The Bronx Music Hall (BMH) celebrates and promotes the unique musical, cultural and artistic heritage of the Bronx. With a mission to disseminate the beauty of the borough’s soundscape, the BMH seeks to present an alternative vision of the Bronx that counters the stereotype of “urban blight” too often linked to its streets.
While the neighborhood surrounding the BMH was ground zero of Bronx’s devastation story, it has also been home to some of the Bronx’s most important and prolific musicians. Although most historians locate the birthplace of hip hop on Sedgwick Avenue in the West Bronx where DJ Kool Herc performed, one of hip hop’s founding DJs, Grandmaster Flash, and the originator of scratching, Grand Wizzard Theodore, innovated close by. A jazz scene that rivaled Harlem’s thrived along nearby Boston Road, with famous jazz musicians Maxine Sullivan, Thelonius Monk, Elmo Hope, and others living in the neighborhood. Music programs in the Bronx’s public schools in the area nurtured famed jazz trumpeter Jimmy Owens, pianist Eddie Palmieri, and percussionist Ray Barretto, who would become National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters. Morrisania, the neighborhood where the BMH is located, was also one of the homes to “doo wop” music, where The Chiffons (“He’s So Fine”), The Chords (“Sh-Boom”), and The Chantels (“Maybe”) all formed in the 1950s and 1960s.
Mambo ruled in Longwood/Hunts Point, where Bronx newcomers from Puerto Rico and Cuba by way of East Harlem sang and played percussion and horns in apartments, in the streets, and in the neighborhoods’ clubs–Hunts Point Palace, Club Tropicoro, Tropicana and Teatro Puerto Rico, where Tito Rodriguez, Tito Puente, Machito and Arsenio Rodriguez, and many others played. This music would come to be called salsa.
Today the surrounding neighborhoods host many West African musicians from the Gambia and Mali, and some of the most famous Dominican bachata musicians attended the local high schools. The Bronx is home to the largest Garifuna community outside of Central America, who perform their distinctive musical style in various venues around the borough ranging from schools to catering halls. The Bronx Music Hall is a home for these and other sounds from the borough, past and present.
In late 2019, the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDco), the creator of the BMH, completed construction on Bronx Commons, a mixed-use affordable housing development that is also home to the new world-class BMH venue. Featuring a 250 seat theater, plazas with amphitheater seating for outdoor performances, classrooms for music and dance instruction and rehearsal, and exhibit space, the BMH is a dynamic center that amplifies and reflects the Bronx’s musical and artistic legacy and talent.
Further Reading:
Salsa Rising: New York Latin Music of the Sixties by Juan Flores. Oxford University Press, 2016.
“A South Bronx Latin Music Tale.” In Centro Journal, by Roberta Singer and Elena Martínez. Volume XVI, No. 1, Spring 2004.