"ON a Sunday afternoon in March 1946, you could have stepped into Club 845 on Prospect Avenue in the Morrisania section of the South Bronx — admission $1.25, plus tax — and danced to a goateed, bespectacled trumpet player named Dizzy Gillespie.
A decade later, you could have sat on your stoop on Lyman Place a dozen blocks from the club and passed the time of day with Thelonious Monk, who often visited musicians and relatives who lived on the block.
You could have been at the Blue Morocco on Boston Road on the night in 1959 when a sultry young woman sang "Guess Who I Saw Today," captivating the audience and, more important, impressing one man in particular, the musical agent and manager John Levy, who signed her the next day. That woman would become the renowned jazz singer Nancy Wilson.
There is no trace of this past in the neighborhood today."
The start of a cool multi-page article in the New York Times available on-line here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/ny...=1&oref=slogin
Andy
