Although he had enjoyed his few days in Paris—and the money he made there—Monk was happy to be home with his family in San Juan Hill. But the excitement of his travels soon wore off and Monk had to start looking for gigs again. Without any steady bookings that summer, Thelonious continued to stay at home with his children while Nellie worked. Toot recalled, “He really did the daddy thing. And I can always see him bent over, changing Boo Boo’s diapers. This is pre-Pampers, man! That was an ordeal. Putting the diapers in the bucket and changing the bucket and the whole thing and he just did it like I never heard a complaint, or a sigh, or nothing.”1
Sometimes Thelonious dropped Boo Boo off at Thomas’s house while he threw Toot on his shoulders and walked around the neighborhood. “My father would just take me out because I was older and I was always, always on his shoulders. It seemed like I was a mile up. And he loved having me on his shoulders.” He’d pass by Green Gables on 62nd and Amsterdam, where his friend Baron Bennerson tended the bar, or Pat’s Bar on the corner of 64th to greet his friends, then head next door to the grocery store and pick up some meat from the local butcher. Toot remembered that everyone they encountered seemed to treat his father like royalty. “At this point he wasn’t ‘world famous,’ you know, but he sure was a somebody in the neighborhood. ’Cause everybody in the neighborhood would say hello to him and I knew something special was going on with my father. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew something special was going on by the way everyone sort of dealt with him.”2
One afternoon, Thelonious decided Toot needed a new pair of shoes. With Toot perched on his shoulders, he walked to Harry’s Shoes on West 64th Street and, in what might be described as an advanced example of modern parenting, or else an astonishing act of courage, he asked his four-year-old son to pick any pair of shoes he liked. “The family was aghast because he had let them know that I picked my own shoes. I remember his argument was, ‘He knows which shoes he likes. He can pick his own shoes.’ His take was basically, ‘I’ll make sure the size is right, but in terms of the style let him wear the shoes he digs, he doesn’t wear the shoes I dig.’ ” This was Thelonious’s approach to parenting.3 Thelonious was once asked how he would feel if his then-six-year-old son decided to become a professional musician when he grew up. Monk’s answer: “The important thing is how he feels. How I feel don’t mean nothing. He’ll be the way he wants to be, the way he’s supposed to be.”4 Nellie reinforced this idea. On many occasions, she reminded both Boo Boo and Toot to just “Be yourself. . . . Don’t bother about what other people say, because you are you. The thing to be is just yourself.”5
Thelonious played daddy but he also had to work. When his nieces were unavailable to baby-sit, Toot and Boo Boo often stayed with Rae McKinney, a close family friend who lived in the high-rise projects across the street. Affectionately known as “Aunt Rae,” she and her husband Mac were strict disciplinarians who had no qualms about spanking their own children. “Aunt Rae was like, ‘I’ll kick your ass, fuck you up in a minute, boy.’ She always had to temper her thing with me because she knew she had to deal with Thelonious, and Thelonious and Nellie didn’t believe in hitting kids. She wonked me a few times but I just took it. I said, you know, ‘If I tell Dad this’ll get crazy.’ He’ll come over here and he’ll hurt Mac and he’ll hurt Aunt Rae too. But I’ll never forget, Aunt Rae and Mac were so rough that they would do a tag team thing on you.”6 Despite the potential for “classic child abuse,” as he put it, staying with Aunt Rae was worth the trouble because their youngest son happened to be Toot’s best friend, Gregory Flowers. They remained running buddies well into their teenage years.7
• • •
It was a fun, relaxing summer for everyone, capped off with a celebration of Boo Boo’s first birthday on September 5 and the release of Monk’s latest Prestige LP recorded in May with Frank Foster and Ray Copeland. Barry Ulanov reviewed it for Metronome, and his opinion of Monk’s work had not changed; he found most of the record “dull” and “monotonous,” though he partly blamed Copeland and Foster for that.8 But Bob Weinstock was unfazed. He called Monk back to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio on September 22, along with Art Blakey and Percy Heath, to record another ten-inch LP.9 Monk came with renewed energy and at least one new composition he titled “Work.” Like “Four in One,” it was one of his treacherous melodies full of strange intervallic leaps, distinctive bass counterpoint, and unique chord progressions played over a medium tempo. Thelonious also introduced his third and most famous original blues, “Blue Monk.” Composed in the studio after Weinstock complained that Monk never played the blues, he borrowed part of the melody from Charlie Shavers’ composition “Pastel Blue,” though the sound is all Monk’s.10 The trio stretched out on “Blue Monk” for seven and a half minutes. Each successive chorus builds on the last and becomes more elaborate and playful—at one point Monk even quotes his own “Misterioso.” Monk liked “Blue Monk” so much that years later he would name it as one of his all-time favorites.11
Still short of tunes, Thelonious came up with “Nutty.” He confessed in an interview years later, “I made it up in the studio. We needed something else to record so I wrote that.”12 Much like Tadd Dameron’s “Good Bait,” its simple, playful melody is repeated in the bridge but modulates up to a different key. Finally, he filled in three more minutes with an unaccompanied, rubato version of “Just a Gigolo,” an old, beautiful ballad by Leonello Casucci and Julius Brammer, made popular in Vienna as “Schöne Gigolo” in 1929. Irving Caesar wrote an English lyric and it was recorded by several American singers, most famously Bing Crosby and Louis Prima.13 His introspective deconstruction of the melody drew critical acclaim and did much to establish Monk as an outstanding solo pianist.
Two days after the session, Monk had a one-night stand at Harlem’s Club Baron on 132nd and Lenox Avenue. Booked without a cabaret card, he joined Sonny Rollins, Willie Jones, and an unknown bass player (perhaps Percy Heath), and the band was billed as “The Greatest in Modern Jazz.”14 Sonny Rollins was Monk’s favorite saxophone player—he had wanted to hire Rollins as a permanent band member, but Rollins was destined to be a leader. Indeed, the very next month, on Monday, October 25, Thelonious returned to Van Gelder’s studio as a sideman on Rollins’s next Prestige session. (Actually, Monk was a last-minute addition, since Sonny planned to use Elmo Hope, but Hope had gotten arrested for drug possession.15) It was a familiar gathering—veteran bassist Tommy Potter and Sonny’s pal from Sugar Hill, drummer Art Taylor—all musicians Monk liked and respected. The relaxed setting produced a real jam session atmosphere; they laid down three sides, all standards or pop tunes. Rollins, who had a penchant for old show tunes, first called Vincent Youmans’ “I Want to Be Happy” at a swinging tempo. Monk threw his reputed minimalism out the window and comped busily behind Rollins, which didn’t faze the saxophonist at all. They then followed with a rollicking revision of Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight.” Rollins imposed a different melodic line over Kern’s chord changes, prompting Weinstock to retitle the song “The Way You Blow Tonight.” They closed the session with another old Broadway hit by Youmans, the romantic ballad “More Than You Know” (1929). Nearly eleven minutes in length, it is the session’s masterpiece. Monk’s accompaniment is more about embellishing Rollins’s melodic statements than laying down a harmonic framework, producing a unique musical marriage that is at once stately and full of surprises.16
The two worked together again that Saturday night at a Town Hall concert produced by Bob Reisner. Monk and the other musicians knew Reisner from his infamous afternoon jazz series at the Open Door, featuring Charlie Parker. Reisner arranged the Town Hall concert as a vehicle to feature Parker, his hero, who was going through some hard times. Parker’s infant daughter, Pree, had died just a few months earlier, and he had checked himself into the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital less than a month before the Town Hall concert.17 The roster of musicians appearing alongside Bird was impressive—Reisner billed the event as the “Great Moderns in Jazz . . . featuring the outstanding Jazz Groups of ’54.”18 The list included Monk, Rollins, trumpeter Art Farmer and his brother Addison on bass, guitarist Jimmy Raney, Horace Silver, and Gigi Gryce, among others. (Monk’s rhythm section consisted of Michael Mattos on bass and Willie Jones on drums, but it is not clear whether Rollins performed as part of Monk’s band or was a featured artist in his own right.) The event was poorly publicized and badly organized, yielding just a smattering of concertgoers.19 Despite the poor attendance, the event became an occasion for Thelonious to see old friends and make new ones. He dug hearing Gigi Gryce, whom he began seeing a bit more frequently now that Gryce was living in New York City. He also saw his friend from Paris, the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter. She was now living at the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue and 81st Street.20 Monk made sure to introduce Nica to his family, especially Nellie, whom she befriended right away.
That same night Jimmy Raney’s pianist, tall, white, slightly younger than Thelonious, introduced himself. His name was Hall Overton. A composer with a Juilliard degree, he had already written an opera, scored for ballet, and was completing a symphony for strings.21 Yet, he was utterly thrilled to meet Monk, a composer whom he had admired ever since his neighbor, a college kid named Harry Colomby, gave him a copy of one of Monk’s 78s from Blue Note. “[Overton] was giving me [piano] lessons,” Colomby remembers, “and I couldn’t pay him, so at first I gave him a free phonograph I had gotten from Sam Goody for buying records. It really didn’t work too well. Then I brought him a Thelonious Monk record. And he had not heard him before. The record had ‘April in Paris,’ and the other side was ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It.’ He said, ‘Whoooo’ and used the phrase ‘purple passages.’ I remember that.”22 It made a lasting impression. That night, he told Monk that he’d recorded “ ’Round Midnight” with Jimmy Raney and Stan Getz the previous year23 and expressed an interest in studying more of his compositions. Thus began a long friendship.
Monk’s reputation as an innovative composer and pianist far exceeded his modest record sales, although Prestige continued to release his LPs and kept his name in circulation. By the second half of 1954, part of the jazz world had finally begun to see Thelonious as more than a sideshow. In November, Monk was invited to Columbia University’s Institute of Arts and Sciences (IAS). Directed by maverick scholar Russell Potter, the IAS offered creative extension courses for the non-academic community, often devoted to music, art, politics, and controversial subjects. The Institute offered a no credit course titled “Adventures in Jazz” taught by British guitarist Sidney Gross. The gig grew out of a series of radio lectures Gross had given on WNYC. The sixty-five students were not Columbia underclassmen but New York jazz lovers—men and women willing to lay out twenty bucks for the ten-week course. The class met every Wednesday night in the School of Journalism building, in a large classroom equipped with a fancy phonograph, a grand piano, and plenty of chalkboard. A course on jazz did not go over well with some administrators and faculty, especially in the Music Department. Professor Paul H. Lang was embarrassed by it and thought the IAS had overstepped its bounds. Lang complained to the University Provost, “This sort of thing can only hurt our reputation, moreover the next morning the room looks like a stable. The piano is banged up and the phonograph which we are nursing at great cost is abused.” He asked the Provost to “take action to stop this circus.”24
For the students, “Adventures in Jazz” was hardly a circus. They were treated to a living history of the music; they met and heard Willie “The Lion” Smith, bassist George “Pops” Foster, trumpeters Henry “Red” Allen and Jonah Jones, and trombonist Jack Teagarden.25 “Bebop” happened to be the theme the week when Gross summoned Monk to share his expertise, and his fellow invitees included Oscar Pettiford, drummer Louis Bellson, and clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton (with whom Gross had just made several recordings26), as well as Nat Hentoff, who talked briefly about the future of jazz, and poet Langston Hughes, who read some of his own jazz-inspired work.27 Although Gross designated Bellson “the star performer,” the nattily dressed Monk stole the show. Gross asked Thelonious to demonstrate the differences between the older swing-era harmonies and those of the modernists. A writer for the New Yorker observed, “Mr. Monk sat down at the piano and struck a few chords. ‘Those are old-style chords,’ he said. ‘Now here’s a new-style chord—a G seventh. . . . That’s what the chords we’re using nowadays sound like.’ ”28 Of course, no one voiced chords like Monk, so what he played jarred the sensibilities of the uninitiated. He continued to prove his point by playing a chorus of “Just You, Just Me,” followed by an ensemble rendition of the same song. Nat Hentoff remembers Gross turning to Monk and asking him to “play some of your weird chords for the class.” Thelonious was taken aback by the question. “What do you mean ‘weird’?” Monk replied acidly. “They’re perfectly logical.”29
• • •
On Christmas Eve, Monk was back in Van Gelder’s studio, this time as a member of an “all-star” band of Prestige recording artists. Once again, Monk was a sideman, not a leader. Bob Weinstock conceived of the session as a vehicle to showcase Miles Davis, backed by Monk and three members of the Modern Jazz Quartet: Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, and Kenny Clarke. To this day, the session has been one of the most controversial in the history of jazz, and not because of the music. Evidently, Miles asked Monk to “lay out” (not play) behind him whenever he took a solo. Indignant, Monk then allegedly did various things to sabotage the session. Words were exchanged, followed by blows. Eyewitnesses like Ira Gitler and Rudy Van Gelder, not to mention Miles and Monk themselves, have tried to lay the rumors to rest.30 In his autobiography, Miles played down any tension between the two men and explained his decision to have Monk lay out as purely musical: “Monk never did know how to play behind a horn player. . . . A trumpet player needs the rhythm section to be hot even if he is playing a ballad. You got to have that kicking thing, and most of the time that wasn’t Monk’s bag. So I just told him to lay out when I was playing, because I wasn’t comfortable with the way he voiced his changes, and I was the only horn on that date.”31 Thelonious also deflected any suggestions of conflict. He famously told Gitler in an interview two years later, “Miles’d got killed if he hit me [chuckling].” And then he added, “I ‘lay out’ my own self. He got that from me. He got that ‘laying out’ from me.”32 In another interview a few years later, Monk’s response to the ubiquitous question about the session was more sober and reasoned: “When Miles asked me to lay out during his solo on that record, I never thought nothing of it—Roy Eldridge had his piano lay out years ago.”33 And when a French jazz magazine asked him about the date, he dismissed stories about their fight as “an invention. . . . Miles and I didn’t have an argument.”34
Still, there were tensions between the two men, exacerbated in part by Monk’s deteriorating relationship with Prestige. This was Monk’s second sideman gig in a row; he was upset that the label had not arranged another recording session for him as a leader. Furthermore, Weinstock had no intention of including any of Monk’s tunes on the date. He was the best-known composer in the room, and the exclusion of his songs was insulting, especially in an all-star session. Composers’ royalties were at stake and Monk needed the money. Ira Gitler was in the studio, and, again came to Monk’s defense, persuading Weinstock to include at least one of his compositions on the playlist.35 Ironically, Monk selected “Bemsha Swing,” the song Weinstock resisted at one of Monk’s recording sessions two years earlier.36 Monk was also feeling a little envious of Milt Jackson, who seemed to be thriving financially as a member of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Monk once expressed his frustrations about Jackson’s success to a French jazz magazine: “Milt Jackson is like Dizzy you know. We played together plenty of times, but in the end he was the one to benefit from it. Meanwhile, I wasn’t even able to find a gig.”37 And to add to the interpersonal tensions, Thelonious would have preferred to spend Christmas Eve with his family, not in Hackensack working for scale.
So when Monk arrived at Van Gelder’s studio around two in the afternoon, he was already a bit agitated. And when Miles insisted that Monk lay out, Monk was in no mood to be given directives–especially from Miles Davis. On the first take of “Bag’s Groove” (Milt Jackson’s composition), Thelonious got up from the piano and stood next to Miles during his entire solo. An annoyed Davis asked Monk why he did it, to which Monk replied, “I don’t have to sit down to lay out.”38 According to Gitler, Monk ruined another take by asking Van Gelder, “Where’s the bathroom?”39 On the other hand, there were times when the question of laying out had not been settled, causing legitimate confusion. For example, on “Swing Spring,” Thelonious plays behind Miles on the melody, but on “Bag’s Groove” he doesn’t. When the band was about to launch into a rendition of Gershwin’s “The Man I Love,” Monk did not know whether to enter on the melody or not. On the first take, Milt Jackson begins his solo introduction and suddenly Monk asks, “When am I supposed to come in, man?” At which point Milt Jackson stops playing and the rest of the band lets out a collective groan. Someone interjects, “Man, the cat’s cutting hisself.” Monk then repeats himself in a kind of feigned irritation, “I don’t know when to come in, man. Can’t I start too? Everybody else . . .” at which point Miles cuts off the conversation and says to Rudy Van Gelder, “Hey, Rudy. Put this on the record—all of it.”40
“The Man I Love” had become a source of controversy and intrigue for other reasons. The song begins in a slow ballad tempo with Miles’s open horn delivering a plaintive rendering of the melody while Jackson and Monk play behind him. Then at the break, Milt Jackson leaps in to solo as the band doubles the tempo. When Monk comes in to take his solo, he decides to restate the melody, but in the original tempo while the band continues to play in double-time, as if Monk were in slow motion. Once he gets through the melody, there is a long pause—about nine measures—at which point Davis plays a phrase away from the mic, as if to remind Monk to play. Monk is spurred to action and jumps right into a short improvisation on the bridge. It was a bizarre musical moment, ripe for rumor-mongering. Some claimed Monk had fallen asleep alleging he was in a heroin-induced stupor, and Miles had to wake him up. The more common explanation is that he got lost in the music and didn’t know where to go.41 Both claims are untrue, since Monk did the same thing on the first take (released later). Miles did not come in and Monk did not pause so long, but it shows that Monk was purposely constructing his solo along these lines.
For all of the antics and the grumbling, the music itself tells a different story. Thelonious threw all he had into the session, collaborating and accompanying without compromising his own sound. A fine example is “Bemsha Swing,” the one song in which Monk never lays out. Miles sounds relaxed and the two are clearly in dialogue, refuting the belief that Miles can’t play over Monk’s backing. But the most revealing exchanges occur on Davis’s composition, “Swing Spring.” Here Miles takes two solos, the second follows Milt Jackson and opens with one of his better known clichés, a quote from “Surrey with a Fringe on Top.” But at the top of the third chorus, Davis lovingly slips into one of Monk’s best-known signature riffs—one Thelonious had been playing over “I Got Rhythm” changes since the days at Minton’s. Monk picks it up and builds his solo around the phrase, becoming more elaborate with each chorus. Then in the ninth bar of the third chorus, Monk literally takes us back to Minton’s by quoting Joe Guy’s “Rear Back,” revealing once again Monk’s wry sense of humor. The lyrics are the words of a hustler imploring his girl: “I want to sit rear back/ rear back, rear back, rear back with you.”42 All sorts of meaning could be made of this moment. Was Monk bringing a little levity to his feud with Miles? Was he suggesting, let’s make up and love each other? Or was it a warning to “rear back,” meaning to back off? It was meant as an inside joke, but as a musical choice, it was a slick, compact phrase that worked perfectly in his solo.
Ultimately, these and other musical interactions between Monk, Miles, and the rest of the band underscore the success of the recording date. When Ira Gitler, who left the session after about three hours of little productivity, asked Kenny Clarke that night how it went, Clarke replied “Miles sure is a beautiful cat.”43 When two French journalists essentially asked the same question of Monk almost nine years later, he remembered, “The conditions were terrible. We were tired. The producer was not in the best of moods. It was Christmas Eve, and everyone wanted to go home.”44 Monk also recalled inviting Miles back to his house where they hung out well into the early morning hours. “I even had a hard time getting rid of him that night.”45
• • •
After the Christmas and birthday festivities, the Monks rang in the New Year of 1955 with the familiar feeling that, despite Thelonious’s press and accolades, unemployment and poverty were permanent conditions. Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Quartet had become the label’s stars and Monk felt himself fading into the background. After two recording sessions as a sideman and no scheduled sessions as a leader, Thelonious let his friends know that he was ready to move on. Nat Hentoff promptly called Bill Grauer and Orrin Keepnews of Riverside Records to inform them that Monk was looking for a new label. They were ecstatic. Both men knew Monk: Grauer was the founding editor of The Record Changer and Keepnews had written a feature piece on Monk for the same publication in 1948. They started Riverside (so named after The Record Changer’s Manhattan telephone exchange) in 1953, initially reissuing classic jazz recordings by the likes of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson, Bix Beiderbecke, Albert Ammons, and blues singers such as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Ma Rainey.46 Their first studio sessions also reflected their predilection for the older jazz. They recorded a number of Dixieland and Chicago-style jazz bands, including Bob Hodes’s Red Onion Band, Ralph Sutton Duo, Gene Mayl’s Dixieland Rhythm Kings, and clarinetist George Lewis.47 But Grauer and Keepnews were not diehard “moldy figs”; in 1954 they signed modern jazz artist Randy Weston.
By the early summer of 1955, Weston had already recorded two LPs for Riverside and was voted “new star” pianist in Down Beat’s critics poll.48 He got to know Grauer and Keepnews pretty well, in part because Weston also worked as a clerk in Riverside’s shipping department. Weston became their entrée to talented modernists, the most famous being Monk. “Keepnews approached me about getting Monk,” Weston remembered. “They knew I was close to Monk, so they asked me to talk to him.”49 Weston talked to Thelonious and arranged his meeting with Grauer and Keepnews.50 Once they laid down the terms, Monk was ready to sign. But he had two matters of business to attend to: First, his contract with Prestige was not up until August, so he needed permission to be released; second, he owed Prestige $108.27 for an advance he had drawn against royalties. He could not get out of his contract unless he paid back the advance, and Thelonious was, as always, broke. Worried that Weinstock “might not turn the pianist loose quite so casually if they were aware that a rival company was standing by,” Keepnews loaned Thelonious $125 to pay back the advance.51 (The money Keepnews advanced Monk to buy out his contract was deducted from his first royalty checks.) Their sub-rosa tactics may not have been necessary, however. Weinstock was ready to release Monk and hoped another label was interested. “At the time, the money Thelonious got for recording for me was probably his only source of income. His records didn’t sell then, and I recorded him often anyway, to help. . . . He had overdrawn that amount, and when he asked for his release, I was happy for him, and hoped that it would be good for him.”52 Weinstock got his money, Monk got his freedom, and Grauer and Keepnews got their man. In March 1955, Thelonious signed a three-year contract,53 although four months would pass before they would get him into a studio.
Monk’s negotiations with Prestige and Riverside were interrupted by the news that Charlie Parker had died at Nica’s home in the Stanhope Hotel. On March 9, while on his way to a gig at Storyville in Boston, Parker stopped by Nica’s place in terrible shape; he was weak and coughing up blood. The Baroness insisted he stay and rest. The hotel doctor diagnosed him with advanced cirrhosis and stomach ulcers and thought he should be hospitalized immediately, but Parker refused to leave. The doctor had no choice but to leave Bird in the care of Nica and her daughter. She called her own physician, Dr. Robert Freymann, to attend to Parker. He, too, believed Bird needed to be hospitalized. Three days later Bird collapsed while watching television.54 He was only thirty-four years old.
Bird’s death was a great loss to the jazz world. It turned Parker into an icon, and it pushed Nica over the precipice of an already scandalous public existence. (In fact, it proved to be the catalyst for Jules de Koenigswarter’s divorce from Nica—he learned of the incident listening to Walter Winchell’s gossip column on the radio.55) Thelonious was never really that close to Bird, but he respected him enormously. Monk attended the funeral at Abyssinian Baptist Church on March 21, and the following week headed down to Philadelphia to participate in a memorial jam session for Parker at the Blue Note. Virtually everyone in the jazz world showed up, from Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster to Billie Holiday and Stan Getz, providing over twelve hours of continuous music.56 Five days later, Monk was back on stage for another Parker benefit, this time at Carnegie Hall for a crowd of 2,700. Running from midnight to 4:00 a.m., the concert was organized by Dizzy, Mary Lou Williams, Nat Hentoff, Maely Dufty, Charles Mingus, and others, and netted nearly $6,000 in proceeds in order to help defray Bird’s funeral expenses and to provide for his two sons.57
Parker’s tragic death brought the jazz community together. In particular, Monk reconnected with Charles Mingus. Mingus, Metronome editor Bill Coss, and Morris Eagle (an NYU grad student in clinical psychology turned producer), had launched a series of concerts at Carnegie Recital Hall and the 92nd Street YM-YWHA under the rubric “Developments of Modern Jazz.” Previous concerts featured compositions by Mingus, clarinetist John La Porta, and tenor saxophonist Teo Macero, a recent Juilliard graduate and a founding member of Mingus’s Jazz Composers’ Workshop.58 Workshop members were interested in fusing jazz with elements of classical music and the avant garde’s forays into atonality and twelve-tone composition. While Monk’s music may not have consciously incorporated these elements, the Workshop found his music worthy enough to be featured in their April 23 concert at the 92nd Street Y.59 He was backed by Mingus, Macero, trombonist Eddie Bert, trumpeter Art Farmer, and drummer Rudy Nichols—all members of the Workshop. Hall Overton sat in when the group played compositions by Mingus and others.60
The concert was neither well-publicized nor well-attended, but it launched a long friendship between Monk and Mingus. Monk admired Mingus’s musicianship and brutal honesty, and Mingus practically worshipped Thelonious. Just a few months after the concert Mingus wrote “Jump Monk” as a tribute to the pianist. “The reason I called it ‘Jump,’ ” he later explained, “was because Monk was always moving around. We were working in a club in the Bronx one time and there was a revolving door. He came in and out, in and out, for about five minutes.”61 Monk would treat the Jazz Composers’ Workshop as a kind of revolving door as well, but in the spring of 1955 he considered it a great source for serious, like-minded musicians. In fact, Monk hired an all-Workshop band for his next big gig—the Tonight Show with Steve Allen.