Cafe Society

March 2, 2009
This inspirational, exciting, atmospheric read takes readers to New York's West Village in the late 1930s, and the white-owned establishment that championed jazz, discovered Billie Holiday and welcomed its mixed-race crowd in a time when such mingling was unheard of. Former New Jersey shoe salesman Josephson (1902-88), frustrated with frivolous American clubs and their racial discrimination, was inspired by European political cabarets to open Club Society in the West village in 1938. A jazz club in which most of the performers, and much of the audience, was black, Josephson's stories from the pioneering music spot are incredible, including Leonard Bernstein performing Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock solo on piano at five in the morning; the virtually unknown Billie Holiday performing, for the first time, Lewis Allen's Strange Fruit; and a well-known policy of kicking out anyone who "objected to sitting next to Negroes." Other Society notables include Lena Horne, Zero Mostel, Sarah Vaughn, and Hazel Scott, and the club's success led to a second location on Park Avenue (which quickly proved wrong predictions that the uptown crowd would never integrate).

February 1, 2009
The owner of two New York City nightclubs that boldly confronted prejudice recalls their glamorous, gritty heyday.

Shifting race relations have played a crucial role in the artistic evolution of jazz, and here Josephson (1902–88) tells that story from within the mural-festooned walls and smoke-filled air of Cafe Society Downtown and Cafe Society Uptown, the extraordinarily successful nightspots he operated from 1938 to 1947. Doggedly challenging entertainment-industry convention by integrating blacks and whites both in the audience and onstage, Josephson sought to recreate the"political cabarets" he'd seen in Europe, with his gracious, distinctively American flair. Vivid recollections taped before his death—edited, organized and supplemented with documentary material by his widow—offer a bird's-eye view of everything from the ubiquitous presence of the mob and the absence of undergarments beneath singers' gowns to up-close encounters with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Studded with enlightening quotes from such musicians as Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson and Lena Horne, comics including Jack Gilford and Imogene Coca, actors, painters and journalists, this complex tapestry of pivotal moments and colorful minutiae is a delightful, albeit occasionally overstuffed time capsule. Josephson, a self-made businessman whose eye for new talent put several careers on steep upward trajectories, ingenuously reminisces about growing up in suburbia and eventually recalibrating the social climate of his adopted milieu, one carefully produced show at a time.

An epic ode to personal integrity, creative vision and entrepreneurial tenacity, shedding timely light on the germination of the civil-rights movement.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 1, 2009
In 1938, months before the beginning of World War II, Josephson, a New Jersey shoe salesman who loved jazz, opened Caf'Society. Unlike atthe famed Cotton Club, the clientele and performersmany just getting started in their careerswere a mixture of races and classes. Among the entertainers who appeared at the Caf' Society, at both the uptown and downtown venues, were Billie Holiday (introducing the song Strange Fruit), bluesman Big Joe Turner, Lena Horne, Hazel Scott, Paul Robeson, and Sarah Vaughan. Comedians Zero Mostel, Imogene Coca, and Jack Gilford also performed at the clubs. Josephsons wife draws on taped interviews with her husband before his death, interspersed with interviews with some of the artists who performed at the cabaret. Josephson was a great raconteur with a love for music, artistic people, and progressive politics. Photographs of theperformers, as well as photos of the colorful and cartoonish murals that graced the walls, add to the evocation of a freewheeling ambience in a Depression-era cabaret thatpromoted itself as the Wrong place for the Right people.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)