Jazz Musicians - Black is Beautiful
Go to http://www.blackisbeautifulamsterdam.nl for more information. Also visit the research lab!
The entertainers in this drawing by John Raedecker are probably musicians. The drawing was made after a visit to Bal Nègre, a Caribbean club in Paris where people danced to jazz music. This work by Jan Wiegers was also inspired by the Bal Nègre.
The Bal quickly became a meeting place for coloured Parisians such as people from the Caribbeans, Africans and Afro-Americans. The Bal also became a favourite haunt and a source of inspiration for many famous European artists and writers.
Piet Mondriaan and Charley Toorop discovered the bar too. The former in particular is said to have gone there almost every day because he loved Negro music and Negro dancing so much. Avant-garde artists like Pablo Picasso, André Masson, Alexander Calder and Man Ray went there too.
Black music was not only hot in Paris. In the Netherlands too, jazz clubs, like the Negro Kit Kat club, Negro Palace, Negro Melody Club, the Shim Sham Negro Club and Mephisto shot up like mushrooms in the 1930s.
The clubs advertised with:
World famous Negro solo players. A cosmopolitan attraction.
or
New Yorks Negro area of Harlem comes to Rotterdam.
or
Harlem in Amsterdam, Coloured Hot trio at Neutraal. Star drummer says, gimme Holland!
Artists were inspired by black jazz musicians here as well. In the 1930s Nola Hatterman made this painting entitled The band of Negro players.
Amsterdam mayor Van der Vlugt soon shut down many of these clubs because of fears of black men and white young women mixing. Die-hard fans had to go to Paris again.
Surinamese musicians played a special role in the Dutch jazz culture. They had the required skin color for jazz, and when they used American-sounding stage names like Kid Dynamite (Arthur Parisius) or Teddy Cotton (Theodoor Kantoor), the audience felt they were more authentic jazz musicians than white Dutch musicians.
Light-skinned Surinamese musician Max Woiski also found out that the blacker the musician, the more authentic his music was thought to be:
Once Kid Dynamite had signed two contracts by mistake: Scheveningen and Oostvoorne. He asked me whether I would play in Oostvoorne. I said okay, but the owner looked at me as if I was trying to swindle him. He was not very interested in my ability to play the flute or saxophone: the point was that I wasnt colored enough. My skin was slightly too light. I added a jet black trumpet player to the orchestra to add some color, but that didnt improve the tone of the music because the poor boy couldnt keep time.
Famous American musicians like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong also visited the Netherlands. De Groene Amsterdammer wrote a review on the Duke prior to his first visit to the Netherlands in 1933:
Stars, a piece by Parker, is performed by Duke Ellington in an inimitable manner. (...) Tension is kept up throughout the piece to such an extent that I do not hesitate to call it one of Ellingtons best products. (..) Such orchestration.
