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Book Reviews : PAUL CHEVIGNY, Gigs: Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City. London and New York: Routledge, 1991

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorSteve Redhead
Date01 June 1993
Published date01 June 1993
DOI10.1177/096466399300200213
Subject MatterArticles
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252
PAUL CHEVIGNY, Gigs: Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City
.
London and New
York: Routledge, 1991.
It is rare - to say the least - for a law book to be adorned with a cover which boasts a
woodcut of a jazz great like Charlie Mingus. This one, by New York civil liberties lawyer
and Professor of Law at New York University, Paul Chevigny, is as riveting as any of
Mingus’ playing. In a series enticingly labelled ’After the Law’, about which sadly there is
no
other information from Routledge in this book, Chevigny narrates the story of the end
of the ’cabaret laws’ in New York City, a story, moreover, in which he played no small
part himself. Chevigny, along with other lawyers, worked as a volunteer on a case in the
late 1980s, supporting the musicians union, which attacked the local regulations (’the
cabaret laws’) that restricted the playing of live music in bars and restaurants in New York
City from 1926 until 1990. Much of the book relates how the laws imposed a complex
system of licensing combined with zoning restrictions on neighbourhoods where live
music could be played and how, despite periodic pressure group activity from the -
mainly jazz - musicians involved, the discriminatory system remained in place for most of
the twentieth century. Equally, the book tries to answer the pertinent question for the
politics of law: why did this case, which Chevigny supported, succeed and provoke the
court into declaring the regulations of New York City unconstitutional, leading to their
virtually complete overhaul?
I agree with the jacket ’blurb’ that ’Gigs is a must read’ for a number of reasons. I read
the book when beginning a funded research project on the changes in licensing laws in a
northwestern English city where the night-time economy has become a vital component
of cultural and economic life. Here, house music rather than jazz was the cultural form
which provided the terrain for ’law and order’ and regulatory debates, but many of the
issues raised in...

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