Thelonious Monk

     When Thelonious Monk said, “There’s no reason why I should go through that Black Power shit now. I guess everybody in New York had to do that, right? Because every block is a different town. It was mean all over New York, all the boroughs. Then, besides fighting the ofays, you had to fight each other. You go to the next block and you’re in another country” (Kelley 19), he demonstrated his belief that racial conflict was a given, natural to urban life in America. This was especially true in San Juan Hill, the area of New York City where Monk grew up. There, racial tensions, though at times culminating in violent break outs, contributed to Monk’s musical upbringing. As a result, Monk used music as a way to vent frustration from the racial discrimination he would face all his life, especially with his 1958 arrest in Delaware.

     Not only was San Juan Hill an unsanitary disgrace, riddled with “tuberculosis, flies, […] high infant mortality rate among blacks, and alcoholism” (Kelley 16), it also had a reputation for violence. The neighborhood, named after a famous battle in the Spanish American War (which reflects its history of fighting), was known for its race riots. There were many instances of police brutality against blacks; as Monk recalled, “It looked like the order of the day was for the cops to go out and call all the kids black bastards” (Kelley 19). Racial conflict was not limited to blacks and whites, however. Caribbean blacks fought with Southern blacks, Chinese with blacks, and Spanish, French, Italians, Germans, and Jews amongst each other.

     The positive side of all these contentious cultures being crammed together in such a small space was that they offered a diversity of influences that are reflected in Monk’s music. For example, he learned piano from a Jewish teacher, Simon Wolf (Kelley 26) who taught him European classical music from composers like Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Rossini, Strauss, Chopin, and Liszt (Kelley 22). San Juan Hill also contributed to Monk’s general multicultural identity; “With the music, cuisine, dialects, and manners of the Caribbean and the American South everywhere in the West 60s, virtually every kid became a kind of cultural hybrid” (Kelley 23). The neighborhood’s ethnic disjunction is manifested in Monk’s Dionysian style of music, which involves scattered, erratic piano notes, improvisation, and atonality. This is significant in terms of the broader scope of jazz’s trajectory and the rise of Bebop; New York, where all these diverse cultures intertwined and clashed, is where a more modern style of jazz developed, one that was a “more angular, more dissonant, more complex kind of beauty than that of swing” (Stewart, lecture 2/26).

     Even though Monk was able to embrace the racial tension in San Juan Hill and inject its energy and dissonance into his style of music, he could not do the same with his 1958 arrest on the charges of “assault and battery on a police officer, […] breach of peace, resisting arrest, and narcotics possession” (Kelley 254). The incident, which started when an ill Monk wandered into a motel for a drink where the owners refused to serve him, ended with white policemen beating him severely and searching his companions’ belongings without a search warrant. The case would have a lasting effect on Monk’s psychological health and his career; the police seized his cabaret card for six years after a crime he did not commit. This is significant because even Monk, who was able to turn the racial disparity of San Juan Hill into a positive influence in his music, was not immune to racial injustice. Even though Bebop was a way for black artists to alleviate the frustration of living in a xenophobic society, it was not strong enough to curb racism altogether.