ABSTRACT
This book is about rights and music, mostly jazz music. For more than sixty years, from 1926 until 1990, live music played in bars and restaurants in New York City was restricted by local regulations called collectively “the cabaret laws.” Although we usually think of a cabaret as a place with a floor-show, the City extended the reach of its regulations even to restaurants with live music. The laws imposed a complex system of licensing combined with zoning restrictions on the neighborhoods where live music could be played; outside those neighborhoods where licensing was permitted, the laws allowed only background music, with a limit on the number and even the types of instruments that could be played. Despite minor amendments, the cabaret laws endured with astonishingly little change over that long period; they came to represent discrimination and degradation to the musicians who played in nightclubs. From time to time, musicians pressed for change in the laws; one of those times was in the 1980s.
