Minton's Playhouse - Bird and Dizzy

Bird and Dizzy

Soon after Charlie Christian’s death, alto saxophonist Charlie Parker would emerge as a new leader of the bebop movement. Parker’s collaboration with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke, at sessions at Minton’s, would build on the earlier experiments of Christian. Before 1942, Parker was known to have spent more time at Clark Monroe’s Uptown House, another Harlem club where jam sessions extended into the early morning, than he spent playing at Minton’s. After leaving Jay McShann’s band at the end of 1941, Parker joined Earl Hines’s band in 1942 and was reunited with Dizzy Gillespie, who he had met some time earlier. It was during this period of time starting in 1942 that Parker, nicknamed ‘Bird’, could be found sitting-in at Minton’s on Monday nights as recalled by Miles Davis:

On Monday nights at Minton’s, Bird and Dizzy would come in to jam, so you’d have a thousand up there trying to get in so they could listen to and play with Bird and Dizzy. But most of the musicians in the know didn’t even think about playing when Bird and Dizzy came to jam. We would just sit out in the audience, to listen and learn.

Parker never was officially a member of the house band at Minton’s during that period, however sensing his importance to the bebop movement, Clarke and Monk approached Teddy Hill about hiring Parker into the band. Hill refused so Clarke and Monk decided to pay Parker out of their salaries.

After Parker’s arrival on the scene in Harlem, a new generation of player followed. Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, Max Roach and many others were drawn to Minton’s. Miles Davis’s search for Charlie Parker brought him to Minton’s where he “cut his teeth” at the jam sessions. Miles remembered:

The way went down up at Minton’s was you brought your horn and hoped that Bird and Dizzy would invite you to play with them up on stage. And when this happened you better not blow it...People would watch for clues from Bird and Dizzy, and if they smiled when you finished playing, then that meant your playing was good.

Davis’s remarks reflect on the frenzy in Harlem for the new sounds of bebop that surrounded Parker, Gillespie and Minton’s.