Stanford music scholar redefines the jazz ....

Stanford music scholar redefines the jazz and cabaret culture of 1920s Harlem

Musicologist Nate Sloan's investigation of Harlem Renaissance jazz portrays a diverse, multisensory experience where music, place and race influenced each other in profound and lasting ways.

Stanford Report, May 15, 2015
BY TANU WAKEFIELD
The Humanities at Stanford
From 1926 to 1935, the Cotton Club was the hottest jazz hub in New York City's vibrant Harlem neighborhood.

Not only did the club launch the careers of Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Lena Horne, but it also attracted celebrity clientele like Jimmy Durante, Walter Winchell and even the Prince of Jordan. Owned and run by mobsters who sold their bootlegged liquor there, the Cotton Club regularly sold out its highly lucrative revues.

As festive as the Cotton Club may have seemed on the surface, the research of Stanford musicology PhD candidate Nate Sloan highlights "the largely forgotten racist history of a legendary musical venue."

A fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, Sloan is studying the ramifications of a major paradox of the Cotton Club and similar Harlem cabarets: While black musicians provided the club's entertainment, black patrons were altogether barred from the shows.

A practicing musician and composer himself, Sloan characterizes these imposed racial limitations as "discriminatory policies that helped forge a diverse palette of jazz" during a period he refers to as a "vanguard moment in African American music."

The bold timbres and sophisticated harmonies of Duke Ellington, the wailing "hi-de-hos" of Cab Calloway and the bluesy torch songs of Harold Arlen were "signature sounds of early jazz developed on the stage of the Cotton Club, and all were shaped by the complex racial politics of the venue," says Sloan.


Cotton Club productions acted as a key draw in the burgeoning nightlife economy of the neighborhood – propelled by "those upper-class white New Yorkers who got their kicks 'slumming' in Harlem," Sloan explains. Sloan coined the phrase "the Harlem moment" to describe this unique era in jazz history.

read more: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/may/jazz-culture-harlem-051515.html
Musicologist Nate Sloan's investigation of Harlem Renaissance jazz includes a detailed study of the Cotton Club, highlighting the racist history of the legendary venue.