The young Thelonious Monk (Photographic Credit 16.1)
Employment opportunities for young blacks were extremely limited. I asked Monk’s contemporary, the legendary drummer Chico Hamilton, about his own career prospects in the 1930s.
“I had a choice of being a musician or a pimp,” Hamilton replied.
Assuming he’d made a joke, I smiled and was promptly excoriated.
“You might smile,” he said, leaning towards me, his eyes blazing with fury, jabbing a drumstick in my direction, “but when I was eight, nine, ten and eleven years old, I shined shoes. That was how I bought my first set of drums, shining shoes for a nickel. You remember what a nickel was. I would go out on a Wednesday and a Saturday from school, I would stay out all day Saturday until I made a dollar and then come home. I made enough money shining shoes, like I said, to buy my first set of drums. I have been making my living ever since. I was a lucky one.”
In 1932, while Nica went husband hunting, curtsying to Queen Charlotte’s cake and marking her dance card with the names of suitable swains, Monk set up his first informal band, left school and got a girlfriend. He also met but hardly noticed Nellie, the younger sister of his friend Sonny Smith, a tiny, skinny ten-year-old who was to become his wife and the mother of his children.
In the year that Nica married, 1935, Monk went on tour supporting a woman preacher. He told Nat Hentoff, “While still in my teens, I went on the road with a group that played church music for an evangelist. Rock and roll or rhythm and blues. That’s what we were doing. Only now they put different words to it. She preached and healed and we played. We travelled for about two years.” It was one of the pianist’s longest periods of steady employment.
On his return to New York, Monk briefly joined some of the big bands, working with Lucky Millinder, Skippy Williams and Dizzy Gillespie. “The bands never did knock me out. I wanted to play my own chords,” he told George Simon. His son Toot was keen to stress that, while Monk might not have been a star on the bandstand, “He was the star of the neighbourhood long before he ever got any international recognition. In those days everybody didn’t have a record player so the party would be where you had the live music.”
Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge and Teddy Hill outside Mintons Playhouse in September 1947 (Photographic Credit 16.2)
The club that launched a thousand dreams and changed the history of jazz was Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. Small and nondescript, it became known for its innovative Monday-night jam sessions where musicians could leave tightly arranged sessions behind on the bandstand and play spontaneous, improvised jazz. It was here that Monk met jazz greats such as Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Lester Young.
At Minton’s, four young men—Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie – were at the forefront of a new form of jazz called bebop. “Everyone called bebop a revolution but it was an evolution,” the critic and writer Ira Gitler told me. “Bebop echoed the faster means of transportation, the uncertainty of wartime, the hope for the future. It captured all the young musicians in a very, very powerful way.”
I visited Gitler in the Upper East Side basement apartment that he shares with his wife Mary Joy which Nica also visited. Like her, Ira Gitler was an habitué of the New York scene and has devoted his life to writing about jazz. Every nook and cranny, corner and surface of the apartment was piled high with jazz memorabilia: musical instruments, photographs and records collected over the previous seventy years. Gitler was one of the small group of people who really helped me understand Nica and the jazz scene.
“I knew of Nica from the time she arrived here because people in jazz started talking about this baroness who was driving around in a Rolls-Royce. I first saw her at the Open Door in Greenwich Village, a club where jam sessions were held late Sunday afternoon to Sunday night. Charlie Parker started to play there and naturally that attracted a lot of attention.”
Surely, I said, it must have been hard for Monk being stuck at home while all that was going on? Gitler nodded but explained that Monk’s career was never easy.
Nica was in Africa and then in France when bebop was born. If the music reached her at all, it was over the wireless rather than on a record. There was a recording ban during the early 1940s while the record companies negotiated a new form of contract, so much early bebop was not recorded. It was not until 1945, when small record companies sprang up, that this new music was captured on shellac and its influence spread.* The writer Gary Giddins explained: “Jazz was a music that brought people together and that was somewhat of an oasis in all this quagmire.”
Monk’s compositions aren’t classic forms of any style. They are suffused with strains of gospel, stride and blues, a hotchpotch of his early influences from the Church, gospel tours and the radio. His sound is completely individual. Three chords in, like it or loathe it, anyone can spot Monk’s signature playing. So what, I wanted to understand, did Monk do for music and musicians?
“Thelonious was the father of modern jazz because it is the harmonic possibilities that he brought to the table that freed the Charlie Parkers and the John Coltranes and Dizzy Gillespies from the chains of popular American music,” Toot explained. Until then, most music was played according to simple chord structures. The beboppers threw that rule book out of the window. To many, though, it sounded as if someone had thrown a big hammer against a beautiful pane of glass: bebop was sound fractured into a thousand pieces.
Monk took the musical anarchy even further than his contemporaries. They were playing notes in strange sequences, ignoring melodies and subverting the chord structures. Monk added to this his own variation. My favourite explanation of why Monk’s playing was ground-breaking came from Chico Hamilton: “Man, I have played with piano players who play with all the white keys, I have played with piano players who have played with all the black keys, but I have never played with no motherfucker who played in between the cracks.”
Monk might have been a hero to other musicians but at the time Nica first heard him, the critics hated his music and his compositions. The influential promoter George Wein admitted to me, “The first time I heard him play was back in the late forties and I just thought he was a bad piano player.” The most important music magazine at the time, Downbeat, described him as “The pianist who did NOT invent bop, and generally plays bad, though interesting piano.”
Were it not for a young female promoter, Nica might never have heard Monk. Lorraine Lion Gordon† fell in love with his sound and was determined to bring the pianist to a wider audience. She went to see Monk at home. “Monk had an upright piano in his narrow room, which looked to me like Van Gogh’s room in Arles, with the bed and the dresser.” She had to sit on the bed while Monk played. “Thelonious played with his back to us various numbers we had never heard before. I thought: is he a great blues pianist! That’s why I liked him so much.”
Lorraine drove her suitcase of Monk records all over the country. “I went to Philly, Baltimore, a whole line-up, Cleveland, Chicago. I was a kid, doing all this for him and for other Blue Notes. I went to Harlem to try to sell Monk there. The guys in the record stores would say, ‘He can’t play. He has two left hands.’ I had to battle all the way to get them to buy a Monk record and listen to him.” Lorraine admitted to being Monk’s gofer. “He used to call me up. ‘Will you take me here? Will you take me there?’ So I kind of pampered him in that way because I did feel he was very special even then. I was the errand lady.”
Monk had a certain talent for finding women to care for him: his mother, his wife Nellie, Lorraine and later Nica. Although he had one brief job in the 1930s, he was happier composing, hanging out and playing music. He was part of a fine tradition where geniuses were expected to be eccentrics and had a licence to misbehave, as if their refusal to take responsibility for anything and their self-indulgent lifestyles were justified in the name of artistry. Lorraine Lion Gordon had begun promoting the idea of the eccentric artist by comparing Monk’s apartm
ent to Van Gogh’s. Subsequent authors and managers promoted the myth by alluding to his dancing, his hats and his erratic behaviour.
In late March 1943, when Nica was in Africa fighting for the Free French, Monk was called up and told to “report for induction.” According to family lore, Monk told the recruiting officer that he refused to fight for an America that had kept his family in slavery and done so little to stamp out racism. He was duly classified as a 4F, a “psychiatric reject.” It was rare for Monk to take a political stand. He did not, like many of his contemporaries, join the Nation of Islam or march for equality: his duty was to play music. “What do you think I am, a social worker?” he told an interviewer. “I don’t care about what happens to this person, that person. I’m just busy making music and thinking about my family.”
Monk was never under any illusions about his own genius. “I feel like I have contributed more to modern jazz than all of the other musicians combined,” he told a French jazz magazine. “That’s why I don’t like to hear: ‘Gillespie and Parker brought the revolution to Jazz,’ when I know most of the ideas came from me. Dizzy and Bird did nothing for me musically, they didn’t teach me anything. In fact they were the ones who came to me with questions, but they got all the credit.”
His reputation endured and among the cognoscenti he became known as the High Priest of Jazz. He taught young musicians such as the saxophonist Theodore “Sonny” Rollins and the trumpeter Miles Davis. “Monk taught me more than anyone on the street when I was down there. [He’s] the one who really showed me everything,” Davis said.
Admiration did not equal fame or fortune. Monk became increasingly resentful as he watched Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker get more work and greater accolades. In the mid-forties, Gillespie was earning thousands of dollars a week; Monk still did not have a regular gig or income. By late 1946, Monk had so little work that he let his union membership lapse. “It’s my feeling that by playing with me, by copying my harmonies, by asking me for advice, by asking me how to get the best sound, how to write good arrangements, and relying on me to correct their music, they composed themes that came directly from me … meanwhile I wasn’t even able to find a gig. Sometimes I couldn’t even enter Birdland. Do you realise what it’s like for a musician to hear his own compositions and not even be able to get inside [a club]?”
Monk cut his first disc in 1948. “Thelonious” was on the A side and “Suburban Eyes” on the B side. Shortly afterwards he was busted for possessing marijuana and sentenced to thirty days in jail. Locked up in a tiny cell in high summer, Monk knew that following his release his cabaret card would be revoked for at least a year. His prospects were then knocked further with the publication of Leonard Feather’s Inside Bebop, which dismissed Monk in one paragraph: “He’s written a few attractive tunes, but his lack of technique and continuity prevented him from accomplishing much as a pianist.” Running into the author early in the winter of 1949, Monk grabbed Feather and screamed at him, “You’re taking bread out of my mouth.”
Monk and Nellie married in 1948. Unable to afford a place of their own, the newlyweds lived with her sister and their children, or with his mother Barbara. Although Nellie was in severe pain for much of her life with recurring stomach problems, Monk would not take responsibility for supporting his family: he was a musician with a mission.
Nellie and Thelonius Monk in New York (Photographic Credit 16.3)
Drugs were an endemic part of the jazz lifestyle. Monk regularly took a cocktail of booze and Benzedrine, marijuana, heroin, acid and prescription drugs. He had a strong physical constitution but few people could cope with this onslaught of mood-altering substances. On the night of his son’s birth, Monk was holed up in a shooting alley. Nellie made her way alone to the City Hospital on “Welfare Island,” sometimes described as “hell in mid-channel” because of its close proximity to asylums and prisons. The new baby’s clothes came from the local welfare shop. As soon as she had recovered from the birth, Nellie was back at work, this time tailoring at Marvel Cleaners for $45 a week.
While music always came first, Monk placed friendship before personal freedom. On August 9, 1951, he was driving his protégé Bud Powell in New York when the police pulled them over. Powell, a well-known addict, had a wrap of heroin in his pocket and, panicking, threw the drugs out of the car window where the packet landed at the policeman’s feet. The two musicians were hauled out of the car, slammed face down on the bonnet, kicked and then handcuffed. Monk knew, even if the cop or Powell did not, that his friend Bud would never survive another term in jail. Many attribute the young pianist’s mental problems, suicidal tendencies and frequent breakdowns to the severe police beatings administered while he was in custody in 1945. Powell had been sectioned previously at Creed-moor Psychiatric Center for over a year where, according to friends, the intensive course of electroconvulsive therapy succeeded only in impairing his memory and exacerbating his mood swings.
Bud Powell (Photographic Credit 16.4)
Monk claimed the drugs were his. Perhaps they were, but he insisted that Bud go free. Monk was sent to the notorious Rikers Island prison for ninety days. He was not the first, nor would he be the last, person to be profoundly damaged by that experience. In 1998, over forty years later, despite advances in prisoners’ and, indeed, human rights, the New York Times reported that “Inmates at the Rikers Island jail complex for years have been subjected to impromptu beatings and planned assaults by guards, according to court papers. In the last decade, Rikers inmates have been brutally beaten, some suffering broken bones, ruptured eardrums or severe head injuries.” Toot was sanguine about that period: “Life was going to be tough for Thelonious anyway. Thelonious was not one of those guys who was going to toe the line or play the game.” There was one important by-product to Monk’s enforced home rest: he wrote some of the great standards of jazz.
Monk and Nellie on tour in Britain, 1968 (Photographic Credit 16.5)
I began to see more parallels between Monk and Nica. Both were capable of being irresponsible and leaving others to take care of basic domestic duties. Timekeeping, a structured routine, financial responsibility and other bourgeois attributes were anathema to both. However, on points of principle, at moments when their highly developed sense of right or wrong was questioned, Monk and Nica did not hesitate. Nica fought in a war to uphold the importance of freedom; Monk went to prison to spare the life of a friend.
Nica in London’s Stork Club in 1954 (Photographic Credit 16.6)
Unable to find Monk, Nica went back to England in 1954 to consider her future. She spent time visiting relatives and trying to sort out the details of her separation from Jules. Her siblings had scattered across the United Kingdom: Victor shuttled between Cambridge and the model eco-village that he had built at Rushbrooke in Suffolk; Miriam had started a family and was devoted to a life in science; Liberty was still in a private hospital, being treated for schizophrenia.
Nica was effectively homeless, unemployed, and unemployable. At forty-one, with a fairly wild past behind her and five children, she was hardly eligible wife material. Not only were there few options open to her but British society had changed. “About time too,” Miriam said. The gossamer threads that had held that cosmopolitan, international world together had disintegrated after the Second World War. Nica was capable and determined but had no obvious outlet for her abilities and no way of channelling her energies. As long as she was fighting for the Free French, learning to fly an aeroplane or galloping her horse at the largest fence, Nica could manage her own character. But in 1954 she was facing a void. The initial excitement of moving to New York and immersing herself in the world of jazz had waned. Later she admitted that in the vacuum she turned increasingly to drink. Those who knew her in London at that time remembered Nica in the Stork Club, always a little tight, waiting for the latest star to hit town. My belief is that Monk came along at exactly the right moment.
Hearing that her musical hero was playing in Paris, Nica jumped on
the next plane. Two disparate lives were about to collide.
* * *
* Most records prior to 1948 were pressed on to the highly brittle mixture of shellac, lampblack and limestone. In their manufacture, gold, glass, copper, wax, nickel and sometimes chromium were used by craftsmen who had to operate machinery to squeeze the sound into a scratch. It was such an exacting and fiddly process that at least 50 per cent of the discs never made it to the final cutting room. Recording studios were kept at high temperatures to ensure that the wax remained pliable, and technicians watched through a microscope while 88 to 136 grooves per radial inch were etched into the surface and then splattered with a thin layer of 24-carat gold.
† Lorraine was married first to the record company Blue Note’s co-founder, Alfred Lion, and later to Max Gordon, with whom she ran the legendary Village Vanguard club.
17 • Black Bitch, White Bitch
Paris was the perfect place for Monk and Nica’s first meeting. The city had lost some of its pre-war sheen but was still the capital of chic. Chanel had reopened her fashion house in 1954, introducing natty little suit jackets and slimline skirts. French movies inspired women to cut off their hair, wear cigarette pants and hooped earrings. There was an aura of tolerant multiculturalism. Nica’s friend Kenny Clarke, the bebop drummer, arrived in 1947: “There’s a difference in the mentality here. People are not afraid to walk around their neighbourhood, to become friends. Socially you feel adjusted. As a black man, as a musician—as a person, I’ve been lucky to be able to live here.” Being a mixed-race couple did not present any problems. Observing the passionate love affair between Juliette Gréco and Miles Davis, Jean-Paul Sartre asked the trumpeter why he didn’t marry her and take her back with him to New York. Miles answered, “Because I love her too much to make her unhappy.” It was, he explained, a question of colour.
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