Three Promotional Photographs and Signed Menu from The Cotton Club.
New York: 1940s-1950s. Three photographs measuring 8 x 10 inches, menu measuring 10 x 3 3/4. Item #List708
Cab Calloway and his band began performing at the Cotton Club in 1931, enjoying an initial three year stint with many sporadic returns in the subsequent decades. Calloway’s manager, Irving Mills, played a large part in marketing Calloway’s music to a white audience. Nate Sloan, in “Constructing Cab Calloway, Publicity, Race, and Performance in 1930s Harlem Jazz,” writes: “Cab Calloway was of the most popular jazz musicians of the 1930s and 1940s whose legacy today is complicated by his repertoire of novelty songs with references to minstrelsy, his residency at a segregated Harlem cabaret, the Cotton Club, and his marketing to white audiences by manager Irving Mills. Calloway’s sound and persona—commercial, racialized, theatrical—did not square with an emergent art discourse around jazz during the 1930s. Hit songs like “Minnie the Moocher” (1931), with its dark, minor sound world, exaggerated depictions of seedy Harlem nightlife, and cultivated use of local slang, catapulted Calloway to success and stardom while erasing him from a burgeoning narrative that defined jazz as an autonomous, high-art tradition.” “Constructing Cab Calloway, Publicity, Race, and Performance in 1930s Harlem Jazz.” Offered here are three press photographs from Mills Artists, Inc., the latest of which advertises the 1956 film Stormy Monday. Also included is a signed portion of a Cotton Club menu from the same period. From the collection of the jazz photographer Jack Bradley, with his marks on rectos. Some wear and marginal tears and two with pin holes on margins, good to very good condition overall.
Price: $450.00