Cabaret card suspensions pushed acclaimed black musicians toward avant-garde venues

Evidence

The Termini brothers were hip enough to let Billie Holiday (who had lost her cabaret card) perform unannounced and to book Thelonious Monk (whose cabaret card had been suspended) for several extended gigs beginning in July 1957. Larry Rivers, who claimed to have persuaded Joe Termini to engage Monk, produced evenings of poetry and jazz. The bar even took out an ad in LeRoi Jones’s “little magazine” Yūgen, advertising it as the home of Monk, jazz poetry, and “America’s Leading Painters, Sculptors, Composers, Actors, Poets, PEOPLE.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 84

Categorization

• XREF: Another material/institutional condition feeding the scene — municipal licensing policy redirecting talent into experimental spaces.