From The New York Times:
An almost startling intimacy characterized the smoky jazz clubs in places like Chicago and Cleveland around 1950. Billie Holiday relaxed on a banquette; Ella Fitzgerald sang on small stages, mere feet from the audience. “This was the way this music was supposed to be presented,” says Joe Lauro, the president of the Historic Films Archive in Greenport, N.Y. “They weren’t filling up Madison Square Garden.” Lauro acquired a trove of pictures from this time taken by Nat Singerman, a photographer and jazz lover, that captures some of the era’s jazz greats in color, rare for the subject matter then. “It’s fascinating to see them at this particular moment,” says Loren Schoenberg, the artistic director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, of these previously unpublished pictures. “This was just before rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll took the spotlight away from these people.”
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