THE CAT ON A HOT THIN GROOVE

On the long road to becoming an Oscar-winning animation director, Gene Deitch became an intense jazz fan. At the age of 21, he disco vered The Record Changer magazine, a jazz fan magazine filled with obsessive, scholarly, and purist essays about jazz as well as lis tings of hard-to-find jazz albums. Every jazz swinger in the 40s was called a cat (as in cool cat), so Gene Deitch created a cart oon feature for Record Changer titled The Cat, which quickly became a fixture of the magazine. He also started drawing the covers, which graced...[Read more]