Minton's Playhouse is a jazz club and bar located on the first floor of the Cecil Hotel at 210 West 118th Street in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City.

[3] In addition, he had been the manager of the Rhythm Club, in Harlem, in the early part of the 1930s, a venue which Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, and Earl Hines frequented.

[4] The novelist Ralph Ellison later wrote that because of his union background and music business experience, Minton was aware of the economic and artistic needs of jazz musicians in New York in the late 1930s.

[8] According to Ralph Ellison, Minton's Playhouse provided "a retreat, a homogeneous community where a collectivity of common experience could find continuity and meaningful expression".

[2] Building in the same direction that Minton had started, Hill used his connections from the Savoy Ballroom (where his band used to play), and the Apollo Theater to increase the interest in the club.

[2] Hill put together the house band which included Thelonious Monk on piano, Joe Guy on trumpet, Nick Fenton on bass, and Kenny Clarke on drums.

[10] The house band at Minton's in 1941, with the addition of frequent guests, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Christian, was at the center of the emergence of bebop in the early 1940s.

A feature of Minton's Playhouse during Teddy Hill's tenure as manager was the Monday Celebrity Nights sponsored by the Schiffmans who owned the nearby Apollo Theater.

[8] During the Monday Celebrity Nights, many guest musicians such as Roy Eldridge, Hot Lips Page, Ben Webster, Don Byas, and Lester Young would sit in.

"[14] Eldridge was an established musician in the older swing style, but he was an active figure at Minton's and contributed through his encouragement of Gillespie and Clarke to further their explorations.

[17] Herman Pritchard, who tended bar at Minton's "in the old days", would watch as Ben Webster and Lester Young would "fight on those saxophones ... like dogs in the road".

[18] Gunther Schuller's assessment of Christian's playing on those recordings is as follows:His work here seems to me relentlessly creative, endlessly fertile, and is so in a way that marks a new stylistic departure.

[20] Christian was admired by his peers at Minton's, including Thelonious Monk who "loved listening to Charlie play solos with fluid lines and interesting harmonies".

Parker's collaboration with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke, at sessions at Minton's, would build on the earlier experiments of Christian.

Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, Max Roach and many others were drawn to Minton's.

According to bassist Milt Hinton, Gillespie prompted the band to play standards, such as Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm", in difficult keys in order to discourage beginners from sitting in.

[31] Bassist Charles Mingus remembered being required to audition to get up on stage:To play at Minton's you couldn't just walk in and grab a bass.

"[32] Practices such as these challenged up-and-coming jazz musicians to get their acts together in order to participate in the jam sessions, which kept the music at a high level.

Harlem writer, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) wrote in Black Music (1967): "The groups that come into Minton's are stand-up replicas of what was a highly experimental twenty-five years ago.