The History of Jazz

by Ted Gioia

Opened in 1923 by Owney Madden and his gang—Owney had recently been released from Sing Sing after serving eight years for murder—the Cotton Club served as the most glamorous distribution outlet for Madden’s bootleg beer business. The confluence of mobsters, money, and music may have created opportunities for Ellington, but with it came added pressures. In addition to playing its standard repertoire, the group now took on responsibility for backing up the other Cotton Club acts—a daunting change for a band that had, for all its merits, grown comfortable performing charts written to accentuate the instrumentalists’ strengths and avoid their weaknesses. But the demands of the new setting were as much psychological as musical. “When I went to the Cotton Club,” Sonny Greer recalls, “they put pressure on. They put pressure on us, and no denying at that time, when the Syndicate say they want something, they got it or you wasn’t in the business.”