to do that. He she was busted three times, you know, and each time basically she just like you know, talked about it. And one of the things she talked about was what bullshit it was, you know, the fact that, um, she was being hounded by the police. She was aware of the fact that she was a public figure, She was aware of the fact that she had these problems

with addiction. She was aware of the fact that people were going to listen to what she said about it, and so that's what she did, and she talked about how she believed that it was more of a medical problem than a criminal justice problem, and that was anathema to what Harry Anslinger wanted to put across to him. It was all about, you know, these people were weak, they were depraved, they were evil, they needed to be

locked up. And anyone who expressed the point of view that was sympathetic to the idea that these people they needed to be cared for. They weren't even allowing them in hospitals. It was illegal to allow a drug addict in Harlem to be admitted to a hospital. Think about that until Billie Holiday in n died in a hospital on Harlem. But there are these moments. Billy Holliday had a really close friend, um. She was a dancer and a singer and an actress. Her name was Marie Bryant,

and she said something really interesting. She said, people like Billy Holiday and Lester Young, they were real and that reality, just how real they were, is what made them so vulnerable. You know, for people like that who were so just like so so vulnerable, it just made it very very

hard for them. You know. There's a wonderful image that Bono puts forth about Billie Holiday in his song Angel of Harlem, which I think also kind of gets to that when he sings Lady Day had Diamond Eyed she sees the truth behind the lies, you know, and I think that's what Marie Bryant was talking. Well, Mark, let

me ask you this, you know, because you do. I mean, you know, obviously one key part of the election with race, and we've been talking about, you know, the ways in which racism, uh, you know, it was one of the reasons why so many of these musicians, you know, found drugs as a way of kind of insulating that from that or defying it, or whatever it might be. I mean, the book's worth reading because you get so much more

deeply and nuanced about so much of this. But you know, the fact of the matter is it was also true of the white jazz musicians. I mean, if I think of the famous you know, white white jazz saxophonist, when you think about not just Stan Gets, but Jerry Mulligan perhaps the greatest of all. You know, baritone saxophonist Art Pepper,

you know the vocalist Chet Baker. You think about the singer Anita oh Day, you think about Zoots Sims and Alcohon and Red Rodney, even Drift, I'd think, because there's more of a theme around race there. But just say a little more about that. That that experience of the white jazz musicians and all of this, well you they were just as prone and just as vulnerable to it. You know, all of the same forces culturally and musically were at work on them. And they were you know,

the brothers and sisters of the black jazz musicians. I mean, they all lived in this world. They all had this experience together. Listen, addiction, it knows no race, it knows no socio economic level. I mean, it's just it's human. I mean, this is fundamentally a human experience. It's not racial, it's not musical, it's not white. It's just fundamentally human and um, it knows no bounds. Listen. And it wasn't just white jazz musicians. I mean the white community of

jazz lovers, the hitsters. You know, they were just as prone to you know, the use of the drugs and the possibility of addiction in as you know anyone who was black. So Martin, listen. I mean, I've loved our conversation. I hope for our listeners that for those you've already into jazz, you'll track down and listen to some of those songs that we play clips of and some of the other references. So Martin, thank you ever so much

for joining me and my listeners on Psychoactive. Thank you and all the all the best for you and all the work that you do. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments, and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com on or find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You can also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman. It's produced by Noam

Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio and me Ethan Nadelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to a brios f, Bianca Grimshaw and Robert BB. Next week I'll be talking with the founder of National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Her name's Lynn Paltrow and she's the leading advocate at the intersection of drug policy,

reform and reproductive rights. I once got a call from a drug testing representative on his way to a hospital, and he said, I'm going up to talk to this hospital and I want to convince them to use our drug test because it will help them treat pregnant women. I was like, no, it won't. It will be used to turn those women over to police or punitive civil child welfare folks and used against them. Subscribe to Cycoactive now see you don't miss it