Feldman Swing Club
In 1942, the venue was a restaurant called Macks, which was hired out beginning 24 October every Sunday evening by Robert Feldman at £4 per night to host a jazz club featuring swing music. The initial lineup of the "Feldman Swing Club" advertised in Melody Maker included Frank Weir, Tommy Pollard, Kenny Baker and Jimmy Skidmore with guest artists the Feldman Trio, composed of Feldman's children, including then 8-year old child prodigy jazz drummer Victor Feldman.
The club was popular with working people and American GI's, who introduced jitterbug to the club, banned at most other music venues. Patrons included Glenn Miller, who auditioned young Victor Feldman, and the club hosted many top American jazz acts, including Mel Powell, Ray McKinley, Art Pepper, and Benny Goodman. Bebop as well as swing was featured. British musicians such as Ronnie Scott and Johnny Dankworth were featured. It became a mecca for black musicians from the Empire, such as Frank Holder, Coleridge Goode and Ray Ellington.
The club was eventually taken over by Humphrey Lyttelton's manager and during that period, Louis Armstrong appeared at the venue.
Read more about this topic: 100 Club
Famous quotes containing the words swing and/or club:
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Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?”
—Edwin Markham (1852–1940)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)