“Black people had less to fear from a Mafiosa boss than a white police officer,” said English, a self-confessed jazz fan. Jazz first started bubbling in New Orleans, where Sicilian immigrants and black Americans faced the same predicament - they were shut out of wealthy white Anglo-Saxon Protestant society and harassed by corrupt white police officers.

Clubs lined Manhattan’s 52nd Street, which was once a hub for jazz. “The music says, ‘We are alive.’ I see jazz as a response to terror and violence.”Įnglish, who has written several books about the criminal underworld, as well as episodes for TV’s “NYPD Blue” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” said the unlikely connection between black musicians and Italian mobsters made sense in the context of an oppressive turn-of-the-century social order. “Jazz began at the end of a long sustained period of lynching after the Emancipation Proclamation,” English told The Post, speaking from his Manhattan home where he has lived for 32 years. “The music seems to me an attempt to create a new reality,” he added. “Legs” Diamond and Charles “Lucky” Luciano. 2, explains why jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra flourished within mob empires headed by the likes of Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, John T. English’s latest book, “ Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld,” which comes out on Aug. When jazz was born in the brothels of New Orleans in the early 20th century, its parents were musicians and mobsters.Īuthor T.J.

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