Metropole Cafe

The Metropole Cafe was a jazz club that operated in New York from the mid-1950s through 1965. Located at 7th Avenue and 48th Street, It was primarily noted, in the bebop and progressive jazz era, as being a venue for traditional musicians. Henry "Red" Allen, a New Orleans veteran of many bands including King Oliver's and Fletcher Henderson's, led the house band there from 1954 on.

The Metropole featured jazz performances in the afternoon as well as evening. Its bandstand was a long runway behind the bar (which proved useful when the club abandoned its jazz policy and started featuring strippers.

Other resident performers at the club included Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Cozy Cole, Charlie Shavers, Zutty Singleton, Claude Hopkins, J. C. Higginbotham, Tony Scott, Max Kaminsky, Sol Yaged and Buster Bailey. The last jazz acts to play the club before it ended its jazz policy in June 1965 were Gene Krupa and Mongo Santamaria.

References

• The Grove Dictionary of Jazz, St. Martin's Press.
• "Goings on About Town," The New Yorker magazine archives, 1965.
• Interview with jazz bassist and historian Bill Crow.