Derek Cook’s Reviews > Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld > Status Update

[Mary Lou’s Mass] was part of Williams’s belief that jazz needed to be elevated out of the basement clubs run by mobsters, where alcohol, drugs, and sexual transactions were part of the draw, and performed in concert halls, conservatories, and cathedrals. Jazz was an art form, and it needed to start being treated like one.

Prohibition created a framework for the music that would otherwise not have existed…There was something about the Roaring Twenties itself- the clandestine social interactions, the posing of racial boundaries, the hoodlums, the musicians- that turned jazz from a subculture into a telling representation of the national psyche.

With more than one hundred light bulbs in the ceiling, plus an electric lighted sign outside, Anderson’s was a monument to Thomas Edison and a promise of things to come: vice and politics arm in arm under the brilliant, man-made radiance of American ingenuity.