Sittin' In: Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s

Introduction

In my work as a music executive, historian, collector, and dealer I’ve had my fair share of crazy adventures, so sorting through the contents of a jazz collector’s safe-deposit boxes in a closet-size room in a bank didn’t strike me as particularly unusual. In the four hours I was there, I discovered many treasures that I coveted and eventually bought: concert tickets and handbills, autographs, contracts, letters, and other documents. But most interesting were the souvenir photographs from jazz clubs of the 1940s and 1950s. Each was in its own custom folder; the graphics were fantastic and so evocative of that classic era of jazz.

As I went through the boxes, I kept finding more photos—twenty-five, fifty, one hundred, and, eventually, more than two hundred—all mixed in with the rest of the collection. Some were well photographed, some were amateurish. But each had something to offer. Even before I finished, the thought struck me that the photographs would make a great book. If I hadn’t seen pictures like these, I doubted many others had.

I bought all of them. Though the images were primarily of African Americans, some pictured white fans, and some showed mixed groups or white and Black people seated next to each other. There were couples on double dates, mothers and fathers with grown children, enlisted men and women in uniform, and even a picture of the Harriet Tubman Social Club. In a few, famous musicians—Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Art Blakey, Oscar Peterson, and Louis Armstrong—posed with audience members. There was plenty of alcohol, which wasn’t surprising.

These quick snapshots were taken by each club’s in-house photographer, developed on-site, and ready to be taken home at the end of an evening for a dollar, a cheap souvenir of a night out. Collectively, though, they are something altogether different, something important today—a visual record of a rarely seen and poorly documented world. An accidental history.

These pictures turn the camera around. We’ve seen photographs of these clubs before, of the performers onstage, the marquees, the lines outside. But rarely, if ever, have we seen the audiences, the fans, as we do here. And they are a critical part of what jazz pianist, composer, and educator Jason Moran calls the ecosystem of jazz. Sonny Rollins told me that in small clubs like these, the audiences sort of played with you. They’re like part of the band.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive history of jazz, this isn’t it. The focus here is on something that hasn’t been properly explored: American jazz clubs of the 1940s and 1950s—what some call the golden age—as seen through the lens of these audience photographs and related memorabilia. Moran says, Seeing these images is powerful because we never document the jazz audience. The Library of Congress, for example, is home to more than 1,600 images taken by legendary jazz photographer William Gottlieb, only a tiny fraction of which picture audience members.

Almost all the souvenir photographs in this book date from the 1940s and 1950s. It doesn’t seem many clubs had in-house photographers before 1940, and by the end of the 1950s, most of these clubs were out of business. As New York City was already well established as the jazz center of the world, the majority of the images here are from the city’s clubs. But there were hundreds of other clubs in cities across America, and we are fortunate to have a representative sampling from many of them.

These photographs were made at a time when discrimination and segregation were the norm in the United States, and some of them document how jazz was really where the racial barriers were broken down heavily, according to Rollins.

I am incredibly fortunate that Quincy Jones and Sonny Rollins, who played these clubs, agreed to speak with me about the culture, the fans, and so much more. I’m grateful to Jason Moran, who looked at these photographs through the eyes of a contemporary jazz musician and historian and shared his insights. Dan Morgenstern, a jazz historian without peer, shared his experiences as a patron of some of these clubs beginning in the late 1940s. And writer and cultural critic Robin Givhan graciously shared her insights on the photographs themselves. This book would have been a much lesser work without them.

I’ve included whatever information I could find about the clubs, musicians, photographers, and mostly anonymous fans. But in some cases, we have only the photos. As I study them, they continue to reveal layers of information. It is my sincere hope they do the same for you.

—JEFF GOLD

William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress

New York City wasn’t always the jazz capital of the world. Jazz was born in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century, predominantly in the city’s red-light district, Storyville, where bar owners and brothel keepers hired ragtime and blues musicians and members of the city’s dance and marching bands to entertain customers. Legendary musicians like cornetist Buddy Bolden, who pioneered a looser, more improvised version of ragtime and added blues, and pianist Jelly Roll Morton, writer of Jelly Roll Blues, the first published jazz composition, helped shape the emerging sounds into what we today recognize as jazz.

But the development of jazz was driven both by the music and, just as often, by unrelated external circumstances. The first was in 1917, when the United States entered World War I. Concerned that troops were being distracted by the abundant sin on offer in Storyville, Secretary of War Newton Baker instituted orders prohibiting prostitution within five miles of military sites. The army and navy demanded that New Orleans close down Storyville, and the city complied.

When Storyville closed, many out-of-work musicians joined other job seekers headed north, as part of the beginnings of the Great Migration. The war had created jobs in America’s industrial centers, and hundreds of thousands of African Americans left their homes in the South in search of better employment and a less racially oppressive environment.

Chicago, the railroad center of the country, was a logical destination for many New Orleans musicians. The city’s wartime economy was humming, and its clubs had abundant jobs for players. In the 1920s, Chicago became America’s second major jazz hub.

But things were happening in New York City too. In 1915, the Original Creole Band, featuring cornetist Freddie Keppard, performed at the Winter Garden, alongside comedians, jugglers, and various other performers. In 1917, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, a New Orleans via Chicago group, played a wildly successful engagement at Reisenweber’s Café on Columbus Circle and was recorded by the Victor label, resulting in the release that year of Livery Stable Blues, the first jazz record ever and an almost instant hit, eventually selling more than one million copies.

In 1920, another external force began to impact jazz in a major way: Prohibition. Passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, establishing the prohibition of intoxicating liquors, resulted in the closure of tens of thousands of bars across the country. But in their place, thousands of speakeasies selling bootleg liquor opened, and many of them offered live music—often jazz. These clubs were also often owned or controlled by mobsters. At the biggest clubs, competition became stiff for the top musicians, and the careers of many artists, including Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, and Fats Waller, received a major boost as a result.

While some clubs were segregated, a culture of Black and tan clubs soon emerged, where Black and white people mixed—an extremely unusual phenomenon at a time when segregation was common and often the law of the land.

During the early years of Prohibition, New York City played along, but that all changed in 1926, when Jimmy Walker was elected mayor. Walker was strongly opposed to the alcohol ban. Under his rule, the speakeasy scene flourished; reportedly there were more than five thousand of them in the city. The situation was similar in Chicago, with thousands of illegal speakeasies and a flourishing jazz scene, but again, external circumstances were about to change everything.

In 1929, the stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression put pressure on clubs everywhere. That same year, Chicago’s violent Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre focused unwanted attention on mobster Al Capone and his illegal empire. In 1931, the government was finally able to send Capone to prison—for income tax evasion. With Chicago’s biggest bootlegger in jail, the music business, media, and broadcasting increasingly centralized in New York, and a growing club and ballroom scene in the city caused many Chicago musicians to leave for the abundant opportunities in the Big Apple, soon to become the next hub of jazz.

The first original jazz style to develop in New York was Harlem stride, a highly rhythmic, almost orchestral piano style. Stride originated during the 1920s and was pioneered by James P. Johnson and Willie the Lion Smith, but its most famous exponent was New Yorker Fats Waller.

Another critical moment for jazz in New York came in 1923, when Duke Ellington moved from Washington, D.C., to Harlem. Inspired by the city’s new piano sounds, Ellington chose New York over Chicago for the next stage of his career, and soon other important musicians followed. In 1924, Louis Armstrong came to the city to join Fletcher Henderson’s band, and though that move was short-lived, in 1929 he relocated to New York for good. In 1928, singer and bandleader Ben Pollack brought his jazz orchestra to New York; his Chicago-born clarinetist Benny Goodman soon left the band to become a sought-after musician for Broadway shows, recording sessions, and radio broadcasts.

New York City’s jazz venues were centered on three areas: Harlem, Fifty-Second Street and midtown, and Greenwich Village.

Dizzy Gillespie on Fifty-Second Street, circa 1946–1948.

William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress

Harlem

A Night-Club Map of Harlem, E. Simms Campbell, 1932.

Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division

During the 1920s and 1930s, most of the musicians who moved to New York settled in Harlem, the city’s predominant African American neighborhood. Like Storyville and Chicago’s South Side, it was a hotbed of live music, filled with clubs, ballrooms, theaters, and, during Prohibition, more than five hundred speakeasies, many located along Seventh Avenue in the 130s and Lenox Avenue in the 140s.

During the Jazz Age, many rich white midtown and downtown denizens headed uptown to the dance halls and nightclubs of Harlem, seeking exotic entertainment. Club owners were happy to oblige, though what they presented was often a highly romanticized and racist view of Black culture. But amid the dancing girls, floor shows, and comedians was some extraordinary music.

Harlem’s three dominant nightclubs at the time were the Cotton Club, Smalls’ Paradise, and Connie’s Inn. The block-long Savoy Ballroom was the area’s main dance hall. The Cotton Club was segregated, featuring exclusively African American entertainers but admitting only white patrons, while the other clubs featured mostly African American performers and admitted both Black and white people. Smaller clubs could be found all over Harlem, with at least twenty on a stretch of 133rd Street, which Billie Holiday called the real swing street.¹

After the bigger clubs closed at two A.M., venues like the Lenox Club and the Rhythm Club hosted all-night jam sessions where bandleaders like Fletcher Henderson and Chick Webb and musicians like saxophonist Johnny Hodges went to unwind and play for themselves.

By the end of the 1920s, coast-to-coast radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club and other Harlem nightspots brought the music of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and others into homes across America, spreading their fame and boosting their record sales. The stock market crash and the long depression that followed affected business at the clubs, but radio—it’s estimated that ten million households had radio sets by that time—played an outsize role in promoting jazz, bringing free entertainment to those who couldn’t afford to go out. The newly emerging talkies—films with synchronized sound—brought jazz to yet another audience, with Ellington and Armstrong both starring in short films in 1932.

The music had been evolving too. Swing—an exciting, danceable music with clear melodies, a strong beat, and soloists often playing call-and-response riffs—began taking hold in the Harlem big bands of Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, and Cab Calloway. During the 1920s and 1930s, touring groups known as territory bands brought jazz and swing to smaller cities across the United States.

Though Black and white people may have been able to enjoy the music together in some New York City clubs, things were different elsewhere. In 1934, the year after a triumphant European tour, Ellington and his band hit the road for a twelve-week tour of the Jim Crow South. Wishing to avoid the indignities of segregation, the group traveled in its own private rail cars, where band members could eat and sleep. When asked how he felt about not being able to stay in many of the hotels he performed in, Ellington replied, I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.²

After race riots in 1935, Harlem was considered unsafe for white clubgoers, and many clubs were forced to either close or move downtown.

Cotton Club

644 LENOX AVENUE AT 142ND STREET

Upon his release from prison in 1923, gangster and bootlegger Owney Madden bought the Club Deluxe from boxer Jack Johnson and rechristened it the Cotton Club. Madden’s vision was to present the finest Black entertainers in New York to Manhattan’s elite caviar-and-martini crowd in an elegant showplace—while selling them his bootleg liquor. The Cotton Club was segregated; while all the performers were African American, only white audience members were allowed. Cultural historian Steven Watson wrote, The division between the performers and the audience was more carefully maintained than in any other club in Harlem.³ It isn’t necessary to mix with colored people if you don’t feel like it, offered the unevolved singer Jimmy Durante.⁴

The club presented musical revues featuring singers, dancers, comedians, variety acts, and, perhaps most important, an African American house band playing jazz. From 1927 to 1931, Duke Ellington led the club’s band, a residency that gave him critical national exposure through weekly radio broadcasts from the club. Having a regular gig also gave him the time and forum to experiment with his music; while at the club he wrote music for dancing, overtures, and transitions and recorded more than one hundred of his compositions.

The club later employed orchestras led by Cab Calloway and Jimmie Lunceford, and headliners included Louis Armstrong, singer Ethel Waters, dancers Bill Bojangles Robinson and the Nicholas Brothers, the Will Mastin Trio (with a young Sammy Davis Jr.), and actress-singer-dancer Dorothy Dandridge.

During its heyday, the club featured Sunday Celebrity Nights, with guest stars including George Gershwin, Eddie Cantor, Mae West, Sophie Tucker, and Al Jolson. White writer Carl Van Vechten once arrived at the club as part of a racially mixed group and was turned away by the bouncer; he vowed to boycott the club until Black patrons could hear Ethel Waters singing on its stage.

Following Harlem’s race riots in 1935, the Cotton Club was forced to close. The next year it reopened on Broadway and Forty-Eighth Street, with a revue headlined by Calloway and Robinson, who was paid $3,500 a week, reportedly the most ever paid to a nightclub performer. In 1940, the Cotton Club closed permanently as a result of increasing rent, changing tastes, and a government inquiry into tax evasion.

The front and back covers from a program from the 1932 Cotton Club Parade, headlined by Cab Calloway.

The 1932 Cotton Club Parade featured songs by legendary composer Harold Arlen and lyricist Ted Koehler, including the standard I’ve Got the World on a String, written specifically for the revue.

Cab Calloway leads the band at the midtown Cotton Club’s New Year’s Eve Celebration, 1937.

Bettmann via Getty Images

Connie’s Inn

2221 SEVENTH AVENUE AT 131ST STREET

Connie’s Inn was opened in 1923 by Latvian immigrant brothers Connie, George, and Louie Immerman, bootleggers and owners of a Harlem delicatessen (a nineteen-year-old Fats Waller had handled their deliveries). From the mid-1920s to 1930s, the basement club billed itself as Harlem’s Largest and was one of the area’s big three clubs, along with Smalls’ Paradise and the Cotton Club.

Connie’s floor shows featured African American performers, but the club welcomed Black and white people alike. During 1929, the club’s peak year, Louis Armstrong performed as part of Carroll Dickerson’s Chicago orchestra, and that year’s floor show, Fats Waller and Andy Razaf’s Hot Chocolates (featuring Ain’t Misbehavin’), was such a success it moved to Broadway’s Hudson Theatre.

A period followed with Fletcher Henderson and His Connie’s Inn Orchestra, featuring Coleman Hawkins and Rex Stewart, and then bands led by Luis Russell and Don Redman. In 1933, with Harlem’s nightlife rush ebbing, the Immermans moved the club to a short-lived midtown location, presenting the revue Stars over Broadway, starring Billie Holiday (and when she became ill, temporary replacement Bessie Smith). But the repeal of Prohibition and the Depression hurt business, and soon Connie’s was forced to close.

This Prohibition Era–menu from Connie’s Inn offered non-alcoholic drinks only. Date unknown.

Fats Waller, who performed at Connie’s Inn and once worked for the Immerman’s deli, date unknown.

Smalls’ Paradise

2294½ SEVENTH AVENUE NEAR 135TH STREET

Smalls’ Paradise, which billed itself as the Hottest Spot in Harlem, opened in the basement of an office building on October 26, 1925, quickly