Host-Pathogen-Venue Combinations and All That Jazz

“T call yourself a New Yorker you must have been to Harlem at least once. Every up-to-date person knows Harlem, and knowing Harlem generally means that one has visited a night club or two,” wrote novelist and editor Wallace Thurman, “....The music is good, the dancers are gay, and setting is conducive to joy” (1). In the 1920s, nightclubs, bars, and cabarets were much in vogue in most of the western world. In New York, many talented entertainers worked in these clubs, Duke Ellington’s orchestra, Cab Calloway’s band, Lena Horne, Adelaide Hall. Chicago became a jazz center with more than 100 clubs. “Midnight was like day,” wrote poet Langston Hughes describing the city’s South Side (2). The exotic, glamorous, intoxicated environment of these clubs, which dominated American entertainment for most of the 20th century, was a main source of inspiration to Chicago painter, Archibald Motley. Motley was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, but his family moved north when he was very young. His mother was a schoolteacher, his father a railroad man, operating a buffet car running on the Michigan Central. Even as a child he sketched scenes and people around him and knew that he wanted to be an artist. The elder Motley mentioned his son’s ambitions to Frank W. Gunsaulus of the Armour Institute, a train patron, who paid the youth’s first year’s tuition at the Art Institute of Chicago. A receptive and eager student, Motley studied under accomplished painter Karl Buehr, who encouraged and advised him: “I want to tell you something, Mr. Motley. I don’t want you to ever change your style of painting... please continue it, for my sake” (3). At the Art Institute, Motley indulged his admiration of the old masters, particularly Dutch painter Frans Hals, and was exposed to the work of other American artists (George Bellows, John Sloan, Randall Davey). His graduation in 1918 coincided with the advent of Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement encompassing the literary, musical,