New Book Illuminates Playboy’s Impact on Jazz History
Posted
12/10/2015
Known by many for its pictorals—and respected by some for its
historically significant interviews—Playboy played a significant role in
the development of jazz during the latter half of the 20th century.
In the new book Playboy Swings, author Patty Farmer examines how
the magazine and its namesake clubs and jazz festival promoted
musicians. She makes a convincing case for the company’s artistic
contributions and offers numerous interesting anecdotes. And despite an
audacious subtitle (“How Hugh Hefner and Playboy Changed the Face of
Music”), Farmer usually avoids hyperbole, but leaves a few crucial
questions unanswered.
As Newport Jazz Festival founder George Wein writes in his introduction
to the book, Playboy’s founder, Hugh Hefner, has always been a jazz fan.
When he started the magazine in Chicago during the early 1950s,
coverage of the music was a major part of his mission. The debut issue,
which arrived on newsstands in December 1953, included an article on
Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey.
Even if more people remember, say, the likes of Marilyn Monroe on the
cover, Farmer reaffirms that Playboy published numerous significant,
sometimes controversial, jazz features and criticism in its early years.
These important pieces include Bob Perlongo’s “West Coast Jazz Is
Nowhere” from 1955, which featured rare quotes from saxophonist Wardell
Gray. In 1962 Alex Haley conducted a provocative interview with Miles
Davis shortly before the author’s own famous collaboration with Malcolm
X. Still, Farmer sometimes wildly overstates her case, such as when she
writes that Playboy’s latter-’50s jazz poll “would become more
influential than those of either Metronome or DownBeat.”
Playboy would go on to present jazz in different media, including a
couple short-lived, yet influential, TV programs and its festival, which
continues to this day at California’s Hollywood Bowl.
Farmer’s liveliest chapters describe the rise of the Playboy Clubs, and
an array of old-school musicians and comedians revel in their memories
of the glamorous rooms.
Playboy Swings also tells how Hefner remained insistent on
combating segregation while opening clubs that carried his magazine’s
name. These battles became especially fierce when the brand expanded
into Southern cities, including New Orleans.
While Farmer charts Playboy’s progressive strides toward racial
integration and equality, she still passes along stereotypes regarding
gender and the jazz audience. She writes that in the 1950s, “Something
about tenor saxophonists with beards and berets spinning endless
variations on a few chord changes appealed less to women than men.” How
Farmer comes to this conclusion is not stated, although this distorted
generality seems to have persisted over the decades. And many female
jazz fans—from back then to today—would have a response that should be
heard.
Several women who worked as waitresses (aka “Bunnies”) in the clubs do
get the chance to tell their stories, but they don’t discuss the music
played within the venues. Much of their conversations are about the
night-to-night work in the clubs and how the organization treated them
with more kindness than some of the celebrity guests. With no
counterarguments about the company’s benevolence, the reader is left
taking them all at their word.
Strangely, the book does not mention the former Bunny who would go on to
have the most musically successful post-Playboy career out of all of
them: Debbie Harry.
But Farmer does go into detail about the interesting singer/actress
Lainie Kazan, who showed enough strength within the organization to
create Lainie’s Room, her own venue within the Los Angeles Playboy Club
during the 1970s. Kazan’s musical taste matched her self-confidence: She
booked the likes of Sarah Vaughan and BIll Evans, and her own story
reflects her discernment and assurance.
(Note: To read a DownBeat review of the 2015 Playboy Jazz Festival, click http://www.downbeat.com/default.asp?sect=news&subsect=news_detail&nid=2752" rel="nofollow - here .) —Aaron Cohen from www.downbeat.com
|