Clark Monroe's Uptown House
Clark Monroe's Uptown House or Monroe's Uptown House was a New York nightclub in Harlem (“Uptown”, 198 West 134th Street) and, next to Minton's Playhouse, one of the “breeding grounds” of bebop .
The club was opened in 1936 by Clark Monroe, a dancer known among his friends as the "Dark Gable ". Barron's Club, where Duke Ellington performed in the 1920s , used to be in the same building . In the 1930s swing jazz was played in Monroe's club and Billie Holiday was engaged there for a few months in 1937. In the 1940s jam sessions took place there , which, like in Minton's Playhouse, brought jazz musicians together after their regular engagements and which became the birthplace of bebop in the "dark years" of the recording ban .
The club had a house band with pianist Al Tinney (from the late 1930s). Charlie Parker played a lot there from 1941 and Max Roach too . In 1943 Monroe closed the club. He moved to 52nd Street (ie "Downtown"), where the center of jazz music in New York relocated in the mid-1940s, and founded Spotlite there in December 1944, in which Dizzy Gillespie's band played from 1946 .
literature
- Ira Gitler : Swing to Bop. An oral history of the transition in Jazz in the 1940s . OUP, New York 1985, ISBN 0-19-503664-6 .