In polar opposition to the exclusive and glitzy Cotton Club was Café Society. It was Ellington's stature and influence that eventually convinced club management to relaxbut not eliminateits racial admission restrictions. Among the performers were Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson, Billie Holiday, Jimmie Lunceford, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington. Writer Langston Hughes described the setting as "a Jim Crow club for gangsters and moneyed whites." Despite the oppressive working conditions, the club provided beneficial exposure for the musicians (often through affiliated radio broadcasts) as well as a relatively high pay rate. Despite featuring the most popular black artists of the era, The Cotton Club served a "white-only" clientele, was decorated in blatantly racist themes, and performers and patrons were strictly segregated. The club operated from 1923 to 1935 at the Harlem location, moving to midtown Manhattan in 1936 and then closing in 1940. Johnson remained the manager but the club essentially became a front for selling liquor during prohibition. Run by boxer Jack Johnson, the club was taken over by a paroled mobster, Owney Madden, in 1923 and the name changed to The Cotton Club. It began life in 1920 as the Club Deluxe, a Harlem supper club at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue. New York If any venue symbolized the Jazz Age, it was The Cotton Club. Their success (more than one million records sold) piqued the interest of music fans and created new opportunities for performers and the establishments that would support audience demand. Still, it was a reluctant gamble for the record labels with Columbia signing, and almost immediately dropping ODJB, and then the Victor label picking them up. It was with the arrival of New Orleans' Original Dixieland Jass Bandan all-white groupthat heads began to turn. The music itself was viewed as a novelty and black performers as caricatures. As jazz bands made their way to New York they tended to be lobbed into a mix of vaudeville acts, comedians and other nomadic entertainers passing through with hopes of striking gold. By the late 1920s, the next phase of the jazz scene had shifted from Chicago to New York though, initially, there was no red carpet rolled out. Virtually every great jazz player and singer of the era performed at clubs.Jazz didn't abandon Chicago but its further development only began to take on a distinct personality in the 1960s. In fact, a tune called "52nd Street Theme" by Thelonious Monk became a bebop anthem and jazz standard. Although musicians from all schools performed there, after Minton's Playhouse in uptown Harlem, 52nd Street was the second most important place for the dissemination of bebop. In its heyday from 1930 through the early 1950s, 52nd Street clubs hosted such jazz legends as Miles Davis, Harry Gibson, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Nat Jaffe, Marian McPartland, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Louis Prima, Art Tatum, Fats Waller, Trummy Young, and many more. Musicians who played for others in the early evening played for themselves on 52nd Street. The street was convenient to musicians playing on Broadway and the 'legitimate' nightclubs and was also the site of a CBS studio. The blocks of 52nd Street between Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue became renowned for the abundance of jazz clubs and lively street life. Following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, 52nd Street replaced 133rd street as "Swing Street" of the city.
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