HISTORIC VENUES
THE APOLLO THEATER is one of Harlem's. New York City's, and America's most iconic and enduring cultural institutions. From the historic night in 1934 when Ella Fitzgerald first won Amateur Night, to performances by Benny Carter, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Bille Holiday and Cab Calloway, the list of jazz greats who played the Apollo goes on and on. CLUB HARLEM, a long-forgotten little jazz haunt on 145th Street, was Cecil Taylor’s first experience at performing live. He speaks fondly of a time when he had to play from 9 pm to 4 am, with one 15-minute break. The upright piano had 8 working keys on a good night and the pay was $50 a week. It was in 1952. He had to play standards, not his own music, and he reports that many guys could play those standards in every key. In this proving ground, everybody wanted the gig. HAVANA SAN JUAN was a club that opened during the heightened pulse of the 1960’s. Located on 138th Street and Broadway, it was a haven for iconic music celebrities such as Machito, Sammy Davis Jr., Celia Cruz, Frank Sinatra, and Tito Puente. The place inspired these artists to create what we know today as “Classic Salsa,” a music and dance that has united cultures through generations and carved a permanent place in American music. LENOX LOUNGE, with its famous Zebra Room, has been giving it up to jazz lovers since 1939. A hotbed for jazz legends, it was also a favorite haunt for Harlem Renaissance writers, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes, among them. Lenox Lounge and the Zebra Room are often a featured location in music videos (Luther Vandross, Janet Jackson, Madonna, Keith Sweat, P. Diddy, Quincy Jones CD cover and more. MINTON’S PLAYHOUSEwas famous for its jam sessions in the early 1940’s, where Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie pushed the boundaries of the art and pioneered bebop. Equally notorious were the club’s “cutting sessions,” great battles between the likes of master trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie or sax giants Lester Young and Ben Webster. CLARK MONROE’S UPTOWN HOUSE was, along with Minton's Playhouse, one of the two principal clubs in the early history of bebopjazz. During the 1930s, the club, located at 198 West 134th Street, presented swing jazzand Billie Holiday lived upstairs. In the early 1940s, Al Tinneyled Monroe's house band, which included Max Roach, Little Benny Harris, George Treadwell, and Victor Coulsen. Charlie Parker was a featured soloist at the club in 1943. PARK PALACE was the up-the-steps dancehall section of a double venue that included a downstairs space called the Park Plaza at the northwest corner of 110th and Fifth Avenue. Together, nightclub and dancehall comprised a tremendously significant New York City stop for aficionados of Latin dance music. Nightly, one could be sure that some of the greatest instrumentalists and singers from Cuba or Puerto Rico would be there, serving it up for East Harlem’s Latin dancers and music lovers. SHOWMAN’S JAZZ CLUB was a hangout for Apollo entertainers sixty plus years ago, when it was literally right next door to the famed theater. In 1988 it moved to its present location on 125th Street, where this intimate room remains one of Harlem’s premier jazz clubs. Over a famed bar, photos of a pantheon glow: Sarah Vaughan, Lionel Hampton, Pearl Bailey, Eartha Kitt, Duke Ellington. SMALL’S PARADISE, which personified the excitement of Harlem nightlife during the “Roaring Twenties,” was famous for its first-class musical acts, elaborate floorshows, dancing waiters and famously integrated audience. Customers vied for space on the postage-stamp-size dance floor while Charleston-dancing waiters brought Chinese food and bootleg liquor to the small tables. One waiter who went on to greater fame was Malcolm Little, later known as Malcolm X, who worked at Small's in 1943. FESTIVAL VENUES
ABYSSINIAN BAPTIST CHURCH
APOLLO THEATER
COWIN CENTER at Columbia University
HARLEM STAGE GATEHOUSE
HARLEM USA
LENOX LOUNGE
MINTON’S PLAYHOUSE
GINNY'S SUPPER CLUB AT RED ROOSTER
SHOWMAN'S JAZZ CLUB
|