Zinky Cohn was an American jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

 pianist.

Cohn played in Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

 in the late 1920s, including in Jimmie Noone

Jimmie Noone

Jimmie Noone was an American jazz clarinetist.- Background :...

's Apex Club Orchestra (1928–30); he recorded with Noone extensively between 1929 and 1934, especially for Vocalion Records

Vocalion Records

Vocalion Records is a record label active for many years in the United States and in the United Kingdom.-History:Vocalion was founded in 1916 by the Aeolian Piano Company of New York City, which introduced a retail line of phonographs at the same time. The name was derived from one of their...

. Many of the tunes Noone recorded were written and/or arranged by Cohn, including "Apex Blues" (previously attributed to Earl Hines

Earl Hines

Earl Kenneth Hines, universally known as Earl "Fatha" Hines, was an American jazz pianist. Hines was one of the most influential figures in the development of modern jazz piano and, according to one source, is "one of a small number of pianists whose playing shaped the history of jazz".-Early...

).

Cohn also recorded as a leader in the early 1930s, with a band that featured Leon Washington

Leon Washington (musician)

Leon Diamond Washington was an American jazz tenor saxophonist.Born in Mississippi, Washington grew up in Chicago from the age of three. He started on clarinet before moving on to tenor saxophone, and studied under Santy Runyon...

 on tenor saxophone. Cohn recorded with Frankie Franko & His Louisianans in 1930, and also accompanied blues

Blues

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

 singers such as Georgia White

Georgia White

Georgia White was an African American blues singer, most prolific in the 1930s and 1940s.Little is known of her early life. By the late 1920s she was singing in clubs in Chicago, and she made her first recording, "When You're Smiling, the Whole World Smiles With You," with Jimmie Noone's...

.

Later in the 1930s Cohn led the Chicago musicians' union, and continued to play locally.