Morrisania Tune of the Day

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Watermelon Man - Mongo Santamaria

Good review of the music of the South Bronx in today's New York Times. Interactive feature as well.

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Morrisania Melody

By MANNY FERNANDEZ
ON a Sunday afternoon in March 1946, you could have stepped into Club 845 on Prospect Avenue in the Morrisania section of the South Bronx — admission $1.25, plus tax — and danced to a goateed, bespectacled trumpet player named Dizzy Gillespie.

A decade later, you could have sat on your stoop on Lyman Place a dozen blocks from the club and passed the time of day with Thelonious Monk, who often visited musicians and relatives who lived on the block.

You could have been at the Blue Morocco on Boston Road on the night in 1959 when a sultry young woman sang "Guess Who I Saw Today," captivating the audience and, more important, impressing one man in particular, the musical agent and manager John Levy, who signed her the next day. That woman would become the renowned jazz singer Nancy Wilson.

There is no trace of this past in the neighborhood today.

The two clubs are long gone; not even their addresses survive. Club 845, so named for its address, 845 Prospect Avenue, has been replaced by a low-slung stretch of gritty shops below the rattling of the elevated 2 and 5 trains. The Blue Morocco, a small, elegant place at 1155 Boston Road that attracted a clientele of mostly dressed-up locals, is an empty narrow lot behind a chain-link fence strewn with rocks and bottle caps.

One of the only ways anyone would know what went on here decades ago is by talking to the people who were there. That is what Mark Naison, a professor of African-American studies and history at Fordham University, has been doing for the past three years. He has been talking to the patrons and musicians of Club 845, the Blue Morocco and other vanished nightclubs, and with their help he is piecing together the fragments of a vibrant but almost entirely unknown chapter of the city's musical past.

Some New York stories tell themselves. Others need a little help. Through research and the memories of residents, Professor Naison has unlocked a secret world, a musical scene that thrived just three miles north of Harlem and one that flourished from the jazz of the 1940's through the Latin music and the doo-wop of the 1950's into the hip-hop of the 1980's. It was a world in which working-class black residents survived in a respectable community long before crime and arson propelled their neighborhood and others near it into national symbols of urban decay.

Cute Duke and the Baroness

This forgotten world has come alive in the most unlikely of places: a cramped, concrete-block office on the sixth floor of Dealy Hall, on Fordham's pristine, decidedly staid Bronx campus. There, in Room 633, is where you can often find Professor Naison, who has invited dozens of people to come to this space and tell their stories as part of the Bronx African-American History Project, which he leads.

The conversations themselves are a kind of jazz: improvisational, loose, melodious. People talk about the time Cute Duke asked the jazz singer Dinah Washington to dance at the Blue Morocco, and was promptly thrown out of the club. They talk about seeing Mr. Monk arrive on Lyman Place in a fancy car, accompanied by the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, an eccentric British patron of jazz musicians. They talk about the exotic dancers who used to perform at Club 845 and the fellow who used to sing like Nat King Cole at Freddie's at 1204 Boston Road, another bygone club.

On a recent afternoon, Professor Naison was talking to Arthur Jenkins, now living in North Carolina, who used to work as a library clerk in a Manhattan law firm. Mr. Jenkins was speaking slowly and methodically into the microphone of an old Marantz tape recorder, as if giving testimony, which in a way, he was.

Professor Naison was curious about many things concerning Mr. Jenkins, but mostly he wanted to know how this man, a 69-year-old former Morrisania resident, used to spend his Saturday nights. The answer: at the Blue Morocco, where he played piano in the house band, a versatile trio as comfortable with jazz standards as with Tito Puente.

The tape recorder was running. The professor was smiling.

Arguably, few New York historians have taken as enthusiastic an interest in the social lives of black Bronx residents as Professor Naison has. Probably even fewer 59-year-old white Jewish grandfathers from Park Slope can rap the opening lines of "The Message," the pioneering rap song by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

Not long ago, when Professor Naison gave a speech about the multicultural roots of hip-hop, someone printed up fliers describing him as the Notorious Ph.D., a tip of the hat to the rapper Notorious B.I.G. Or as Professor Naison, who taped one of the fliers to his office door, put it, "I may be old, I may be white, but my flow is funky and my rhymes are tight."

Mining for Gold

The erased musical history of the South Bronx has emerged as a subplot to the Bronx African-American History Project, a partnership between Fordham and the Bronx County Historical Society that began in early 2003. This legacy of black residents has been largely overshadowed by a better-known aspect of the Bronx past: the stickball nostalgia of the borough's Jewish, Italian and Irish prewar population. It is often through the prism of the events of the 1970's and 1980's, when arson, drugs and crime helped transform the South Bronx into an urban nightmare, that the borough's black and Latino population is still defined.

"When people think of black history in New York City," Professor Naison said, "they think of Harlem and Bed-Stuy. But there was a whole culture of strivers in the South Bronx."

Professor Naison's first interview was with Victoria Archibald-Good, a social worker, whose family moved from Harlem to the Bronx around 1950. Ms. Good, whose brother is Nate Archibald, the former N.B.A. star, grew up in Patterson Houses, a public housing project in Mott Haven. She told Professor Naison about dancing in the mid-1960's to some of the greats of Latin music — Mr. Puente, Celia Cruz — at the nearby Embassy Ballroom on East 163rd Street at Third Avenue.

For Professor Naison, it was the first of a series of epiphanies: in the multicultural melting pot of Bronx nightlife, black residents were so influenced by their Puerto Rican neighbors that they danced to Latin music at the Embassy, the Hunts Point Palace and other bygone clubs. "I said: 'Oh, boy! I didn't know any of this,' " he recalled. "Little did I know how big the iceberg was going to be."

More interviews followed, each person leading to another, and another. Interview No. 28 was Bob Gumbs, a publisher of books on African-American history and culture who was raised in Morrisania.

Mr. Gumbs, who is 67, lived on Lyman Place, across the street from Elmo Hope, an influential bebop pianist. He also recalled seeing Mr. Monk on the block, there to visit Mr. Hope and relatives of Mr. Monk's wife, who also lived on Lyman Place. Mr. Monk, the great jazz pianist and composer, wore an overcoat, even in August.

"I said, 'Whoa,' " recalled Professor Naison, who had no idea that Mr. Monk was a regular visitor to Lyman Place. "This was the spark for exploring the jazz history of the Bronx."

Many Morrisanians whom Professor Naison has interviewed say he has helped reclaim some of the luster of the neighborhood's past. "The history of the Bronx has not been told from our perspective," Mr. Gumbs said. "We know that the Bronx has always been a borough made up of different ethnic groups. But when it comes to the story of African-Americans in the Bronx, there have been gaps."

To help with some of the research into jazz history, Professor Naison hired Maxine Gordon, the 64-year-old widow of the renowned tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon and a doctoral candidate in African diaspora history at New York University. Ms. Gordon never spent an evening at Club 845, which saw its popularity decline in 1968 after a club worker was found fatally beaten inside, but one of the first things she discovered when poring through old newspaper ads about the place was that her late husband regularly played there in the 1940's.

A Great Day in the South Bronx

The project got another boost last year when Professor Naison came into possession of a historical gold mine that had been hidden away in a New Jersey attic. David Carp, a 55-year-old freelance orchestra librarian who was researching the history of Latin music and social dance, had amassed an extensive collection of articles, ads and memorabilia on Bronx nightclubs, including Club 845 and the Blue Morocco, and he offered to donate the material to the Bronx County Historical Society.

To collect it, Professor Naison drove his silver Mazda minivan to Mr. Carp's house in Leonia, carried more than two dozen 50-pound boxes down from the attic, and accidentally backed his vehicle into a wall on the way out, causing auto damage that cost $1,500 to repair.

He remembers it as a great day for the project.

The documents painted a vivid picture of a little-known chapter of South Bronx history, the moment in the 1940's and 1950's when Latin music thrived alongside jazz in nightclubs in Morrisania and the surrounding neighborhoods. Latin bandleaders such as Mr. Puente, Tito Rodriguez and Johnny Pacheco all lived here at one time, and local clubs such as the Hunts Point Palace and the Tropicana fueled the rhythms of mambo and salsa.

Several black Morrisania residents remember dancing to Latin rhythms at the Royal Mansion, a dance hall at 1315 Boston Road. Mr. Jenkins, the pianist at the Blue Morocco, who lived around the corner from the club, played his first gig there.

The Royal Mansion occupied the second floor of a building that also included a movie theater. But the original structure was torn down two years ago. In its place sits a three-story tan-brick building, its bright red awning announcing a soon-to-open Family Dollar store.

More than a physical structure was lost when the Royal Mansion was destroyed. "That's one of the sad things about it," said Elena Martinez, a folklorist at City Lore, a nonprofit arts group, who has researched the history of the borough's Latin clubs. "That's why it's important to hold onto the history in other ways. You don't have the physical spaces to hold onto as a reminder."

Survivors and Strugglers

On a recent afternoon, Professor Naison pulled his minivan over near the intersection of East 168th Street and Boston Road, got out of the car, and stood on the sidewalk to trace yet another chapter in the history of the music birthed in Morrisania. It was on these blocks, in the mid-1950's, that doo-wop became one of the big sounds.

Inside the majestic neo-Gothic building that is Morris High School, now occupied by five small schools, a young man named William Lindsay performed in 1954 at the school's senior talent show. He went on to sing with the Crickets, the original members of which were from Morrisania, and were a favorite of doo-wop fans for their 1953 ballads "You're Mine" and "I'm Not the One You Love."

Another popular doo-wop group from the neighborhood, the Chimes, got their start winning talent shows at Public School 99, an institution on Stebbins Avenue in Morrisania that Arthur Crier, a onetime member of the group, called "the Motown of the Bronx."

The Chords, the group that recorded the 1954 doo-wop classic "Sh-Boom," attended Morris High. And the Chantels, who went on to record the 1957 hit "Maybe," grew up singing together in the choir of St. Anthony of Padua, a few blocks away.

When Professor Naison returned to his minivan, he put on an old Nancy Wilson CD. Her voice provided an unlikely soundtrack, filling the van with sweet harmony, while outside the windows, the sweetness evaporated into the grating harshness of city life: car alarms, sirens, the rumble of the elevated railroad.

The hilly, graffiti-pocked neighborhoods south and east of Yankee Stadium — Morrisania, Hunts Point, Melrose, Mott Haven, Longwood — are known more for the fires that raged in the 1970's and the random violence that still explodes there today than for the music they gave birth to. Yet musical creativity grew out of — in spite of — such violence. Or, as Professor Naison put it, "The Bronx is more than the sum total of its tragedies."

It was in the late 1970's, at the asphalt playground of Public School 63, known as 63 Park, at Boston Road and East 169th Street, that a skinny teenager named Joseph Saddler, later more famous as Grandmaster Flash, used to set up his turntables and stereo equipment for parties known as park jams. Grand Wizard Theodore, an early hip-hop innovator credited with inventing scratching — the rubbing of a record to a beat by a D.J., the squeaky sound of which has become synonymous with rap — once told an interviewer that the first time he ever "got on the turntables" in public was at 63 Park.

Occasionally, the D.J.'s used electricity from the light poles outside park jams, borrowing the city's high voltage to create some of their own. Had these outdoor concerts taken place in a wealthier neighborhood, it's likely that the police would have moved fast to stop the al fresco improvisations. But given the gravity of the neighborhood's problems, the police had far more serious things to worry about than noise, and the music had a chance to thrive.

The parties soon moved indoors, to Morrisania clubs like the Black Door and the Dixie. Charlie Ahearn, an independent filmmaker whose cult movie "Wild Style," filmed largely in the Morrisania area in the early 1980's, captured hip-hop culture in its infancy, said it was important to remember that the global phenomenon of rap had its roots in the despair of the South Bronx. "It came up in a very hard atmosphere," Mr. Ahearn said of hip-hop. "Everyone that I knew from the hip-hop scene were survivors and strugglers."

A few years later, in the mid-1980's, the men's shelter in the Franklin Avenue Armory, off Third Avenue, was the meeting place of two men who would eventually form an influential rap duo called Boogie Down Productions: the social worker Scott Sterling, a k a Scott La Rock, and the homeless rapper Kris Parker, now known as KRS-One and considered an intellectual in the rap world. Mr. Sterling was fatally shot outside the Highbridge Garden Homes on University Avenue in 1987.

On a recent afternoon, the only person causing a scene at 63 Park was a harried-looking woman selling $1.25 cherry ices in tiny cups from a cart. The schoolyard behind the red-brick building looks no different from hundreds in the city: white basketball backboards, a bright blue mural of a diploma painted onto a nearby wall.

These days, as the music of choice — Latin-flavored reggaeton — blares from car stereos, it is difficult to imagine such musical innovation coming from these gritty streets. Sneakers dangle from block after block of power lines. Curls of razor wire decorate the fences surrounding apartment buildings. The old plastic bags that get caught in their grasp flap in the wind like flags. People walk quickly, carrying bags of groceries, picking up their children from school, talking on their cellphones.

On Lyman Place, the little street where Mr. Monk used to show up in his overcoat, a mural has been spray-painted on a concrete-block wall, a memorial to someone who has died. People line up their empty liquor bottles at the base of the mural in tribute. The spray paint reads, "R.I.P."