Frank Newton & Café Society
The wrong place for the right people...
“Good morning, Ladies & Gentlemen, and welcome to Downtown Café Society. We’d like to present at this time for your listening entertainment the 2nd Edition of our Show, and we’d like to open the Show with a Band number, one that was recorded & released not long ago on the Mercury Label by yours truly with strings, we hope you enjoy, without strings, equally as much, ‘Just Friends‘…”
-The Charlie Parker Quintet played a 4-week Engagement at Café Society Downtown
During the late summer and fall of 1982, when I could get a weekend pass, I’d take the bus from Highland Falls down to New York City. At this point in my musical journey, I was still a bigger blues fan than jazz fan, although my transition to jazz, which began at “Ground Zero” a couple years earlier, was well on the way.
At that time, the great blues singer Alberta Hunter had a longstanding gig at the Cookery,
a Greenwich Village nightclub owned by Barney Josephson, who in the late 1930s and 1940s had also owned two pioneering jazz clubs in New York City called Café Society and Café Society Downtown.
She performed with just a piano and bass player every Wednesday to Saturday night. If there was nothing else going on, I’d sit in at the Cookery and listen to her sing the blues. She was something special. One of the songs I remember her singing was Downhearted Blues, which she had written 60 years earlier and was Bessie Smith’s first big hit in 1923.
As it turns out, a young trumpet player from Emory, Virginia, Frank Newton, played on Bessie Smith’s last recording session. Here is Gimme A Pigfoot from that New York City session on the Okeh label, and one of her last big hits in 1933.
Record producer John Hammond recorded the session and selected Newton for Bessie Smith’s band. Incidentally, Benny Goodman plays clarinet on the song - you can kinda hear him in there….
About five years later, in December of 1938, when New Jersey shoe salesman Barney Josephson decided to open a new club in Greenwich Village, the first of his two Café Society locations, he selected John Hammond as his musical director and asked him to hire musicians for the house band. Hammond tapped trumpeter Frank Newton and his band became Frank Newton and his Café Society Orchestra. Although Newton first went into the recording studio with Cecil Scott’s Bright Boys in 1929 for the Victor label and recorded with other strong bands after that, this gig at the Café Society really solidified his career as a band leader.
It’s difficult to highlight just one of Newton’s earlier recordings, but I like this one from a 1937 Vocalion session featuring Maxine Sullivan with members of the Claude Thornhill band:
A Political Cabaret
Barney Josephson had an affinity for jazz music that he acquired from visiting the political cabarets of underground Berlin and Prague. Located in the West Village, Café Society welcomed diversity of all kinds and naturally took on a liberal, left-leaning clientele. It would become a jazz club with a political edge.
This is from the post Off The Grid, a collaboration between the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and New York University students:
“The inspiration for the radically progressive club Barney hoped to establish came from the political European cabarets. He wanted to reflect bohemian traditions, unconventional social habits, and a free spirit. Barney also pictured his cabaret as a place for political exchange and Communist meetings. He maintained a politically leftist house policy in his club, as well as a commitment to challenging not only racism but sexism.”
In addition, and perhaps more importantly than political motivation, he was looking for a place where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out front. From the start, he set out to break the norm of New York City’s segregated nightclub scene, and the Café Society was the first racially integrated nightclub in New York City.
As a jazz fan, he had visited the Cotton Club in Harlem. However, he had this to say about the experience:
“One thing that bugged me about the Cotton Club was that blacks were limited to the back one-third of the club, behind columns and partitions. It infuriated me that even in their own ghetto they had to take this. Of course, in any club below Harlem, which had black entertainment, such as the Kit Kat Club, a black couldn't even get in.”
The club quickly became a gathering point for many of New York City’s intellectuals and progressives, and was known as “the wrong place for the right people.” With the significant influence of his romantic partner and later wife, Ethel Klein, Newton’s passion for the Communist Party had intensified, and the trumpeter led several political discussions at the club when he wasn’t performing onstage.
This summer I was walking around in the West Village and found myself at the corner of Grove Street and West 4th Street. I looked down toward Sheridan Square (it’s actually a triangle) toward the old home of the Café Society.
Now, ironically, the building is home to a couple up-scale beau monde boutiques, the kind the Cafe Society’s owner, Barney Josephson, and Frank Newton would have loathed.
Also in 1939, Newton recorded Daybreak Blues for a new and up-and-coming New York City label Blue Note, started by Alfred Lion and Francis Wolf.
For a label that would go on to become legendary, Newton holds the distinction of Blue Note’s first recorded horn player, as the earliest Blue Note 78s recordings featured piano players Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis. As you can hear on his early Blue Note recordings, Newton remained true to his blues and swing roots.
Frankie Newton’s Rejection of Bebop
Frank Newton did not follow the trend of bebop players who started showing up in New York City in the early 1940s. In fact, he maintained that bebop players weren’t as “advanced” as they thought they were.
In 2019, Ethan Iverson, founding member of Minneapolis jazz trio The Bad Plus, for his Do The M@th website interviewed Mark Stryker, author of JAZZ From Detroit. Stryker tells an interesting story about Frank Newton:
Mark Stryker: I had this long, odd relationship with Frankie Newton, because when I was a sophomore in high school, I had an honors English class in which we did individual projects. I was already interested in writing about jazz. The teacher hooked us up with mentors in the community. One thing I did was work with Michael Bourne, the jazz radio host who’s been on WBGO in Newark for 35 years. But in the ‘70s, Michael was on the air at WFIU in Bloomington, and he wrote for Downbeat. My teacher also happened to know Frankie Newton’s widow in suburban Boston, so I started this correspondence with Ethel Newton about her husband.
Ethan Iverson: How old were you?
MS: I was 15. I knew Frankie Newton’s name, because my father had the record of “Fine and Mellow” and the label says, “Trumpet obligato by Frankie Newton.”
I’m certain I was the only 15-year-old on the planet in 1979 who knew who Frankie Newton was. A unique, swing era player. He came out of Louis Armstrong but had a dark, highly personalized sound and a lyrical conception of melody streaked with melancholy. We talk a lot in this music about being an individual or a school of one. Frankie Newton was a school of one.
One thing I asked Ethel Newton about was what her husband thought of the bebop “advances” — that was a word I picked up reading liner notes. Her response was restrained. She said that Frankie didn’t think the bebop players were as advanced as they thought they were. That perplexed me, and while I could not have articulated it at the time, what Ethel was telling me was that history is more complicated than the reductive way it’s often transmitted in liner notes, magazines and the like. Years later in 1984, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I took a graduate seminar in jazz history with Larry Gushee, a seminal scholar of early jazz. I wrote a paper with the grandiose title: “Frankie Newton and the Rejection of Bebop.” Newton was socially and politically progressive. He traveled in leftwing political circles, his wife was white, and he was the musical director for Billie Holiday at the Café Society, where she first sang “Strange Fruit.” I reconnected with Ethel Newton by phone. She told me that Frankie was the person who introduced Billie Holiday to “Strange Fruit” by the poet/songwriter Lewis Allen — the pen name of Abel Meeropol — and that her husband had strongly encouraged Billie to sing it. Newton is never mentioned in the history in this context, but I’m confident he had an important role as a catalyst.
EI: Makes sense.
MS: I had also gotten curious about why Newton had taken such a cool stance toward bebop given that he was a social progressive and there were musically progressive ideas in his playing. My theory was that he didn’t need bebop musically, politically or culturally. His music had already attained such a high degree of individual style, and he had spent almost his entire career in small groups, so he had creative freedom. And he was already so aware in terms of politics, race, economics, and culture that he didn’t need bebop on the social front either. He was already more sophisticated than the beboppers who were now thinking of themselves as artists and connecting to politics as a kind of cultural stance. That’s what Ethel Newton was getting at. The idea of bebop “advancement” was a chimera in the context of a man and musician already as liberated as her husband.
Here’s the legendary 1939 Commodore recording of Strange Fruit:
Café Society’s leftist reputation and influence ultimately led to its demise. Josephson’s brother Leon was investigated for Communist ties and soon Barney was feeling the heat from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and his House Un-American Activities Committee. Shortly after the FBI started investigating Barney, bad press followed and both Café Society locations were closed by 1950.
Here’s one more for the road. Recorded on Victor record’s subsidiary Bluebird label in 1939, with the great James P. Johnson on piano, The Blues My Baby Gave To Me, which might be my favorite Frank Newton tune:
Next week, on that Big River Called Jazz, we’ll stay in New York City to explore further Café Society’s legacy and one of its clientele, artist David Stone Martin.
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Until then, keep on walking….
Good one