WHEN HEROIN HIT JAZZ: Fascination with a deadly drug ravaged a generation of great American musicians.

In postwar America, an epidemic of heroin addiction swept the world of jazz. Greats who developed a habit included John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker. Nowadays, jazz has an ambivalent reputation as “America’s classical music.” Americans under 40 are likely to consider it PBS stuff that not even their parents listened to—their grandparents, maybe. In the early postwar years, jazz had a different reputation. The music defined the counterculture, an identity powerfully reinforced by its association with heroin.

Drugs wrecked many jazzmen’s lives. Contrasting with the current addiction crisis, fatal overdoses were rarer, as the product was weaker. (In every year since 2009, more Americans have died from drug overdoses than car crashes.) But the older epidemic was catastrophic, too, when measured in terms of stifled promise.

When heroin hit, jazz’s day was already beginning to fade. The emergence of rock and roll and Motown would soon devastate jazz musicians’ ability to earn a living. After the 1960s, there would be no more superstars on the level of Coltrane and Miles. The music ceased to develop as rapidly and successfully as it had in previous decades, much of the action shifted toward revivals of older forms, and the audience contracted. The musicians didn’t appreciate how little time they had left, and they failed to make the most of it, partly because so many couldn’t shake their addiction to drugs.

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Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a different place from the rural communities devastated by opioids in the twenty-first century. In the current crisis, widespread drug addiction is seen as an effect of decline. In Harlem back then, widespread drug addiction was seen more as a cause of decline. Numerous observers, such as novelist Claude Brown, noted the startling abruptness with which heroin overtook Harlem and jazz in the postwar period. At mid-century, Harlem was teetering, though the cultural capital that the community had built up during its fabled renaissance in the 1920s had not been wholly exhausted and was being replenished, at least somewhat, by the ongoing Great Migration. Some jazz legends were Harlem natives, such as Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell, and Jackie McLean. Those born elsewhere got there as quickly as they could. “You ain’t nothing till you come to New York,” said Coleman Hawkins, a Missourian. New York was where ambitious musicians felt they needed to be. Many also felt they needed to use.

The late 1940s and 1950s were the peak era of heroin consumption for jazz musicians. In The Making of Jazz (1978), historian James Lincoln Collier claims that as many as three-quarters of all musicians used heroin during this period. As for the rate of bona fide addiction, researcher Charles Winick, in a study appearing in the journal Social Problems in 1959, found that, of about 360 jazz musicians he was able to interview properly, 16 percent were “regular users” of heroin. Projecting that rate to New York as a whole meant 700 to 800 working jazz-musician addicts based in the city in 1955. Four out of the six musicians on Kind of Blue (1959), the best-selling jazz album of all time, were heroin addicts at some point.

In the 1970s, numerous prominent rockers became heroin addicts. It takes a special kind of hubris to think that you’ll be able to handle the effects of a drug that Miles Davis (who eventually kicked, but would have further bouts with hard drugs later in his career), Charlie Parker, and Chet Baker couldn’t.