The Jazz Baroness Helps Keep It Real
Finished this book recently, which fills in a fascinating hole in jazz history. In fact, while reading this post, play this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKvVKsJ8sk4&feature=player_detailpage. For those of you who are Thelonious Monk fans , you may be familiar with his famous piece ” Pannonica.” Turns out it was written in honor of Pannonica “Nica” Rothschild de Koenigswarter, a true heroine of the modern jazz movement during its nascent days in NYC. She was born into the famous Rothschild banking family in 1913—at that time the wealthiest family in the world. BTW the book offers quite an interesting history of the family for better or worse. And she leads that life for a good while, marrying a French baron in the process. However she also got a another taste that opened her eyes by working as an ambulance driver and helping her husband organize the resistance during the German occupation of Africa during WWII.
While in Paris in 1943, her epiphany occurred: Someone played her Monk’s ‘Round Midnight and her life changed. She was already a very headstrong person, and the life of a one- tenth -of -one percenter grew more and more suffocating. She vowed to find a way to get with this music someday. And she found her chance when her husband the baron was appointed French ambassador to Mexico in 1950. They moved there w/ their 5 kids, and as soon as she was able went to NYC, where the modern jazz era was becoming in full swing. She had actually met Monk briefly in Paris a few years before, but now she started hitting all the clubs on 42nd Street, where the action was at that point, and getting to know many of the greats: Gillespie, Bird, Silver, Blakey, Tatum, et al. But it was Monk who somehow connected to her soul. They became inseparable. Interestingly, it was platonic —Monk was dedicated to his wife Nellie - whom Nica also became tight with. In a way she and Nellie formed a partnership to help Monk be Monk. Eventually the NYC trips became too much for her marriage (plus her hubby sneered at the jazz genre altogether) and they separated. She took her oldest daughter with her, leaving the other children behind, and rented a huge suite at the Stanhope Hotel on Central Park, bought a Bentley sports car, and began another life.
Nica became a…what? Patron doesn’t cut it, supporter is too bland, and wannabe is too disrespectful for what she did for the NY jazz world. She became a beacon of love, respect, fascination and yes, some financial largess, within this tight and exclusive group. There would be jamming at her place till all hours almost every night after the clubs closed with Monk holding center stage piano. Several other musicians wrote songs dedicated to her: Gigi Gryce’s “Nica’s Tempo”, Sonny Clark’s “Nica”, Horace Silver’s “Nica’s Dream”, Kenny Dorham’s “Tonica”, Kenny Drew’s “Blues for Nica”, Freddie Redd’s “Nica Steps Out”, Barry Harris’s “Inca”, Tommy Flanagan’s “Thelonica” and Thelonious Monk’s “Pannonica.” She supported Monk absolutely, first with her heart, then by helping him w/ money here and there, going to gigs, talking him up, traveling with him on a few road trips. One such road trip ended in arrests in Newark DE in fact. You know, the Black White thing in the ’50s. They fulfilled something in each other, this unlikely duo.
One incident got her worldwide notoriety soon after she moved to NYC. In ‘53 Charlie Parker died in her apartment. She had been a supporter, and when he had no place to live and showed up on her doorstep very ill, she took him in. Even though the club Birdland was open, and his music had exploded, his heroin habit had gotten so bad that no one wanted much to do with him. Even his own club (mostly owned by The Mob— not him— anyway).
It was an incredible scandal and a sad story. He died there 5 days later.
Unbowed by her great wealth, at first these cats thought: What’s this babe’s real interest, and who’s she sleeping with? But she gradually won them all over, incredibly, and she was seen as the real deal. She was fixture on that music scene for the next 35 years. Without her deep support and friendship, it was most likely that Monk would have self-destructed long before his last public appearance in 1976. He was bi-polar and depressed, and being Black in bigoted America was a bad push for him of course. He died at her home in 1982, where he’d lived for the last 10 years of his life.
Nica’s all night jams got her kicked out of two grand hotels, and she finally bought a house across the Hudson on the Palisades. That house alone was worth the book - an early Bauhaus masterpiece (not my favorite type of architecture, but still a very cool look) which became the “Cat House.” The double entendre was funny because the woman, from 2 Siamese she bought, ended up with more than 50 cats roaming the place and mixing with the cool cats playing music there all the time.
Also, the ferment and foment of the modern jazz movement helped breed the modern art and lit movements of Ginsberg and Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollack, Helen Frankenthaler and others working new magic in an amazing stew of creativity. At the clubs like the Five Spot they all gathered to water and exchange ideas and criticism. Anyway, you will love this book if you love jazz.
