Minton's Playhouse
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Photograph by William P. Gottlieb .
Minton's Playhouse is a jazz club (and bar) on the first floor of the Cecil Hotel at 210 West 118th Street in Harlem , New York . The club was opened in 1938 by tenor saxophonist Henry Minton and is best known for its jam sessions in the early 1940s, which played an important role in the creation of bebop and which included musicians such as Thelonious Monk , Kenny Clarke , Charlie Christian and Dizzy Gillespie .
Minton already had the Rhythm Club in Harlem in the early 1930s , in which musicians such as Louis Armstrong , Fats Waller and Earl Hines performed, and was an important person in the musicians' union, which made the organization of jam sessions possible in the first place. In 1940 he hired the bandleader Teddy Hill as manager, who brought in his connections to the Savoy Ballroom (where Hills big band played) and Apollo Theater and a house band with Monk on piano, Clarke on drums, trumpeter Joe Guy and bassist Nick Fenton (and later with the tenor saxophonist Kermit Scott ). Frequent guests were Dizzy Gillespie and Jimmy Blanton from Duke Ellington's band . Charlie Christian , guitarist in Benny Goodman's band, only played there for a short time in 1941, but exerted a great influence. Hill, like Minton, wanted the sessions to help musicians get over times without engagement. The “Monday Celebrity Nights”, which the owners of the Apollo, the Schiffmans, donated with free food and drink at the end of their one-week engagement in the Apollo, were also very popular. Here "battles" took place between the star soloists of swing music and aspiring young bebop musicians. B. famous trumpet duels between Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie or between the saxophonist Don Byas (also with a swing background, he was with Count Basie at the time , but played bebop at Minton's) and stars like Ben Webster , Lester Young , Chu Berry and Coleman Hawkins .
From 1942 Charlie Parker also took part in the jam sessions (when he was in Jay McShann's band in 1941 he jammed in Clark Monroe's Uptown House in Harlem), who played with Gillespie in Earl Hines' band. Clarke and Monk tried to persuade Hill to hire Parker as well, and when that was unsuccessful, they paid him out of pocket fees. The game of Gillespie and Parker in Minton's exerted a suction effect on jazz musicians such as Miles Davis , Dexter Gordon , Art Blakey , Max Roach , Fats Navarro , Bud Powell out to be the hoped asked by Gillespie and Parker to play along. As Charles Mingus reports, Gillespie used to thoroughly test new musicians who wanted to play by performing in the back room.
Due to a strike ( recording ban ) from 1942 to 1944, the recordings of the sessions in Minton's Playhouse, which were later released as recordings, take the place of studio recordings from this period and form central documents for the history of jazz . After their time at Minton's, the increasingly popular bebopers moved downtown to the clubs on 52nd Street in the mid-1940s (such as Jimmy Ryans , Famous Door , Three Deuces , Spotlite Club , Onyx Club , Hickory House , Birdland from 1949 ).
In the 1950s, the club lost its pioneering role and became an ordinary jazz club. The club began to decline in the late 1960s and closed for good in 1974. On May 19, 2006, it reopened under the name Uptown Lounge at Minton's Playhouse .
The building, 210th West 118th Street, was listed on the United States' National Register of Historic Places in 1985, making it an officially recognized Historic Site.
Web links
- Nick Catalano: Minton's Playhouse Redux on AllAboutJazz.com