the days when jazz and sex were practically inseparable

pdf, with thanks to the original sharer

“Any time I got broke, in a sporting house I would go,” said Morton, and the best houses clamored for his services. He even worked for Emma Johnson’s Circus House, where naked dances and sex acts were performed, close up, for paying customers—a distinctly New Orleans brand of theatrical entertainment. While the erotic acts progressed, Morton played music to match, both setting the tempo and following it. He usually worked from behind a screen, but to get around this impediment, Morton often cut a hole at eye level with a pocket knife, so he could ogle the action while his fingers stroked the keys. The ambience inspired a red-hot music, which became still more brilliant and rhythmically free at the Frenchman’s, an after-hours saloon nearby, at the corner of Bienville and Villere. After working the brothels or catching cornetist Joe Oliver at the Big 25 (at Franklin and Iberville) or hoisting a few at Billy Phillips’s place (around the corner from Tom Anderson’s), the New Orleans professors headed for the Frenchman’s. They started filtering in at about 4 A.M., ready to blow off steam after a long night’s work. This was where they gambled, drank, took turns at the piano, and tried to cut each other with their newest and flashiest keyboard repertoire. More than at the brothels, where the piano men played for money, here they played for each other. Music lovers, insomniacs, and late-night women swarmed the place, a hothouse for a newly emerging sound that still had no particular name, except for “New Orleans music.” In the front room, a bar and nearby piano kept spirits high, while a table in the back room accommodated food, drink, and cards. Morton went so far as to call this “the place where jazz originated,” the birth of an art form attended by whores dripping diamonds and delivered by bone-tired musicians stoking up with a toot of cocaine or winding down with a pinch of heroin.