Mona’s bar is part of a series of tidbits from the chapters of my book Bars, Taverns and Dives New Yorkers Love, published by Rizzoli. You can order it from Powell’s, Amazon, Rizzoli, and Barnes & Noble. Signed prints of all the bars in the book are available here.
What sets Mona’s bar apart is the music. It’s home base to a couple of diehard communities of musicians and their fans, who descend like pigeons on breadcrumbs every Monday and Tuesday.
Mondays are for bluegrass. Devotees of Bill Monroe, The Stanley Brothers, Flatt, Fleck, Scruggs and Skaggs converge weekly around 9:30 p.m. to pick, grin, hoot and/or holler till the wee hours and the moon is o’er the mountain. Every week, guitarist Rick Snell hosts this open session featuring Appalachian fiddle music, bluegrass, and old school country.
Tuesday nights from 11 p.m. on are for old-timey jazz, the traditional stuff that flowered in New Orleans in the early 1900s, moved up the river to St. Louis and Chicago, then hopped over to New York and Europe in the 1920s. Think Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sidney Bechet. Bouncy music with a syncopated swing, heavy on brass, clarinet, upright bass, and piano. We’re talking the kind of lively jazz you’d hear in a wacky Woody Allen “caper” scene, not the abstract skwonk jazz of the late 1950s, sounding like a nightmare soundtrack for Hollywood’s idea of a heroin trip, and definitely not “the smooth jazz of the ‘70s, ‘80s and today” that you hear on lame radio stations.
Tuesday night jazz has become quite a thing at Mona’s bar since Dennis Lichtman got it going in 2007. At first it was just a few musicians showing up after nearby gigs to jam, with a handful of people in the bar listening. But the timing was significant. The trad jazz scene was bubbling up in New York around then, with younger people getting into it, both as musicians and listeners.
Now, Lichtman and the Mona’s Hot Four (as the core group is called) play from 11 to midnight as the crowd builds, then open up the jam to other musicians, some of whom show up in coats and ties and dresses and even tuxedos after gigs with the likes of Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks at Iguana on 54th Street. Sometimes up to 30 musicians will cycle through during a session, joining the circle for a while before heading home. The jam lasts until around 3 a.m. “It’s been ruining my Wednesdays for a while, man,” Lichtman jokes. “I don’t plan anything too early on Wednesdays.”
Next up:
McSorley’s Old Ale House, one of New York’s finest, and another chapter of my book Bars, Taverns and Dives New Yorkers Love, which you can order right here. Limited-edition signed prints of the bars are available here.