Cotton Club

40.818505555556 - 73.93736111111110000Koordinaten: 40 ° 49 '7 "N, 73 ° 56' 15 " W

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

The club was opened by the boxing champ Jack Johnson Delux Club in Harlem corner of 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in 1920. In 1923 he was taken from the bootlegger and gangster Owney Madden and renamed Cotton Club. The club developed in the time of Prohibition quickly became a popular meeting place for New York's high society. The interior reproduced a racist stereotype of the life of "wild, primitive Negro slaves " in the rural American South. Although the dedicated Club musicians and dancers were virtually exclusively African American, access was denied to the club non-white guests.

The musicians had to occur to fit into the desired image. Example, it was expected from Duke Ellington to play " jungle music ," from which the band leader later developed the famous Jungle style, the hallmark of his orchestra in the late 1920s. At the urging of Ellington the access provisions for non-whites have been relaxed over the years.

The Cotton Club played an important role in the recognition and development of numerous jazz bands of the time. 1923, there on the band of Fletcher Henderson. After the Missourians was from 1927 to 1931, the orchestra of Duke Ellington, the house band at the Cotton Club and became known through radio broadcasts from the club across the United States. From 1931, the band of Cab Calloway, the house band was followed from 1934 by Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra. In addition, stars like Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, and Bill " Bojangles " Robinson appeared at the Cotton Club. The singer Lena Horne, first as a member of the dance troupe, began her solo career at the club.

The Cotton Club was repeatedly closed at short notice, first in 1925 for violation of the prohibition laws and 1936 due to the race riots in Harlem in the previous year. The club was in 1937 elsewhere in Manhattan (corner of Broadway and 48th Street ) opened again, but had to close in 1940 for economic reasons its doors permanently. Opened in 1978 125th Street in Harlem, a new club of the same name.

In the arts

• Cotton Club: A feature film of 1984 by Francis Ford Coppola, who evokes the myth of the club and the struggles of the gangster Owney Madden, Dutch Schultz, Vincent " Mad Dog " Coll and Lucky Luciano as its theme.
• The club was mentioned in Ken Burns ' documentary Jazz 2001.
• In the feature film Taxi! with James Cagney plays a part of the action in the fictional Cotton Pickers Club, which is an allusion to the Cotton Club.