The saxophonist and human rights activist Archie Shepp was impressed by Nica’s courage.
She was a woman who was ahead of her time. She took a stand when it wasn’t popular to do so. Actually she stands as a role model. One of the early feminists who not only served her right to be herself, but to see herself as a person who implemented social change and that social change was possible from her class. By being associated where people like her were never seen and standing up when she saw injustice, she impressed my entire community with a sense of democracy.
Nica was an instinctive rather than a political animal. Avoiding self-reflection or organised causes, she was whimsical and impulsive. If there was a situation where she could help, she waded in regardless of the consequences. There was no attempt to systematise her actions or organise a strategy.
The world was changing in the 1960s while Nica was stuck in a bebop time warp, apparently oblivious to the musical, social and political revolution unfolding around her. Monk’s music was no longer new wave. It was old hat. It had been superseded by rock and pop and cool jazz. Monk believed that Miles Davis had sold out rather than progressed and that new practitioners of jazz such as Ornette Coleman were dismissible. Nica agreed with him: after all, he was her teacher, her guide. Beyond 63 Kingswood Road, society and music was changing: Elvis vied with Chuck Berry and the Beatles took on the beatniks. The Rolling Stones rubbed shoulders with Andy Warhol; Tamla Motown and Phil Spector hogged the airwaves while Frank Stella and Jasper Johns amazed the museums. The election of John F. Kennedy and the clarion call of Martin Luther King promised to erase the stains of political injustice.
Monk and Nica backstage (Photographic Credit 21.4)
All this seemed to pass Nica right by. The co-ordinates of her life barely changed: she slept till late and drove into town at night. She was focused on Monk, his music and his mayhem. Whatever was going on outside, Nica’s private collection of photographs show that life in “Catville” hardly changed. In them, the clothes people wore, their hairstyles and wrinkles show the passing of time but otherwise number 63 Kingswood Road seems frozen in the fifties. Nica was the Miss Havisham of bebop.
There was one event she could not ignore: her forthcoming trial at the Delaware Superior Court. The date was eventually set for January 15, 1962. The night before, she wrote the following letter to Mary Lou Williams:
Today is the day upon which my entire future may well depend. At this very moment it may well be being decided. Release, miraculous escape, the chance to start afresh with a clean slate or the onset of inevitable catastrophe, the beginning of the end. I don’t mention it to Thelonious or Nellie or anyone else. And now I sit outside St. Martin’s and wonder which of them has any idea of what I’m going through today. And as for Thelonious, well, his protection is at the root of the whole business and I have never discussed it with him. And I don’t think he’s really aware of it. He and Nellie have enough problems as it is. I have been sitting here for almost two hours and it is very cold. So now I am going in to light a candle to St. Martin.
So there it was: she was facing “the beginning of the end.” Nica was truly scared and had no one to turn to. She had gone back to Delaware to stand trial and hear her sentence alone. There were no family members or friends by her side, no one to wave her off as she confronted the possibility of leaving the courtroom only to be sent directly to jail. “And now I sit outside St. Martin’s and wonder which of them has any idea what I’m going through today.”
How extraordinary and heartbreaking that someone whose house was Party Central, a place where others went to have a good time, to eat and make music, should have had to face her darkest hour alone. Where, I wondered, were those people whom she had so generously helped? If found guilty, Nica would go straight from the dock to the jail; then, after serving her term, she would be deported. With no one to turn to in person, she had to write her feelings down. Nica planned to send the letter only if she was found guilty. If set free, she would destroy it.* She had been taught from an early age not to display emotion and not to talk about her feelings. When, as a young woman, she crossed war-torn France, avoided the Nazis and got her children to safety in England, her mother had praised her for “looking fresh as a daisy.”
Both Monk and Nellie were battling ill health. Following the Delaware arrest, Monk had one of his most serious breakdowns and was placed in a mental asylum where he remained for several months. Nellie suffered from recurring stomach pains and had to send her children to stay with her in-laws while she fought to regain her health. At this point I began to wonder about the relationship between Nica and the Monks. Was Nica being used or simply allowing herself to be used? Their relationship, in her hour of need, seemed to be rather one-sided. Perhaps Nica herself had set these distant personal parameters; perhaps the lack of intimacy suited her. The alternative was too painful to contemplate. I did not want to believe that Nica, naive and desperate, was just another groupie, a patsy to be pitied.
The night before Nica’s case came to court, she suffered a further setback when, at the last minute, her distinguished trial lawyer, Mr. Bennett Williams, failed to appear. She was represented instead by two of his associates who were far less familiar with the case. It was an unusually cold January with snowfalls recorded as far south as Pensacola, Florida, and as far west as Long Beach, California, but the courtroom was crammed with onlookers. Children had been given the day off school and the troopers’ wives came dressed in all their finery to see what promised to be a great show: the sentencing of a British aristocrat who smoked a cigarette in a long holder and drove a fancy European car. As the defendant had already admitted that the narcotics were hers, most assumed the outcome was assured and it was worth taking the day off to enjoy her humiliation.
The judge, the Hon. Andrew Christie, presided over his jury and a packed courtroom and frequently had to call the crowds to order. Despite her admitted guilt, Nica’s advocates fought the case on a technicality, arguing that the police had failed to follow the correct procedure. While arresting the defendant, the troopers had searched Nica’s handbag and car without her full permission. The judge was forced reluctantly to agree. The courtroom vibrated with disbelief and disappointment.
The case was dismissed. Nica was free.
Later she told Max Gordon, “Darling, I never dreamed Delaware could be such a mean, uptight little state.”
Although Nica was released and had taken full responsibility for possession of the drugs, Monk still lost his cabaret card. Once again he was banned from the clubs. Nica engaged an attorney to represent Monk to fight, “blood, sweat and tears,” for justice and to repeal the police decision.
* * *
*Years later, in the 1980s, she sent it to Mary Lou on a whim.
22 • Gotten Me Crazy
Nica was fifty. Although linked to Monk via his composition “Pannonica,” she longed for more involvement in his work. She had risked her freedom for this musician but had no official role: he already had a wife and a manager. Nica wanted to be recognised as more than his groupie. At times, Harry Colomby admitted, Nica made his job harder. “Sometimes she could be an absolute pain in the arse,” he said. “We’d be trying to get on with work and she would whisper some conspiracy theory in Monk’s ear about who was doing what.”
“I really want to do an album cover for him,” she wrote to the producer Ted Macero, as it “would make up for the disappointment of having had one of my paintings chosen by Charlie Parker for a record that was never made.” When Macero arranged to meet Nica to go through some of her artworks, she failed to keep the appointment. Macero had to choose a photograph instead.
Frustrated but undeterred, Nica sent him a rambling and fulsome eulogy about Monk that the producer edited and used as the sleeve notes for Monk’s 1963 album, Criss Cross. She starts by comparing Thelonious to Bartók: “Monk’s name is synonymous with ‘genius.’ Thelonious is at his greatest. The only thing which is not easy about Criss Cross is to keep your foot from
tapping. His greatness lies in the very fact that he transcends all formulae, all well-worn adjectives and clichés. Only new vocabulary, perhaps, could suffice. Even if Thelonious’ music is precise and mathematical, it is at the same time pure magic.”
Nica and Monk in a recording studio (Photographic Credit 22.1)
I came across other examples of Nica talking about Monk. “The thing that always shook me up about Thelonious was how he could hear the music around the music,” she told the producer Bruce Ricker in 1988. “He’d take tunes and make them twenty times more beautiful than they were before, he explored all those possibilities that one never dreamed of.” He was, for her, like Beethoven because in her view he too had the facility, imagination and skill to improvise and play variations on a tune. “He took things and plumbed depths with them that had never been done before and Thelonious did that with everything he played.”
Even when he performed other people’s music, Nica believed that Monk “saw infinitely more possibilities in them than the people who wrote them.” She said that he “heard the music all around. It was like the air was just filled with all those different variations and Thelonious just brought them down.”
After many years spent in both a critical and a financial wilderness, living on scraps of critical praise and an irregular income, Monk finally began to receive widespread recognition. “Now it’s Monk’s time,” Val Wilmer wrote in 1965. “Times have been hard for the eccentric genius and the work all but nonexistent. But he’s famous now. He appears in the sticks, he wears $150 suits and stays at the best hotels.” The determined efforts of his supporters, including Nica, began to reap benefits. “I’ve been doing it for twenty years,” Monk said in an interview for Bazaar. “Maybe I’ve turned jazz another way. Maybe I’m a major influence. I don’t know. Anyway, my music is my music, on my piano too. That’s the criterion of something. Jazz is my adventure. I’m after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figurations, new runs. How to use notes differently. That’s it. Just using notes differently.”
Cult status did not translate into audiences or income. Even in his heyday, Monk wasn’t filling large clubs or taking home significant pay cheques. In 1963 his earnings were at an all-time high. Gross receipts for his concerts reached $53,832 and his royalties added up to $22,850. But after the normal deductions for band members, travel, rest and relaxation, Monk took home only $33,055. Successful concerts such as Monk’s big band collaboration with Hal Overton sold out to 1,500 people in the Lincoln Center Philharmonic Hall but this was still insignificant compared to the crowds of four thousand screaming fans who turned up to see the Beatles get on a plane. It was also galling that Monk’s protégé Miles Davis could sell at least five times more records than his former teacher.
A huge emotional boost came when Time magazine asked to put Monk on their cover. He was only the fourth jazz musician and one of the few black men to receive this honour. The magazine also devoted a long article and several photographs to his life. One section focuses on his relationship with Nica, whom the writer describes as his “friend, mascot and champion.” Alongside Monk’s statement that he only has eyes for Nellie, he claims that he took Nica on as “another mother. She gave him rides, rooms to compose and play in, and in 1957, help in getting back his cabaret card.” An accompanying photograph shows Nica gazing lovingly up at Monk.
Time writer Barry Farrell spent several months trailing Monk. Although he had full access to the pianist and conducted “thirty chats,” Farrell managed only to glean a few rather nondescript quotes. Asked what it was like to have such an ecstatic crowd at one concert in Germany, Monk just says, “These cats are with it.” When Farrell asked Monk if he had any friends in the jazz world, Monk replied, “I was a friend to lots of musicians but looks like they weren’t friends to me.” On occasion Farrell just offers blunt Monk quotations, such as “Solid” and “All reet.”
The overriding impression from the article was that Monk was rarely sober, always stoned. “Every day,” Farrell wrote, “is a brand new pharmaceutical event for Monk: alcohol, Dexedrine, sleeping potions, whatever is at hand, charge through his bloodstream in baffling combinations.” He acknowledged that Monk seemed a very happy man at times, at other times “he appears merely mad. He has periods of acute disconnection in which he falls totally mute. He stays up for days on end, prowling around desperately in his rooms, troubling his friends, playing the piano as if jazz were a wearying curse.”
Boris Chaliapin was commissioned to produce the cover portrait of Monk. “He was a very stiff old guy,” Nica recalled. “Thelonious would go every day and just sit down there and go straight to sleep.” His behaviour, she admitted, had “gotten me crazy.” She was so annoyed with her friend that one day she shook him awake. When Monk half opened his eyes, Chaliapin caught the moment with a Polaroid camera.
Having been burned before by journalists and jazz writers, Monk was ambivalent about the press. Nica claimed that “He never wanted that stuff, but he got talked into it.” Monk played up to his gnomic reputation. On one occasion he told a critic that he didn’t care why audiences came; all that mattered was that they turned up.
“Isn’t that cold and businesslike for a genius to be saying?” the critic asked.
“You have to do business to make money,” Monk retorted.
Asked by Francis Postif whether he came from a musical family, Monk replied, “I come from a musical family, since my family is the world. And the world is musical, is it not?”
In another interview Leonard Feather asked Monk to rate a record by Art Pepper. “Ask her,” Monk said, pointing to Nellie.
“It’s your opinion I’m asking,” Feather replied.
“You asked for my opinion, I gave you my opinion.”
On February 29, 1964, Monk became the fourth jazz musician and one of the few black men to appear on the cover of Time magazine. (Photographic Credit 22.2)
In his last interview, given in 1971 to Pearl Gonzales in Mexico City, the journalist asked him what he thought the purpose of life was. Monk replied, “To die.”
“But between life and death there’s a lot to do,” Pearl said, and asked Monk to say more.
“You asked a question and that’s the answer.” The interview was over.
As they grew older, Nica’s children were spending more time with their mother. She was proud of their knowledge and enthusiasm for the music she loved, saying that they “were all hip to jazz, they don’t need to be told anything.” Nica was particularly fond of Janka, her eldest daughter and closest friend. “Once we were in Iceland, also with some musicians, and they had a competition recognising people on the records and Janka and I won out of hundreds of countries,” she said proudly. “Janka knew the sidemen on every record.”
Janka had lived with her mother since she was sixteen. Not unlike her mother’s, Janka’s friends were jazz men who occasionally got her into trouble. In 1956 Janka travelled by car with Art Blakey, Horace Silver and the band boy Ahmed from Philadelphia to New York after a concert. “We got in the car and Art started driving,” Horace Silver wrote in his autobiography.
Before we could get out of Philly, we were stopped by a motorcycle cop. We weren’t speeding or breaking any traffic rules. The cop saw three black men with a white woman, and that was enough for him to stop us. If Art had been cool, the cop might have let us go. But Art was high and acted belligerent and indignant. The cop told Art to follow him to the local precinct. He found a loaded gun and a box of shells and a box of Benzedrine tablets in the glove compartment. Art had no permit for the gun. The Benzedrine belonged to Janka, the baroness’s daughter. Ahmed had track marks on his arms.
They were all booked and put in cells. Art called Nica, who found a lawyer to get them out, but “when the lawyer found out that three of us were black, he didn’t want to get involved with us. He did get Janka out and left us in jail.” Eventually all four were acquitted; Horace Silver wrote, “Evidently everybody paid off the Judge.” I suspect
that “everybody” meant Nica and that her experience in Wilmington taught her to avoid the judicial system if possible.
Success for a jazz musician meant a gruelling touring schedule. Bands often travelled seven hundred miles overnight to save on hotel bills. Once they arrived in a town, particularly in the South, it was hard to find a place that would serve black musicians. Quincy Jones told me about one incident in Texas. “We finished a job at about 12:30 a.m. and we had to drive until almost six o’clock in the morning to find the place where we could eat. We had to send the white driver in first to ask. But someone shouted out, ‘Look at the church,’ and there, hanging from the steeple of the biggest church in town, was a rope with an effigy of a black man. Drive on, we said.”
Roy Haynes, the drummer who often played with Monk, told me, “The only place we could usually stay in those days was the black ghetto. There was no way you could eat or stay on the other side of the tracks. There were no hotels so we had to sleep in stations or by the roadside. If you did get a hotel room, you would sleep in shifts to save money.”
“If you went on the road you had two rents to pay,” Paul Jeffrey, Monk’s close friend and last saxophone player, explained. “There were no benefits because there was no income tax taken out. You just got paid for the job. You weren’t working every week. It was just the conditions in the hotels and, you know, when I think about it now, I don’t know how I made it. The hopelessness of not being able to function with any sense of real dignity.”
In 1969, the promoter George Wein, who also organised the Newport jazz festivals, took Monk and his band around the world. In addition to appearing on television and radio, and fitting in the odd recording session, Monk, in a period of a few weeks, played in Paris, Caen, Lyons, Nantes and Amiens in France; then in Geneva, Berne, Zurich, Lugano and Basle in Switzerland; in the resort of Lecco, Italy; in Brussels; in Warsaw; in the Scandinavian capitals; in Frankfurt; in Amsterdam; and in London (twice), Manchester and Birmingham. He then flew to Tokyo to play nine concerts in Japan before returning to the USA, where he played on the West Coast, in Minneapolis and at two jazz festivals, followed by another run at the Village Vanguard Club.
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