As he traveled across the Atlantic in the relative comfort of Air France’s Lockheed Super Constellation,1 Monk had quite a bit on his mind. He was going to miss home, but he knew he had to make this trip. He hungered for recognition, opportunities to play and create, and, ultimately, money. And over the years, he had developed a special fondness for France, from his high-school French class to the days at Minton’s when he’d wear a beret and a “Free France” button.2 Like most of his colleagues, Monk had heard stories of the grand treatment the French bestowed on black jazz musicians, and he knew that one of his early heroes, Herman Chittison, had made the same trip exactly twenty years before. When Chittison made his trans-Atlantic crossing to Paris, the jazz musicians’ paradise was also a city in crisis. Hitler’s rise to power emboldened French fascists, who rioted in the streets just months before Chittison arrived, and labor resistance to fascism generated literally hundreds of strikes and confrontations.3 But the gardens bloomed, lovers strolled the boulevard, and intellectuals occupied the cafés to discuss the latest developments in art, literature, and the anticolonial movement. Paris proved hospitable enough for Chittison to extend his stay for four years.4 Monk also arrived during a moment of crisis and uncertainty. Three weeks earlier, France had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Viet Minh in Dien Bien Phu. Riots erupted in France’s North African colonies, and it was becoming clear the old empire could no longer hold.5 But for many of Monk’s fellow travelers, some of whom were seeking romance in the City of Light, the country’s political crisis was of no real consequence.
The plane set down at Orly airport on Monday morning, May 31. Thelonious was greeted by a representative from the Paris Jazz festival (“Salon du Jazz”), who escorted him to a small hotel room on the Champs-Elysées—not far from the Blue Note on rue d’Artois—secured for him by Charles Delaunay.6 The terms of his performances were hardly ideal. He was scheduled to play the following night with a French rhythm section unfamiliar with his music. And because he was a last-minute addition to the program, none of the advance publicity mentioned Monk or prepared the audience for his unique brand of jazz. His Blue Note records and recent Prestige releases received a few notices in the French jazz press, and the 1949 essay on Monk in the Swiss journal Jazz-Revue caught the attention of hardcore fans, but Thelonious was still unknown in Paris. The festival’s real headliners were Gerry Mulligan and his quartet, trumpeter Jonah Jones, pianist Lalo Schifrin, hometown favorites like pianist Martial Solal and the Claude Luter orchestra, to name a few. Fortunately, Monk’s old friend Mary Lou Williams was there, having recently joined the American expatriate community in Paris. She was living at the Hotel Cristal on the Left Bank and had become a magnet for American musicians, artists, and intellectuals passing through. Unfortunately, Thelonious found Mary Lou in a particularly depressed and reclusive mood. The day Monk arrived, Williams’s dear friend, pianist Garland Wilson, had died of liver failure. He was only forty-four.7
Nervous, sleep-deprived, and with little time to rehearse, Monk did what made sense to him: He went out to buy some reefer. He had a contact: an expatriate bluesman named Al “Fats” Edwards. Coincidentally, it was during Monk’s search for weed that he first met his rhythm section, drummer Jean-Louis Viale and bassist Jean-Marie Ingrand. They were both in their early twenties and were working regularly at the Blue Note in Paris backing pianist René Urtreger. They were in the lobby of Fats’s building for the same reason Monk was. As Ingrand recalls, “At eight p.m. one lovely night, we arrived as usual at the door to his apartment complex. A big Black man, his beret turned towards his ears, was in full conversation with the concierge, who did not speak a word of English. Having noticed us, he asks us if we knew Fats, and if we could take him to his apartment. He explained to us that he got Fats’s address in New York and was anxious to meet him. Having recognized Monk completely by accident, we took the stairs to Fats’s pad, while Monk told us that he had arrived that morning in Paris to play in the festival and was assigned a French rhythm section. At that moment, I wasn’t even close to thinking that this rhythm section would include me. Later that night at Blue Note, I found out that Viale and I had been chosen to accompany Monk during his concerts.”8
The next day, June 1, Thelonious called a rehearsal at Salle Pleyel, the huge, elegant concert hall where the festival was to be held. Monk showed up late, barely uttered a word to Ingrand and Viale, and headed immediately to the piano and began to play. Without music or direction, they wrestled with the piece the best they could until Monk finally said, “It’s all right.”9 It really wasn’t all right. Thelonious was not happy with his rhythm section and he said as much in an interview a few years later. “I enjoyed the visit very much,” he explained to Nat Hentoff. “The only drag was I didn’t have my own band with me. I couldn’t find anybody to play with me that could make it.”10
Monk’s initial disappointment just added to his nervousness. By the time he returned to the Salle Pleyel that night for the concert, he was already a little tipsy. (As he would later confess, he discovered cognac in Paris and drank so much that it made him sick.11) Backstage, while Claude Luter’s wildly popular Dixieland band performed before 3,000 enthusiastic fans, Monk continued to toss back shots of scotch. Luter completed his set, the heavy green-velvet curtain closed, and the emcee and festival organizer, Charles Delaunay, stepped on stage to introduce the Thelonious Monk trio. A smattering of diehard Monk followers showed their appreciation, but most of the folks were there to see Luter and couldn’t care less about the strange American. The curtain drew back to reveal Ingrand and Viale poised to play, a lovely grand piano, and an empty bench. After a few seconds of tepid applause, Thelonious strolled onto the stage as if he hadn’t a care in the world, sporting a slightly oversized blue suit with a bright blue shirt and socks to match and a bow tie. He headed straight to the microphone and spoke in a manner that would have made his French teacher proud. “Bonsoir tout le monde. . . . Je joue ‘Well, You Needn’t.’ ” Then he coolly walked to the piano bench and sat down, ready to play. But before he touched the keyboard he suddenly changed his mind, returned to the mic, and declared: “Je joue ‘Off Minor.’ ”12
The audience was already restless and unforgiving, and the music did nothing to console them. Thelonious Monk was unlike anything the French had ever heard . . . or seen. He grunted and sweated, both feet flailing wildly underneath him in a macabre stationary dance. His chords were shockingly dissonant and the melody unfamiliar. When Monk would bang his elbow or forearm down on the keys, it looked contrived to fans who believed that Luter’s brand of Dixieland defined jazz. Viale and Ingrand were completely bewildered. Half an hour into the set, Monk suddenly got up, Ingrand recalls, and “pointed a vengeful finger towards an unsuspecting Jean-Louis Viale. Caught off guard and not knowing what to do, Viale immediately started to play a brilliant solo. At this point a furious Monk left the stage, downed a shot of scotch, then returned and serenely sat at his piano to finish the piece still playing, as if what he had just done was absolutely normal.”13 Later in the dressing room, Monk tore into Viale, explaining that when he gets up from the piano the set is over. Hurt, dejected, and utterly confused by the evening’s proceedings, Viale quit on the spot. Since they had one more show to do, Ingrand recruited drummer Gerard “Dave” Pochonnet to fill in. Pochonnet, a close friend of Mary Lou Williams, had been hanging out backstage for just such an occasion.14
Monk’s European debut proved to be a disaster. According to the leading French jazz magazine, Jazz Hot, Monk was not well received that first night, and the two British critics who attended the inaugural concert, Raymond Horricks and Mike Nevard, concurred. They both took in the proceedings with a combination of fascination and disappointment, concluding independently that Monk’s performance was more circus than concert. Describing him as a “kind of court jester to modern jazz,” Horricks’s comments were particularly harsh: “To witness a man making a fool of himself and his music as I had just done, a man committing artistic suicide, was no such pleasant sensation.”15 Nevard proved a bit more sympathetic, suggesting that while Monk might be easily dismissed “as a musical charlatan,” he found the music “sometimes startling, sometimes banal,” but always challenging. “You can’t assess Monk because there are no set standards by which to judge him. By the normal criterion of jazz he is inferior . . . but there may be minds attuned to his weird, morse-like message.”16
By the time the concert ended and the musicians retired to the Salle Pleyel cabaret for an informal jam session, Thelonious seemed more relaxed but was clearly inebriated. He sat in with baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and his group and a few of the locals.17 According to Horricks, Thelonious thoroughly disrupted the proceedings with his off-beat comping and strange harmonics, eliciting strange and angry looks from the other musicians. All except for Mulligan, who rose to the challenge and established a fruitful musical dialogue with Monk. The exchange ended only when Mulligan’s wife, Arlyne, abruptly announced that it was late and time to go home.18 But it wasn’t late for Thelonious. Despite obvious signs of exhaustion, he made his way to Mae Mezzrow’s19 flat where she was hosting a gathering of some fifteen friends, mostly musicians. Monk arrived and dominated the piano bench. Twenty-two-year-old pianist René Urtrerger was there. “Monk played all night and eventually everyone fell asleep. When we awoke the next day, he was still at the piano.”20
That night Monk met Joachim Berendt, an eminent German music critic and radio producer who was in Paris to record the festival for the Südwestfunk (SWF) radio network and Radiodiffusion Francaise. He was perhaps Germany’s equivalent of Leonard Feather; the founding director of the jazz division at SWF, Berendt had published a tome on jazz history entitled Das Jazzbuch (The Jazz Book) the previous year.21 Monk took a liking to Berendt and made arrangements to meet at his hotel the following evening. In Monk’s mind, Berendt was a hip European who knew the music and knew Paris and might help him navigate the city. In Berendt’s mind, Monk was a mystery to unravel. Monk wanted to shoot the breeze; Berendt wanted an interview. When Berendt arrived, Thelonious was sitting on his bed wearing “a fancy silk dressing gown” and ending an animated conversation with two other visitors. As soon as they left, it was the allegedly taciturn Monk who did the talking, bombarding Berendt with many specific questions about Paris. “I sensed,” mused Berendt later, “that it really meant something to Monk to be in Europe and, especially so, to be in Paris.”22 Unfortunately, the German critic’s limited knowledge of the city proved unhelpful. But when the tables turned and Berendt became the interrogator, Thelonious suddenly became close-lipped, if not uninterested. Berendt asked about Monk’s family, racial problems in the United States, and commercialism in jazz, but his answers alternated between “okay” and “just okay.” It was enough to persuade Berendt that Monk believed “that no race problem existed today.”23 Just when he thought he had exhausted all topics, Berendt casually asked about his stylish silk robe. Monk suddenly “stopped his ‘just okay’ attitude and even told me where he got it.”24 Thelonious wasn’t interested in being an object of curiosity; he wanted to see Paris, and, if he could afford it on his minuscule budget, bring home some stylish Parisian threads.
Monk appreciated Berendt’s interest in him given the generally cold reception of his music, though he did not realize at the time that Berendt was hardly his fan. Berendt agreed with certain criticisms, having found “much to criticize in Monk’s harmonies, which are sometimes wrong if you accept certain harmonic rules.”25 Danny Halperin, a Canadian who worked for the Continental Daily Mail and had become an intimate of jazz musicians,26 remembered hanging out with Monk the night after the first concert, listening to him complain about the audience response. “They’re not really listening to what I’m playing.” Overhearing their conversation, Gerry Mulligan jumped in and told Monk, “Don’t bother about it . . . I’ll be listening to you from now on. I’ll be just off stage listening. If you turn a little that way you’ll see me there.”27 The advice must have helped because on Thursday June 3, the second night of the festival, Monk came back swinging. Sober and focused, he ignored the “scattering of disrespectful gestures” from the audience, sat down at the piano, and took care of business. He kept the same rhythm section, having made up with Jean-Louis Viale, and this time they worked together on tunes like “We See” and “Well, You Needn’t.” Jazz Hot called Monk’s performance “significantly better,” and Raymond Horricks concurred.28 “His touch was definitive, his spontaneous search for new harmonic structures successful, his rhythmic emphasis clear and direct and considerate to his supporting musicians; in short, a musician sure of himself and sure of his direction in jazz.”29 Berendt was the lone dissenting voice, insisting that both performances were poor compared to his recorded output, the only detectable difference being “he drank less before the second concert than he did before the first one.”30
The audience seemed to concur with Berendt, for their attitude toward Monk remained unchanged. His spirits were lifted, however, when Mary Lou Williams greeted him warmly backstage. Accompanying her was an elegantly-dressed European woman of about forty years of age.31 Her friends called her Nica, but the world knew her by a much grander name: the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. She loved jazz and believed Thelonious was one of its greatest artists. She told him that Teddy Wilson persuaded her to buy the Blue Note disc of Monk’s “ ’Round Midnight” during a visit to New York City in 1951. She had to catch a flight back to Mexico City, her home at the time, but once the needle hit the groove she was overwhelmed. She missed her flight and remained in New York for three more months.32 As she later recounted to club owner Max Gordon, “The first time I heard Thelonious playing ‘ ’Round Midnight,’ I cried.”33 Thus began what would become the most significant relationship in Monk’s life outside his family.
During the course of Monk’s stay in Paris, he became acquainted with Nica’s stories, which succeeded in breaking down his initial detached and circumspect posture. She wasn’t just any rich baroness—she was a Rothschild, one of the world’s most powerful financial dynasties. Born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild in London on December 10, 1913, she was the youngest daughter of Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, a banker and amateur botanist and entymologist who loved insects more than money, and Rozsika von Wetheimstein, a beautiful and stately woman born of Hungary’s Jewish elite.34 They met during one of Charles’s excursions to Hungary in search of rare butterflies. In fact, Charles named his daughter Pannonica after a moth he had caught in 1913, the year of her birth.35
Despite the loss of her father when she was ten years old, Nica thrived in the well-heeled Rothschild family.36 She showed early promise as a painter: at age eleven she won a silver medal in an art contest held by the Royal Academy of Art.37 She attended the best finishing schools in Paris, met with royalty, and lived a life of protected privilege. And while her mother kept her children isolated from most other kids, Nica had her two sisters, Miriam and “Liberty” (Elizabeth), and her older brother Victor, with whom she grew quite close. Victor was a fine piano player who fell in love with jazz and invited his little sister to join the affair. Teddy Wilson became his teacher, and through their relationship Nica gained entrée into the actual world of jazz—records, musicians, clubs, and the like. It would become her first love. As she once explained, “In time, I grew to feel that if the music is beautiful, the musicians must be beautiful too in some way.”38
In the spring of 1935, Nica met Jules de Koenigswarter, a mining engineer and inspector for the Bank of Paris. Like Nica, he was from a prominent Jewish family with roots in Austria and Hungary, and a bona-fide baron to boot. They both loved to fly: When they first met in the summer of 1935, Nica had begun taking flying lessons and Jules was an accomplished pilot. As their son Shaun de Koenigswarter explained, “According to both of them, it was love at first sight (‘le coup de foudre,’ as we say in French).”39 They spent the remaining summer months in Jules’s small plane touring Europe, stopping off in Le Touquet, Deauville, Salzburg, Vienna, Budapest, Venice, and Monte Carlo. At the end of the tour, Jules popped the question. Ten years her senior and a widower with a young son, Jules was not only madly in love but quite anxious to remarry. It happened so suddenly that Nica’s response was to flee. On September 19, she boarded the S.S. Normandie, bound for New York where her sister Liberty now lived. 40 Jules followed in hot pursuit, arriving in New York on October 7.41 Eight days later, they were married at the New York City municipal building, to much fanfare, and set off on a honeymoon circumnavigating the globe.42
Now Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, she joined her new husband and stepson in Paris, bore two children—Patrick and Janka—and watched in horror as fascism spread throughout Europe. On September 3, 1939, a month shy of their fourth wedding anniversary, Jules was called up by the French Army as a reservist lieutenant to assist the R.A.F. in setting up a radar network in France. Five weeks after Hitler’s forces invaded France and propped up the Vichy regime, Jules managed to escape to England on June 21, 1940, where he promptly joined the Free French Army under the leadership of Général Charles de Gaulle. Five months later, he was dispatched to Brazzaville (Congo), then to Accra (Gold Coast), and eventually participated in the campaigns in Tunisia, Italy, and France as a member of the Première Division Française Libre (First Free French Division). By the war’s end, he had been promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel and earned the highest military honors, including the Croix de la Libération, Croix de la Légion d’Honneur, and the Croix de Guerre.43
Meanwhile, Nica and her nanny gathered the three kids and fled France just as German tanks rolled across the border. On June 11, 1940, they boarded a ship at Liverpool en route to New York.44 “She only stayed six months,” her son Shaun recounted, “long enough to find an American family to whom she could entrust the children and to find a way of being reunited with my father.”45 But during her brief stay she became active in the France Forever Committee, founded in Philadelphia in September 1940 by chemist and French expatriate World War I hero Eugene Houdry.46 De Gaulle himself recognized it as the official arm of the Resistance in the United States. Through France Forever, Nica volunteered to ship several tons of medical supplies to the Free French forces based in Brazzaville. She oversaw the delivery personally, boarding a Norwegian cargo ship in December 1940 and arriving in Brazzaville early in January 1941. She joined her husband in Brazzaville, then in Accra, working as a decoder and broadcasting anti-fascist messages and news of the Free French Forces into Vichy-controlled territories of French West Africa.47 Toward the end of the year, she contracted malaria in the Gold Coast and was granted a leave to visit her children. On New Year’s Eve, 1941, Nica boarded the S.S. Santa Paula bound for New York City.48 She almost didn’t make it. The much-celebrated ocean liner was attacked twice by German U-boats—once off the coast of West Africa, where a torpedo came within twenty feet of the vessel, and again off the U.S. coast, where it nearly collided with another ship dodging a U-boat attack. The Santa Paula arrived in one piece, docking in New York harbor on January 23, 1942.49 (Sadly, her mother-in-law did not make it; she refused to leave France and died at Auschwitz.50) Nica sailed back to the Gold Coast in December 1942, and three months later rejoined her husband in the First Free French Division as military driver in Cairo and later in Tunisia, Italy, and France. Holding the rank of private second-class, Nica also volunteered as a driver for the War Graves Commission, sometimes traveling close to the frontlines in Italy and Germany.51 And like her husband, she was decorated for her service, earning the Médaille de la France Libre.52
Jules’s military service earned him a coveted post in the diplomatic corps. He served first in Oslo (1946 to 1949) and then Mexico City, where he was counselor at the French Embassy.53 In the meantime, Nica had had three more children, Berit (born in 1946), Shaun (1948), and Kari (1950), but quickly became bored as the wife of a diplomat. She was terribly unhappy in her marriage; she found Jules controlling and disapproving of her friends. In 1951 she began to take more frequent trips to New York to hear music and escape what had become a stifling life. For Jules, these frequent excursions and his wife’s associations with black musicians became a source of embarrassment, which sometimes elicited acts of cruelty. “He used to break my records when I was late for dinner,” she lamented.54 She responded by coming home even later, extending her New York trips for weeks, months. By the time he was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to the United States and Canada, relocating to New York City in 1953, he and Nica had separated.55 She paid a rather dear price for her freedom. The Rothschilds did not look kindly upon her fraternizing with musicians, and separations are always messy when one is the subject of tabloids. She was not cut off entirely, but her access to the family fortune was significantly curtailed.
So when Nica first laid eyes on Monk that June night in 1954, she was essentially a free woman. She found in this unusual black man an artistic soulmate, though Thelonious did not know it at the time. Nica and Monk became fast friends, “and the rest of the time he was there we had a ball.”56 Besides Nica, Monk hung out with Mary Lou, Charles Delaunay, Henri and Ny Renaud, and some of the musicians in the festival. He spent quite a bit of time with his bassist Jean-Marie Ingrand. Despite their rough beginnings, they became friendly after the second performance, largely because Ingrand had a decent command of English. He served as Monk’s unofficial guide, translator, and problem-solver, and in exchange Monk taught the young bassist his music. “One day, Monk asked me to find him a small record player,” recalled Ingrand, “because he wanted me to listen to his latest disc with Sonny Rollins for Prestige. Together, we must have listened to ‘Friday The 13th’ a thousand times, and having studied the theme so thoroughly, I was the only one capable of playing it in Paris.”57
The Saturday, June 5 concert featured solo piano performances by Monk and seven other pianists, including Martial Solal, Bernard Peiffer, Henri Renaud, Lalo Schifrin, and Mary Lou Williams.58 Renaud and Delaunay found Monk’s solo performance so compelling that they decided to record a radio show of Monk alone, especially since the trio performances did not seem to go over well. So Delaunay secured the studio at Radiodiffusion Française for Monday afternoon, June 7.59
Renaud, Delaunay, and producer André Francis never thought they would release the nine sides they recorded that afternoon.60 After all, Monk’s contract with Prestige prohibited him from recording with another label, and the circumstances that day were hardly ideal. The engineers were on strike, which meant that Francis had to man the sound board himself. But given that Monk planned to return to New York in three days, they went ahead and crossed the picket line. Monk recorded each song in one take, the repertoire consisting primarily of tunes he had recorded for Blue Note (“Off Minor,” “Eronel,” “ ’Round Midnight,” “Well, You Needn’t”) as well as three songs he had laid down for Prestige the previous month—“Hackensack,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” and “We See,” which Francis originally retitled “Manganese.” Perhaps he, too, couldn’t understand Thelonious when he said “Weetee,” or maybe Monk never told him the title, but Francis came up with “Manganese,” an element from the periodic table that also doubles as a pun for “Monk at Ease.”61 Monk also included his latest composition, “Reflections,” which Francis listed as “Portrait of an Eremite” (meaning hermit or recluse—ermite in French). Like “ ’Round Midnight,” Monk performed it at a kind of fox-trot tempo—slower than medium but not quite a ballad.62
As soon as Monk was paid, he cut out to see Paris and do a little shopping. He picked up a few berets for himself and for friends, bought some French liquor, and a few trinkets for the kids. He spent the next few days hanging out with his crew—Nica, the Renauds, Mary Lou—playing where he could, even sitting in with his new pal Jean-Marie Ingrand at the Blue Note. Ingrand, especially, found it hard to see him go. “Along with a few friends,” he recalled, “I accompanied him to Orly. When he presented himself at customs, a bottle of scotch stood out from each of his pockets. This was Monk: a strange being, incomprehensible at times, but filled with kindness and simplicity at every occasion. He was a man one could easily get attached to.”63 Carrying just one piece of luggage weighing about twenty pounds, and apparently two bottles of scotch, Monk boarded Air France flight 29, headed for home.64