Having initially escaped regulation, musicians and performers were added to those employees covered under the Cabaret Employee’s Identification Card system of regulation in 1943. Upon their inclusion in the system, jazz musicians became its “most vulnerable victims” (Cohen, The Police Card ix). Musicians were required to have their cards on file with the nightclub owners during the time they were employed at a cabaret club, and the owners had to “enter the card number into a book that [was] kept for police inspection” (Hoefer 7; see also Cohen, The Police Card xiv). It became unlawful for a club to hire a person who did not have a so-called “police card,” and cards were denied to anyone with a criminal record, regardless of how petty or distant the crime (Nicholson 167).
Not only was the cabaret card system degrading to the musicians, it was also conducted in an atmosphere of “petty graft, corruption and personal influence” (167). Musicians applying for a card were often sent next door to a photo studio to pay for an identification photo—even if they had brought their own picture. Some musicians who were denied cards at first, usually because of past drug offences, found they could hire a lawyer and eventually obtain a card (Chevigny 61). However, many had neither the money nor adequate knowledge of the system to fight the problem. Others, such as Billie Holiday,7 were rumoured to have had their appeals continually denied because of their political commitment to desegregation (Gomez 197 fn 7). The irony of this system was that artists denied a cabaret card could still perform in theatres, Central Park and, as Holiday later demonstrated, the nation’s foremost stage, Carnegie Hall (Nicholson 167).
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It has thus been argued that the addition of musicians to the list of employees requiring cabaret cards was in fact a “racist impulse to control the supposedly degrading abandon of black music” (59) and that, through the cards, the NYPD was attempting to “stomp out the ‘threat’ of the wild, rhythmic sounds of jazz, and to curtail the intermixing of blacks and whites in Harlem jazz clubs” (Miller).
The above claim is supported by the fact that, at the same time musicians were required to obtain a “police card,” cooks and dishwashers were deemed to no longer require regulation (Cohen, The Police Card 19; see also Hoefer 6). The rationale for the removal of the latter was that kitchen staff “did not come into direct contact with the public” (Hoefer 6, emphasis in original). Thus, it appears the cabaret laws looked less to crime control and more to the regulation of intimacy and the prevention of “any close contact between the audience and the seductive art [of jazz]” (Chevigny 60). This view was supported by a Press Release offered by the Citizens Union on 12 December 1960: “Intimacy is encouraged by the crowding, the drinking, the music and the dim lights. In such surroundings, a shady character can make hay while the sun is not shining. Because of these special circumstances, it is fair to put cabarets and dance halls in a class by themselves for regulatory purposes” (Citizens Union 2-3; see also Chevigny 65).
http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/1084/1733
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #164: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv, 10.6., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba