Oasis of Swing: The Onyx Club, Jazz, and White Masculinity in the Early 1930s

By Patrick Burke

On January 24, 1933, a group of New York's most sought-after studio musicians gathered for a routine recording session. During much of the session, these musicians, all white men, accompanied singer Greta Keller on popular numbers including "I'll Never Have to Dream Again" and "I'm Playing with Fire," but they also took time to record a much less conventional performance not intended for public release. Trumpeter Manny Klein recalled years later that the band, led by Victor Young and including such rising jazz luminaries as Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and violinist Joe Venuti, was "trying to cut this corny waltz" but kept making mistakes. "Finally, Victor said, 'let's play it through. Play the worst you can. And let's get all those clinkers out of our systems.'" a 78-rpm record of this experiment, entitled "Onyx Club Revue," was pressed in limited quantity and distributed to the members of the band; a copy also went to Joe Helbock, a white bootlegger and jazz buff who owned the Onyx Club, a 52nd street speakeasy that served as a meeting place for these and other musicians. Even a cursory hearing of "Onyx Club Revue," reissued on CD in 2002, reveals that this is a willfully irreverent recording. It features intentionally out-of-tune playing and nasal singing, flippant references to drinking, passages in which the musicians' barely suppressed laughter renders them almost unable to perform, a jarring and seemingly irrelevant quotation from "St. Louis Blues," and even occasional belches into the microphone by guitarist Carl Kress. A private joke rather than a public performance, "Onyx Club Revue" allows us a rare glimpse of soon-to-be-famous musicians in an unguarded and relaxed moment, clowning for their own amusement.