No nightclub could compete with the Cotton Club when it came to raucous music. Duke Ellington and later cab Calloway, performed nightly surrounded by half naked dancers. Uptown was where the party crowd went to hear jazz performances by Lena Horn, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and others. The Cotton Club may have been a favored stage for the great african american talent of the time, but the audience was strictly whites only attribution to the criminal element, mob and mafia news Archer Davis reporting