PAUL
VERNON CHESTER
Manouche Maestro
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Manouche Maestro
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Django @ Cafe Society NYC
The Cafe Society was a nightclub operated by Barney Josephson who sold his New Jersey shoe store to enter the nightclub business and try out a novel idea for Greenwich Village: Mixing Blacks and Whites both on the bandstand and within the audience.
One of the close friends of this radical son of immigrant parents from Latvia was, oddly enough, a snobbish, catty, distinctly un-radical lady named Clare Booth Luce, and it is she who came up with the nice ironic name for Josephson’s anti-nightclub: Café Society. She also helped him devise its motto: “The right place for the wrong people.” Or “The wrong place for the right people”? Take your pick. (Café Society became Café Society Downtown when Josephson opened a parallel spot on East 58th Street.) CLARE BOOTHE LUCE, the journalist, socialite and later congresswoman, is credited with coining the celebrated term. In 1938, Barney Josephson, a New Jersey shoe salesman and jazz aficionado, hijacked it to mock her vision of New York’s elitist nightclub scene. He named his own cabaret, in the basement of a century-old building on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, Cafe Society. And just in case anyone didn’t get the joke, he dubbed it “the wrong place for the Right people.” (Right was capitalized, in what was perceived as another jab at sanctimonious conservatives.) “I wanted a club where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out front, a club whose stated advertised policy would be just that,” he said. “There wasn’t, so far as I know, a place like that in New York, or in the whole country for that matter.”
The book Cafe Society tells the personal history of Barney Josephson, proprietor of the legendary interracial New York City night clubs Cafe Society Downtown and Cafe Society Uptown and their successor, The Cookery. Famously known as "the wrong place for the Right people," Cafe Society featured the cream of jazz and blues performers--among whom were Billie Holiday, Big Joe Turner, Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Big Sid Catlett, and Mary Lou Williams--as well as comedy stars Imogene Coca, Zero Mostel, and Jack Gilford, the boogie-woogie pianists, and legendary gospel and folk artists. A trailblazer in many ways, Josephson welcomed black and white artists alike to perform for mixed audiences in a venue whose walls were festooned with artistic and satiric murals lampooning what was then called "high society." In particular, he sought out and developed new performing talent, and he offered musicians and performers the rare security of continuous work for months and years. Spanning half a century from the 1930s to the 1980s, Josephson's narrative depicts both the business and the artistic sides of Cafe Society while exposing the tensions between the club's own progressive interracial openness and the more restrictive social and political climate in which it evolved. When his brother Leon was targeted by the House of Un-American Activities Committee, Barney was tarred by the same brush and forced to close Cafe Society. Now out of the limelight, Barney opened a hamburger restaurant, The Cookery, hiring unemployed dancers as waitresses. Mr. Josephson died in 1988. Twenty years later, his widow, Terry Trilling-Josephson, has cobbled together a posthumous memoir. Her husband’s tape-recorded recollections and capsule oral histories from other eyewitnesses recall a cultural phenomenon that helped promote Billie Holiday, Alberta Hunter, Lena Horne (Then Helena), Sarah Vaughan, Big Joe Turner, Art Tatum, Mary Lou Williams, Jack Gilford, Zero Mostel, Imogene Coca, and more.
Leonard Feather, Roberta Lee, Les Paul, Django Reinhardt, Lionel Hampton, Nat "King" Cole, Illinois Jacquet. "Ed Hall, made to order for the room, did a great job"... Cafe Society Uptown, opened in October of 1940, two years after the first club Cafe Society Downtown. It in December 1947. It was located on Manhattan's East Side at 128 East 58th Street. It was considered a pretentious, huge place (350 places, $3,5 to see and hear the Master).
REVOLUTIONARY Cafe Society Uptown, seen in 1943, left, was one of Barney Josephson’s clubs in New York; Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing at Cafe Society Downtown in 1940. “Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People,” by Barney Josephson with Terry Trilling-Josephson, is part of the Music in American Life series The authors’ collaboration can be as improvisational as jazz itself (“I found I had questions for Barney, but Barney wasn’t here to answer them,” Ms. Trilling-Josephson writes). Like fast riffs loosely strung together, or a documentarian’s unedited footage, the text is not always seamless and sometimes begs for context. But Mr. Josephson’s voice comes through, gentle, passionate, occasionally larger than life, as when he archly describes his decision to open a branch of Cafe Society on East 58th Street: “I was still heavily in debt when I made up my mind that I’m the right man in the wrong place. Barney Josephson is not for Greenwich Village... I’m not a Village character... I’m for the chic, smart crowd Uptown. They want a guy like me.” Mr. Josephson also memorably recounts a visit to the Greenwich Village cabaret from a high school teacher, Abel Meeropol, who with his wife would adopt the sons of the convicted spies Ethel and Julius Rosennberg. Mr. Meeropol (writing under the name Lewis Allan) came to deliver a new song to Mr. Josephson. The cafe owner couldn’t read music, but, he recalled, “I can sure read words, and I read lyrics on that sheet which brought tears to my eyes.”
“I think Barney and his story should be made into a movie,” Art D’Lugoff, the former owner of the Village Gate, is quoted as saying. “I think Cafe Society should be the story that should be told about our century.”
Josh White at Cafe Society Downtown
Mary Lou Williams was hired by the
astute Barney Josephson, owner of Cafe Society, the Greenwich Village night club
that featured outstanding jazz, blues and comedy unique for its day
catered to integrated audiences. It was through Josephson's assistance in 1945 that she got her own weekly radio broadcast on WNEW, Mary Lou Williams' Piano Workshop. Her program figured into Mary's composing one of the more interesting compositions (and reflecting Duke Ellington's movement toward creating extended works), The Zodiac Suite.
"Good
morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Downtown Café Society. We'd like
to present at this time for your listening entertainment the second edition of
our show, and we'd like to open the show with a band number, one that was
recorded and released not long ago on the Mercury label by yours truly with
strings, we hope you enjoy, without strings, equally as much, 'Just Friends'..."
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"A funny
thing happened with Django. He was staying at the Hudson Hotel in Manhattan, and
I would go up in the afternoon and we'd mess around together, or maybe I'd take
him round the city. At this time Les Paul was at the Paramount Theatre so Django
and I went down there to visit him in the afternoon. After that, Django invited
me to join him at this club where he was working, the Cafe Society, up town and
a real hoity-toity place. I didn't even have on a tie and he hadn't shaved, and
I didn't want to go in but he insisted - I had to be his guest for dinner. So we
go into this restaurant and the place was full of people in dinner clothes and
looking immaculate. They put us at a table way over in the corner - I guess to
get us out of the way. So we sat there and all of a sudden Django picked up his
knife and started banging on the table. People started looking around because by
now dishes were falling off the table, and waiters ran over to try to quieten
him down. They spoke French, so finally we found out the reason for the
commotion: he was insulted because all the other tables had a little glass vase
with a flower in it and our table didn't. He just tore up the joint because -
that was an insult! - Johnny Smith Guitarist
DREGNI'S CHRONOLOGY STATES
DJANGO PLAYED THE CAFE SOCIETY BETWEEN DECEMBER 16TH 1946 AND
JAN 11 1947 BUT THIS WELL EXCEEDS THE 2 MONTH VISA. The supporting
band was EDMOND HALL - CLARINETTIST 
Django's reported description was
a fat and calve man with a Chaplinesque moustache but also the fact that he
played with a plectrum on an acoustic guitar with the microphone amplification
not properly working . He also indicates that Django had no preparation for such
a show (nitery preem is used to say that Django appeared to be a sweet small
baby thrown in a night-club for the first time). So Django might have used for
his second day in Cafe Society Uptown (he started on Dec 16th, 1946) the Selmer
that Delaunay gave to Django (and also damaged during transit to the States) as
a gift from Henri Selmer himself. There is a photo with Django and Paul Whiteman
that was shot during the first day Django played there showing he had a Gibson
ES-300 guitar. The term 'gutbox' shows that it was funny for an American
to look at such a foreign acoustic guitar as they were by then accustomed to
clear sounding electric guitars. (gutbox was American slang for acoustic
guitar). The author clearly analyses Django performance as a virtuoso but
his music was not adapted for a night-club and also says that Django made no
presentation of what he did. In fact we know that Django was not an entertainer
who was able to introduce his music as well as say Duke was able to do "and now
Ladies and Gentlemen we will play for you a very special number" and to add "I
love you madly" when the final applause arrived. The author also indicates that
the audience was a noisy one more interested in drinks than in music. The
wrong place for the right people!
Django knew he couldn't play in
the States without a special authorisation from the Musicians Union and without a contract
(his one was with the William Morris Agency for the Duke Ellington tour and for
the Café Society Uptown) , he confirmed that in an interview saying he met Benny
Goodman at the 400 Club in NYC but added they couldn't play together because he
was not allowed to do it. 
The
song was “Strange Fruit,” a doleful protest of lynching's in the South. Mr.
Josephson stage-managed Billie Holiday’s performance of it so that “when
people walked out of Cafe Society, I wanted them to remember every word of the
song or at least to go out thinking about it.” Blood at the leaves and
blood at the root: It’s all part of the same song, or would have been in the
days when black and white shared time and space together at a place called Café
Society.
