Minton's Playhouse - Cutting Sessions and Duels

Cutting Sessions and Duels

During the Monday Celebrity Nights, many notable guest musicians such as Roy Eldridge, Hot Lips Page, Ben Webster, Don Byas, and Lester Young would sit in. The trumpet duels between Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie became legend, with Gillespie eventually surpassing his mentor. Speaking to Al Fraser, Gillespie recalled how Thelonious Monk one night teased Eldridge after being out-played by Gillespie saying, “Look, you’re supposed to be the greatest trumpet player in the world...but that’s the best.” Even though Eldridge was an established musician in the older swing style, he was an active figure at Minton’s and contributed through his encouragement of Gillespie and Clarke to further their explorations.

Eldridge and the other swing masters who participated in the early cutting sessions at Minton’s played an important role in the evolution of swing toward bebop by inspiring the next generation of musicians. A young Sonny Stitt witnessed the great battles between the master saxophonists of the day in the early 1940s:

Can you imagine Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, Don Byas, and Ben Webster on the same little jam session? They had a place called Minton’s Playhouse in New York. It’s kaput now. And these guys, man, nothing like it. And guess who won the fight?...Don Byas walked off with everything.

Byas was one of the first tenor saxophonists to assimilate bebop into his style, in contrast to Young, Hawkins, and Webster, who stayed close to their swing roots through the development of bebop.

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.” Ralph Ellison believes that what was occurring at Minton’s from 1941 to 1942 was a “continuing symposium of jazz, a summation of all the styles, personal and traditional, of jazz.”