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
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong collaborations decades, from the 1920s to the 1960s, and different eras both musically and also in terms of U.S. culture. Coming to prominence first as an inventive player, Armstrong attracted notice for shifting the focus in his records from collective improvisations to turn-by-turn solo performances. Like Fitzgerald, Armstrong picked up popular nicknames, in his case "Pops" and "Satchmo", that stuck, and critics praised him by the 1950s as a sort of elder statesmen of popular music. Fitzgerald appeared in many duets in the Forties, appearing on recordings with, among others, The Ink Spots, Louis Jordan and Louis Armstrong as well as