Cotton Club

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Coordinates: 40 ° 49 ′ 6.6 "  N , 73 ° 56 ′ 14.5"  W.

The Cotton Club was a nightclub in New York City that featured numerous well-known African-American jazz musicians and entertainers such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway during the Prohibition era of the 1920s and 1930s .

The club was opened in 1920 by boxing champion Jack Johnson as Club Delux on the corner of 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem . In 1923 it was taken over by the alcohol smuggler and gangster Owney Madden and renamed the Cotton Club . During the prohibition era, the club quickly developed into a well-known meeting place, also for the New York high society. The interior reproduced a racist stereotype of the life of "wild, primitive Negro slaves " in the rural American southern states . Although the musicians and dancers engaged in the club were practically exclusively African-American , non-white guests were denied entry to the club.

The performing musicians also had to fit into the desired image. Duke Ellington, for example, was expected to play “jungle music”, from which the bandleader developed the later famous jungle style , the trademark of his orchestra in the late 1920s. At Ellington's insistence, access regulations for non-whites have been relaxed over the years.

The Cotton Club played an important role in the awareness and development of numerous jazz bands of the time. In 1923, Fletcher Henderson's band performed there . After the Missourians , Duke Ellington's orchestra was the house band of the Cotton Club from 1927 to 1931 and became known throughout the United States through radio broadcasts from the club. From 1931 Cab Calloway 's band became the house band, followed in 1934 by Jimmie Lunceford's orchestra . Stars such as Louis Armstrong , Ethel Waters and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson also appeared in the Cotton Club. The singer Lena Horne , initially a member of the dance troupe, began her solo career in the club.

The Cotton Club was closed several times at short notice, first in 1925 for violating prohibition laws and in 1936 as a result of the Harlem uprisings of 1935 . The club reopened in 1937 elsewhere in Manhattan (corner of Broadway and 48th Street), but had to close its doors for good in 1940 for economic reasons. In 1978 a new club of the same name opened on 125th Street in Harlem.

In art

literature

  • James Haskins: The Cotton Club: A Pictorial and Social History of the most famous symbol of the Jazz Era , Random House 1977, Hippocrene Books, New York, NY 1994, ISBN 0-7818-0248-2 .

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