Midnight at Minton's

Midnight at Minton's
Live album by
Released1973
Recorded1941
GenreJazz
Length38:51
LabelHigh Note Records
ProducerDon Schlitten
Don Byas chronology
Midnight at Minton's
(1973)
A Tribute to Cannonball
(1979)
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[1]
The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings [2]

Midnight at Minton's is an album by jazz musician Don Byas, first released in 1973. It is a live recording of a 1941 jam session at Minton's Playhouse, the New York City nightclub at which the emerging style of bebop was being pioneered.

It features one of the earliest known recordings of Thelonious Monk, who was then playing piano in Minton's house band.[3][4]

The album is taken from private recordings made by Columbia University student Jerry Newman on a portable acetate disc recorder. Newman made the recordings for "Delayed on Disc" broadcasts on college radio station WKCR — the discs were rushed back to the radio studio shortly after being cut and presented in the style of a live broadcast from the venue.[5]

In a review for AllMusic, Michael G. Nastos concludes that, "the music itself is priceless, the document of a transitional period from swing to bop, and some of the people that made it happen, especially the underappreciated genius Byas."[6]

  1. ^ Allmusic review
  2. ^ Cook, Richard; Morton, Brian (2008). The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (9th ed.). Penguin. p. 209. ISBN 978-0-141-03401-0.
  3. ^ "Bebop", Scott Yanow
  4. ^ "Jazz: The First 100 Years", Henry Martin and Keith Waters
  5. ^ A History of WKCR's Jazz Programming Archived 2006-02-22 at the Wayback Machine
  6. ^ AllMusic review