Jazz Years: Exhibition at the Amsterdam City Archives
Date: 5 June 2026
Time: 10:00 – 17:00
Artist: Unknown
Location: Amsterdam City Archives
Price: Free Admission
Exhibition at the Amsterdam City Archives
Jazz Years: People, Migration and Music in Amsterdam, 1930–1939
In the 1930s, Amsterdam became home to a thriving jazz scene shaped by artists from the United States, Suriname, and Eastern Europe. This is the subject of the multimedia exhibition Jazz Years: People, Migration and Music in Amsterdam, 1930–1939 at the Stadsarchief Amsterdam.
Jazz musicians came from the United States, Eastern Europe, Suriname, the Caribbean, and, of course, Amsterdam itself. Some of the best-known names of the period include Freddy Johnson, Boy Edgar, Teddy Cotton, and Kid Dynamite. All of these musicians lived in Amsterdam for shorter or longer periods during the 1930s, where they worked and performed. During the same years, international jazz legends such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway also appeared in Amsterdam, alongside many performers whose names are now less widely remembered, especially women such as Rosie Poindexter, Alma Braaf, and Clara de Vries.
Vijzelstraat
The Vijzelstraat played an important role in this story. As a modern, wide metropolitan boulevard, it was both a residential area for musicians and an important performance venue. At the ultra-modern Carlton Hotel, popular American artists such as Louis Armstrong (1933) and Cab Calloway (1934) performed for Dutch audiences for the very first time.
Rembrandtplein
Several jazz clubs were established on and around Rembrandtplein. At Tuschinski, jazz musicians performed night after night in La Gaîté. The Palace and Kit Kat Club catered to a broad and curious Amsterdam audience. Not only the performers but also the bar staff often came from Afro-American and Afro-Surinamese backgrounds. At the same time, these venues became breeding grounds for new talent. Amsterdam jazz heroes such as Boy Edgar and Kid Dynamite laid the foundations of their careers during these years. In the Palace Bar, Martin Sterman and Boy Edgar learned music from renowned artists such as Coleman Hawkins, who stayed there in 1936 and 1937.
Netwerken van muzikanten
The exhibition at the Stadsarchief places both international and local celebrities within their social environment, with special attention to the international networks that connected them. The focus is not only on the stories of musicians, but also on actors and on the experiences of Afro-Surinamese and Afro-Caribbean sailors living in Amsterdam at the time.
The exhibition presents the results of this new research into musicians, theatre makers, and cultural figures through music and other audiovisual material drawn from various collections, photography — including family archives — visual art, and remarkable archival documents.