GOTTLIEB, William (photo.).

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Original photograph signed and titled by the photographer, "Minton's Playhouse: Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, Teddy Hill". From the collection of Rolling Stones drummer and jazz aficionado Charlie Watts. This is one of the most recognizable group portraits in jazz, captured outside Minton's Playhouse in 1947, where in the early 40s, as the photographer remarked, "bop had actually been incubated".Gottlieb (1917-2006) was "one of the craft's greatest practitioners in an era when jazz was moving stylistically from swing to bebop. Even better, his eye for picture composition and sense of timing was well-nigh perfect. As Whitney Balliett, the New Yorker's jazz writer, put it: 'Gottlieb was not taking pictures. He was photographing the music'" (The Guardian obituary).In his The Golden Age of Jazz, Gottlieb remarks that he had been trying to track down the elusive Monk and through Mary Lou Williams eventually arranged an interview at his Rockefeller Center office. But the formality of the venue discomfited Monk, so the pair grabbed a cab up to Minton's, in the photographer's words "an undistinguished-looking night club in Harlem" but the joint where "a complete art movement [had] been created in a single room". Here he captured some of the finest images of Monk in his iconoclastic prime, including this delightfully relaxed image of the pianist-composer standing alongside trumpeters Howard McGhee and Roy Eldridge, and the club owner and former band leader Teddy Hill.

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