State Honors Marcella Monk Flake

“Kind of surreal” is how Marcella Monk Flake described winning a Connecticut Arts Hero award this year. But in a sense, Flake’s award is the most natural thing in the world, another step in a life steeped in the arts, education, and community since before she was a child.

The state’s official announcement details the myriad of reasons why it is recognizing Flake this year: Flake has spent 37 years teaching and has shaped New Haven’s Talented and Gifted Program, she is the founder and executive director of Monk Youth Jazz, and she ​“has mentored and empowered countless individuals in the performing arts and STEAM and has been referred to as one of the most compassionate and genuine arts leaders of her generation.”

Talking to Flake, it’s easy to see how all of those pieces are part of a larger whole that encompasses generations of work, family and music. ​“You do it because it’s what you do. It’s a part of you. You do it because it’s what you love,” she said.

Flake is one of the Monk Family Singers, a gospel group that has been singing out of Thomas Chapel Church on White Street in the Hill for over 60 years. Her parents, Olivia and Conley Monk, moved to New Haven in 1952 from Rocky Mount, N.C., where they were sharecroppers. They became fixtures of the Hill community and entrepreneurs, and they helped found the church they sang out of. They were also youth leaders. ​“It’s what was modeled for us,” Flake said. ​“It’s just natural.”

“I always wanted to sing,” Flake said, recalling how she sang her first solo in church at the age of 4. ​“I didn’t have a shy bone in my body. I loved Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, Shirley Caesar,” women with powerful voices and messages to convey. Conley formed the Monk Singers when she was 5, ​“almost 62 years ago,” Flake said. She and her entire family were a part of it from the beginning. ​“We had an annual concert, and we still have that concert every year.… I was really drawn to gospel because that’s the only music our parents allowed us to listen to in our home — except Thelonious.”

Thelonious Sphere Monk, the famous jazz composer and pianist, was Conley’s first cousin. Monk is a major part of the jazz canon thanks to a unique performance and compositional style that married the blues to a more angular sensibility that projected both sharp intelligence and warm humor. ​“Music has just been steeped in our family tradition,” Flake said. Her parents bought a brand new piano for the house. Of the nine kids, one sister took lessons; at the time, it was what the parents could afford, and ​“whoever had lessons had to teach the others.” 

“We knew Thelonious was famous,” Flake recalled. ​“He was in our music books at school.” When she was an elementary-school student at Prince Street School, Monk’s name came up in class. ​“I said ​‘that’s my cousin!’” Flake recalled. Her teacher didn’t believe her, but the impression was solidified. ​“I knew he was important, I knew he was great, and I loved his music,” she said. Other secular music entered her ears as well, of course. ​“When my father was at work,” she said, or in the car, the kids would listen to the radio.

Her childhood in the Hill — before White flight made the neighborhood predominantly African American and Latino — was also her first experience of ​“multiculturalism and bridge building.” Her parents bought a house on Cedar Street, and she found herself with Italian and Jewish neighbors while forging deeper roots with the Black community there. ​“I always had people from different ethnicities in my life,” she said, as neighbors and teachers. Her father taught her about entrepreneurship as well, as they went around town, visiting grocers and other businessman. ​“We’ve always been about bridge building” and ​“we’ve used music to try to create bridges,” she said, citing Thelonious Monk’s concert at a high school in 1968, playing for an integrated audience.

Flake’s connection to music only strengthened as she got older. She attended Connecticut College, where ​“my husband and I met because of gospel music” and ​“worked together in music ministry,” Flake said. ​“I’m so artsy. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have a song.” 

For most of her 37 years as an educator, she taught in New Haven’s gifted and talented program, where ​“I had the luxury of creating a curriculum” and ​“I could infuse it with music and visual art and dance” even as she took on more science- and engineering-based topics. Toward the end of her teaching career, she went back to school to get an administrative degree, but upon starting out as an administrator, ​“I realized that really wasn’t me. I wanted to affect change as far as children learn, the things they learn that make it more fun and engaging.”

In short, she wanted to create a chance for every child to partake in the kind of programming she had developed for New Haven’s gifted and talented program. ​“I knew every child could flourish” in that kind of environment. So she started the Monk Center for Academic Enrichment and Performing Arts, and the Monk Youth Jazz and STEAM Collective, Inc., to ​“bring a gifted curriculum to all children.”

In the program’s anatomy class, ​“they wear white lab coats and they have anatomy kits. They call themselves ​‘doctor,’” Flake said. ​“We’re getting them acclimated,” to seeing themselves in scientific and medical fields. Before the pandemic, the program had partnerships with Yale’s and Quinnipiac’s medical schools, so the kids could ​“see medical students of color” and thus see themselves pursuing careers. She hopes to rekindle those connections now that they are possible again.

“I was so determined to start my pre-med module,” she said. ​“My generation, we were not pushed that way.” The program also offer classes in literature and film, in constitutional law and mock trials, in dance, violin, and pre-engineering. ​“I want a child to walk into any education environment and know they can thrive,” she said.

Monk Youth Jazz’s jams are intergenerational. Everyone in the house band is over 60 years old. ​“We bring the teenagers in and they play” right alongside the older musicians, Flake said. ​“It’s an experiential learning” like ​“what happens in New Orleans.” The participants are ​“old, young, Black, White, Latino, Asian, gay, straight — everybody,” she said.

All of this, to Flake, is carrying on her family’s traditions. ​“I watched and I lived our elders giving their lives for the next generation,” she said. Her father worked 16-hour days for 25 years, whether at Yale-New Haven Hospital as a porter or as a materials handler at Seamless Rubber Company. ​“He wanted us to have a better life than he had a sharecropper.” Her mother was a tech in an operating room. The parents made sure their kids could go to college if they wanted to — and drove them into Brooklyn for gospel singing competitions.

“They didn’t think about themselves. They were really selfless people,” Flake said. ​“They wanted to prepare us to bring something to the table as adults.”

So she looks at the children in her youth program now with the same sense of future responsibility — and promise. ​“There are some surgeons in there. There are lawyers and teachers in there,” she said. ​“They can be anything they want to be.”

But it always circles back to music. ​“My cousin T.S.” — Thelonious Monk’s son — ​“talks about jazz as a metaphor for democracy. It teaches you to be part of a group and support the leader,” and also teaches you ​“when to step out and lead. It taught me leadership more than anything. It taught me to take risk.” In gospel, she said, ​“nothing is notated. You learn the basics of a song and make it yours.”

“I want to see everyone who has a song, have an opportunity to share that song,” Flake continued. ​“Every kid that’s sitting there with a song running through their head — I’d love for them to express that song.” So the work of education must continue. ​“There is this really important work that’s out there and young people need us,” she said. ​“So many people appear to be afraid of young people, especially teenagers.”

But ​“we were once kids, and there were people who poured into us and helped us develop into who we are.”

The Connecticut Arts Hero Awards will be presented on Jan. 24 at 6 p.m. at Infinity Music Hall in Hartford. The event is free and open to all. Visit the arts award’s website for more information.