Description:
Harry Belafonte looking up and laughing during Bop City nightclub opening night. It seems certain that 52nd Street in New York City – where Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, 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.