In the late spring of 1957, Harry Colomby appealed to the State Liquor Authority once again in an effort to restore Monk’s cabaret card. Both Nica and Maely Dufty offered to retain legal assistance, and the lawyer Nica hired succeeded in getting a police hearing. But it was Colomby who filled out the paperwork required by the Liquor Authority.1 He argued that Thelonious was a drug-free, law-abiding citizen, whose productivity and growing popularity as a recording artist demonstrates his standing as a responsible working musician. Colomby banked on his own position as a white, clean-cut high school teacher, managing him, to turn the tide in Monk’s favor. Again, Colomby asked Monk’s prominent friends and acquaintances to submit character letters on his behalf. In May 1957, the State Liquor Authority agreed to grant Thelonious a hearing, but only on the condition that a club owner commit to hire him.
“I wanted to find a place that was small,” Colomby explained. “I once drove past this place in the Village and there was a bar and I heard music. I went into it and it was the Five Spot. A place where poets hung out.” The place was a nondescript Bowery bar at 5 Cooper Square, and the owners were two brothers, Joe and Iggy Termini. “Monk was brought to us by Harry Colomby,” Joe Termini concurred. They not only agreed to give Monk a gig, but Joe willingly testified on Monk’s behalf at the police hearing.2 It worked. Once approved, Monk promptly headed down to 56 Worth Street, the Police License Division, where he was fingerprinted, photographed, and relieved of two bucks (the fees went to a retirement fund for cops). He walked out with card number G7321, a license to work, and a job.3
On the 4th of July, 1957, Monk began what turned out to be a six-month stay at the Five Spot Café. Working six nights a week, four sets a night, Monk earned $600 a week, $225 of which he kept for himself and the rest he paid his three sidemen.4 It was his first long-term engagement as a leader and it was his first regular paycheck since working for Coleman Hawkins over a decade earlier. He was now thirty-nine years old.5
• • •
The story of how Monk came to the Five Spot involves more than a business transaction or Harry Colomby’s serendipitous drive through the East Village.6 The common lore is that Monk single-handedly put the tiny Bowery bar on New York’s jazz map. But in truth, the Five Spot had already established its own presence in New York’s artistic and cultural landscape. The Terminis’ bar had become a gathering place for emerging modern artists and writers, from leading abstract expressionists to the so-called Beat Generation literati, before Monk ever stepped foot on the club’s sawdust-covered floors. Rather, it was this world of experimental arts and letters that put Monk on a much larger cultural map. They found in Monk’s angular sounds and startling sense of freedom a musical parallel or complement to their own experiments on canvas and in verse. In order to understand how this incredible marriage came to be, we need to know how a nondescript Bowery bar became the hangout for America’s cultural avant-garde.
For one thing, it wasn’t always called the Five Spot. When Salvatore Termini, an enterprising Sicilian born in 1884, purchased the bar in 1937, patrons knew it as the Bowery Café.7 Situated between East 4th and East 5th Streets, where the Bowery ends and splits off into Third Avenue and Cooper Square, the Bowery Café was one of several small bars hidden in the shadows of the elevated train line known to natives as the Third Avenue El. Salvatore had no illusions about the clientele, a smattering of street drunks and thirsty vagabonds mixed with respectable working-class locals and occasional outlaws.8 He knew the area well. In 1930, Salvatore lived in a tenement house just off the Bowery, with his wife, Angelina, and five of their six children.9
This watering hole was no gold mine, but it enabled Salvatore to put food on the table, purchase a modest home in Brooklyn, and launch a family-run printing business.10 His two eldest sons, John and Frank, took on financial and administrative responsibilities for both businesses, while Ignatze (“Iggy” for short11) worked briefly as a linotype and monotype operator until he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force in May 1942. Ten months later, his nineteen-year-old brother Joe followed suit.12
Joe and Iggy returned home in 1946 and helped their father run the Bowery Café. Five years later, they assumed ownership of the establishment, now called No. 5 Bar. It continued to thrive as a neighborhood joint, serving the regular drunks who could pay their tab and providing a haven from the winter cold for homeless men. “It was a busy place,” Iggy Termini remembered. “We were making a lot of money and it was a busy place. But all people were doing was drinking. . . . I was buying one hundred cases of wine, in gallon bottles, a month, and about thirty barrels of beer a week.”13 Then, in the latter part of 1955, the city decided that the Third Avenue El had seen its last days and embarked on a massive demolition and redevelopment project. The removal of the El brought fresh air, quiet, sunlight, a commitment to “clean up” the Bowery, and a wave of artists and musicians in search of loft spaces and cheaper rents.14 The Termini brothers responded accordingly, transforming the drab bar into a haven for the new clientele, adorning the walls with posters from various art exhibitions.15 The bar also attracted some neighborhood musicians, including a pianist and merchant marine named Don Shoemaker. When Shoemaker wasn’t at sea, he organized jam sessions in his upstairs studio at 1 Cooper Square, next door to the bar. “They’d be coming down and buying a pitcher, a beer or whatever,” Joe Termini recalled. “They were running up and down and all that, so Don Shoemaker says to me, ‘Why don’t you get a piano and we’ll come play here.’ ”16 The Terminis liked the idea, so they purchased an old upright and applied for a cabaret license. They received the license August 30, 1956, and a week later opened for business as the Five Spot, the newest jazz club in the Village. Shoemaker and a bass trumpet player named William Dale Wales simply moved the jam sessions downstairs and invited their friends to play.17 Within weeks of the club’s reincarnation, the Five Spot earned a reputation as the local place for cheap beer and good music.18
Painter Herman Cherry and sculptor David Smith were among the first wave of artist-regulars. They couldn’t resist the music, or the seventy-five-cent pitchers of beer. Neither starving nor young, both artists were approaching fifty when they became part of the emerging “East Village” scene. The two men were both early proponents of abstract expressionism and widely respected in the art world. Smith, who split his time between Bolton Landing, New York, and the city, was already in the planning stages of a major retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art.19 Cherry, who had only recently moved to abstraction and mixed media works, set up a studio on the Bowery just across the street from the Five Spot.20 They told their friends about the place, and soon the little bar became a coveted gathering spot for New York artists. The regulars included painters Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Alfred Leslie, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Jack Tworkov, Mike Goldberg, Roy Newell, Howard Kanovitz, and writers Jack Kerouac, Ted Joans, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, among others.21 Occasionally poets read and artists with musical proficiency seized the bandstand.22 Helen Tworkov, the club’s hat-check girl and daughter of painter Jack Tworkov, put it best: “The Terminis didn’t know who the artists or musicians were—the scene was self-made. It wasn’t like some entrepreneur said, ‘Let’s start a jazz club.’ It was all underground word of mouth.”23
During the Five Spot’s formative stage, the scene was nearly all-white and mostly male. Amiri Baraka was an early patron when he was still LeRoi Jones, but he didn’t arrive in the Village until 1957, not long before Monk started playing there.24 Ted Joans, an extraordinary poet, painter, sometimes jazz vocalist, sometimes jazz trumpeter, was probably the first black Five Spot regular. While he found the Five Spot friendly and hospitable, the neighborhood was not. “It was dangerous. The Italians did not want any ‘spades’ in their territory, so we had to be careful. Don’t let them catch you with a white woman! I used to carry a blackjack and a napkin filled with hot pepper to throw in their eyes in case I was attacked.”25 When Amiri Baraka joined the community, Joans hipped him to the state of race relations. Baraka took to carrying “a lead pipe in a manila envelope, the envelope under my arm like a good messenger, not intimidated but nevertheless ready.”26 While most working-class residents were hostile to all bohemian artists, “the general resentment the locals felt toward the white bohemians,” mused Jones, “was quadrupled at the sight of the black species.”27 There were very few African-Americans in the Village in 1956, though the affordable rents and the rise of the downtown jazz scene paved the way for a substantial migration of black artists.28
The Five Spot crowd became a little more diverse soon after David Amram joined the group. He sat in on French horn and began inviting musician friends, many of whom were African-American. One evening in November 1956, he brought a pianist named Cecil Taylor.29 Rather small and wiry, bespectacled, all of twenty-seven, Taylor challenged the image of the Negro jazz musician held by much of white bohemia. Raised in a middle-class family on Long Island by a mother who was a classically trained pianist, Taylor was also a poet who read widely in all the arts. He grew up listening to the black dance bands of Ellington, Basie, and Jimmie Lunceford, but, as a student at the New England Conservatory, he studied the works of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Bartók, and Stravinsky. His role models were Duke Ellington, Horace Silver, and Thelonious Monk (he recorded “Bemsha Swing” on his first LP), as well as Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano.30 Taylor could hold his own in a conversation, but when he touched the keyboard he had the room under his spell.
“So Cecil sat down and started playing by himself,” Amram recalled, “started playing all this incredible stuff—and all the painters, the artists who were sitting there, just suddenly got quiet. Instinctively they knew that this was some other stuff happening, and they were really into it.”31 Taylor’s music touched a nerve. It was abstract expressionism in sound. He played with a kind of kinetic energy that can’t be contained within a steady beat. Unfortunately, the Terminis’ old upright piano wasn’t ready for Taylor’s brand of freedom. “Joe had a piano that at tops was worth $20,” Taylor recounted. “It had no front on it, and the ivory was off some of the keys, but naturally when I played one of the keys broke and one of the hammers flew out and Joe got very upset. That piano was one of the weakest, worst pianos ever conceived by man.”32 According to Amram, when Joe Termini saw keys and hammers flying out of the instrument, he blew up. “He said, ‘Don’t you bring that guy back, he’s going to break my piano! I don’t want him ever to play here!’ . . . And then the painters said, ‘Listen, if you don’t let him come back we’re not going to come back here anymore.’ ”33
Needless to say, Joe changed his mind. He hired Taylor’s trio—bassist Buell Neidlinger and drummer Dennis Charles—to accompany multi-instrumentalist Dick Whitmore, but Whitmore quit after three nights.34 In turn, the Terminis gave Taylor the gig. He added soprano saxophonist Steve Lackritz (who would soon change his name to Steve Lacy) to the group and they stayed from November 29 through January 3, 1957.35 The music was dense, complex, dissonant, and thoroughly avant-garde. Three years before Ornette Coleman opened at the Five Spot and shook up the jazz world with his free improvisations, Cecil Taylor introduced the “New Thing” to an appreciative audience. And an appreciative management: for the first time in the sleepy little bar’s history, there were lines outside the door. Even the naysayers showed up, if only to offer a critique. And so it was in the winter of 1956 that Cecil Taylor, there only by the insistence of the artists, turned the Five Spot into the city’s leading venue for experimental jazz.36
In January 1957, David Amram brought a subdued but experimental energy on French horn. He kept drummer Dennis Charles from Taylor’s group and hired pianist Valdo Williams.37 A month into the gig they added John Ore, a twenty-three-year-old bassist from Philly whose résumé included stints with Lester Young, Tiny Grimes, Bud Powell, Elmo Hope, Coleman Hawkins, and a year at Juilliard.38 For eleven straight weeks, the Terminis kept Amram’s band on the payroll, though on most nights the bandstand swelled with guests. Jack Kerouac read with the group every once in a while, and a parade of musicians sat in, including Zoot Sims, Gerry Mulligan, and fellow French hornist Julius Watkins. One night, the entire Woody Herman band showed up to play.39 When Amram’s run ended on March 20, Dale Wales, his wife, singer Jenny McKenzie, and a host of his friends returned for a month. It was the last time the original neighborhood clan would take the stage at the Five Spot. By mid-April Joe Termini, the club’s front man in charge of music, decided to limit bookings to noteworthy artists. On April 18, Randy Weston opened with baritone saxophonist Cecil Payne, followed by Charles Mingus and his Jazz Workshop in May, and pianists Mal Waldron and Freddie Redd through June.40 The Five Spot suddenly attracted nation-wide attention. In June photographer Burt Glinn shot a photo spread there for Esquire magazine41; Steve Allen ran a short segment on the club for the Tonight Show42; and the patrons who typically hit Café Bohemia and the Vanguard now ventured farther east. In other words, as Amiri Baraka put it, “By the time Monk and Trane got there, The Five Spot was the center of the jazz world!”43
Monk’s Five Spot gig coincided with the reissue of his Prestige and Blue Note recordings on twelve-inch LPs,44 as well as the release of Brilliant Corners, which earned a glowing review in Down Beat.45 The Metronome reviewer was only slightly more reserved, praising Brilliant Corners for capturing Monk’s unique balance of complexity and simplicity. “This is real Monk; full of all the sometimes incongruous and often primitiveness that is so distinctly his own.”46
Monk opened on July 4, playing opposite the Cecil Payne/Duke Jordan quartet. In fact, during the first two weeks of the date, Monk used Payne’s bassist Michael Mattos, with whom he’d worked before, and a young drummer named Mack Simpkins.47 While it wasn’t his band, Monk was pleased with the results. “I was there for Thelonious’s opening night,” David Amram remembered, “and he was so excited and so happy, and so full of energy.”48 Nellie, Nica, and Harry Colomby, too, were excited and happy, but given the uncertainty of Monk’s condition, they were also cautious and a bit nervous. Thelonious insisted that Nellie accompany him for the first couple of weeks in case he became restless and emotionally off-balance.49 Colomby was worried more about Thelonious getting caught with drugs and losing his cabaret card again. He also worried about his own reputation: “I could just see the headlines—‘School Teacher Linked to Narcotics Case.’ If anything like that happened, I’d be out of a job for good.”50
On Tuesday night, July 16, Monk brought in his own quartet. Keeping his promise, he hired John Coltrane and called on his favorite bassist Wilbur Ware.51 His choice on drums was a relative newcomer named Frankie Dunlop. A few weeks earlier, he’d heard Dunlop at a jam session at Connie’s in Harlem and loved his sense of swing, his strong and solid backbeat, and the little shuffle rhythms that would become his trademark. Dunlop wasn’t exactly a kid. The twenty-eight-year-old had worked with Skippy Williams and toured with Big Jay MacNeely’s R&B band, but was based in his hometown of Buffalo. He was drafted by the Army and served some time in Korea, but immediately after his discharge he moved to New York City.52 When Monk offered Dunlop the job, he had not completed his three-month waiting period and thus, by union rules, wasn’t eligible to work except for one-nighters. A couple of days into the gig, the Local 802 union rep showed up and pulled Dunlop off the job. Incensed, Monk asked the union rep, “Can you play drums, man?” The rep replied, “What do you mean? I’m not even a drummer. I’m a trumpet player. I haven’t touched my horn in 20 years.” This only made Thelonious angrier. “Oh, that’s a drag, man. You come and mess up my group. Can you swing like he can? . . . You’re going to pull the man off who can play drums. You can’t play. You can’t find me anybody who can play. Now, who looks stupid? You or me?”53
So Monk turned to his old friend Shadow Wilson, who could swing hard with just a snare, bass drum, hi-hat, and ride cymbal.54 He loved Wilson’s drumming, but worried about his heroin addiction. When Monk used him for the early Blue Note sessions, Wilson was clean, but now he had a very bad habit exacerbated by poor health. So Monk’s dream band consisted of two heroin addicts—Ware and Wilson—and a recovering addict—Coltrane. Luckily, Shadow’s addiction evidently did not affect his work. As Harry Colomby put it, Shadow Wilson was “a very controlled addict. You would have never known he was an addict from his behavior. Always the consummate professional.”55
Word of Monk’s new quartet spread fast. Joe Termini: “Once we hired Monk, all of a sudden the place was crowded every night. And frankly, in the beginning, I just didn’t understand what was happening. Of course, after two, three weeks, I was there nodding my head like everybody else. But in the beginning I didn’t understand any of it.”56 On weekends, long lines stretched down the block and would-be patrons were turned away because the club could officially seat only seventy-six people—though barring a visit from the fire marshal, they could squeeze in another dozen or so. The Terminis quickly realized that the upright piano they had gotten at the behest of Don Shoemaker was inadequate for an artist of Monk’s stature. Joe Termini acknowledged the piano’s sad condition: “Hammers were flying off, strings would break.” So he asked Thelonious to help them find a new instrument; he chose a Baldwin baby grand.57
Critic Dom Cerulli, who was on hand during the second week of the gig, wrote a glowing review for Down Beat in which he called Monk’s musical ideas “astounding” and praised Coltrane and Ware’s solo- and ensemble-playing. More importantly, he noticed the great pride Monk had for his band: “Thelonious was quite excited about his group. . . . They appear to be digging each other, and to be quite intent on building something with the group.”58 “Building” is an apt metaphor. It took a while for the quartet to become a cohesive unit, especially because Monk literally rehearsed on the bandstand. Amiri Baraka, who was there practically every night, is one of the few critics to admit that “opening night [Coltrane] was struggling with all the tunes.”59 For Coltrane, every song with Monk was a challenge, even after he felt he had a handle on the music. “You have to be awake all the time. You never know exactly what’s going to happen. Rhythmically, for example, Monk creates such tension that it makes horn players think instead of falling into regular patterns. He may start a phrase from somewhere you don’t expect, and you have to know what to do. And harmonically, he’ll go different ways than you’d anticipate. One thing above all that Monk has taught me is not to be afraid to try anything so long as I feel it.”60
By early August, the band really came together. Nellie’s homemade recording of their performance of “Ruby, My Dear” bears this out. Shadow Wilson’s brush work is exquisite and Monk plays sparse enough to allow Wilbur Ware’s bass to come through. Over Monk’s insistent statement of the theme, Coltrane invents a completely different countermelody to produce a beautiful duet.61 Monk was so pleased with his band, Dom Cerulli observed, “he was out front leading or spurring the soloists fully as often as he was at the keyboard.”62 At first he just moved with the music, his attention focused on the band. His movements eventually became more elaborate, evolving into a peculiar little spinning dance, elbow pumping up and down on each turn, with an occasional stutter step allowing him to glide left and right. He’d danced before—in the recording studio or in private among friends—and in a sense he always danced at the keyboard, stomping his right foot to establish tempo and accenting off-beat phrases with his body. But this was different, and according to both Nellie and Coltrane, it was new.63 Monk told Coltrane that he got up from the piano because “he wanted to hear the band,”64 and he couldn’t help dancing to his own music. Sometimes he’d dance to the bar, order a drink, and shuffle his way back to the bandstand.
Monk’s dancing indirectly affected the music in surprising ways. “He’d leave the stand for a drink or to do his dance,” Coltrane explained, “and I could just improvise by myself for fifteen or twenty minutes before he returned.”65 Monk’s absence from the piano allowed for experimentation within the ensemble, opening the door for various kinds of collective improvisation. Ware’s inventive playing challenged Coltrane in different ways, particularly without Monk leading. “[Ware] plays things that are foreign,” Coltrane remarked. “[I]f you didn’t know the song, you wouldn’t be able to find it. Because he’s superimposing things. He’s playing around, and under, and over—building tension, so when he comes back to it you feel everything sets in. But usually I know the tunes—I know the changes anyway. So we manage to come out at the end together anyway.” 66 Ware found incredible freedom in his pianoless interactions with ’Trane and Wilson. “Monk would get up and we could . . . go outside and inside. . . . [W]e’d take it out [of the song’s harmonic structure] as far as we wanted to take it out. . . . Monk come back in, boom. We knew where he’s at. We had one chord and we was right back into the thing. . . . The cats would say, ‘Man, you play avant-garde.’ . . . I didn’t look at it like that. I didn’t even know the meaning of the word ‘avant-garde.’ ”67
The writers and artists in the audience did know its meaning, and they declared virtually every aspect of Monk’s performance “avant-garde.” Monk’s dance, for example, was seen as a spectacular example of modern performance art in an age when expressions of bodily pleasure and excess became central to conceptual art.68 Fans lined up outside the Five Spot for the music as well as a chance to catch Monk dance and whatever “eccentric” behavior he was rumored to exhibit. Because he perspired profusely, Nellie made huge handkerchiefs out of white sheets, which he used to wipe his face and neck. Sometimes he unfurled the sweat-drenched cloth to air out while he danced.69
To Monk as well as to his sidemen, there was nothing strange or eccentric about dancing to music. Nearly all of the musicians who played with him described the dance as his way of letting the band know it was swinging. For Gigi Gryce, dancing was Monk’s way of “conducting. It’s the way he gets what he wants. At one record date, some of the musicians were laughing as he danced without realizing that meanwhile, by following his rhythmic pulse, they were moving into the rhythm he wanted.”70 “It wasn’t a stage presentation,” Charlie Rouse explained, “it was how he felt at that moment. . . . When he danced, it meant the thing was swinging, and it made him do that. It was never a ‘routine’ where someone said, ‘Keep that in, it looks good.’ It was spontaneous, he often didn’t do it.”71 Drummer Ben Riley knew that when Monk did not dance, it often meant the music wasn’t happening. When he got up from the piano bench, it meant that “he was feeling good and he knew you knew where you were and the music was swinging and that’s what he wanted.”72
Monk’s reasons for dancing were clear and unequivocal: “I get tired sitting down at the piano! That way I can dig the rhythm better.”73 Having grown up in the church and witnessed ecstatic expressions during his travels with an evangelist, dancing was a natural response to the music. He told David Amram as much: “He talked about how the music came from the dance and from the church and being able to dance to it. And of course he did that, he didn’t say that in interviews, but I think assumed that by doing that people would understand that this wasn’t just something coming out of a bottle of formaldehyde.”74
The bohemian artists and, especially, the Beat Generation writers and their followers began looking at Monk as a sort of religious or sacred figure, due in part to his evangelical stage presence. Monk’s image as a mystic or diviner—the “High Priest of Bebop”—appealed to the Beats. With the death of their musical guru, Charlie Parker, just two years before Monk’s “return” to the New York club scene, many of these writers regarded Monk as a towering figure in jazz, akin to being a spiritual leader. In The Subterraneans (1958), Jack Kerouac described Monk “sweating leading the generation with his elbow chords, eying the band madly to lead them on, the monk the saint of bop. . . .”75 Several years later, writer Barry Farrell mused that “Monk’s name and his mystic utterances . . . made him seem like the ideal Dharma Bum to an audience of hipsters.”76
The Beats’ reverence for Monk and black jazz musicians also partly reflects a larger crisis of masculinity during the 1950s. As Norman Mailer wrote in his controversial essay, “The White Negro” (published in Dissent five months after Monk opened at the Five Spot), black men—particularly the hipster and the jazz musician—offered an alternative model of masculinity in the age of the gray flannel suit, suburbia, and other sterile forces. Beat writers often characterized jazz musicians as emotionally driven, uninhibited, strong black men reaching into their souls to create a pure Negro sound.77 For many, Monk embodied this combination of abstract qualities and unbridled, authentic Negro sound (and an extremely stylish wardrobe to boot). Moreover, even musicians and critics at the time interpreted his dissonant harmonies, startling rhythmic displacements, and swinging tempos as distinctively “masculine.”78 And some critics attributed his music to racial bloodlines rather than intelligence and hard work. Listen to Albert Goldman’s paean to Monk: “Monk’s brand of thinking comes from the soul and the blood rather than the mind, tapping into a well of racial memory that keeps the music pure, authentic, and black. [N]o matter how gone he gets with his atonal jazz, he never loses a strong racial sound. You see, most of the modern cats are pretty well hung up between jazz and the classical stuff. They all took a little vacation up at Juilliard after the war, and before they got away they were hooked on Bach and Debussy. Now, a man like Monk is good for these cats. He’s like some old oil well that keeps pumping up the good black stuff, when all the new rigs have gone dry.”79
But Monk wasn’t always playing the eccentric Negro banging at the keyboard. Monk often surprised. Between sets, he held court in the kitchen, engaging in lively conversations with band members, friends, or the staff. He discussed politics, art, culture, and expressed an interest in jazz poetry readings at the Five Spot.80 And, despite his reputation for being taciturn or uncommunicative, he occasionally engaged the audience. In one well-worn anecdote, after Monk finished playing an entire set without Coltrane, an audience member shouted, “We wanna hear Coltrane!” Monk replied simply, “Coltrane bust up his horn.” After the break, the same heckler repeated his demand to hear Coltrane. Monk, in turn, repeated his reply, at which point the heckler asked, “What do you mean, ‘he bust up his horn’?” At which point Monk launched into a full-blown lecture, rising slowly from the piano bench and explaining, “Mr. Coltrane plays a wind instrument. The sound is produced by blowing into it and opening different holes to let air out. Over some of these holes is a felt pad. One of Mr. Coltrane’s felt pads has fallen off, and in order for him to get the sound he wants, so that we can make better music for you, he is in the back making a new one. . . . You dig?”81
Monk tended to approach the bohemian art world with a sense of humor and curiosity. The regulars remember Monk’s hijinks and the laughter. Hettie Jones, writer and wife of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, once witnessed Monk toting a “furled umbrella, and then laughing at us when we gasped as he pulled out a sword!”82 Poet-painter Ted Joans used to carry jars of tempera and a pad of drawing paper when he went to the Five Spot. One night, he painted a small portrait of Monk on the bandstand. When Thelonious saw it, he asked, “What’s this?”
“That’s a portrait of you,” Joans replied as he handed the picture to Monk to study. “He was taken by the painting. His eyes were very happy, wonderful.” Thelonious then thanked Joans for the painting and proceeded to walk away with it.
“No, no. I’m not giving it to you,” Joans said, panicked. Monk turned around, pointed to the image, and asked, “Who is this?”
“It’s you.”
“You just gave it to me.”
“Yes, but I gave it to you just to look at.” A bemused look suddenly came over Monk.
“You gave it to me to look at and that’s me and it’s not mine?” This dance went on for a while, until Monk reluctantly returned the painting after Joans promised to do another portrait of him to keep. Joe Termini stepped in and offered to buy the painting as long as Monk signed it. Monk agreed and Termini promised never to sell it. Two years later, it ended up in the hands of Ted Wilentz, owner of the Eighth Street Bookshop.83
The Termini brothers did not always understand Monk’s humor or appreciate his sense of joie de vivre. He had the annoying habit of setting his lit cigarette on the piano, and too often he would doze off at the keyboard. Iggy Termini found Monk’s onstage dancing strange though harmless. “But sometimes after he was through dancing, he’d wander into the kitchen and start talking to the dishwasher about God knows what.”84 And occasionally he’d wander right out the door. One night, Joe Termini found him a few blocks away staring at the moon. He asked Monk if he was lost. “No, I ain’t lost. I’m here,” he replied matter-of-factly. “The Five Spot’s lost.”85 Despite these behaviors, the Terminis were genuinely fond of Monk. “There was a certain aura about Monk, in those days especially,” recalled Joe Termini, “he’s supposed to be weird, before he played the piano he faced the East and all that. . . . When I start to tell [people] that Thelonious was a very normal man, loved his family, it turns them around . . . He’s a man of dignity. He carried himself well. . . . He wasn’t an oddball. . . . All the musicians looked up to him. When he was playing at the Five Spot, almost everybody came to the Five Spot to see him.”86
The Terminis and Monk did bump heads over one issue: his chronic lateness. Monk would often show up to work two, sometimes three hours late.87 Nica usually drove him to work, and occasionally Joe Termini had to fetch him from West 63rd Street. “There was a time when I would run up and go get him,” Termini explained. “I’d have a full house waiting for him. And they’d all be sitting there waiting. Nobody would walk out.”88 Monk depended on others to drive him because by the summer of 1957, he had abandoned his prized Buick. According to Harry Colomby, Thelonious lost his license after he allegedly nicked a young girl crossing the street. She suffered no injuries, but he was so distraught that he picked her up and drove her to the hospital.89 Toot tells a very different story. He remembers the car was stolen, but when the police finally retrieved the car, Monk refused to drive it. “He said the vibe changed. There was nothing wrong with that car. . . . Like he forgot about it. Just threw it out of his mind.”90 I cannot confirm either story, but everyone agrees that at some point in the late winter, early spring of 1957, Thelonious parked the car in a lot near the West Side Highway and never drove it again. It was eventually towed away.
When Nica was unavailable, Monk caught a cab or accepted a ride from an adoring fan. One fan who became Monk’s accidental chauffeur was eighteen-year-old Bob Lemkowitz. He was in awe of Monk and Coltrane, whom he likened to “Moses and Jesus walking around on that bandstand.”91 He and his friends had joined the faithful, showing up nearly every night and staying through the last set. “Then one night,” Lemkowitz recalled, “I’m walking over to my car. It was late, of course. Everything is shut down. And who’s standing there, off to the side in front of the Five Spot? It’s Monk. I walked over to him and I said, ‘Mr. Monk, can I take you somewhere?’ ” Monk hesitated at first, surprised by the question. But once he saw Lemkowitz’s car, Monk agreed and they took off to the upper West Side. When they got to Monk’s neighborhood, he asked to be dropped off on the corner. As he was getting out the car, Monk graciously thanked Lemkowitz for the ride and asked if he will see them again. “You bet!” shouted Lemkowitz. For the next few weeks, Lemkowitz began to look for Monk after the final set and drove him home when Nica wasn’t there. Monk began calling Lemkowitz “my wheel man” and thanking him with quirky gifts. One night Monk slipped him a green ballpoint pen, another night a yellow crayon. Once he handed Lemkowitz what appeared to be a “carte de visite,” or a small photograph on cardstock with two images of William McKinley, with the added explanation: “That’s one of our presidents.” Perhaps the funniest gift was a miniature replica of a trolley car, adding, “Now you know this isn’t a real trolley car. It’s a toy trolley car. See, look at the wheels.”92 For Lemkowitz, these small gifts were precious acts of affection and grace infused with a dose of humor. “He didn’t appear to be a crazy guy. He was as straight as can be. He had these great one-liners.” He once asked Lemkowitz if he had a girlfriend, to which he answered, “No, not really.” Befuddled, Monk shot back: “Then who stays in your car when you get out to buy cigarettes?”93
• • •
Nellie had not seen Monk this happy in quite a while. He enjoyed working, loved his band, finally had money in his pocket, and relished the attention. The Terminis made sure customers knew they were in Monk’s house: By the end of the summer, during intermission they played only Monk’s LPs.94 The Five Spot became a big family affair. Monk sometimes brought his underage nieces and nephews to the club and defied anyone to ask them to leave. “Thelonious would come in the middle of the night at Lyman Place and wake up the whole house,” Evelyn Smith remembered, “and sometimes we would go to the Five Spot. I remember going with him and Nica. I was about twelve.”95 As soon as they walked in the door, the kids were given the royal treatment. Evelyn’s sister Jackie loved how Monk introduced the kids in the family to his colleagues. “He’d bring Coltrane over and say, ‘Coltrane, this is my niece Jackie, you need to know her,’ or ‘Meet my son, Toot. He’s an important cat.’ It was as if we were the celebrities. Never, ‘here is the great John Coltrane’ or ‘you need to meet the great Bud Powell.’ None of that. Imagine how that made us feel.”96 Charlotte Washington remembers feeling very comfortable at the Five Spot. So comfortable that one night she noticed her uncle dozing off at the piano. “So I just walked up to the bandstand, sat right down next to him and put my arm around him. He woke up and started to play again and I just eased my way back to my seat.”97
Thelonious was in such a good mood that one night in July he snuck out between sets to check out Miles Davis at Café Bohemia and ended up sitting in. Thelonious had Miles in stitches when he started playing with his elbows.98
Monk was anxious to record his new band, as was Keepnews who arranged a studio date for late July, possibly early August. The band laid down three incredible tracks—“Nutty,” “Ruby, My Dear,” and the now-legendary “Trinkle, Tinkle.” As brilliant as the session was, it would be four years before these recordings would see the light of day.99 Coltrane was still under contract with Prestige and Bob Weinstock would not grant him permission to record unless Monk agreed to return the favor. Monk refused. He wanted no dealings with his old label.
Monk returned to Reeves Sound Studios on August 12 and 13 to do another Riverside LP, but not as a leader. When Orrin Keepnews found out that Monk and Gerry Mulligan were tight, he thought a meeting of these two minds would yield great music. Both men originally planned to use Monk’s regular rhythm section and record one side with a quartet and the other side with a larger band, but after the first day of recording “I Mean You,” “Straight, No Chaser,” and an unusually fast version of “Rhythm-a-ning,” both artists decided to stick with the quartet format for the rest of the album. Mulligan was anxious to sink his teeth into “ ’Round Midnight” and feared that other soloists might get in his way. They rounded out the session with an ethereal version of one of Monk’s preferred standards, “Sweet and Lovely,” and Mulligan’s original “Decidedly,” a rather old-fashioned swing tune based on Charlie Shavers’s “Undecided.”100
The date ended on a positive note. Both principals appreciated the chance to play together and felt good about the outcome. And they completed the session in time for Monk and his band to get to the Five Spot.101 Wilbur Ware arrived early to drop off his bass and pick up a bite to eat, but when it was time to go on, he was nowhere to be found. The Terminis grumbled and Colomby panicked. Knowing Ware’s history with drug addiction and remembering the Blakey session where he showed up incapacitated, Colomby didn’t expect him to return.102 And he didn’t, but by Ware’s account the problem was neither drugs nor alcohol: “I got a tunafish salad [sandwich], ate it, and oh boy, it ate the pit of my stomach and I was sick; so sick I was afraid and I just took a taxi [home].”103 Ware says that he called a bass player he knew to fill in; Colomby says they found a substitute on their own. Whatever the case, there was a bass player on the stand and he held his own that night. He was a familiar face among the old Five Spot crowd, having performed with both Valdo Williams and Randy Weston before Monk ever stepped foot in the place. Impressed, Monk hired him as his regular bass player. His name was Ahmed Abdul-Malik.104
A childhood friend of Randy Weston’s, Abdul-Malik first met Monk at a Brooklyn jam session in 1949, the same year he converted to Ahmadiyya Islam and changed his name from Jonathan Timm, Jr. Although he claimed his father was Sudanese, both of his parents hailed from St. Vincent.105 His father was a fine violinist and started his son on the instrument at age seven. Abdul-Malik went on to study piano, cello, and bass, and after graduating from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, he began his professional career as a jazz bassist in 1944 with Fess Williams. Over the next decade he worked with a range of artists, including Art Blakey, Don Byas, Jutta Hipp, Zoot Simms, Coleman Hawkins, and Randy Weston.106 Weston and Abdul-Malik shared a fascination with the music of North Africa. The two of them would listen to North African musicians play on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and try to play what they heard at local jam sessions. He would instruct Weston to play scales rather than chords and to lay out during his solo so that he could explore pitches on his bass that fall outside the Western tempered scale. “For this we were called rebels,” Weston recalled. “We used to catch hell. They thought we were far out.”107 Abdul-Malik studied with veteran Arab musicians in New York, and added the kanoon (72-stringed zither) and the oud (a lute consisting of five double strings) to his repertoire of instruments.108 When he joined Monk’s band, he had just formed his own group dedicated to fusing jazz and North African music.109
Because of Abdul-Malik’s devotion to Islam and his forays into non-Western music, he and Ware couldn’t have been more different. He did not drink or smoke, showed up to work on time, was quiet and focused, and worked extremely hard. He had to learn the music on the bandstand. It took him at least a week to figure out what Monk wanted. Sometimes Monk would stop him in the middle of a song or would play the same song over again in a different tempo until Abdul-Malik got it. “Monk would ask me, ‘Are you sure about such and such a tune?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, I’m sure. You know I know, I’ve been doing this for years.’ But when we started playing, I went some place else. He looked at me and said, ‘you sure you know [the] number?’ I said, ‘Well, I really need to check that out.’ ”110 Within a couple of weeks, Abdul-Malik sounded as if he had been playing with Monk all of his life.
The summer ended on another high note. On August 25, John S. Wilson published a glowing review of Brilliant Corners in the New York Times. He called it “one of the clearest expositions of Monkism that we have had. The quirksome dissonances and eccentric rhythms that color his piano work are frequently even more expressive on the quintet’s expanded palette. . . . Monk’s harmonies sag top-heavily but the disk is strong evidence that this man who was once viewed as an inscrutable eccentric is slowly developing into one of the most valid jazz voices of this decade.”111 Four days later, on August 29, he took a well-deserved, week-long vacation, returning to work on September 5 to a new eight-week contract.112 That night, Monk celebrated his daughter’s fourth birthday, and the following month the Terminis celebrated Monk’s fortieth. On Friday night, October 11, they surprised Monk with an impromptu birthday party and a cake big enough to share with the entire audience. Oscar Pettiford, who had since made up with Monk after the trying Brilliant Corners session, emceed the event.113 The usual suspects were there—Nellie, Nica, Colomby—and the house was packed, as usual.
Monk looked forward to a slightly longer break beginning the second week of November. He took the first week off, then headed to Montreal where he and Cecil Payne played a week at Café André with the house rhythm section, bassist Neil Michaund and drummer Billy Graham.114 He returned to New York just before Thanksgiving and prepared for a concert Ken Karpe was producing at Carnegie Hall on November 29, a fundraiser for the Morningside Community Center. The event was special in many ways; it was Monk’s first concert performance since Karpe’s Easter Jazz Festival in Town Hall a year and a half earlier; and it was his band’s debut on the big stage. The occasion was also gratifying for Monk. The Morningside Community Center in West Harlem reminded him of the community center he grew up in; it served some 4,000 low-income youth, providing a range of social and recreational programs.115 Monk shared the bill with Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie and his orchestra, Chet Baker and Zoot Sims, and “the brilliant Sonny Rollins.” The headliner was Ray Charles, who took great pleasure in revisiting his roots as a jazz musician.116
The concert started twenty-five minutes late, which did not augur well for such a full program. Dizzy Gillespie struck up his band before the curtain opened in an effort to calm the restless crowd.117 Once things got under way, the concert was well worth the wait. Voice of America recorded the show for broadcast, and the tapes reveal just how tight Monk’s quartet had become after eighteen weeks of steady work.118 The group’s rapport is astonishing, and Thelonious’s playing is full of surprises. “Monk’s Mood” is a startlingly beautiful dialogue, with Monk playing sensuous arpeggios underneath Coltrane’s interpretation of the theme. The dynamism Shadow Wilson creates for the band is most evident on “Nutty,” “Epistrophy,” and “Bye-Ya”—in which he demonstrates his ability to evoke Caribbean rhythms. The only standard the band performs is “Sweet and Lovely,” and their rendition is like an abstract expressionist painting—Monk paints swirls of color around descending chord progressions. The band played for less than an hour, and Monk was having such a good time at the piano that he hardly got up from the bench. There was no dancing around while Coltrane “strolled” with the rhythm section. Thelonious remained in constant dialogue with the band.
Even if Ray Charles garnered the lion’s share of attention that night, Monk came away from Carnegie Hall enormously happy and proud of his band. He returned “home” to the Five Spot triumphant and prepared for the latest challenge—a television appearance on the popular CBS show The Seven Lively Arts, to air live on Sunday afternoon, December 8.119 Organized by critics Whitney Balliett and Nat Hentoff at the behest of producer Robert Herridge, the episode was called “The Sound of Jazz,” and it featured Count Basie with an all-star band and vocalists Jimmy Rushing and Billie Holiday. The supporting cast of characters included the most distinguished names in jazz: Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Lester Young, Jo Jones, Roy Eldridge, to name a few. And Monk, of course, was invited to perform in a trio with Ahmed Abdul-Malik and Osie Johnson, the versatile veteran drummer who also backed Billie Holiday in her performance. Three days before the show aired, CBS recorded the various bands at a rehearsal. Monk never made it. According to Hentoff, Monk had lost so much sleep fretting over his performance that he collapsed in a state of exhaustion.120 We will never know what happened. Mal Waldron, Billie Holiday’s accompanist, filled in for Monk with a frenetic solo piano piece appropriately titled “Nervous.”121
But when it came time to “hit” for the cameras, Thelonious arrived at the Town Theater, aka CBS Studio 58, on 55th Street and Ninth Avenue on time and ready to play. And, as usual, he made a sartorial statement few viewers could forget: He donned a hip plaid jacket, white shirt and tie, a sporty driving cap, bamboo sunglasses, and a pair of Hush Puppies that never stayed still as he pounded out a characteristically angular yet swinging rendition of “Blue Monk.” The music was great, but by the time Thelonious got up from the piano he was seething. The producers sat Count Basie against the piano right across from him, and Monk found it distracting. Colomby recalled, “While Monk was doodling around with the piano during a coffee break, the stagehands, cameramen, and everybody who could hear him wandered over to the piano. Then in came Count Basie and Billie Holiday, and Lester Young—all the stars! They gathered around the piano and stared as though they’d been hypnotized, as though it was the first time they’d ever heard anything like that. The director was so impressed by the expressions on their faces that he had Billie and Count and the rest of them stand at the piano when the show went on the air, just so he could televise their reactions while Monk played.”122 On the way home, Monk vowed that the next time Basie had a gig in town, he was going to “sit across the piano and stare at him the whole time.”123
Besides his three minutes and thirty seconds of fame on “The Sound of Jazz,” Monk appeared later that night on “The World of Jazz,” John S. Wilson’s half-hour radio show on WQXR.124 Then it was off to work. Monk knew his nights at the Five Spot were numbered. Customers still came but began clamoring for new acts. And the Terminis were growing weary of Monk’s regular tardiness. He also worried about his band. Shadow Wilson’s health was failing, and he began missing dates.125 Coltrane was also ready to move on. Miles wanted him back and ’Trane himself was considering a solo career. But the last days of December were not without its highlights, like the night Nat Adderley sat in, or when Monk’s brother Thomas showed up with Thomas, Jr., to celebrate his twenty-first birthday.126 His brother’s appearance was unexpected; he was now studying for the ministry as a Jehovah’s Witness and avoided nightclubs on principle. “My dad made me drink ginger ale,” recalled Thomas, Jr. “I remember standing in the kitchen with Uncle Bubba and my dad, and he was giving Coltrane some kind of lessons. He had a chalkboard and he was writing down music. And then before he walked out on stage, Uncle Bubba turned to my dad and said, “Why don’t you go preach to these cats ’cause they don’t know what’s happening, give them a little boost, a little spirit!”127
Perhaps Monk didn’t realize that he’d already spent the last half-year preaching to these cats himself and giving them more than a little spirit. With the assistance of brothers Coltrane, Wilson, Ware, and Abdul-Malik, Monk had turned the Five Spot into the hippest monastery in the Western world. But it worked both ways: This tiny little bar in the East Village gave him the boost he needed. It raised his spirits, helped provide sustenance, and positioned him in a community that truly dug his music. The “un” years seemed to be behind him and Nellie, whose health improved, though he’d gladly turn down all the gigs in the world to keep Nellie around.
On December 16, Kenny Dennis took over for Shadow Wilson, whose deteriorating health put him out of commission. Monk himself did not stay much longer; his last night was the day after Christmas. The band continued to work together until New Year’s, with Red Garland at the piano in place of Monk.128 With Monk no longer employed, he was free to celebrate Nellie’s and Toot’s birthdays on the 27th of December. Nellie turned thirty-seven and Toot was eight years old. And this year Thelonious had money to shower them with gifts. He even treated himself to a new piece of jewelry—a black onyx ring of his own design with the letters MO above NK divided by two medium-sized diamonds. The ring was clunky and it only fit properly when he gained weight, but he adored that ring. He liked pointing out that from his vantage point it read “MONK” but from someone else’s vantage point, the letters were upside down and backward and thus spelled KNOW.129
It was a fitting conclusion to what turned out to be a very good year. But on December 29, Monk received some terrible news: his friend and former sideman Ernie Henry was dead at forty-one. He had been clean for a year and thought he’d kicked the habit, but then he ran into a couple of old friends coming home on the subway who persuaded him to shoot up. Henry overdosed. Rather than take him to a hospital, the two guys dropped him off at his mother’s house, where she found him dead the next morning.130