Alfred Appel Jr’s Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce is published by Knopf. He is a professor emeritus of English at Northwestern University and editor of The Annotated Lolita.
Duke Ellington’s ten-man group of 1927-32 was billed for a time as the Jungle Band, a title in keeping with the Southern plantation/Afro-Deco interior and exotic-erotic floor shows of the Cotton Club, the grandest Harlem venue (it seated more than six hundred), where Ellington performed, before whites only, for the five years from 1927, and in the spring seasons of 1933, 1937 and 1938....
Fats Waller trying to teach an English woman to jitterbug on the transatlantic liner that returned him to America in 1939 after a long musical tour and happy stay in Britain, where he composed and recorded his ‘London Suite’.
On the eve of World War Two, Fats Waller was, after Louis Armstrong, the jazz musician and jazz entertainer best known and most loved by the American and...
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