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| 1945-1960: Breaking Out |
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| 52nd Street in 1947 |
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| Avant-garde music was never so much fun. |
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It seems certain that 52nd Street—where Charlie Parker
and Miles Davis (both above), Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Coleman
Hawkins, Billie Holiday, and hundreds more played at clubs named the
Three Deuces, the Spotlite, Onyx, Tondelayo’s, Famous Door,
Jimmy Ryan’s, Kelly’s Stable, and Bop City— represented
the single longest-running, and most spectacularly productive, collaborative
art movement in American history. It was here, beneath the clatter
of the Sixth Avenue el, that bop, the zenith of modernism, was invented.
As the musicians refined their art amid clinking cocktail glasses,
the audience mastered their role: how to slouch in chairs, how to
smoke, how to dig. It was the school of cool. They say 52nd Street
finally stopped the day the narco squad banned Charlie Parker from
Birdland, the club named in his honor. But it might have been when
Birdland doorman and emcee Pee Wee Marquette, a midget who often appeared
in tuxedo, sued after Miles Davis allegedly referred to him as “half
a motherfucker.
Photo: Frank Driggs Collection |
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