Let the Music Talk for You

     Freedom from want, and freedom from fear, fundamental freedoms that everyone ought enjoy.(Kennedy, David).  Franklin Roosevelt proposed the Allies were fighting for those in WWII, and later the U.S. would join the fight in a claim to protect those freedoms.  The conditions experienced in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of New York during that time, made this contradictory.  Fear and want were not in short supply, with the strong racial tensions and the dismal living conditions.  The tenements were like, “human hives, honeycombed with little rooms thick with human beings ... no fresh breezes, only foul air carrying too often the germs of disease (Kelley, p16).”  Tensions between the Italians to the north, and the Irish to the south were fierce, and consistently produced race fights (Jazz in New York, New York Times).  Somehow Thelonious Monk was able to find beauty in the dissonance of this situation as the community of San Juan Hill fostered his creativity, and propelled him to a storied music career.  

Many jazz musicians were thrust into the spotlight while they weighed in on uneasy relationships between blacks and whites.  Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis both approached the subject with angst and reproach.  Gillespie even suggested that he might mistake white soldiers for the enemy if given and gun and sent to fight in the war (Fraser, p120).  Thelonious Monk on the other hand, avoided the traditional politics of race.  In an interview for Down Beat magazine Monk was quoted as saying, “My music is not a social comment on discrimination or poverty or the like.  I would have written the same way even if I had not been a Negro (Kelley, p249).”  He did his best to either avoid the subject or put a positive spin to it, telling his friend Larry Ridley, “Ain’t no drag, Larry because everybody wants to be young,” after Larry complained of whites calling them “boys” (Kelley, p417).  When discussing the violence endured by young people in San Juan Hill, Monk addressed the diverse black population of Caribbeans, West Indians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and blacks from the American South, the influence of which is later heard in compositions such as “Bye-ya” and “Bemsha Swing” (Kelley, p19).  He tried to point out that there was more to America’s troubles than just the black and white tensions.  Monk’s experiences in the community of San Juan Hill led him to approach the subject of social justice and the black freedom movement differently than other jazz musicians during the era.

Throughout his life in New York, Thelonious Monk was continually supported by his family, his friends, his peers, and his community.  As Europeans came to New York to escape WWII, Monk had a Jewish-Austrian as his piano teacher.  The neighborhood was filled with influential professional and amateur jazz musicians.  His mother, Barbara, allowed for open discussions at the dinner table, and raised him on church hymns, although she was a stickler when it came to learning music.  His close friend Baroness Pannonica outfitted her house in New Jersey with a piano upstairs and a ping pong table in the basement with Thelonious in mind.  His manager, Harry Colomby, often drove him to performances and was able to procure his most important job at The Five Spot bar.  Monk was able to play at the Termini’s Five Spot Bar, night after night versus being out on the road.  He was able to bring his children and family up on stage, and avoid the vices that most other musicians fell prey to.  The Termini’s threw him birthday parties, and he was home for family birthdays, that he would not have other wise been there for had he been on the road.  In the small club he experimented, and developed an individual sound that expressed the dissonance of the community through dissonance in the music.  Monk found beauty in the reality, and ugliness of the living conditions and racial tensions in San Juan Hill (Kelley).

As the community supported Thelonious, through his music Monk fostered a community of artist, poets and musicians.  They all rallied around their collective rebellion against the conformity to middle class norms.  He tried to avoid racial politics, but it was inevitable when a white woman refused to serve him during a road trip.  He could no longer remain well behaved and cooperative, and the rage that had been simmering in the dark, boiled out into the open (Kelley).  His cabaret card was revoked for a third time after he resisted arrest by police, and he could avoid the subject no more.  When he returned to his music, though, he continued to transcend the race conflict he considered a given, and chose instead let the music do the talking.