Cotton Club - Club's Heyday

Club's Heyday

Nonetheless, the club also helped launch the careers of Fletcher Henderson, who led the first band to play there in the year 1923, and Ellington, whose orchestra was the house band there from December 4, 1927 to June 30, 1931. The club not only gave Ellington national exposure through radio broadcasts originating there (first through WHN, then over WEAF and after September 1929 through the NBC Red Network - WEAF was the flagship station for that network - on Fridays), but enabled him to develop his repertoire while composing not only the dance tunes for the shows, but also the overtures, transitions, accompaniments, and "jungle" effects that gave him the freedom to experiment with orchestral colours and arrangements that touring bands rarely had. Ellington recorded over 100 compositions during this era, while building the group that he led for nearly fifty years. Eventually, in deference to a request by Ellington, the club slightly relaxed its policy of excluding black customers.

Cab Calloway's orchestra brought its Brown Sugar revue to the club in 1930, replacing Ellington's group after its departure in 1931; Jimmie Lunceford's band replaced Calloway's in 1934, while Ellington, Armstrong, and Calloway returned to perform at the club in later years. The most lavish revue in the Cotton Club’s thirteen-year history opened on Broadway on September 24, 1936. Robinson and Calloway headed a roster of some 130 other performers. The club was also the first show business opportunity for Lena Horne, who began there as a chorus girl at the age of sixteen. Dorothy Dandridge performed there while still one of The Dandridge Sisters, while Coleman Hawkins and Don Redman played there as part of Henderson's band. Tap dancers Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Sammy Davis Jr. (as part of the Will Mastin Trio), and the Nicholas Brothers starred there as well.

The club also drew from white popular culture of the day. Walter Brooks, who had produced the successful Broadway show Shuffle Along, was the nominal owner. Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, one of the most prominent songwriting teams of the era, and Harold Arlen provided the songs for the revues, one of which, "Blackbirds of 1928", starring Adelaide Hall featured the songs "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" and "Diga Diga Doo", produced by Lew Leslie on Broadway. In 1934, Adelaide Hall starred at the Cotton Club in the biggest grossing show that ever appeared at the club. Featured on the bill was the 16-year-old Lena Horne.

Closed temporarily in 1936 after the race riot in Harlem the previous year, the Cotton Club reopened later that year at Broadway and 48th Street. In fact a 1937 New York Times article writes, "The Cotton Club has climbed aboard the Broadway bandwagon, wish a show that is calculated to give the customers their money’s worth of sound and color – and it does". It closed for good in 1940, under pressure from higher rents, changing tastes and a federal investigation into tax evasion by Manhattan nightclub owners. The Latin Quarter nightclub opened in its space and the building was torn down in 1989 to make way for a hotel. All in all, the Broadway Cotton Club was a highly successful blend of old and new. The site may have been new, the décor may have been slightly different, but once a patron entered and was comfortably seated, he knew he was in a familiar place.

Jazz writer James Haskins, wrote in 1977, "Today, there is a new incarnation of the Cotton Club which sits on the most western end of the 125th Street under the massive Manhattanville viaduct. The windowless block of a building has a less dramatic display out front but seems to be popular with tourists for Sunday jazz brunches."