Monte Kay

Common card · No. 201430

Monte Kay (September 18, 1924 – May 25, 1988) was an American music agent and record producer. Kay acted as a talent scout and musical director of several night clubs on the New York jazz scene in the late 1940s and 1950s. According to some accounts, during those years, the Caucasian Kay would sometimes introduce himself as a fair-skinned African American. In May and June 1945, Mal Braveman and Kay's New Jazz Foundation produced concerts at New York's Town Hall that included Dizzy Gillespie, Pearl Bailey, Erroll Garner, Don Byas, Charlie Parker, Max Roach and Sidney Catlett. As the artistic director of the Royal Roost (a jazz venue on 52nd Street) he succeeded in persuading the owner, Ralph Watkins, to hire Miles Davis's nonet—sometimes called the "Tuba Band"—with which Davis was pursuing a project that gave birth to the cool jazz movement later to be called Birth of the Cool. Kay befriended Davis and, during his later marriage to singer and actress Diahann Carroll, was for a time Miles...

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