Savoie

1930 · 190332 — New York: The Savoy Ballroom 1930s. Chic memento of Harlem's greatest nightspot From the collection of Rolling Stones drummer and jazz aficionado Charlie Watts with his posthumous bookplate: a striking souvenir of the fabled Savoy "the World's Greatest Ballroom" situated on Lenox Avenue. Langston Hughes surely had it in mind when in "Juke Box Love Song" he referred to "Harlem's heartbeat". Entirely unsegregated from the beginning this was a ballroom not a night club - they came to dance. The long narrow dance floor known to the regulars as the "Track" was not a place for the faint-hearted it was every bit as competitive as the Savoy's dual bandstands where the Battles of the Bands or Cutting Contests took place and for which the venue became famous. Through the 1930s until his unfortunately premature demise in 1939 the great Chick Webb the original King of Swing held sway with his hard-driving band defeating all comers of the stature of Benny Goodman and Count Basie the winners chosen by the dancers of course. The folder contains the original table photograph which shows a booth with four African-American couples in their thirties and a couple of hangers-on outside the booth all of them sharply turned out and ready for a good time. And - if the debris on the table is anything to go by with at least one champagne bottle in evidence - on their way to having one. This is a wonderfully evocative piece of jazz ephemera from the Charlie Parker and Night Club Memorabilia collection of Norman R. Saks. Pink card photo-folder 238 x 278 mm superb graphic of a dancing couple to front panel. Original silver gelatin table photograph in the window mount. A little rubbed and soiled some minor stripping at the spine and lower edge of the front panel short split to the window-mount the photograph slightly mottled. Ken Vail The Norman R. Saks Collection 292 unknown