Reflections on Jazz

When I entered this class, I knew that jazz began as a specifically African American form of music.  Other than that, I didn't know much about jazz other than names I heard growing up as the greatest jazz players: Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk.  These names were my reference point for jazz.  What I didn't realize until after taking this course is how much jazz both musically, socially, and historically relies on collaboration.  Because jazz music has often emerged out of collaboration of different individuals and their personal styles, jazz is expressive of the community around it. But the concept that really took this concept to the next level for me was the idea of jazz as dialogue.  Before taking this class, I would have assumed that jazz music was reflexive of the culture of the environment in which it was create.  What was new for me was the other ways in which the spaces and cities developed due to the emergence and growing popularity of jazz.  Specifically, jazz had a major impact on the race relations in Chicago, New York, and Kansas City.  This dialogic aspect of jazz also greatly influenced jazz musicians and geniuses who would not have been able to flourish had they had not had both the support and diverse influences of their communities. This again emphasizes the importance of collaboration in jazz music. Jazz shaped the cities it developed in and the people who listened to it socially, culturally, economically, and historically.  Before taking this class, I hadn't realized that a form of musical expression could have such serious effects on the history of people and communities. The fact that jazz did this for so many people and had such a large social impact is due to its expressive qualities and role as the first African American produced entertainment to enter the conscious of American popular culture.  

The Unique Sound and Vision of Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Monk had a much wider perspective of racial issues than many of his contemporaries who responded solely to the tension between blacks and whites.  He had no desire to “go through that Black Power shit now,” because he felt that he had already transcended traditional racial politics through his music and his worldview. Instead, Monk’s playing was characterized by unique influences from his diverse community in San Juan Hill.  San Juan Hill was so unique in that its racial tensions were not just between blacks and whites but between many different blacks and many different whites.  There were race issues between the Irish, Italians, and Germans (Kelley 18) as well as between blacks from the South, native black New Yorkers, and immigrants from the Caribbean (Kelley 19).  These more specific distinctions of ethnicity and culture made Monk feel that each block was “another country”.  This complicated Monk’s perspective on race as not so clearly “black” and “white”.  And because it was “mean all over,” it was up to the individual to distinguish himself and create his own community. This community enabled Monk to be the unique individual both in his personal life and in his music.

Monk’s success embodies the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child”.  However, in his case, the word “village” should be replaced by “community,” and  “child” by “genius”.  As  a child in San Juan Hill, Monk had exposure to many different cultures from which he could build his community, or “village”.  He spent most of his time in church and at the Columbus Hill Neighborhood Center (Kelley 28).  These were both places where people could come together in an all-inclusive setting to build extensive networks that served as larger families in the intensity of New York. 

These places provided inspiration for Monk musically as well.  As a child, Monk learned gospel tendencies and sang with his mother in church. Another big influence on his musical development were his piano teachers.  Simon Wolf was a Jewish Austrian immigrant who also lived in San Juan hill and taught him classical piano (Kelley 26).  Simeltaneously, Monk also learned stride piano from another pianist in his community, Alberta Simmons.  In addition to these specific influences, the music being played in the streets and apartment buildings ranging in origin from the Carribean to the South gave Monk an ear for very different styles of music happening at the same time.  This later led to aspects of his distinct, dissonant sound.  It was in this way that the diverse elements and sounds of San Juan Hill effected Monk’s music.

The way that Thelonious Monk opted out of mainstream jazz and instead created his own very unique sound of Bebop is similar to how he ignored typical racial stigmas on the national scale and instead created and reacted to his own communities on the micro scale.  I think that this came from recognizing community at an early age as learning something from those living around you.  Monk’s community shaped him by surrounding him with different musical sounds and the understanding of community as something beyond skin color or a family name.  In turn, Monk’s art fostered a community that was not fragmented by racial tensions but used different cultures to form a multi-faceted ideology and musical sound.