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 and is a registered trademark of Housing and Services, Inc. a New York City nonprofit provider of supportive housing. Minton’s was founded by tenor saxophonist Henry Minton in 1938. Minton’s is famous for its role in the development of modern jazz, also known as bebop, where in its jam sessions in the early 1940s, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Christian, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, pioneered the new music. Minton’s thrived for three decades until its decline near the end of the 1960s, and its eventual closing in 1974. After being shuttered for more than 30 years, the newly remodeled club reopened its doors on May 19, 2006, under the name Uptown Lounge at Minton’s Playhouse. Unfortunately, the reopened club was closed again in 2010.

Minton’s original owner, Henry Minton, was well known in Harlem for being the first ever black delegate to the American Federation of Musicians Local 802. In addition, he had been the manager of the Rhythm Club, in Harlem, in the early part of the 1930s, a place where Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, and Earl Hines frequented. 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. Minton’s popularity and his penchant for generosity with food and loans, made his club a favorite hang-out for musicians.

Daniel Glass is an American music industry executive whose output has included work with artists Billy Idol, Wilson Phillips, Sinéad O'Connor, Jon Secada, Warren Zevon, Blur, Goldfinger, Reel Big Fish, Erykah Badu, Baha Men, Kurupt, Susan Tedeschi, The Pretenders, Zakk Wylde’s Black Label Society, Sugarcult, Better Than Ezra, and, in 2007, the launch of Glassnote Entertainment Group artists – Secondhand Serenade, Justin Nozuka, Grammy Award winning Phoenix, Grammy Nominated Mumford & Sons, The Temper Trap, Two Door Cinema Club, Kele, Royal Bangs, GIVERS, Oberhofer, Little Green Cars, Daughter and Childish Gambino. In 2011 Rolling Stone magazine named Glassnote "Best Indie Label."

Glass was raised in Brooklyn, New York. In 1977, while engaged in pre-med studies at Brooklyn College, he began a stint as an R&B/dance disc jockey at the college's radio station WBCR. Still a student, he was subsequently hired as the first DJ for the influential discotheque, Regine's. Over the intervening years he learned the record industry from the ground up.