Cab Calloway and his orchestra with the Cotton Club Chorus at the Cotton Club, 1936.
March 10, 1927
Dancing in the streets…
Gangsters
Sorry, no gangsters here. These gentlemen are Andy Garcia, Sean Connery, Kevin Costner and Charles Martin Smith in “The Untouchables” playing the squad to stop Al Capone.
“After Billie Holiday’s funeral service, there was such a quietness over these musicians, such a multitude of them there, and we just stood around like in awe and we filed out of the church and stood on the corners for a few minutes until everybody got out and we just quietly just stepped away into the crowd. It was not the usual thing of musicians going to a bar…having a nice drink or a type of New Orleans festivity. It was just dead quiet and sadness.”
RIP Billie Holiday (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959)
Billie Holiday at record producer Harry Lim’s jam session, photographed by Life photographer Charles Peterson, c. 1939
Other musicians in attendance include Duke Ellington, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Johnny Hodgers, J.C. Higginbotham, Hot Lips Page and Chu Berry among others.
Big bands in color, 1934 – 1943
Featuring Glen Gray and the Casa Loma orchestra, Kay Kyser, Benny Carter, the Benny Goodman Quartet, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller and Ted Fiorito.
(I originally wanted to do a video montage of these and other scenes, but I couldn’t think of a tune that fit all the clips.)
“William P. Gottlieb was an American photographer and newspaper columnist who is best known for his classic photographs of the leading performers of the ‘Golden Age’ of American Jazz in the 1930s and 1940s. Gottlieb’s photographs are among the best known and widely reproduced images of this era of jazz.” (x)
Photographed are: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, 52nd Street, Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, Teddy Hill, and Lena Horne.
Billie Holiday was performing in a Manhattan club in 1943, and between sets she took a seat at a table and ordered her usual Top and Bottom (a mixture of gin and port wine). Two white sailors from the South, on leave in the Big Apple, approached her, wanting to know where a “darkie” got off wearing a mink coat. When Lady told them to get lost they snuffed out their cigarettes in her mink. Without pause, Holiday told them to meet her outside, if they had any balls. At which point Holiday proceeded to beat them both unconscious with her fists. It was a bad idea to mess with Lady Day.
Rich English on the toughness of Billie Holiday (via sinatrra)
Three cheers for Billie…!