If you walk down Avenue B on a Tuesday night sometime after 9 p.m. — past Tompkins Square Park, past the bodegas and the wine bars and the people walking small dogs — and you stop at the corner of 14th Street, you’ll hear something that sounds, for a second, like it shouldn’t be there. A clarinet, maybe. A muted trumpet. The skittering brush-on-snare of a drummer playing very, very quietly. Traditional jazz, the way it sounded in 1925, leaking out the open door of a bar.
That’s Mona’s. And that’s the Mona’s Hot Four. And if you know about this, you know about one of the best-kept late-night secrets in New York City.
The Bar That Doesn’t Try
Mona’s sits at 224 Avenue B, on a stretch of the East Village that hasn’t fully surrendered to the bottle-service economy. The bar itself is what people mean when they say “dive” without sneering about it: dim, friendly, a little battered, with a pool table in the back and a jukebox that, by most accounts, is one of the better jukeboxes in lower Manhattan. There’s also Skee Ball, which feels like a small miracle.
It is not a destination cocktail bar. It is not a craft-beer paradise. It is a neighborhood drinking spot with cheap drinks and old wood and the kind of light that flatters anyone who walks in. People go to Mona’s to talk and to drink and, on Tuesday nights, to listen.
Tuesdays Are the Whole Point
Since June 2007, the clarinetist Dennis Lichtman has led the Mona’s Hot Four — a rotating crew of New York’s best traditional-jazz players — in a weekly Tuesday-night session that begins at 9 p.m. and runs, no exaggeration, until 4 a.m.
That’s not a typo. Four hours of music, sometimes more, deep into Wednesday morning, with players cycling on and off the bandstand as the night gets later and weirder and looser. The music is what was once called “hot jazz” — pre-swing, pre-bebop, the New Orleans and Chicago and 52nd Street sound from the 1920s and early ’30s. Think Sidney Bechet. Think Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five. Think the kind of music that built jazz before “jazz” became respectable.
The catch — and it is the best catch in New York — is that there is no cover. Walk in, order a drink, find a stool, and listen. The musicians work for tips and the love of the music. The crowd is a mix of neighborhood regulars, jazz nerds who have been coming for fifteen years, NYU students who heard about it from somebody’s older brother, and, increasingly, young swing dancers who treat the corner near the band as an unofficial dance floor.
The Mona’s Tuesday night has been described, accurately, as “ground zero for an emerging late-night scene of young swing and traditional jazz players.” Almost every working trad-jazz musician under forty in New York has either played that gig or sat in. It is one of the last regular weekly jam sessions in the city that takes itself this seriously without taking itself seriously at all.
What It Feels Like at 1 A.M.
Earlier in the night — say, between 9 and 11 — Mona’s on a Tuesday feels like a small, lively jazz club. The band is locked in. People are paying attention. You can find a seat without much trouble.
By midnight, the room is fuller. The drinks are flowing a little harder. The musicians are stretching out, taking longer solos, calling tunes nobody recognizes. The energy lifts in a specific way that anyone who has spent time in late-night jazz rooms will recognize immediately.
By 2 a.m., it’s somewhere else again. The crowd is thinner but more committed. The players who showed up to sit in have arrived from gigs at other clubs. Someone is leaning against the wall with a cocktail in one hand and a cornet case in the other, waiting their turn. The music gets riskier. The room gets warmer. You start to understand why this Tuesday-night thing has lasted almost two decades, and why no other bar in the city has managed to clone it.
How to Visit
Address: 224 Avenue B, New York, NY 10009 (between East 13th and 14th)
Nearest Subway: First Avenue (L) — three-block walk east; or Astor Place (6) — about ten minutes west
Hot Jazz Night: Tuesdays, 9 p.m. to roughly 4 a.m.
Cover: None — tip the band generously
Drinks: Cheap by Manhattan standards. Cash works. Cards work. Either is fine.
Reservations: No — first come, first served
Why This Matters
Live music in New York costs money. A night at Smalls Jazz Club in Greenwich Village runs you a cover and a drink minimum. A night at the Village Vanguard or the Blue Note is a real expense. Both are extraordinary rooms — but they are not free, and they are not 4 a.m.
Mona’s on a Tuesday is something else entirely. It is the kind of New York thing that doesn’t really exist anywhere else: a neighborhood bar where, for free, on a weeknight, you can hear some of the best traditional-jazz players in America play for four hours straight. The musicians get paid in tips and beers and the chance to play with each other. The audience gets one of the great deals in the city. The bar gets a Tuesday-night crowd that, in any other establishment, would be impossible to manufacture.
It’s the kind of thing that ought to exist in every city and basically exists in New York alone.
One More Thing
If you go — and you should — go without a plan. Don’t try to make it the centerpiece of a night out. Don’t bring a group of eight people. Don’t show up at 9:01 expecting a table. Drift in late, alone or with one other person, when you’ve already had dinner somewhere nearby and the evening is starting to feel like it wants to keep going. Order a drink. Stand or sit, whichever the room allows. Let the music do its slow, gorgeous work.
And then, around 2 a.m., when the band is in the middle of “St. James Infirmary” and the whole room has gone quiet because the trumpet player is doing something nobody expected, you’ll realize that Mona’s on a Tuesday is one of the secret reasons people stay in New York. Not the skyline, not the museums, not the restaurants. This. A bar, a band, no cover, and the sound of hot jazz drifting out an open door onto Avenue B at one o’clock in the morning.
For more late-night NYC after-dark coverage, see our guides to the speakeasy inside the 50th Street subway station and Apotheke at 9 Doyers.
