By 1943, the modern jazz world’s center of gravity had shifted slightly, from Harlem to West 52nd Street. Minton’s was still a hot spot and some of the small clubs hung on, but the Savoy’s closing sent the uptown hep cats downtown to establishments bearing names such as the Yacht Club, the Down Beat, Three Deuces, Kelly’s Stable, and the Famous Door. Almost overnight, the complexion of “Swing Street” became darker (at least west of Fifth Avenue), as more and more African-Americans came downtown to listen or perform.1
Consequently, 52nd Street had become both a haven for cool, hip interracial communities and a racial battleground. Pianist Johnny Guarnieri reported one incident when a cop approached him and two other musicians on the sidewalk and ordered them to move along, adding “We don’t want you niggers on the streets.”2 The police claimed they were merely cracking down on drugs and prostitution, but sex was often at the center of it all. White men in uniform—government-issued military and NYPD blue—harassed black men for cavorting with white women and fights broke out frequently. At one point, the chief of police was so fearful that 52nd Street would see a repeat of the Harlem Riot that the cops attempted to ban blacks from a popular bar called the White Rose.3
The Onyx Club was considered an interracial haven. Situated in the tiny, narrow basement of a brownstone, maybe sixty or seventy people could squeeze in, but not many more. One jazz writer warned that “all claustrophobes should avoid it scrupulously.”4 The Onyx regulars tended to be “musicians and singers on their time off,” though tourists and celebrity seekers also found their way there.5 It had a long illustrious history on the “strip,” dating back to the late 1920s, but the venue moved, closed, and reopened several times before establishing a home at 57 West 52nd Street in 1942. Besides engaging Billie Holiday fairly regularly, the Onyx was known for presenting small swing combos, even some Dixieland groups. All that changed when Oscar Pettiford and Dizzy Gillespie persuaded the owner, Mike Westerman, to hire a small group they had just formed.
Gillespie had been champing at the bit to play some new music after several stifling weeks in Duke Ellington’s trumpet section, and he wanted to put together a genuinely “modern” band that experimented with new directions in harmony and rhythm. Initially, they hired Don Byas and Budd Johnson on tenor and Max Roach on drums. Lester Young was also a frequent guest, and the band’s biggest draw. They had hoped to hire Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, but Parker’s union transfer from Kansas City had not come through and Powell6 was still a minor. Cootie Williams, his employer and legal guardian, wouldn’t let him out to play.7 So when the Gillespie-Pettiford group opened in December of 1943, the piano stool became a musical chair, alternately filled by Billy Taylor and Thelonious Monk.8
History was being made at the Onyx Club that winter. Billy Taylor risked his regular job with Ben Webster to sit in with the Gillespie-Pettiford group: “I sat in a lot at the Onyx, during that December, and I kept getting back late to play my next set across the Street with Ben Webster, so Ben fired me. I got my job back a little later, but for a while there I was playing quite often at the Onyx, and Monk, was doing the same.”9 Monk had no job, but neither Dizzy nor Pettiford wanted to hire him as the band’s regular pianist. They had a very specific concept of the piano’s role in their band and Monk’s style did not fit. Billy Taylor remembers Dizzy patiently teaching him specific voicings for chord changes he wanted.10 Monk, on the other hand, would have voiced chords his own way. Less than a month into the gig, Pettiford and Gillespie found what they were looking for in Italian-born piano player Giacinto Figlia, who used the stage name George Wallington. Wallington, one of Monk’s early admirers,11 gave Dizzy the voicings he wanted, favored linear right-hand lines, and remained in the background. “We didn’t need a strong piano player in there,” explained Dizzy. “We needed a piano player to stay outta the way. . . . That’s why George Wallington fitted in so well, because he stayed outta the way, and when he played a solo, he’d fill it up; sounded just like Bud.”12 Pettiford was less pleased, however. When Wallington missed a change and lost his place, Pettiford was often heard shouting or mumbling “White muthafucka, can’t play shit!”13
Faced with the prospect of yet another winter without work, the fact that Monk was developing a reputation along 52nd Street as one of the most creative minds in jazz came as a small consolation. He hit the jam sessions, sat in where and when he could, wrote new compositions, and continued to drop in on his friends to use their pianos. Now that Billy Taylor had moved to New York permanently—in an apartment around the corner from Minton’s—Monk had a new friend with a rented Steinway upright. Even before they started sharing the job at the Onyx, Taylor generously invited Monk to come by “any time” to play. Monk took “any time” quite literally. “I was at Minton’s one night and Monk was there,” Taylor remembered. “The place closed and we went around the corner to some greasy spoon to have breakfast. We were just sitting there lying to each other and talking a whole bunch of crap when Monk said that somebody told him I had a piano? I said yes. He asked me if it was a good one? I said yes. So he asked me if he could come over and practice on it some time. I said, ‘Sure!’ We finished breakfast and somehow we got separated. Either he ran into somebody or I did. Anyway, I went on home. I had just gotten into bed and was just about to fall asleep when somebody knocks on the door. I go to the door and it was Monk. He says, ‘Can I practice now?’ [laughs] . . . I said, ‘Well-l-l-l. . . . It’s cool with me but the people in this building work in the day. They don’t start getting up until about 7:00 so that’s really the earliest that I can hit it.’ He says, ‘Can I wait?’ So I said okay and he came in. I sat in the chair and we talked. But I kept dozing off. I was just about asleep when he came and I just couldn’t keep ’em open. All of a sudden I hear this little “Dee . . . dee . . . deet. . . .” I woke up and there’s Monk playing!”14
It is too easy to caricature Monk as obsessive when it comes to the piano. Thelonious was also a practical joker with a sense of humor, and his antics were often deliberate and calculated to get a laugh or to throw someone off kilter. In Billy Taylor’s view, “He was funny, man. He always had a comment about something. He was fun. I always enjoyed his company. This is one thing that really got to me from the beginning. He used to put me on from day one. And it was fun. It wasn’t cruel, we used to laugh together.”15
Monk also used to laugh quite a bit with Mary Lou Williams. Williams had been in New York off and on since 1942. By the fall of 1943, she had transferred her union membership to Local 802 and secured a regular job at Café Society downtown in Greenwich Village. Before the year was up, she moved into an apartment in Harlem on a tree-lined street called Hamilton Terrace. It became a den for musicians, artists, writers, and various political figures she met during her long engagement at Café Society.16 Barney Josephson, an antiracist liberal, created Café Society as a kind of radical nightclub that encouraged interracial mingling. With the help of record producer and impresario John Hammond, Josephson booked a broad spectrum of jazz artists, most of whom were black. Some of the greatest piano players passed through Café Society in those days, including Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Teddy Wilson, Hazel Scott, and Art Tatum.17
After hours, Williams would head uptown, check out Minton’s Playhouse, and spend the early hours of the morning hanging out with other musicians, sharing ideas and shooting the breeze. Besides Monk and Bud Powell, visitors to Williams’s apartment included young cats like Tadd Dameron and Kenny Dorham and established performers Lena Horne and Billy Strayhorn. Everyone who was anyone in the jazz world was “in and out of my place at all hours, and we’d really ball.”18 Thelonious and Bud usually dropped by around 4:00 a.m. Mary Lou would serve drinks, make breakfast, and everyone would “sit talk or someone would play a new composition they’d just written.”19 Monk loved to play Mary Lou’s Baldwin upright, but was polite about asking. Mary Lou recalls one episode in particular:
I had gotten very sleepy—had gotten up the previous morning to do a broadcast. Left the guys in the living room to enjoy themselves. It seems during the morning every body left. Johnnie Gary [he worked at the Café Society] being the last one to leave, left my front door open. . . . At the time I had twin beds in my bedroom.
It must have been 11:30 AM when I awaken to go to the bathroom, to my surprise I saw someone stretched out on the other bed. I screamed and whoever it was ran to my bedroom door returning in disgust. I discovered it was Monk. Immediately I asked how he got in. He said that the front door was opened & he had come to see me and discovered that I was asleep, decided not to play the piano. Thought he’d wait—ending up in the room. Well later we both laughed about this little incident.20
With so much free time in between jobs, Monk had begun to write more and really came to see himself as a composer. He trusted Mary Lou’s ear and her frank opinions. “Usually when Monk composed a song,” Williams noted, “he’d [play it] both night and day if you didn’t stop him.”21 “I’m trying to see if it’s a hit,” Thelonious would tell her. “It’ll stay with you if it’s a hit.”22
Mary Lou admired Monk for having his own original style, not just at the keyboard but in all aspects of his daily life. He didn’t care what others thought about him. He wore whatever he wanted and always tried to stand out from the crowd. She credits Monk with launching the fashion craze that would come to define the bebop generation. Ever since she reunited with Thelonious in New York, she recalled seeing him “wearing a beret, with a small piano clip on it.” Soon thereafter, he added a pair of custom-made shades to his ensemble. “I happened to run into Thelonious standing next door to the 802 union building on Sixth Avenue, where I was going to pay my dues,” recounted Williams. “He was looking at some heavy-framed sunglasses in a shop window, and said he was going to have a pair made similar to a pair of ladies’ glasses he had seen and liked. He suggested a few improvements in the design, and I remember laughing at him. But he had them made in the Bronx, and several days later came to the house with his new glasses and, of course, a beret.”23
Mary Lou expanded Monk’s circle, introducing him to key players who would subsequently become sidemen and collaborators on his own musical journey. He grew quite fond of Art Blakey, the drummer she brought up from Pittsburgh. Diminutive, wiry, dark-skinned, friends jokingly called him a “pygmy,” although the pain he experienced from color prejudice in his own community was no laughing matter. Blakey was only six months old when his mother died and his father walked out on him—by some accounts, because the child was too dark. Raised by his mother’s first cousin in the bleak poverty of Pittsburgh, he began working in coal mines and steel mills at age 13. He fell in love with music and began playing piano in some of the local clubs, which offered a less dangerous alternative to the steel mills. He wasn’t great on the instrument, which was a hard thing in a city that produced Earl “Fatha” Hines, Mary Lou Williams, Billy Strayhorn, Ahmad Jamal, Dodo Marmarosa, and Erroll Garner (who, according to one of Blakey’s tall tales, is responsible for pushing him off the piano bench and onto the drum stool).
By the time Monk met Blakey, he had a wife and three kids back in Pittsburgh. Despite this, and the fact that the two men were separated in age only by two years and one day, Monk initially felt a little paternal toward Blakey—perhaps because he was orphaned so young. But more than anything, Monk loved Blakey because he was an extraordinarily exciting drummer who swung hard. His influences were Chick Webb, Big Sid Catlett, Sonny Greer (of Duke Ellington’s orchestra), and a New Orleans drummer named Ray Bauduc—all of these drummers played in dance bands. Blakey came up, like most drummers of his generation, playing for dancers who wanted a steady beat, propulsion, breaks, and exciting moments of tension and release. Catlett took the young drummer under his wing and taught him to master the press roll, which would become Blakey’s signature move. He played on and off with Fletcher Henderson until 1944, when he became the drummer in Billy Eckstine’s astonishingly modern big band.24 But before that, Monk made sure that New York heard Blakey and that the young drummer had every opportunity to develop his chops. Blakey, Bud, and Monk became a threesome on the jam session scene. “[Monk] would take Bud and I around and make the piano player get up and let Bud play, and some of the musicians would walk off, and he would say, ‘Art, you play the drums.’ ”25
Early in 1944, Thelonious proposed a collaborative project with Mary Lou Williams and Bud Powell. Ideally, they would each contribute compositions that could be arranged for three pianos. Powell agreed to provide a “solo on ‘Cherokee,’ ” whereas Williams had written an original piece titled “Bobo” and began to re-work “Scorpio,” a movement in her “Zodiac Suite.”26 Monk contributed his own original piece, which he later titled “Criss Cross.” (In Williams’s collection, the lead sheet and the bass part, which are in her handwriting, are simply labeled “Monk.”) It was an abstract piece, full of musical elements of which Monk was quite fond—chromaticism, rhythmic displacement, and dissonance. It would be another seven years before he recorded the piece with an ensemble—it was never arranged for three pianos. But once “Criss Cross” was released, critic/composer Gunther Schuller declared it “perhaps the Monk masterpiece of this period.”27
The dream of collaboration never materialized. “Our rehearsal turned out to be the funniest,” wrote Williams. “I use[d] to laugh at Bud & Monk. Monk reaching over Bud’s shoulder to play his chords & Bud turning around giving Monk a mean look. This went on some time until I got sick of it—then I was never home.”28 Besides, Bud wasn’t well. Still shy of his twentieth birthday, he had become a heavy drinker and, as far as Mary Lou was concerned, began showing signs of mental illness. He remained the pianist in Cootie Williams’s band throughout this period, and Mary Lou found herself in the position of being Bud’s third guardian, after his mother and Cootie. Between Powell’s clowning and his unstable behavior, he never came through for the trio. Mary Lou lamented, “Bud was supposed to write one but I discovered he was a bit gone again.”29
Meanwhile, Monk had no choice but to write. Powell had a regular job, and had made his first studio recordings with Cootie Williams in January of 1944. Mary Lou received a steady paycheck from Barney Josephson downtown. Monk had nothing, except for his songs. He knew that in order to get a hit, he had to do more than merely copyright his songs. Songs had to be sold, published, and played. Desperate for money, Monk began talking to Teddy McRae, a tenor player, arranger, and songwriter who had established ties to several publishing houses. Nearly ten years older than Thelonious, McRae had come out of the popular swing bands. His longest association was with Chick Webb’s band, but he also played with Elmer Snowden, Stuff Smith, Lil Armstrong, recorded with Teddy Wilson and Henry “Red” Allen, and in 1941–42, was a member of Cab Calloway’s band. When McRae met Monk in 1943, he had recently left Lionel Hampton to become staff arranger for Artie Shaw, through whom he established ties to major publishing firms, including Robbins Music and Regent Music Corporation. He discovered that writing and publishing music could be more lucrative than gigging. “I figured I write one good song a week, I can, you know, I can make good money, because I was getting nice advances.”30
Thelonious shared some of his original compositions with McRae, hoping he might help him find a publisher. “The Pump” was a lively tune that represents an advanced example of rhythmic displacement.31 He also showed McRae “You Need ’Na,” a swinging number and an example of Monk’s penchant for chromaticism. The title was inspired by Geraldine Smith’s cousin, Charlie Beamon. A diminutive, gay black man with a rich baritone voice, Beamon struggled to make it as a singer. Monk befriended Beamon, as they were both hanging out at the Smiths’ house. Beamon hired Monk to play a gig with him at a gay club in Manhattan. Before Beamon was to take the stage, a stand-up comedian offended the audience with some snide, insensitive remarks, prompting an angry brawl. Monk’s niece Benetta Bines relates the story: “Thelonious grabbed him up and said ‘Let’s get outta here.’ And Charlie is saying, ‘But I haven’t sung yet!’ ”32 They got out intact, but it was one of those adventures Thelonious would never forget. When Monk offered to name a song after him, Charlie responded, “Well, you need not.”33
Both compositions were entirely Monk’s. McRae’s only contribution was to submit the copyright registration forms and arrange for Regent Music Corporation to publish them, which he did in early February of 1944. In exchange for his services, McRae took co-composer’s credits and listed himself as a claimant on both tunes.34 McRae’s actions were unscrupulous, but not uncommon. Bandleaders and arrangers, in particular, often laid claim to songs they had little or nothing to do with, or took co-composer’s credit in exchange for publishing, recording, or adding a song to their repertoire. Monk had been around the business long enough to know this, but he also believed that colleagues and business partners ought to be forthright and honest in their dealings. Once Monk discovered what had happened, he severed ties with McRae and sought other routes to get his songs published and recorded. Monk was clever enough to make slight alterations to the melodies and record them a few years later under different titles: “You Need ’Na” became “Well, You Needn’t,” first recorded by Monk in 1947, and “The Pump” was reconstituted as “Little Rootie Tootie,” retitled in honor of his first-born son. (Monk changed the melody by adding a triplet figure meant to replicate the sound of a train whistle.) McRae, on the other hand, never did anything with either song. Evidently, Artie Shaw’s band wasn’t interested in recording them, and if he tried to sell them to other bands there were no takers.
Monk decided to handle things on his own for the next song, a ditty based loosely on “I Got Rhythm” changes. He registered “Nameless” for a copyright as sole composer in April of 1944.35 Although the piece was still untitled at the time, it was popular on 52nd Street as a closing theme song, and Monk was concerned about protecting his claim on the tune.36 Music journalist and jazz producer Leonard Feather claims responsibility for giving the song the title by which it is now known. During a recording session with Dizzy Gillespie, Feather recounts, “Dizzy played a riff and said, ‘Let’s do this thing of Monk’s.’ We did it, and because we had heard it played regularly as a sign-off by the bop groups along 52nd Street, I suggested, ‘Why don’t we just call it “52nd Street Theme”?’ ”37 Since Monk had already copyrighted the song under a different title, he earned no publishing royalties for the recording. He had also given the song an alternative name: “Bip Bop.” Nearly two decades later, Thelonious tried to set the record straight during a performance/lecture at the New School for Social Research: “Well, I mean, doing a little detective work, myself, I happen to find, I found some script of a song of mine that I made up long ago that everybody used to use for signing off. All the clubs used to play it all the time. Dizzy recorded it on RCA Victor—‘Fifty-second Street Theme.’ The name I had at first was ‘Bip Bop.’ And I told the cats the name so probably that’s where the name ‘Bebop’ came from.”38 Ironically, Thelonious never recorded “Bip Bop.”
If Monk’s dream of a hit eluded him in 1944, he did finally land a job—a great job. His employer happened to be one of the greatest tenor saxophonists since Adolphe Sax invented the instrument. And he was one of the few jazz musicians who had a hit. His name was Coleman Hawkins, and his hit consisted of two improvised choruses of “Body and Soul.” It had been in his repertoire for years before he recorded it for RCA Victor in 1939, but to his surprise, the record sold like hotcakes—100,000 copies in the first six months, rare for an instrumental not intended for dancing. Down Beat anointed him “best tenor saxophonist” for that year, and from that moment on he could not play anywhere without a request for “Body and Soul.”39 Hawkins’s success with “Body and Soul” was always a curiosity for Monk. “Thelonious Monk said to me,” recalled Hawkins in a 1956 interview, “ ‘You know, you never did explain to me,’ he said, ‘how did these people, these old folks and everybody, go for your record of ‘Body and Soul’? ’Cause I’ve listened to the record, and I could understand if you played melody, ’cause that’s what they like, those kind of people, that’s what they like, they like melody. . . . They sure won’t listen to anything else that’s jazz!”40
The call from Hawkins for Monk to join his band in March 1944 came as a pleasant surprise. Thelonious had long been an admirer of Hawkins for his musicianship, his openness to new ideas, and his ultracool style. Thirteen years Monk’s elder, Hawkins came up in a very musical middle-class family in St. Joseph, Missouri. His mother, a schoolteacher and organist, began teaching her son piano from age five. By age seven, he’d taken up cello; two years later his mother gave him a tenor saxophone for his birthday. Hawkins attended the Industrial and Educational Institute in Topeka, Kansas, where he continued with cello and saxophone and advanced his knowledge of composition and harmony. Hawkins’s overall intelligence earned him the nickname “Bean.” A brilliant classical player on both instruments, he often found work playing in theater orchestras in Kansas City when classes were out. He toured with blues singer Mamie Smith in the early 1920s, and ended up playing with some of the great swing bands of the 1920s—from Wilbur Sweatman’s band to the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. In 1934, he left for Europe and kicked around there until 1939.41
Hawkins developed an appreciation for Monk’s harmonic conception early on. In fact, the two musicians had much in common. (Hawkins not only employed tritone substitutions in his interpretation of “Body and Soul,” but he had been experimenting with whole-tone harmony for at least a decade.42) Budd Johnson remembers how much Hawkins adored Monk’s approach to harmony: “I don’t know whether a lot of people realize that or not but he fell in love with Monk. ’Cause Hawk felt that’s where it was. When he heard that playin’, that piano playin’ that stuff with the changes, he said, ‘This is where it is.’ . . . Hawk dug that. He said, ‘Well, I want that man for a piano player.’ ”43
Hawkins sought out the freshest, most original musicians, and had little patience for those who would quibble over the difference between “modern” or “progressive,” “swing” or “bebop.” “I don’t think about music as being new, or modern, or anything of the type,” he mused. “Music doesn’t go seasonable to me.”44 He dug the experiments being dubbed “bebop,” and on nights off, he would catch the Gillespie-Pettiford group at the Onyx Club. Kenny Clarke was Hawkins’s drummer at Kelly’s Stable in 1943, and when Clarke was drafted in December, Hawkins hired Max Roach. In February of 1944, he put together a band of young lions for a recording session that would result in what critics have called Hawk’s first “bebop” record: Dizzy Gillespie and Vic Coulsen on trumpet, Budd Johnson and Don Byas on tenor saxophones, and Clyde Hart on piano.45
Thelonious began sitting in with Hawkins as early as February, 1944.46 By late March, Hawkins had put together his new sextet: Monk on piano, Don Byas on tenor, Little Benny Harris on trumpet, and Eddie Robinson on bass. The final addition to the band was drummer Denzil Best. Best had been working at the Three Deuces with Ben Webster, it was his first regular professional gig as a drummer since a bout with tuberculosis forced him to give up the trumpet. Although he was still finding his way on drums, Best had established a distinctive laid-back style that appealed to many musicians. When Best’s job with Webster ended in mid-April, Hawkins promptly offered him the job, just in time for the band’s first out-of-town gigs in Toronto and Boston.47
The band was set to open at the Club Top Hat in Toronto on April 19th. But at the last minute, Eddie Robinson decided he couldn’t make the trip. Best proposed fellow Caribbean bassist Selwyn Warner to substitute for Robinson. Having worked with Hazel Scott and Hot Lips Page, Warner knew how to swing and had a great rapport with the drummer. The band spent two successful and restful weeks at the Club Top Hat. Conveniently situated a block from Sunnyside Beach and Amusement Park, the club was set in the middle of a popular vacation spot along Lake Ontario. Dubbed “Canada’s Coney Island” and “the unemployed man’s Riviera,” Sunnyside Park catered to some 1.5 million beachgoers a year. It was also a center of Toronto nightlife, across the street from the open-air dance spot the Sea Breeze, and next door to the popular Palais Royale.48 Although the weather was still a bit cool, Monk spent part of his time off strolling the boardwalk and checking out the scene. The remaining part of the day was spent rehearsing; Hawkins saw the Toronto gig as an opportunity to tighten up the band. Monk was designated the band’s arranger, though Benny Harris and Denzil Best also contributed new arrangements.49 “We used to rehearse everyday,” Hawkins recalled. “We played our arrangements. Everything we played was all written down, outside of the various solos themselves.”50 Selwyn Warner remembers playing matinees that attracted throngs of young people shouting for “Body and Soul.” Hawkins would turn to the band and say, “ ‘We’ll just do a couple of choruses like the record and that’ll quiet them down.’ ”51
Four or five days later, the group crossed back over the border and made their way to Boston, where they opened at the Hi-Hat Club at Columbus and Massachusetts Avenues. The Hi-Hat crowd was pretty hip; it was one of the few Boston clubs that catered to the so-called “beboppers,” although no one in Hawk’s band was using the phrase then. The band had great chemistry. Even during the one month bassist Selwyn Warner was with Hawkins, he observed that “the band got along with each other. Thelonious Monk was coming along in those days, getting his chops together. He was very bright, quiet and cool, but not eccentric.”52 On the stand, the band sizzled. Byas and Hawk produced a big sound, and the dynamics between them generated sparks. Monk’s accompaniment encouraged flights of harmonic inventiveness on the part of all the horns. In some respects, the unison horn lines, exploring somewhat angular and complex melodies, mirrored what Gillespie, Byas, and Budd Johnson were doing at the Onyx Club. Denzil Best’s drumming was understated, and laid down a strong, swinging foundation for the soloists. Hawkins was pleased.53
They returned to New York after a week, just in time for Selwyn Warner to give the bass job back to Eddie Robinson, and for the band to open at the Yacht Club on 52nd Street on Friday, April 28. Called “one of the largest crowds of show world luminaries,” the artists who came out to greet Hawk included Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ethel Waters, Teddy Wilson, Billy Eckstine, “and the entire cast of ‘Carmen Jones.’ ”54 The night was a great success, as many of these same musicians found their way on to the bandstand for a lively jam session.55 Their engagement was extended as Monte Kay and Pete Kameran took over the space and renamed it the Down Beat Club, reopening to much fanfare on May 19.56 Monte Kay was especially enthusiastic about Hawkins’s new group, which he described as “one of the greatest combos of [Hawk’s] career,” despite its flaws. For him, Bean and Byas were the stars of the group, “playing those breathy, big-toned solos.” He was less impressed with Monk and Harris, who, he felt, was “unable to execute what he was thinking.” Nevertheless, Kay concluded that Hawkins delivered “some of the best jazz The Street ever heard.”57
Hawkins soon found himself struggling to keep the band together. Benny Harris began drifting in and out after a few weeks, eventually leaving Hawk for Boyd Raeburn’s band. Vic Coulsen, a favorite of Monk’s who doubled on trumpet and cornet, sat in for Benny initially until it became his permanent gig.58 Monk knew Vic from Minton’s and Monroe’s, and when jazz journalists decided Monk was print-worthy, he often gave Coulsen credit for new directions in the music. He especially loved Coulsen’s phrasing, which he found more interesting than Dizzy’s.59 A native of Harlem, Coulsen was the son of an elevator operator from the Virgin Islands and a housewife from South Carolina who scraped whatever they could to give their only child music lessons.60 Although he appears on very few recordings, he was highly regarded among musicians in the early 1940s. Al Tinney compared him to Fats Navarro, while pianist Al Haig thought he sounded a bit like young Miles Davis—“He was a very low-key, understated type of trumpet player. He didn’t have a lot of range, I don’t think. His playing was rather impeccable in a way.” Haig does remember Coulsen working very well with Hawkins, Monk, and Best: “he fitted that band very neatly.”61
Stan Levey, a nineteen-year-old drummer fresh from Philly, was beside himself when he saw the band perform at the Down Beat Club. “You should have heard that rhythm section! Those guys could play! The bandstand would actually seem to levitate, these guys would cook so deeply into the beat!”62 Thelonious attracted a number of young piano players who wanted to see what the fuss was about, but few were impressed. “One of the worst things I went through in those days was with Monk, when he was working in my group,” recalled Hawkins. “I used to get it every night—‘Why don’t you get a piano player?’ and ‘What’s that stuff he’s playing?’ ”63 When Randy Weston, an up-and-coming nineteen-year-old pianist from Brooklyn, first heard Monk at the Down Beat Club, he initially thought the same thing. He could not understand why Coleman Hawkins, his all-time musical hero, hired Monk. “He would play one note, and then another note. [I thought] I could play more piano than this.” Weston was a member of the Army’s Signal Corps stationed near New York City. Whenever he was granted leave or was off-duty, he made it a point to catch his hero and the strange piano player with the stranger name.64 It turned out to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Not every pianist walked away from the Down Beat Club that summer scratching his head. Herbie Nichols understood Monk right away, which is unsurprising given the similarities in their lives and careers. Two years younger than Thelonious, Nichols was born in San Juan Hill but his family made the trek to Harlem when he was seven. Their paths did not cross until they both were struggling musicians. Like Monk, Nichols was classically trained. He led a highly regarded combo in high school, and in 1937, soon after graduating, he joined the Royal Baron Orchestra. A year later Nichols became the house pianist at Monroe’s and built a reputation as an excellent player with modern ideas, though he was perhaps better known for his column in the black-owned New York Age. He spent some time at Minton’s, primarily as an observer, until he began a tour of duty in the South Pacific.65 He returned to civilian life in August 1943, but struggled like many others to find work.
Nichols continued to write, freelancing for the short-lived Music Dial—the city’s first black-owned jazz magazine. Monk’s work with Hawk inspired Nichols to pen what proved to be the first critical notice of Monk. In a review of Oscar Pettiford’s band across the street at the Onyx Club,66 Nichols heaped lavish praise on tenor saxophonist Johnny Hartzfield, trumpeter Joe Guy, and drummer Joe Johnston. He wrote that they epitomized the best of the younger generation on their respective instruments. When it came to piano players, however, Nichols directed readers to the other side of 52nd Street. “Thelonious Monk is an oddity among piano players,” he wrote. “This particular fellow is the author of the weirdest rhythmical melodies I’ve ever heard. They are very great too. (Don’t ever praise Monk too much or he’ll let you down.) But I will say that I’d rather hear him play a ‘boston’ [stride piano] than any other pianist. His sense of fitness is uncanny.”67
Nichols had his reservations, however. He found Monk’s use of dissonance too limiting, and compared Monk to Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson. “[W]hen Monk takes a solo, he seems to be partial to certain limited harmonies which prevent him from taking a place beside Art [Tatum] and Teddy [Wilson]. He seems to be in a vise as far as that goes and never shows any signs of being able to extricate himself.”68 Nevertheless, he concluded, “Monk, Joe Guy, Joe Johnston, Johnny Hartzfield and Pettiford would be a tough combination to beat.”69
• • •
June 6, 1944, D-Day, is one of the most famous dates of the twentieth century. Most of America was glued to the radio. Thelonious, however, was making something other than war. The Smith family was gathered at Lincoln Hospital, where Geraldine gave birth to her fourth child, a little girl named Evelyn who would be known by her nickname “Weetee.” With the house empty, Monk and Nellie enjoyed a moment of privacy and made love for the first time.70 Thelonious was serious about Nellie and marriage probably crossed his mind, but money was an issue. Nellie and Geraldine made a little change as file clerks with the IRS,71 and Monk was not sure how long Hawkins would keep him around.
The gig at the Down Beat Club officially ended August 17. Don Byas left the band and Hawkins took a week off. In the meantime, Clark Monroe hired Monk to fill in a week at his new establishment, the Spotlite. It was the only black-owned club on 52nd Street.72 Monroe paired Monk with Max Roach and bassist W. O. Smith.73 Smith, who had just been discharged from the service and was about to begin graduate school at NYU in the fall, was the same age as Thelonious. And yet, he felt like the odd man out in the trio, an old-fashioned swing bassist in a kind of bebop twilight zone. “It was a weird week. . . . I was a big-band bassist accustomed to a straight, driving, swinging four/four beat. It was unsettling to try to survive in the dislocation of the rhythmic patterns and the unsettling ‘bombs’ of the very experimental Max Roach. . . . This stuff was too new for me to digest.”74 Initially, he wasn’t too crazy about Monk’s piano playing, either, but it opened his eyes to new harmonic developments. “I thought that Thelonious was fumbling for the right notes pretty much as I would do on a piano trying to play an unfamiliar tune. I did notice some of his harmonic eccentricities, which later registered as brilliant.”75 The fact that neither Thelonious nor Max talked very much made the gig even less comfortable for Smith, though both musicians were always professional, punctual, and committed to the music. Nevertheless, it was a tough week for Smith: “I would not want the experience again.”76
Before the week ended, Hawkins came calling again. He reconstituted the band as a quintet with the same rhythm section and Vic Coulsen, and they headed to Washington, D.C., for a two-week engagement at Club Bali, opening August 25. Club Bali had become one of the hottest jazz clubs around U Street, D.C.’s historic entertainment district known as “Black Broadway.”77
During his stay in D.C., Thelonious hit some of the other clubs along U and T streets. At either the Crystal Caverns on 11th or Keyes restaurant on 7th and T, he heard a young tenor player named Charlie Rouse. He was still a kid, a native of D.C., just out of high school. Nap Turner witnessed Monk and Rouse’s first meeting: “Just before the midnight show started, I was standing down there listening to the guys upstairs. So I happened to look over there and here’s Thelonious Monk. It’s night time and he got on sunglasses, you know, and a beret, and he looks weird. He’s strange looking! So I’m watching him, you know what I mean? . . . While he was standing there, the band took an intermission, and Rouse comes down and Monk says to Rouse, ‘What’s your name?’ Rouse told him his name. ‘Charlie Rouse.’ ‘See, I’m going to put you in my bitches book. Give me your phone number.’ Meaning that you are a bad, bad excellent player and I want your phone number.”78
Monk took down Rouse’s number, though it would be a while before he made that call. Not long after Monk left D.C., Rouse caught the ear of another musician—a valve trombone player turned bandleader named Billy Eckstine. Eckstine had just formed a big band chock full of all the “modern” players—Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Budd Johnson, as well as pianist John Malachi who had played with Rouse in D. C. Eckstine needed a new tenor player, Malachi recommended Rouse, and the job was his.79
Hawkins returned to New York to open a week-long engagement at the Apollo on September 8. The quintet played opposite clarinetist Tommy Reynolds’ big band, though Hawkins was billed as the featured artist.80 After their set, Hawkins joined Reynolds’s band for a jam session featuring Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump.” Critic Leonard Feather was on hand to review the show for Metronome, and he mentioned Monk briefly but favorably: “Thelonious Monk’s piano always covers a fertile harmonic ground.”81 It would be one of the few positive reviews he’d give the pianist; Feather, a powerful voice in the jazz industry as critic, producer, promoter, and sometimes composer and arranger, would eventually become one of Monk’s most vociferous detractors.
On October 10, Monk celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday doing what he loved to do best—working. (Hawkins’s group had begun a three-and-a-half-month engagement at the Down Beat Club.82) Nine days later, Hawkins had Monk come down to Empire Studios to do a record date for the Joe Davis label. The session did not include Coulsen, just Hawkins and the band’s rhythm section. In less than two hours, the quartet recorded eleven and a half minutes of quality music spread over two 78s.83 Every tune was done in a single take. Monk, Best, and Robinson were paid scale for the date—about $30 each—while Hawkins earned a whopping $400, though no royalties were promised.84 Given the three-minute format of 78s, Monk’s presence is necessarily limited. On the two ballad selections, “Recollections” and “Drifting on a Reed,” Monk does not solo, but he launches each song with concise and innovative introductions. We hear more of Thelonious on the two jump tunes, “On the Bean,” based on the chord changes of “Whispering,” and “Flying Hawk.” His economical solos are full of Monkisms: whole-tone scales, dissonant clusters, and quotes from his own compositions.85
While Monk was playing and recording Hawk’s music, his pal Bud Powell was playing and recording Monk’s music in Cootie Williams’s Orchestra. Two months before Monk went into the studio, Williams recorded a revised version of “I Need You So,” now called “ ’Round Midnight.”86 By his own account, Bud Powell had to persuade Williams to add the song to his repertoire: “When I was playing with Cootie Williams in 1944, I did most of the arrangements for the band ’cause I was the only one who could write music. I was working a lot with Thelonious then and I wanted Cootie to put ‘Midnight’ in the repertoire. He didn’t want to, but he finally agreed on the condition that he himself would write a second part for the piece. At the time, you see, it had only the main theme.”87 Later he told his friend and patron Francis Paudras that he threatened to leave if Williams refused to put “ ’Round Midnight” in the program.88
Powell’s claim that the song lacked a bridge is actually incorrect. The original lead sheet of “I Need You So” had it. What Williams did, however, was to write a third section—an eight-bar interlude. It was recorded once, and never recorded again. Yet with that interlude, he felt justified taking co-composer’s credit for the song. Williams’s version of what happened differs substantially from Powell’s. Williams insists that he dealt directly with Monk, who “was always around the band.” It was Monk who introduced the song to Williams: “He wanted me to listen to it. And I listened to it. And I says, ‘Okay, give it here. I’ll put the verse to it.’ ” Williams liked the song, contributed “the verse,” and recorded it, correctly adding, “Nobody ever did play the verse, or interlude, or whatever they call it. Nobody but me.”89
Through Advanced Music Corporation, Williams filed for copyright on November 27, 1944, three months after the song was first recorded, with a third name on the certificate of registration in addition to Williams and Monk: lyricist Bernie Hanighen.90 Originally from Omaha, Nebraska, Hanighen had been on the scene for a while, writing lyrics for Broadway musicals. Hanighen’s lyrics typically pined on about love and longing, but in this case the dominant theme is longing and loss:
It begins to tell ’round midnight
’Round midnight
I do pretty well ’til after sundown
Suppertime I’m feeling sad
But it really gets bad ’round midnight
Memories always start ’round midnight
’Round midnight
Haven’t got the heart to stand those memories
When my heart is still with you
And old midnight knows it too. . . .
It closes on a note of hope, the possibility of return.
Thelonious had nothing to do with these lyrics, and it’s quite possible that neither he nor Thelma Murray was aware of them until they were copyrighted. It became a mainstay of Williams’s repertoire, but he did not employ a vocalist, and when he did, as in the case of Ella Fitzgerald, he still played the instrumental version.91 Moreover, Hanighen and Williams reregistered the lyric version of the song five months later under the title “Grand Finale,” perhaps as a way of distinguishing the instrumental from the vocal, but it was never recorded under that title during Monk’s career, nor was Hanighen’s name ever removed from the original copyright. Consequently, Hanighen and his estate receive a third of the royalties from every version of “ ’Round Midnight” produced. And in turn, the original composer and his estate receive only a third of the royalties—to this very day.92
Cootie’s version of “ ’Round Midnight” was released in early 1945 with “Somebody’s Gotta Go,” a humorous blues sung by Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, on the A side. “Somebody’s Gotta Go” was intended as a commercial hit, though the B side drew surprising attention. The Chicago Tribune singled out “ ’Round Midnight” as “a tour de force for Cootie, with a slow moody trumpet talking to itself. The Cootie is doing some splendid work.”93 For Monk, it was deeply ironic. On one hand, it looked as if Monk might get a hit after all. On the other, he felt completely disconnected from the composition. His protégé was at the piano, he now had to share composer’s credit with two guys who contributed virtually nothing to the basic song, and it just didn’t sound like Monk. To top it all off, when the sides he recorded with Hawkins were finally released in 1945, they received virtually no critical notice. Joe Davis took out a couple of ads in the black press,94 but Hawk’s overall output was so substantial that these recordings were lost in the pile.
Everywhere Monk turned, he heard other artists playing his tunes. In December 1944, Coleman Hawkins participated in a recording session led by Mary Lou Williams. They recorded an arrangement of “Lady Be Good.” Monk claimed to have written the first sixteen bars of the melody; he would record them a decade later as “Hackensack.”95 Hawkins, for his part, claimed the melody as his own, recording it again in February of 1945 as “Rifftide.”96 Monk and Mary Lou were close and borrowed from each other on occasion, and it was customary for bandleaders to poach songs by their sidemen. While Monk did his own share of poaching, the circulation of his tunes without credit became a source of frustration.
Among musicians, however, Monk was becoming an iconic figure despite his inability to record his own music. While Hawkins and Williams were in the studio working through Monk’s riff on “Lady Be Good,” the men and women of the armed forces heard a hot new song by the Eddie South trio called “Mad Monk.”97 A swinging, medium-tempo, riff-based tune, it was the sort of thing folks could dance to. The A-section was based on the changes for “I Got Rhythm” and the bridge was straight from “Honeysuckle Rose.” The composer, also the group’s pianist, was Billy Taylor. He wrote it in tribute to Thelonious, in part because he was among the few in New York to really embrace Taylor when he first arrived. Moreover, Monk’s ideas influenced and inspired Taylor to create a piece that drew on Monk’s compositional ideas. “It was really the first bebop tune that I tried to write,” Taylor explained. “The idea was based on [Monk’s] ‘52nd Street Theme’ . . . but I was thinking about Art Tatum, so it didn’t sound like bebop. I realized that one of the devices Monk used in that song was a riff. At the turnaround and the last couple of bars, he played what I thought was a bebop phrase. And that’s what I tried to do. I tried to do my version of what Monk was trying to do.”98 In plain English, he combined swing, bebop, and stride. In that sense, it was highly appropriate as a tribute to Monk: You couldn’t pin it down, but everyone liked it. In March of 1945, Taylor recorded the song with his own trio for Savoy.99 When Thelonious heard it he was impressed. He commented to Taylor that he especially liked the idea of someone playing stride piano and bebop at the same time.100
• • •
The Down Beat Club engagement ended in late December when Billy Berg, a Los Angeles promoter who had recently opened a jazz club, booked Hawkins for a fairly long stay. The engagement was widely publicized, with “Delonious Monk” listed as the pianist, but by the time Berg nailed down the opening date for February 1945, Monk chose to stay behind. The versatile “Sir” Charles Thompson went in his place.101 It was a regrettable decision. Hawk’s new band recorded six sides for the Moe Asch label just before leaving for the West Coast. They played to a crowded room at Billy Berg’s, recorded for Capitol Records, and played a February 12th concert organized by jazz impresario Norman Granz that Moe Asch recorded and released as Jazz at the Philharmonic, Vol. 1. The disc sold over 150,000 copies in the first couple of years. The band even made a cameo appearance in a movie called The Crimson Canary featuring Noah Berry, Jr.102
Talk about missed opportunities! Of course, Monk could not have anticipated any of this. All he knew was that California was at the other end of the world, far from the musical center of the universe, far from potential gigs, and far from Nellie and his aging mother. Besides, he had just spent the last eight months working for the great Coleman Hawkins. Who wouldn’t hire him?