After troubled relationships with two successive managers, Louis Armstrong convinced Joseph Glaser, a Jewish nightclub owner, to do the job. Their partnership, according to Larry Tye, was a happy one that made both men rich. Something similar can be said of Duke Ellington and his own Jewish manager, Irving Mills. Tye goes on to consider Jews’ role in jazz:
It was no surprise that Mills, Glaser, and so many other managers of Black jazzmen were not just white but also Jewish. Jews always played a big role in jazz, as performers like Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, club owners like Frank Schiffman at the Apollo and Max Gordon at the Village Vanguard, gangster benefactors like Dutch Schultz and Meyer Lansky, along with a legion of producers, bookers, and critics. Jews, like Blacks, had limited opportunities in white-shoe fields like advertising, publishing, and broadcasting. Such barriers are what made the equally rebellious field of comic books so attractive to Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and Batman inventors Bob Kane and Bill Finger, all Jewish and all aware they were getting in on the ground floor of a rapidly growing and super-profitable field that white American businessmen foolishly wanted no part of.
More about: American Jewish History, Black-Jewish relations, Jazz, Popular music
