Martin Torgoff on Jazz, Race, The Beats & Drugs

An extraordinary number of the greatest jazz musicians were deeply involved in psychoactive drug use – to the extent that the history of jazz and the history of drugs during the middle third of the 20th century are inseparable. The King of Jazz, Louis Armstrong, never went a day without marijuana. The great “Lady Day,” Billie Holiday, became during the 1950s “the most famous drug addict in America.” Most of the great saxophonists – Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Art Pepper, Gerry Mulligan, Dexter Gordon and many more – used heroin as well as other drugs. Martin Torgoff, author of Bop Apocalypse, has probably thought about this subject more deeply than anyone else. Why did so many jazz musicians use heroin and other drugs? How did it impact the music they made and the lives they led? What role did racism and the nascent war on drugs play in all this? And what’s the connection with famous Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and the poet Allen Ginsberg?

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