Cotton Club Cotton Club The Cotton Club was a New York City nightclub located in Harlem on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue from 1923 to 1935, then briefly in the midtown Theater District from 1936 to 1940. The club operated most notably during the United States' era of Prohibition. The club was a whites-only establishment, but featured many of the most popular black entertainers of the era, including musicians Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Willie Bryant; vocalists Adelaide Hall, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, Aida Ward, Avon Long, the Dandridge Sisters, the
Jazz the 1950s and 1960s, Dixieland was one of the most commercially popular jazz styles in the US, Europe, and Japan, although critics paid little attention to it. In 1944, jazz impresario Norman Granz organized the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in Los Angeles, which helped make a star of Nat "King" Cole and Les Paul. In 1946, he founded Clef, discovering Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson in 1949 and merging Clef with his new label Verve in 1956, which advanced the career of Ella Fitzgerald. By the end of the 1940s, the nervous energy and tension of bebop was