A bit more than three years into his exile from New York City, St. Elmo Sylvester Hope sat for an interview with Down Beat magazine in Los Angeles. He was a diminutive, softspoken man who looked like what his mother had once dreamed he’d become—a professor. But he was actually a working musician who seemed to be on the cusp of fame after years of obscurity. He’d just contributed to a celebrated album called The Fox, and his most recent release as a bandleader had prompted a reviewer to declare him “a new jazz star.”
People liked Hope. He was charming, generous with his musical insights, funny when the occasion called for it, and endearingly quirky. Sometimes, apropos of nothing, he’d ask friends to solve quadratic equations. But none of those qualities were on display when he spoke to Down Beat. It was the only interview of any length and substance he ever gave, and he used it to tear down California’s music scene.
“The weather is great,” he told Down Beat’s West Coast editor, John Tynan, “and there are a few people I dig.” But his praise ended there. “The musicians out here thrive on envy and jealousy,” he said. “Their motto is, ‘It’s better to receive than to give.’ And damn near every one of ’em is overrated for what he can do. They’re all, or nearly all, jivin’.”
Thirty-seven years old that day, Hope spent his formative years woodshedding with two of jazz’s finest—Earl “Bud” Powell and Thelonious Monk. The three were so close, they communicated using a sign language of their own creation—the flick of a finger, a jutted chin, the occasional “dig it” for confirmation. And when their schedules permitted, they’d spend days and nights meandering about New York City from apartment to apartment, bar to bar, searching for pianos to occupy—deconstructing standards as they roamed, testing new phrases, struggling to impress each other.
By some measures, Hope was thriving in California. He was performing regularly, had recently made some of his finest recordings, and he and his partner, Bertha, had just had a daughter. But during his interview, he openly yearned for his hometown. “This is no place to try to learn anything,” he said. If young musicians “want to learn, let them go back to New York—both for inspiration and brotherly love. They’ll hear more things happening, and they’ll find young musicians there, 14 and 15 years old, who make the musicians here look like clowns.”
Tynan wrote up the interview for the January 5, 1961, issue of Down Beat and ran it with the headline bitter hope. In the text, he tried to dull the sting of Hope’s words by explaining that he spoke out of “disgust,” not “anger or resentment.” Hope is known to share his knowledge freely, Tynan said, and he feels his “generosity” isn’t appreciated. But he said nothing about why Hope was living in California if he disdained it so fulsomely, or why a man he described as a “modern jazz pioneer” was still scrounging for gigs and relatively obscure.
“Frustrations” have “complicated [Hope’s] existence” recently, and he’s been “beset through the years with crippling personal problems,” Tynan wrote. But aside from those unsatisfying euphemisms, he didn’t explain the source of Hope’s discontent.
On November 24, 1940, Elmo stepped off the subway at 110th Street in Harlem and headed toward his family’s apartment at 1663 Madison Avenue. It was around three in the morning and the sidewalks were bathed in the incandescent glow of the city’s streetlights. He was seventeen years old, and the eldest of nine. His parents, Simeon and Gertrude, had encouraged all of their children to learn instruments, and several had—but Elmo was the family’s prodigy. He’d been training as a pianist since he was seven, and his mother had long hoped he’d become a professor someday, or join a classical orchestra. But that was her dream, not Elmo’s, and he had recently dropped out of school to pursue jazz—starting himself down a path that would lead him through the city’s bars, clubs, and dance halls, not toward university.
Elmo walked up Eighth Avenue and was about to turn toward home, and his bed, when he heard someone yell, “The cops are coming, you better run!”
A moment later, a pair of officers named Brady and Ferraro appeared and saw bodies in flight—dashing into the gray distance, whipping around corners, behind cars. Amid the tumult, they spotted a thin, young Black man sprinting north. He stood only five feet, four inches tall and weighed about 125 pounds. They decided to pursue.
Elmo reached the corner of 112th Street with Brady and Ferraro close behind, and when he spotted the door to 2099 Eighth Avenue, he ducked inside. Brady followed and raised his revolver. Elmo turned and, a newspaper later reported, “reached into his pocket as if for a gun.” Then Brady fired and hit Elmo in the back, dropping him near the building’s entrance.
Elmo was transported to Sydenham Hospital, and Gertrude Hope spoke with someone there who said her son had nearly been paralyzed but that he was “resting fair.” Elmo went under the knife, successfully, and while he recovered, he was charged with assault, attempted robbery, and—though no weapon had been found on him after he was shot—violating the Sullivan Act, a gun control law.
While Elmo healed and the district attorney’s office prepared its case against him, the New York Amsterdam News heard about his shooting and connected it to a pattern of police violence. The first article to mention him was headlined another youth shot by policeman. It referred to his case as “the third such tragedy this month” and described the two preceding it. The first involved Adolphus Brice, a thirty-year-old father of five who was shot four times—three bullets in the back, one in the head—as he ascended the stairs toward his apartment. Fred Trimmer was the second. Arrested on a morals charge, he was taken to the police station on 152nd Street for questioning and then shot in the gut, supposedly after he tried to escape.
The Amsterdam News’s account was accurate, but narrow and cautious—a longer timeline would have connected Elmo’s shooting to many more in the area.
In February of 1940, a Black officer named John Holt was summoned by a neighbor who said someone was trying to break into an apartment in their building. He grabbed his service revolver and chased the burglar, and when two radio car officers arrived, they shot Holt, killing him. In March, a man named Harry Small was shot twice when he “failed to obey” a command to halt, and in April, Arthur Stanley was shot and killed after escaping from a police cruiser. During a “march against crime” in May, the Harlem police shot four people in a week. There was Mario Caneckil, a sixteen-year-old who was killed on the rooftop of an East Harlem tenement after allegedly robbing someone. And then there was Clarence Wyde, a theater usher who stole a suit from the home of a police officer by convincing the man’s maid to hand it over. The police chased him and opened fire on a street corner—hitting Wyde in the back, and shooting two pedestrians.
A nineteen-year-old named Theodore Walker was near a street fight in September when he saw the police approaching and ran, just as Elmo would two months later. He was shot in the back but managed to talk a taxi driver into taking him to Harlem Hospital. He was arrested there, joining Wallace Fraser in custody. Fraser had been spotted in a stolen car and tried to drive off when the police approached. As he raced away, an officer jumped on the car’s running board and fired into the passenger compartment, hitting Fraser in the arm.
And those assaults—all in a single year and within the confines of a couple square miles—were part of a longer story of police violence in the area.
Just five years earlier, a conflict that began at a store near the Apollo Theater escalated when an all-white compliment of police arrived. Fighting broke out, and people streamed down 125th Street in both directions—smashing windows, looting stores, lighting fires. By the time the uprising ended, two hundred businesses had been damaged, one hundred and twenty-five people had been arrested, one hundred people had been injured, and three Black men were dead.
A mayoral commission tasked with investigating the riot’s causes later heard testimony about assaults, false arrests, and harassment of interracial couples. In its report, the commission wrote, “The insecurity of the individual in Harlem against police aggression is one of the most potent causes for the existing hostility to authority . . . . Police aggressions and brutalities more than any other factor weld the people together for mass action.”
Elmo’s parents rallied as his court date approached. They hired an attorney and threatened to sue the officer who shot Elmo, and when Elmo’s case was called in Judge Harry Andrews’s courtroom on January 14, 1941, that civil action loomed over the proceedings. So did the police shootings throughout 1940, the riot in 1935, and the years of violence preceding it.
Elmo had pled not guilty and maintained his innocence. His story was simple: He’d been heading home when he heard someone yell. Then he ran. But the police couldn’t settle on a story. Their initial report stated that Elmo and some other children had tried to rob “three white men.” But when no victims were identified and the Amsterdam News pressed, the report was amended. The second version claimed that Elmo and some other children were “fighting some white boys.” Then, in court, the officers who shot Elmo reverted to their initial story. They testified that he’d been one member of a gang trying to rob three white men.
The judge heard their testimony. But when the district attorney failed to provide accomplices, victims, or a weapon, he dismissed the case.
The conclusion of Elmo’s legal trouble was mentioned in the press, but only once. News of more recent police assaults soon eclipsed his story. The same edition of the Amsterdam News that reported on Judge Andrews’s decision also contained a short piece about a robbery suspect who’d been shot in the hand. The following month, another seventeen-year-old was shot by the police in a vacant lot on East 102nd Street—and died.
There was no formal school for jazz in 1941, or conservatories that taught their students to play or compose it. No universities offered courses in its history or sponsored lectures on its future, so anyone who wanted to become a jazz musician had to work their way up through an informal system of apprenticeships. No two were the same, but as a rule they required young musicians to accept any job they could find and spend their off-hours hanging around bars and clubs, hoping for a chance to sit in and impress the more experienced players onstage.
Elmo began his apprenticeship when he left high school in June of 1940 and resumed it in earnest when the charges against him were dismissed. It was a tenuous way to live—one that came with no guarantee of reliable income or recognition, and whose sacrifices could only be justified by the few who couldn’t imagine doing anything else with their lives. But at least in Elmo’s case, it wasn’t a lonesome path. A close friend had also just begun his apprenticeship.
Elmo and Earl Rudolph “Bud” Powell probably met in grade school, and as adolescents they spent their free time practicing together and listening to classical recordings. Powell was an eerily quiet child—awkward, and so focused on his art that he rarely talked about anything else. But his talent was so profound, his eccentricities were overlooked. He started playing piano at five or six and by the time he was ten, it’s said, he could reproduce just about anything he heard—classical, popular, jazz. If you asked him to play Bach, he’d ask what part of Bach’s life you were interested in, but his first public appearance was at a rent party in Sugar Hill, where he played stride piano.
Elmo was about a year older, but Powell was the precocious one. In his early teens, he grew a thin mustache, began sporting dress shirts and ties, and gravitated to Harlem’s bars and clubs. He spent so many nights performing in the spring of 1939 that he was absent from school about half the time, and though he enrolled that fall, he didn’t really attend. The following year, he joined a band led by his older brother—Skeets Powell and His Jolly Swingsters—and afterward, he never considered being anything but a working musician. The year Elmo and Powell joined the city’s nightclub scene was a hard one for young Black musicians from Harlem. The Great Depression and the end of Prohibition had each taken a toll on the neighborhood’s nightlife, so work was hard to find and often ignoble. Gin mills. Rent parties. Dance halls. And a place called Mack’s that was infested with bedbugs. It was a grim landscape, but they did both manage to find work. Bud was hired by a Coney Island club called Indian Village, and Elmo ended up in the city’s taxi dance halls.
There were dozens of them at the time. Some occupied grand rooms with stadium seating; others were crammed into grim little rooms with folding chairs. But all offered women. They’d be arranged just beyond the entrance—arms crossed and bored, or eager and coquettish, depending on their finances and their mood. Once a patron entered a dance hall, they’d purchase tickets and select a woman and she’d rise, collect her fee, and dance with them—a dime a ticket, a ticket a song.
And Elmo, with his head full of Bach and Chopin and new ideas about jazz, would work the keys as couples swayed and a buzzer sounded regularly to signal it was time to hand over another ticket. It was tedious work, and he kept his mind occupied by playing songs as written through their first chorus, then making what he could of the chords afterward—something for the customers, a little something for himself.
When New York City purchased Rikers Island in 1884, it was a picturesque sliver of land shaped a bit like a conjoined semicolon punctuating the flow of the East River. That changed, though, when the city decided to enlarge it. To create new land, they brought decommissioned ships to its shores, scuttled them, dumped soil and stone atop the wrecks, and then began sloughing horse manure, street sweepings, and incinerator ashes into the surrounding waters until the island had grown fivefold.
Early in its expansion, imprisoned workers were detailed to Rikers and tasked with fortifying its shores and raising a prison—but the product of their labors more closely resembled an earthbound purgatory. A trash fire moldered beneath the island’s surface for eighteen years, heating the soil so that snow wouldn’t stick even when the shores on either side of the river were blanketed in sacral white. Trash near the surface combusted spontaneously, releasing fumes that induced “violent nausea” when they drifted to Manhattan, and giant rats proliferated. The city tried eradicating them using traps, poison, and dogs. But nothing worked. They gassed the island in 1930, as if it were a battlefield, but that failed, too.
When Elmo reached Rikers, he was assigned a drab gray uniform, a cell, and a work assignment. The trash dumps were closed by then, and the rats were being held at bay, but the island still reeked of decay and moldering manure and work was still compulsory. Some people spent their time unloading fifty-pound bags of food from the ships that delivered them each day. Others worked in the nursery, tending to trees and bushes destined for the city’s parks. And an unlucky few shoveled coal, or were sent to Hart Island to dig graves at the city’s potter’s field.
But Elmo was assigned to the band. The jail’s chaplain had arranged it so that musicians could spend their days practicing, and performing hymns during services. It was the best job on the island, and over time, some of New York’s finest jazz talents worked it. A few years after Elmo joined, Jackie McLean did, too. The band had taken on a different form by then but still pulled from a deep pool of talent. Ike Quebec, who recorded and arranged for Blue Note, was the bandleader—Freddie Douglas, an alto player from the Bronx, was a member, and so was the drummer Roy Porter. “It was a who’s who on Rikers Island,” McLean said.
While Elmo was in the band, he was joined by a young saxophone player named Sonny Rollins. In October of 1951, Rollins and two friends had taken a cab to Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington in the middle of the night. They were users and had a vague plan to rob a store, but before they could follow through, or drift home, an officer decided they looked suspicious, stopped them, and found a gun on Rollins. Eventually, he took a plea and received a sentence of one to three years.
There was no bridge connecting Rikers to the rest of the city in 1952, only ferries. People incarcerated there were allowed to write one letter per day, and visits were every other week—one hour per. The isolation was intense and unremitting, and Elmo and Rollins dealt with it by playing and composing.
While on Rikers they coauthored two songs. One is the swinging, medium-tempo “Bellarosa”—a sultry, swaggering tune meant to evoke the confident stride of the woman Elmo was then seeing, Rose Mary. The other is “Carvin’ the Rock,” a fast-tempo piece whose title contains two sly references. It was a nod both to Charlie Parker’s “Carvin’ the Bird” and the place of its birth. Rikers was, and is, known as “The Rock,” and musicians sent there sometimes explained their absence from the scene by saying they’d been away, “carvin’ the rock.”
When Elmo’s Blue Note album was released in April, Ralph Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle raved that he’d “adapted the rapid and complex style of Bud Powell to his own ideas” and emerged “as a jazz pianist of great talent in his own right.” Down Beat gave him a four-star review, and less than a week later, Elmo violated the terms of his probation so that he could record for Blue Note again.
He and Rose Mary rented a room in a residential hotel on West Fifty-third Street, and when he failed to report to his probation officer in Massachusetts, a warrant was issued for his arrest. But despite the looming threat of incarceration, Elmo worked steadily in 1954 and 1955. He recorded six originals with a quintet that featured Art Blakey on drums for his second Blue Note release. And afterward, he was in the studio regularly. He recorded with Sonny Rollins, with Lou Donaldson again, and with Jackie McLean. And he helmed three albums for Prestige Records—Meditations ( five originals and six standards, played in a contemplative mood), Hope Meets Foster (a collaboration with Frank Foster, taking a break from Count Basie’s band to show off with Elmo), and Informal Jazz (a blowing session, where Elmo cedes the floor to the saxophone greats John Coltrane and Hank Mobley).
By the end of 1956, Elmo had produced five albums as a leader, and more than two dozen of his originals had been recorded. It was a remarkable run of productivity after years of obscurity, and critics took note. They compared him to Monk or, more often, to Powell—both of whom had, by then, become far more prominent than Elmo—but they all agreed he was no imitator. “This guy can swing with anybody, and he also plays very interesting things,” Ralph Gleason enthused. He is “at last starting to receive the recognition due him,” Ira Gitler announced.
But outside the studio, Elmo struggled. He still couldn’t obtain a cabaret card, and his recording income was paltry—Prestige paid him $300 per album, and less than $100 when he appeared as a sideman. He rejoined Dud Bascomb’s band, in New Jersey, and to get by, he returned to Massachusetts at least once and washed dishes at a hotel. And because there was a warrant for his arrest, he lived in fear of the police. Only luck had kept him out of jail since he returned to the city to record, and his supply ran out on October 27, 1956.
Early that morning, Elmo was near the corner of 108th Street and Broadway when an officer stopped him on the street, searched him, and found four glassine envelopes of heroin. In court a few weeks later, Elmo appeared at a hearing to answer for absconding from probation. His defense attorney pleaded his case and asked the judge to be lenient. “The defendant is a good musician and he is recording now and has been recording and I show you one of his old ads,” he said. “He is one of these unfortunate fellows who uses drugs.” The judge was sympathetic, but the courts had no power to offer treatment—only uncontrolled withdrawal in custody. “There is a way to cure a man like this, but it is the old story and I refuse to get excited about it again because when I think of it, I get angry,” Judge Capozzoli said, “to think of all the money we spend for many other things and we never have the good sense to spend some real money to cure these men who are really sick, rather than criminals. “However, I have to work with the tools that are given to me, and under the circumstances I have no choice. Probation is revoked and the defendant is sentenced to six months in the workhouse.”
The city’s workhouse was, by then, located on Hart Island—a mile-long sliver of land that’s home to New York City’s potter’s field. On the north side was a monument to the dead that bore the image of a cross and the word peace. At its base was a mass grave that was home, at the time, to about a half million bodies. Nearby was a Nike missile base operated by the US Army.
There were no easy assignments on Hart. Some people dug graves, some dealt with interment; others handled the empty caskets. Incarcerated men worked in the kitchen, too, or cleaned the cells, but there was no orchestra, little entertainment, and no relief from the sense of inevitability that came from living in a graveyard. “Eight out of ten keep coming back,” Ed Dros, the man who ran the burial crews, claimed. “A lot of them are old timers who have outlived their families and their jobs and they soon learn that the best way to spend the cold winter months is to get arrested and come here.”
When Elmo was released from Hart in 1957, he had nowhere to go. The probation department had reached out to Rose Mary after he was arrested but she didn’t respond. And he was wasn’t welcome at the family apartment on Lyman Place. On a recent visit, his mother had tossed a pot of water at him from her window when he rang her doorbell.
So, at Monk’s suggestion, Elmo went to the East Village and asked David Amram to put him up. Amram was a young polymath whose apartment was one location where a loosely affiliated group of musicians and artists gathered to trade ideas. He played French horn, piano, guitar, and penny whistle, and though he was attending school, he was also working with Charles Mingus and spending a great deal of time in bars and coffeehouses.
Amram welcomed Elmo into his home, and that spring, Elmo drifted in and out as needed. He was “a little magician,” Amram recalled, and when other musicians stopped by, he’d hold court and they’d listen reverently—pianists and horn players, in particular. When the two men were alone, they’d take turns at Amram’s piano and talk, and for decades afterward Amram sometimes found himself, without meaning to, playing a figure Elmo composed idly that spring.
Amram cherished those moments, but his favorite memory from Elmo’s time at his apartment was the night they hung out with Monk. The three of them stayed up until dawn, then made their way to Central Park. When the park’s boat rentals opened, they were first in line, and Amram rowed them about while Elmo and Monk talked about Chopin, cracked jokes, and reminisced about their tenures with touring bands.
Elmo’s sojourn at Amram’s was a welcome moment of equanimity, but before he wore out his welcome, he left and decided to flee New York. The fear of narcotics that had taken hold of the city in 1950 had heightened since. In 1954, the Daily News offered a reward of $250 to any reader who provided information that led to the “arrest and conviction of anyone selling narcotics.” And that year, and the year following, about four thousand users ended up in New York City jails. In 1956, the number rose to 4,886, Elmo being one of them—and the effect on the jazz scene was devastating.
Jackie McLean was also arrested for possession in 1956, and he lost his cabaret card. Asked, years later, how many musicians were in the same situation in that era, he said, “Everybody. Everybody. There were very few cats that didn’t get caught up in that thing, Dizzy [Gillespie] being one of them. But the list—you could practically name anybody from that period. [Col]Trane, Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, Kenny Drew, Walter Bishop, Arthur Taylor, Max [Roach].”1 He could have added Monk’s name to that list as well, and Powell’s—and Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Billy Higgins, Chet Baker, Elvin Jones, Anita O’Day, Freddie Douglas, Ike Quebec, Freddie Redd, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and scores of others whose arrests were never publicized.
The New York Police Department’s focus on drug arrests, and its control over cabaret cards, gave it, arguably, more influence over the development of the city’s jazz scene than any other institution. No single club, label, or manager had nearly as much power to decide which musicians could perform and earn a living, who could share stages and collaborate, or whose ideas audiences were exposed to. The department had been a malign presence in Elmo’s life since his shooting seventeen years earlier, and in 1957, he decided to escape their reach.
That April, he and Philly Joe Jones hired on to tour west with Chet Baker, and when they reached Los Angeles in July, Elmo stayed.
Excerpted from The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music. Copyright ©2026 by Colin Asher. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
I’ve quoted McLean accurately, but I’m not certain that his claims are accurate in every case. It’s not clear, for instance, that Coltrane had trouble securing a cabaret card. ↩
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