Robin D.G. Kelley came to jazz through labor history, and he has never left. The Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA is best known in jazz circles for his definitive 2009 biography of Thelonious Monk, but his approach to the music is unlike any other biographer’s. Where most jazz histories focus on aesthetics — the development of a style, the arc of a career — Kelley follows the money, the union grievances, the daily economic reality of making a life as a Black musician in mid-twentieth-century America.
“Coming from a labor history perspective, and having had a stepfather who’s a jazz musician,” he has said, “you actually see how playing music, improvised music, American music, it is a proletarian life.” The Monk biography, all 600-plus pages of it, is built on that insight. It traces not just the harmonic innovations and the eccentric public persona but the battles with New York Musicians Union Local 802, the years of economic precarity, the specific difficulty of surviving as a truly original artist in a market that didn’t know what to do with him.
Jazz Diggs: Most historians who write about jazz come out of music criticism. You came out of labor history and the history of Black radical movements. How does that change what you see?
The thing that strikes me when I read most jazz history is what’s missing. Most historians of jazz only look at Local 802 records to see if someone had a gig, but not at whether or not they had a grievance. It doesn’t occur to them. So to me, that thread of labor organizing and labor democracy just runs through everything I do.
With Monk, the labor element was really, really important. What a struggle it was for him to survive and to keep his family together. How little money he made. I try to follow the money, look at the labor conditions. That was a revelation for a lot of readers — they were surprised that I, known as a historian of political movements, would write a biography of a musician. But once you start looking at musicians as workers, everything looks different.
Jazz history tends to tell these stories as individual genius narratives. Monk the eccentric. Miles the iconoclast. Does that framing do damage?
It absolutely does damage, because it individualizes what are actually collective struggles. It also tends to strip the music of its political content. When you tell the story as a lone genius story, you don’t have to ask: what were the conditions that produced this genius? What was the social world this person moved in? What were they arguing about, economically, politically, personally?
And in Monk’s case, this matters enormously. He was surrounded by people — Nellie, his wife and manager, his neighborhood in San Juan Hill before it was demolished for Lincoln Center, the musicians who showed up at his apartment and played through the night. The genius was real. But it didn’t happen in isolation. It happened in a community that was under economic pressure, facing racism at every level of the industry, and still producing some of the most sophisticated music in American history.
Your book Africa Speaks, America Answers looks at jazz in the context of the African diaspora, specifically during decolonization. That’s a context most jazz histories completely ignore.
Jazz has always been a global music, but the way it gets written about is usually very national, very American. And the American story it gets attached to tends to be the civil rights story — which is real and important — but it obscures other stories.
What was happening in the 1950s and ’60s, when American jazz musicians were traveling to Ghana, to Nigeria, to South Africa, to Cuba? What were those conversations? Randy Weston going to Morocco, living there, building a club there. Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln making We Insist! Freedom Now Suite in 1960, the same year that seventeen African countries became independent. These are not coincidences. The music was in dialogue with global struggles for decolonization, and that dialogue gets erased when you treat jazz as a purely American story.
You’ve written about art and culture as a form of what you call “renewal” — distinct from being the expression of a political ideology. Can you explain that distinction?
This is important to me. I’m not interested in reducing art to politics. The great artists were not making agitprop. Monk wasn’t writing manifestos. Coltrane wasn’t writing protest songs, even when A Love Supreme or Alabama had obvious political resonances.
What I mean by renewal is something more fundamental. Art gives people who are living under oppression — economic, political, psychological — access to a different sense of what’s possible. It opens up the imagination. It says: the world can sound like this, feel like this, even when everything around you is telling you it can’t.
That’s not a substitute for political organizing. But it’s not nothing, either. The AACM musicians in Chicago, the Black Arts Movement musicians in New York — they understood that making music was not separable from making community, from making a different kind of life. You can’t fully understand the music without understanding that.
What do you think gets most consistently wrong in how jazz is taught and talked about now?
The separation of the music from the conditions that produced it. We teach jazz as a sequence of styles — swing, bebop, hard bop, free jazz, fusion — and we lose the social history that connects those styles. Why did bebop happen? Not just because Charlie Parker was a genius, but because a generation of Black musicians in the 1940s was tired of playing music for white audiences who wouldn’t let them sit at the table. The music was an argument. It was a refusal.
We also lose the labor history. Jazz musicians were workers. They had day jobs, they had union disputes, they had economic precarity that shaped every decision they made about what music to play and for whom. When you put that back in, the music becomes more interesting, not less. You understand the stakes.
Robin D.G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. His books include Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original and Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times.
