Band Manager

Screenwriter, novelist, and artist Stephen Longstreet was passionate about music. While studying at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts in the late 1920s, Longstreet began making drawings of the musical scenes in Greenwich Village, the city’s speakeasies, and the Cotton Club in Harlem. “I had hoped to capture with black marks on white paper, this music created by these people, and set down what they looked like, felt and did before they were gone,” he remarked. Longstreet published five books on jazz, including The Real Jazz Old and New (1956) and Jazz from A-Z: A Graphic Dictionary (1989), which he illustrated with his own drawings and watercolors.