Monk rang in the New Year without a band, without a job, and without his friend Ernie Henry. He took advantage of his much-needed respite to relax, spend time with the family, and compose. That same month, Nica bid farewell to hotel life and purchased a home of her own at 63 Kingswood Road in Weehawken, New Jersey. Located across the Hudson River just off the Lincoln Tunnel, the modern two-story house had been built in the 1940s by the maverick film director Josef von Sternberg. Known for his collaborations with Marlene Dietrich and for influencing a generation of film noir directors, Sternberg also had a long fascination with architecture.1 In 1935, he had Richard Neutra, one of the pioneers of modernist architecture, build his “mini-mansion” in California’s San Fernando Valley, and it remains one of Neutra’s most acclaimed works.2 Although Sternberg’s Weehawken house never earned such praise, it possessed a number of impressive features, including huge picture windows on each floor to showcase the spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline. Nica furnished her new home with Thelonious in mind: She put the Steinway upstairs in a large room with a brick fireplace and set up a Ping-Pong table downstairs in the dining room. Monk could rehearse and write in peace and take time out for one of his favorite pastimes. He also had to share the space with her feline friends, which began as a pair of Siamese cats but quickly became a veritable cat colony made up of offspring and rescued strays. At one point the cat population at 63 Kingswood numbered over one hundred, earning Nica’s place the title of the “Cat House” or the “Cat Pad.”3
The Cat House became Monk’s second home. Sometimes he and Nellie would spend the whole day hanging out there, often in the company of other musicians and friends. During one of his early visits, Nica asked Monk, “If you were given three wishes, to be instantly granted, what would they be?” He gave the question a lot of thought, pacing back and forth in front of the picture window, stopping long enough to gaze out across the river to the New York skyline. A few minutes later, he gave his answer: “To be successful musically”; “To have a happy family”; “To have a crazy friend like you!” Nica replied that he already had these things, but Monk just looked at her and smiled.4 His point was clear: He was satisfied with life. The critical tide had turned in his favor, and he’d survived those difficult times with his family intact. During his three-and-a-half-year friendship with Nica, both she and Monk remained in each other’s corner. He encouraged her to return to her childhood love of painting, and he dared her to enter the annual art contest hosted by ACA Gallery in New York. Her work was selected, along with that of 124 aspiring artists, to be exhibited in a group show.5 When the show opened in June at ACA on East 57th Street, Thelonious was there to lend his support and good humor.
Monk christened Nica’s pad with a composition paying tribute to the breathtaking view. Titled “Coming on the Hudson,” it was the first thing he wrote at her Weehawken house. An oddly structured, eighteen-and-a-half-bar theme, it was classic Monk, from the medium/slow tempo and the chromatic harmonic progressions to the three-and-a-half-bar bridge. And its sound was evocative of the movement of boats slowly making their way up and down the Hudson. He recorded “Coming on the Hudson” for Riverside on February 25, soon after he had written it, with a sextet consisting of Johnny Griffin, trumpeter Donald Byrd, baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams, and a rhythm section made up of Wilbur Ware and Philly Joe Jones. This was not the line-up Keepnews and Monk had agreed upon. Blakey was the intended drummer and they planned to pair Sonny Rollins and Griffin, but Keepnews blamed Monk for not contacting them. At the last minute, he called Adams and Jones to substitute. The session turned out to be a near disaster. “Coming on the Hudson” proved to be incredibly challenging for the musicians: Ware complained that the bass part was “impossible to play.”6 Frustrated, Monk called it quits after a couple of takes.7 Monk was doubly disappointed because he had hoped to hire Rollins as his new tenor player. Rollins had even begun rehearsing with Monk at Nica’s house, generating rumors that the pair planned to open at the Five Spot in May.8
Thelonious opened at the Village Vanguard in April without Rollins. For the first couple of weeks, he led a quintet made up of tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley, Kenny Dorham, Wilbur Ware, and Shadow Wilson. After a two-week hiatus, he returned the first week of May with a quartet playing opposite the Kingston Trio.9 It was only his second appearance at the Vanguard, his first in ten years. He was supposed to open on April 1, but a dispute between owner Max Gordon and Monk delayed the opening by a day.10 Monk resisted the Vanguard’s policy of Sunday matinees from 4:30 to 7:00 in addition to the regular Sunday night gig. He told Gordon, “Man, I ain’t gonna work no seven nights a week—not me.” 11 Gordon pushed back, insisting that it was club policy and there were customers who could only make the matinees. In the end, they came up with a compromise: Monk’s group played the afternoon and Gordon hired a guest for the evening.12 The gig turned out to be a real family affair. Nellie showed up and sometimes brought the kids. And it was at the Vanguard that Boo Boo made her debut as a dancer. Toot remembers, “She was dancing on the bandstand at the Vanguard when she was four years old! She was dancing . . . my sister and my father were so in tune it was truly crazy.”13
Meanwhile, Monk’s contract with Riverside was up and had to be renegotiated. That task fell to Colomby, who distrusted Bill Grauer and the label’s accounting methods. “I always suspected that something was going on [because] it was so simple to cheat. All you needed was a bunch of pressing plants and different parts and God knows it’s like the weapons of mass destruction.”14 He couldn’t prove it at the time, but Monk’s brisk record sales did not produce what he believed were comparable royalties. On the other hand, Keepnews approached Colomby with suspicion, and when Monk insisted that his manager negotiate on his behalf, Keepnews sometimes turned cold.15 Nevertheless, the two parties came to an agreement and Colomby’s efforts paid off: Monk’s advances doubled and his royalty percentage slightly increased.16
Before signing the new contract, Monk made one more record for Riverside, but as a sideman for Clark Terry.17 Also included were Philly Joe Jones and bassist Sam Jones,18 and the session took place over two days—May 7 and May 12. “I was surprised when he agreed to do the gig with me,” Terry reflected. “I thought he would probably say no, but he was happy to, and he was very easy to work with. He had his moments, but he was a beautiful person and I loved him very much. I wrote most of the pieces for the session and when they reissued it some years later, they retitled one of my pieces.”19 Actually, two pieces: “Pea-Eye,” a swinging blues Terry originally titled “Zip Co-Ed” as a pun on college women and sex, and the uptempo “In Orbit,” the title track Terry had initially called “Globetrotter.” With the launching of Sputnik having occurred just a few months earlier, Keepnews and Grauer thought In Orbit had more market appeal.20 The music was happy and incredibly warm, in part because Terry had recently adopted the flugelhorn—an instrument known for its rich, warm tone. Monk left his mark on nearly every tune. Besides recording one of his own compositions, “Let’s Cool One,” they took the changes from Monk’s favorite hymn, “We’ll Understand it Better, By and By,” and turned it into Terry’s “One Foot in the Gutter,” enabling Monk to return to his church roots. In his review of the album later that year, John S. Wilson took note of the “rollicking, straightforward manner [Monk] has rarely shown before, giving Mr. Terry close, sympathetic support and galloping off on exuberant solos of his own.”21 Monk’s impact was so great, in fact, that it eventually became known as Monk’s album—a development that understandably irked Clark Terry: “When Monk died they brought the record out as by Monk with me as a sideman!”22
The Terminis offered Thelonious an eight-week engagement at the Five Spot to open on June 12.23 They were in need of guaranteed revenue, having just opened a second Five Spot in Water Mill, Long Island, to cater to their original clientele of artists who also had studios and homes in the Hamptons.24 Monk still hoped to hire Rollins, though it seemed unlikely. Rollins had earned critical acclaim for his recent recordings as a leader, including an astounding pianoless trio LP with Wilbur Ware, Live at the Village Vanguard, and he had just recorded his much anticipated Freedom Suite for Riverside. But Rollins’s reverence for Monk was such that he continued to keep the door open in case his schedule freed up. In the meantime, Monk hired another favored tenor player, Johnny Griffin, backed by Ahmed Abdul-Malik and the fabulous Roy Haynes on drums.25
Monk had put together another dream band, and while Coltrane wasn’t part of it, the group played to a full house most weekend nights.26 Although Griffin had performed with Monk many times, he never had the opportunity to learn his entire repertoire. His first few weeks on the job were reminiscent of Coltrane’s. “We rehearsed on the bandstand,” Griffin explained. “[Monk] wouldn’t pull his music out, and the joint would be loaded, every night. He had it in his briefcase, but he said it would be better if I heard it. So he would play the melody and I’m supposed to retain the melody after he played the first chorus, and I was supposed to play the second chorus coming in with the melody! So you can imagine what happened. I’d mess up, and he’d say ‘No, no, no, let’s do it again.’ And the people loved it. You know what? I never felt embarrassed.”27 He may not have been embarrassed, but by the end of the night he was thoroughly exhausted. “I found it difficult at times, I mean, DIFFICULT. I enjoyed playing with him, enjoying playing his music, but when I’m playing my solos, for instance, the way his comping is so strong, playing his own music, that it’s almost like you’re in a padded cell. I mean, trying to express yourself, because his music, with him comping, is so overwhelming, like it’s almost like you’re trying to break out of a room made of marshmallows.”28 Like Coltrane, Griffin enjoyed those long moments when Monk left the piano to dance around or air out his gigantic, sweat-soaked handkerchiefs, or rambled to the bar for a drink. Sometimes he would even encourage Monk to leave the piano by calling “strollers.” He thrived on the space and found that when he soloed over Monk’s accompaniment he felt too confined. “Any deviation, one note off, and you sound like you’re playing another tune, and you’re not paying attention to what’s going on. And it’s so evident. . . . There’s no space.”29 Once they mastered the repertoire and the band really gelled, however, Thelonious occasionally called familiar standards, such as Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia,” in order to change things up and give Griffin a respite.30
Keepnews captured the quartet live at the Five Spot, recording two separate nights of music. On July 9, Keepnews recorded two sets of music, which included a version of “Bye-Ya” with Art Blakey sitting in, a funky little blues Monk composed in honor of the club titled “Blues Five Spot,” and an unaccompanied original Monk would call “Dreamland.” “Dreamland” is a bit of a mystery. It is an old-fashioned ballad that sounds as though it could have been written in the 1920s. Monk never copyrighted it, rarely performed it, and only recorded it once thirteen years later.31 He never spoke about it nor explained whether it was just an old song or his own composition. In the end, Monk wasn’t satisfied with the recording and refused to grant Riverside permission to release it.32 (Keepnews eventually released these recordings after Monk died.33) Keepnews returned on August 7 and recorded enough music to make up two albums. Subsequently released as Thelonious in Action and Misterioso, the music was lively and exciting. Haynes set rather swift tempos compared to most other Monk outings, and once Griffin achieved mastery over a tune, he played with a kind of revelry that belied his complaints. Monk complemented Griffin’s lengthy improvised excursions with concise, well-balanced solos.
That summer the Terminis promoted the original Five Spot as the “home of Thelonious Monk.” The jazz world knew this implicitly, and anyone who wanted a glimpse of the man made his or her way to Cooper Square. One man’s pilgrimage began in Africa by way of Chicago. On an especially warm night in July, a handsome, stately black man in his mid-thirties approached Thelonious for an autograph as he was sitting at the bar between sets. The man had a slight accent and sported a West African kofi hat and dark shades. “I’m one of your admirers,” he said. After Thelonious signed his book, the man quietly withdrew to his seat. The next day, the man called Orrin Keepnews to request a meeting with Monk so that he could present him with a gift he had brought from his native country of Ghana. Keepnews was a bit skeptical at first, but when he called the Monk household and explained that a Mr. Guy Warren from Ghana would like to pay a visit, Nellie replied, “Oh, Thelonious knows about him and wants to meet him.”34
Monk had been hearing about Guy Warren from Wilbur Ware and Johnny Griffin for a couple of years now. In fact, Monk and Warren played the same benefit for Chicago’s Vaughan Hospital back in December of 1955, though they never met. Warren arrived in Chicago around December of 1954, and in a matter of months had become a sensation. The Windy City had never experienced anything like him: a bona fide West African who played a mean drum kit but also mastered traditional instruments like the “talking drum” and the djembe. Lionel Hampton wanted to take him on tour. Duke Ellington hired him for a few gigs. He even played with Dizzy. More importantly, Warren had gained some notoriety with his debut LP, Africa Speaks, America Answers! Released on the Decca label in 1956, it was the first serious effort to fuse jazz and traditional African music.35 Born in Accra, Ghana, in 1923 (back when it was still a British colony known as the Gold Coast), Warren fell in love with jazz as a small child and learned to play drums in school. At fifteen, he began playing highlife (popular West African dance music) in local bands, and earned a scholarship to Achimota College—the colony’s prestigious performing arts school. During the 1940s, he traveled briefly to the United States and spent nearly three years in England, where he became a principal member of Kenny Graham’s Afro-Cubists, playing calypso, highlife, mambo, as well as jazz.36
After almost three years in Chicago, he set out for the Big Apple in the early part of 1958. He put together a trio playing his own original compositions and performed regularly at the African Room on Third Avenue. Then in May, just weeks before he caught Monk at the Five Spot, he recorded his second LP, this time for RCA/Victor. Called Themes for African Drums, the album featured the great trombonist Lawrence Brown from Ellington’s band, vibist Earl Griffith, and the sensational African-American percussionist Chief Bey.37 The album includes a piece titled “The Talking Drum Looks Ahead,” in which he improvises a blues using the talking drum (an instrument whereby a player can change the pitch by squeezing the sides of the drum and striking it with a bent stick). Warren dedicated the song “to my idol Thelonious Monk.”38
Guy showed up on Monk’s doorstep loaded down with gifts. He carried an elegant carving of Sasabonsam, the Ashanti god of the forest, a copy of Africa Speaks, America Answers! and an early pressing of his latest recording, Themes for African Drums. Monk and Warren talked quite a bit about music, but Monk would not put on Guy’s record at first. He read the liner notes and expressed some skepticism. Warren recalled, “He wanted me to feel that there was nothing new. That everything in jazz had been said.”39 Once Monk did listen to Warren’s music, he let him know right away that he “realized the new contribution I was bringing to jazz.” In fact, according to Warren, Monk liked his music so much that he borrowed the melody from “The Talking Drum Looks Ahead” and recorded a slightly altered, slower version as a solo piano piece less than a year later. He titled it “Bluehawk,” as a tribute to Coleman Hawkins and the Blackhawk club in San Francisco, but it could also be heard as a sly nod to the Ghanaian drummer.40
Monk and Nellie once visited Guy at his apartment on 110th Street. He had an old battered piano and they jammed together, but Monk was challenged by Warren’s rhythmic approach. “I was playing my rhythms, but he said he would lose his concentration because my rhythm would dominate what he was doing,” recalled Warren.41 The music never gelled, and Warren’s dream of performing with his idol never happened, but Monk did come to admire him as a musician and a friend. Warren called Monk “his Grace,” and Nellie became “Nelly-O,” and young Barbara became obsessed with Themes for African Drums. When Warren announced that he was returning home in August—he had not visited Ghana since it won independence the previous year—he offered to take Thelonious with him. “His Grace wanted to go. At one time he told Nelly-O that he was coming to live with me and he would stop running around and going on tours and all that. And Nelly-O talked to me and I said, sure he can come and stay with me. But then again Nelly-O says, ‘You know how he is. I have to take care of him. His clothing, his food, his this and that. And you are a single man and you can’t do that so let’s not work on that.’ ”42 A couple of years later, Warren sent Monk another gift: a beautiful, wide-brimmed straw hat from Northern Ghana. Observers would mistakenly call it Monk’s “Chinese” hat, but Thelonious took special delight in the fact that it was from Africa. “I’ll never forget when he got that package,” Toot recalled. “You have to understand, Thelonious never opened mail. My mother opened mail, then me or my sister, but never my dad. But when that package came from Africa, he opened it himself, and I’ll never forget the smell. It smelled like Africa; it was so fresh and clean and pure. The hat was beautiful.”43
• • •
The summer of 1958 was busier than ever. Besides his regular Five Spot gig, Monk performed at the Newport Jazz Festival during the Fourth of July weekend. While it was the first time George Wein had invited Monk to Newport since his 1955 performance with Miles Davis, and his first appearance as a leader, Thelonious was still considered small potatoes. Monk’s name was not mentioned in print ads promoting the festival, and he was granted a fifteen-minute Sunday afternoon slot. The festival paid only for a trio, and rather than employ Ahmed Abdul-Malik they assigned a talented twenty-three-year-old bassist from Philadelphia named Henry Grimes. Grimes served as the unofficial house bassist for the festival, performing that weekend with Benny Goodman’s big band, Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz, and Tony Scott. Monk used his fifteen minutes to great effect, playing renditions of “Just You, Just Me,” “Blue Monk,” “Well, You Needn’t,” and “ ’Round Midnight”—as if to remind Newport fans who really owned that song.44
Thanks to fashion photographer-turned-filmmaker Bert Stern, a brief segment of Monk’s already brief performance was caught on the highly acclaimed documentary Jazz on a Summer’s Day. Although it would be nearly two years before its theatrical release, the film not only radically altered the look of concert films, with its rich color, candid shots of audiences and scenery, avant-garde editing, and utter rejection of narration and interviews, it contributed to the iconization of certain musicians, notably Anita O’Day, Mahalia Jackson, and one Thelonious Sphere Monk.45 Monk appears on screen for about thirty seconds wailing away on “Blue Monk,” then suddenly the camera cuts away to shots of sailboats in the bay competing in the 1958 America’s Cup Trials. Even the announcer’s voice cuts into the performance, temporarily turning Monk’s piano into background music for the yacht race.46 And yet, it is precisely the quirkiness of the scene that reinforced for an international audience the image of Monk as an eccentric figure. Monk had no clue the film would become a runaway success, but he was pleased to know that Stern planned to pay him a couple of hundred bucks for his appearance.47
The following month, Monk was invited to play the New York Jazz Festival at Randall’s Island. The festival, which took place August 22 and 23 at Downing Stadium in the middle of the East River, was in its third year of existence. Monk’s name was included in the ads and press releases, but as the featured artist with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.48 Monk did share the billing with Blakey, as well as Miles Davis, Chris Connor, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck, Anita O’Day, Jimmy Giuffre, and Sonny Rollins, but Monk brought his own quartet: Griffin, Haynes, and Abdul-Malik. New York Times critic John S. Wilson was there and found Monk in a particularly “jaunty” mood, praising the pianist for achieving “a high level of outgoing, communicative playing that was a far cry from the widely held conception of Mr. Monk as a dour, brooding musician. Still, this is part of what one may normally expect from Mr. Monk . . .”49
Two major concerts, a nice run at the Vanguard, and a long engagement at the Five Spot, and no reports of the “dour” Monk. Wilson’s observations were prescient; audiences began to expect the “jaunty” Monk, the joyous and humorous Monk. Real or imagined, there was a perceived shift in Monk’s mood. He was getting the recognition that had eluded him for so long. In fact, several days before the Randalls Island gig, the latest issue of Down Beat appeared, announcing the winners of the annual International Critics Poll. There, in the “Best Pianist” category, perched above Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson, and Earl Hines, was the High Priest of Bebop himself.50 Winning a Down Beat poll, or any magazine poll for that matter, was certainly a first for Monk. And it proved to be quite an upset. The happy and upbeat Garner had been a long-time favorite among musicians and critics, noted for his melodic style and ability to swing. Peterson’s astounding facility earned him the imprimatur as Art Tatum’s heir apparent. Monk’s rise marked a sea change in how the critics heard his music—the music he had been playing for the last fifteen years.
The poll results had hardly registered when Monk received a call from Bob Altschuler, the publicity director for Riverside Records, asking him to participate in an historic photo shoot for Esquire magazine. The magazine wanted Art Kane to produce a photograph to illustrate a special issue devoted to “The Golden Age of Jazz.” Kane ambitiously called together all the major jazz musicians he could think of to pose for a group picture in Harlem. The musicians were instructed to show up on 126th Street by 10:00 a.m. Knowing Monk’s reputation for lateness, Altschuler decided to personally pick him up the morning of the shoot. Altschuler arrived by cab with Gigi Gryce and sat outside Monk’s apartment waiting for him. “I was not on a big generous expense account. The meter kept running, of course. . . . And we kept waiting and waiting, and finally, after about an hour and ten minutes—I was concerned we were going to miss the photograph.”51 When Monk finally emerged, he was sporting a bright yellow sports jacket, a sharp brim, and his signature bamboo-frame sunglasses. He politely apologized for being late but never explained what took so long. Later, Altschuler pulled Gryce aside to find out what happened and learned that “Monk wanted to ensure that he would be seen, and he had to think about what he was going to wear.” Realizing that most musicians would wear dark suits, he decided on a light-colored jacket in order to stand out in the crowd.52
And crowd it was: fifty-six other musicians showed up, many of whom were genuine living legends: Basie, Roy Eldridge, Luckey Roberts, Lester Young, Jimmy Rushing. For Monk and everyone else, the photo shoot was more like an old family reunion. Besides seeing his old boss Coleman Hawkins and his long-time pal Mary Lou Williams, Monk stood with Blakey, Dizzy, Wilbur Ware, Mingus, Rollins, Sahib Shihab, Johnny Griffin, and Gerry Mulligan, among others. Taking stock of the scene, Monk took one extra precaution to make sure the wandering eye can find him in the picture. He parked himself next to the only two women in the photo besides Maxine Sullivan: fellow pianists Mary Lou Williams and Marian McPartland.53
Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of Monk. Harry Colomby received a telegram in August that sent shivers down his spine: “interested in thelonious monk music. stop. for movie . . .”54 It was from Marcel Romano, the music director for celebrated filmmaker Roger Vadim. Known for the controversial and highly acclaimed And God Created Woman (1956), launching the film career of Brigitte Bardot (whom he’d recently divorced), Vadim had just agreed to adapt the once-scandalous eighteenth-century novel, Les liaisons dangereuses, to the big screen. Romano was responsible for the soundtrack and he wanted Monk.55 He first met Thelonious at the Five Spot in the late summer of 1957, during one of his sojourns to New York.56 Colomby was thrilled. He knew that scoring films offered a good source of income and could provide a broader audience for Monk’s music. And Romano had a reputation for working with jazz musicians, having just hired Miles Davis to score Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud.57 They wanted him to come to France to record the soundtrack, so Colomby began talking to booking agents to see if they could arrange a European tour for October. Colomby didn’t get very far, but the rumor mill did: In late August Down Beat reported that Monk was scheduled to tour Europe with Sonny Rollins and Johnny Griffin.58
Colomby decided it was time to hire a publicist, so he approached Ivan Black, a Five Spot regular who also wrote press releases for the club. Black was a veteran, having begun his career as the publicist for Café Society. Before that, the Harvard graduate wrote art and theater criticism and had done some corporate publicity work, but the radical-at-heart decided to devote his energies to promoting jazz musicians and other struggling artists. Besides Monk, Ivan Black’s stable of clients would include Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Herbie Mann, Miriam Makeba, and Odetta.59
Ivan Black had barely begun the job when Down Beat magazine came knocking on Monk’s door hoping to do a feature on their latest poll winner. The idea for the piece initially came from Frank London Brown, the young singer who had sat in with Monk at Chicago’s Beige Room nine years earlier. Now a thirty-year-old writer, Brown wasn’t your typical jazz critic or journalist. He had just won the prestigious John Hay Whitney Award for creative writing and had completed a novel titled Trumbull Park, about several black families who integrated an all-white public housing project in a Chicago suburb.60 Slated for publication in 1959, Brown’s novel focused on the struggle for community, solidarity, even dignity in the midst of physical and psychological terror. It was a story Brown knew well, having been part of the group of black activists who desegregated Trumbull Park. Indeed, Brown’s writing was an extension of his activism. Born in Kansas City but raised on Chicago’s Southside, after graduating from Roosevelt University in 1951, Brown worked as a machinist, unionized textile workers, was active in the NAACP, and traveled to Sumner, Mississippi, to cover the Emmett Till trial as a reporter for the Chicago Defender.61
Brown was passionate about Monk’s music. He had told Sepia magazine that listening to Monk influenced his writing. “[Monk] shows a daring in execution in his work that I have admired since I was 17. I try to emulate his music by writing in a jazz-oriented language.”62 And in a letter to Ivan Black, he explained that he had been writing “lyrics and short stories to be accompanied by the compositions of Thelonious Monk” and hoped he might collaborate with Monk at the Five Spot.63 (Brown had established a weekly “Readings in Jazz” series at the Gate of Horn that summer, where he read short stories to live jazz, and he had even sent Ivan Black a taped recording of one of his readings.64) Unfortunately, the proposed collaboration never happened.
Brown and his new bride, Evelyn, arrived in New York in early September. He spent several days speaking with Nellie, Harry Colomby, friends, neighbors, the local bartender, and of course Monk himself. Perhaps because they knew each other, Monk felt comfortable enough to conduct part of the interview lying in bed.65 Brown’s manner was disarming, and elicited some surprisingly personal reflections. He impressed Monk as a regular, honest cat, not the fawning type but someone who was self-possessed and not afraid to speak his mind. Brown’s sensitivity and attention to detail resulted in the most thorough profile on the pianist published to date. Monk comes across as proud, hard-working, family-oriented, and fair-minded. His stoic persona and allegedly reclusive personality is presented as little more than a performance—at best, an act of self-protection. As Monk famously put it to Brown, “You know people have tried to put me off as being crazy. Sometimes it’s to your advantage for people to think you’re crazy.”66 Nellie made a point of Monk’s pride and sense of humor, dimensions of Monk that the public never saw. For his part, Colomby demolished the myth that Monk was undependable by pointing out that his insistence on fair pay and decent working conditions had resulted in a subtle kind of blacklisting.
Overall, Monk appreciated the article and found it to be truthful, though years later he complained about one quote in particular. At one point in their conversation, he tells Brown, “My music is not a social comment on discrimination or poverty or the like. I would have written the same way even if I had not been a Negro.”67 While the veracity of the statement is beyond doubt, Monk is clearly responding to a question or set of questions dear to Brown. As a black writer and activist committed to social justice at a critical juncture in the black freedom movement, Brown wanted to know Monk’s thoughts about the plight of the Negro. It wasn’t an unreasonable question, especially in light of the proliferation of political statements by jazz musicians during the era. Unfortunately, Monk’s words would come back to haunt him, turning what was clearly a defense of artistry into a complete rejection of politics.
Meanwhile, Bill Grauer and Orrin Keepnews sensed that Monk’s star was rising. In 1958, they decided to rerelease some of Monk’s earlier LPs in stereo, but with radically different album covers. Beginning with The Unique Thelonious Monk, the first trio sessions Riverside put out in 1955, they decided to create a Thelonious Monk postage stamp as a way of recognizing his importance while poking fun at hero worship. They converted the photo to make it look like an engraving, and the price of thirty-three and one-third cents was a clever reference to the LP.68 As a publicity stunt, however, Riverside printed faux stamps to promote the album, but when customers mistakenly (or deliberately) used them for postage, the U.S. Postal Service issued a restraining order against Riverside.69 Most of the redesigns, however, replaced Monk’s image with twentieth-century works of art—a deliberate effort to reach the kind of bohemian, intellectual audiences that patronized places like the Five Spot.70 For the rerelease of Monk Plays Ellington, designers Paul Bacon and Harris Lewine selected Henri Rousseau’s painting Repast of the Lion, because it reminded them of Ellington and his “jungle music” in the 1930s.71 Later in the year, they released the first of Monk’s live recordings from the Five Spot with Giorgio de Chirico’s The Seer gracing the cover.72 It was an ideal choice. The Seer paid tribute to poet and Surrealist icon Arthur Rimbaud, who called on the artist to be a seer in order to plumb the depths of the unconscious in the quest for clairvoyance. The one-eyed figure represented the visionary; the architectural forms and the placement of the chalkboard evoked the unity of art and science—a perfect symbol for an artist whose music has been called “mathematical.”73
• • •
To many of the young patrons who lined up outside the Five Spot six nights a week, Monk was indeed the “Seer.” When Monk was on the stand, the club was holy ground. He got to be so popular that the Terminis sometimes had to turn away customers. Of course, not every patron was a fan. His growing celebrity status and mainstream appeal produced a backlash from some of the self-appointed jazz police. One night, critic Robert A. Perlongo overheard a conversation between a rather belligerent guy and a young woman whom he was trying to impress:
“He’s had it,” a man behind us announced.
“The pianist, you mean?” said the girl with him.
“Yah, Monk. He went out with bebop, that stuff.”
“Really?”
“Sure,” said the man. “He hasn’t done anything in years. Not since with Bird.”74
While it is true that his repertoire rarely strayed beyond a dozen or so songs, patrons were treated to more than a few surprises. Like the night after the Randall’s Island festival when Sahib Shihab substituted for Griffin, or Thursday, September 11, when John Coltrane did the same. Fortunately, ’Trane’s wife, Naima, brought the family tape recorder to the club.75 Only five tunes survive, however, and they were Monk chestnuts Coltrane knew in his sleep, such as “In Walked Bud,” “I Mean You,” and the treacherous “Trinkle Tinkle.” Coltrane sounds like he never left the band, though this might be expected since he continued to rehearse with Monk at Nica’s house throughout the spring and summer.76 His playing here is strong, confident, and particularly bold when Monk “strolls” from the piano. Roy Haynes, with his signature snare and hi-hat, lights a fire under him, generating a level of frenetic energy missing from Shadow Wilson’s accompaniment.77
One of the biggest surprises, however, occurred about a week later when Johnny Griffin left the band permanently and Sonny Rollins stepped in. Griffin enjoyed the gig but he couldn’t make ends meet. “I had to make some money,” he explained to me, “and I couldn’t make no money at the Five Spot. The only one making money at the Five Spot was Thelonious. It wasn’t a large club, it was small, so there wasn’t that much money to go around. And I had a family, I had to see about them.”78 Griffin had arranged for Rollins to take his place—a dream come true for Thelonious. Rollins accepted the sideman gig only because he loved playing with Thelonious.79 They spent twelve beautiful nights together at the Five Spot and performed one benefit concert at Carnegie Hall to help launch Mary Lou Williams’s Bel Canto Foundation, founded to assist struggling, mainly drug-addicted musicians.80 A varied group of artists came out in support of Williams’s efforts, ranging from Randy Weston and Henry Red Allen to Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. Coincidentally, Les Jazz Modes was also on the roster, giving Monk yet another chance to hear and see Charlie Rouse. It was a fortuitous encounter. Rollins had already given notice, having committed to playing the inaugural Monterey Jazz Festival the weekend of October 3, and he had suggested Rouse as a possible replacement.81
Monk’s choice of Rouse surprised some, and disappointed many young saxophonists gunning for the slot. Nellie recalls fielding dozens of phone calls from players interested in working for her husband, including one call from a talented newcomer named Wayne Shorter.82 But Rouse was the ideal choice for a number of reasons. Monk and Rouse had worked together before and had been acquainted for over a decade. Rouse was not only an excellent musician but he had the kind of personality Monk liked. David Amram described him as “kind of like Ernie Henry—very warm, devoted, and loving person. He loved music, and was also a consummate player.”83 He also came with a long résumé, having played with Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron, Fats Navarro, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie—all before he turned twenty-six! Throughout the 1950s, he was everybody’s sideman and played on dozens of record dates—from Clifford Brown to Eddie Cleanhead Vinson, Bennie Green to Bull Moose Jackson.84 By the time he joined Monk, Rouse was a seasoned veteran familiar with a wide range of styles and approaches to music.
There was another way in which he resembled Henry, and for that matter Shadow Wilson: Rouse had a habit. He was using heroin when he joined the band, but he kept it under control and rarely did his addiction affect his work. Rouse was never comfortable with his condition, and he had already begun to make strides to break his habit. It would be a few years before he completely quit.85 His manager, Princess Orelia Benskina, was instrumental in Rouse’s efforts to redirect his life. The Panamanian-born dancer was eight years Rouse’s senior, and had established a name as a leading proponent of African and Afro-Cuban dance. She worked in a duo with “Cuban Pete” or Pedro, and in the 1940s was a member of Asadata Dafora’s dance troupe. More significantly, she was a practitioner of West African divination. In 1956 she was ordained into the “Spiritual Healers Fellowship” and owned and operated a botanica. Despite a life in nightclubs and theaters, she found a way to be spiritually grounded and to help others in need—including Rouse. She tried to “heal” Rouse of his drug addiction and keep him centered, and whenever he needed money or a place to stay, she was always generous.86
The sacred and spiritual worlds were not new to Rouse. Like Monk, he had North Carolina roots. Although he was born in West Virginia on April 6, 1924, both of his parents, William and Mary Bell Rouse, hailed from the furniture-manufacturing town of Lenoir, North Carolina.87 Childhood sweethearts, they married young, and William worked in a sawmill for a couple of years before becoming a coal miner in West Virginia. By the late 1920s, the family headed to Washington, D.C., where William secured a federal job and Mary Bell took in laundry. By the time Charlie was six years old, the Rouses owned their home in a stable black working-class neighborhood.88 Charlie’s neighborhood running buddy was a boy named Warren Hester, the son of Bill Hester, a musician and leader of the popular local dance band called the Bluebirds. Charlie, who lived a couple of doors down from the Hesters, loved to sit beneath their window with Warren and listen to the Bluebirds rehearse. When Bill was out at his day job as a chauffeur, Warren and Charlie used to sneak into their band room and try to play the instruments. They were eventually caught and punished, but Charlie was already hooked. He started on saxophone in junior high school, played drums in various neighborhood bands, fooled around with a clarinet his mother bought him, and tried his hand at trumpet (“I liked Louis Armstrong”).89 By the time he enrolled in high school, he excelled in music and athletics—like Monk. During his senior year, he starred on the football team, went to school, and began playing regularly at the Crystal Cavern in D.C. with pianist John Malachi, bassist Tommy Potter, and Osie Johnson on drums. It got to be too much, so he quit football and focused solely on music, joining the Eckstine band not long after graduation.90
Despite having played with Monk before, Rouse was a bit overwhelmed at first. He opened the night of October 2 with very little rehearsal time. They had practiced briefly at Nica’s house, but most of those rehearsals took place a couple of days into the gig, usually after the last set, and lasted until late the next morning.91 “We rehearsed when Thelonious felt like rehearsing,” Rouse explained. “He would teach me one or two tunes a night, usually just one. He would play it for me, then get up and walk around the house while I practiced it. It might seem that he wasn’t listening, but he was, and when I got the melody down and started to turn it around, he come upstairs and say, ‘Okay, let’s play it.’ ”92 As was Monk’s custom, Rouse had to learn the music by ear, though he did write out some of the more difficult songs such as “Trinkle Tinkle” or “Four in One.” “Sometimes he might say or write out the chord changes but on some tunes he wanted you to figure them out.”93 And just like all the tenor players before Rouse, he had to figure the songs out on the bandstand. Monk had no playlist, and Rouse never knew what his new boss was going to play until he started playing it: “The first chorus might sound like spaghetti until I got it. He didn’t stop though, he just kept going.”94 He quickly learned how to simultaneously take direction from Monk while being self-directed. “Playing with Thelonious you can’t wait and let him guide you; you got to be there yourself. Or he’ll throw you off just like that. You have to realize that when he comps he’s playing with the rhythm section, and playing with you too. During a tune, if he feels he wants you to play more, he won’t tell you, he’ll do a certain thing that’ll drop you right in, so you got to take another chorus!”95 And each chorus had to be strong. He let Rouse know right away that “you’re not playing with a French horn now. You’re out there alone.”96
Thelonious really wanted to hear what the band sounded like, so on Rouse’s first or second night he had Nica bring her portable reel-to-reel to the club. The surviving tapes not only reveal a somewhat nervous but energetic Rouse struggling with the music, they provide early evidence of the kind of rapport he and Monk would establish over the coming years.97 On “Rhythm-a-ning,” which Haynes sets at a fairly swift tempo, Rouse seems comfortable playing off the changes of “I Got Rhythm,” especially after Monk leaves the piano. When Monk returns, he picks up on the last phrase Rouse plays and builds on it, turning it upside down, extending it further, until it becomes his own phrase and he takes off into his characteristic Monkian solo. Monk’s elaboration of Rouse’s final phrases would become a common characteristic of their uncanny musical relationship. Rouse struggles with “Epistrophy.” He navigates the chromatic chord movement by borrowing a few licks from Coltrane. Rouse, like everyone else, had been listening to the way Coltrane developed a vertical approach to Monk’s music, elaborating and extending chords rather than building a solo off the melody. He does the same thing on “Off Minor,” once again taking a page from the book of John Coltrane. Rouse tries to match the drummer’s fast tempo with a blur of eighth and sixteenth notes outlining the chords. He ends up repeating a few phrases, as if he were short of ideas, while Monk constantly restates the theme behind him. In fact, Monk steps away from the piano for only fourteen bars—less than half a chorus, and when he comes back to solo, he reinforces the melody with deliberately incomplete phrases and abstract lines. After the set, Monk probably gave Rouse the same advice he’d given other sidemen: “If you know the melody you can make a better solo.” Later Rouse related the lesson that Monk composed with the idea that musicians build on the melody, not the chord changes. “He thought if you practiced the changes themselves, you’d play the chords as such and he didn’t want to hear that. He wanted you to experiment. He wanted you to be as free as possible and not be boxed in by playing from the chords.”98
Thelonious was pleased with his new acquisition, and Rouse was happy to have steady work. Rouse not only had his habit to deal with, he had a young son, Charles “Chico” Jr., from his marriage to dancer Esperanza Rouse—a marriage that had nearly dissolved by the time he joined Monk. But his personal battles did not seem to affect his performance. Within a couple of weeks, the band had settled into a nice groove and demonstrated to the skeptics that they lost none of their luster without Coltrane, Rollins, or Griffin. Monk worked his birthday weekend and then took a week off from the Five Spot to play the Comedy Club in Baltimore. The band was scheduled to open Tuesday night, October 15. Nellie had planned to drive down to Baltimore with Monk but had to cancel at the last minute, so Nica volunteered. Just before noon, she picked up Monk and Rouse in the Bentley and headed south. “Thelonious was having one of his bad days—silent, sweating, and miserable. Finally he spoke up. ‘Could we stop somewhere for a cold drink, a beer, a glass of water, anything?’ ”99 Having just crossed the Delaware Memorial Bridge on Route 40, Nica decided to stop at the Park Plaza Motel in New Castle, Delaware.100 Around 1:00, they pulled up in front of the motel and Thelonious went inside to get something to drink. Rouse was asleep in the backseat and Nica sat behind the wheel. “As Thelonious walked towards the entrance, it occurred to me that maybe I should have gone with him.”101
Her presence would not have made matters better. It never occurred to her that Jim Crow still prevailed in Delaware.102 No one was behind the front desk when Thelonious entered the motel. He noticed the kitchen off to the side and saw a woman washing dishes, so by his own account he walked in and asked her for some water. The woman turned out to be Mrs. Tonge, the owner’s wife. She claimed he simply stared at her and said nothing.103 Startled, she demanded that Monk leave immediately. She never actually said they don’t serve Negroes, but it was clear in her response that they had no intention of catering to him. In the meantime, Mr. Harold Tonge called the police, who arrived in minutes.104 “As I got out of the car to find out what happened,” Nica reported years later, “a jeep drove up, ground to a halt, and two cops dashed up the steps.”105 There are conflicting reports as to what happened next. According to court documents the state troopers tried to question Monk, but he refused to speak. Nica intervened and explained to the officers that he was sick, so they physically escorted Monk out without arresting him. By this time, Rouse was wide awake and taking everything in. A white woman and two black men driving around in a $19,000 Bentley was enough to pique the troopers’ suspicions. As soon as they left the parking lot and headed toward Route 40, the same state troopers pulled them over and ordered Thelonious out of the car. Again, Monk refused, but this time he spoke, asking Officer H. Thomas Little, “Why the hell should I?” Little had called for backup, so now several troopers “appeared in patrol cars with handcuffs and weapons.”106 According to Nica, “Thelonious was so mad, he wouldn’t move. He took hold of the car door . . . and couldn’t be budged until one cop started beating on his hands with a billy club, his pianist’s hands.”107 Nica jumped out of the car and pleaded with the police not to hit Thelonious because he was ill, but her protests were ignored and they proceeded to beat him mercilessly with night sticks. He was finally dragged to the ground, handcuffed behind his back, and thrown on the floor of a patrol car. Monk kept fighting back by pushing the door open with his feet, so several officers continued to pummel him while he lay handcuffed. They beat him severely, ripping his red tie off his neck in the fracas.108
The troopers placed Monk in custody and ordered Nica and Rouse to follow them to the magistrate’s office, though they had not been arrested for anything. They were held for questioning and detained for quite a while without charge. Indeed, over two hours had passed before the police searched Nica’s pocketbook and the trunk of the car, where they allegedly found a bottle of pills and a small amount of marijuana in her luggage. They never obtained a search warrant, nor had they read Nica her rights. The trace amount of reefer was all they needed to charge both Nica and Rouse with possession of narcotics. Thus with Magistrate Samuel J. Hatton presiding, all three were brought into the courtroom to be indicted. Thelonious was extremely agitated and, though still handcuffed, hit the officer who held him in custody. He also refused to cooperate. “Monk didn’t back down,” observed Rouse. “If he thinks he’s right, he sticks by what he thinks. He stood there and defied the judge. If they told him to sit down, he stood up. If they told him to say something, he said nothing.”109 Hatton angrily called for order and then added a second count of assault and battery on a police officer, along with the charges of breach of the peace, resisting arrest, and narcotics possession. Bail was set at $5,300, and he had to pay a $14.50 fine for breach of the peace. Nica and Rouse were also fined for breach of the peace and charged with narcotics possession, and bail was set at $5,000 each. Nica had to post $15,300 for their release.110
They never made it to Baltimore.111 Instead, they high-tailed it back to New York City. The New York Post carried a story about the arrest the very next day,112 and the police did not hesitate to suspend Thelonious’s cabaret card, even though he had not been convicted of anything and had yet to stand trial. The whole ordeal sent him spiraling into a deep depression. For days, he couldn’t sleep and he lost his appetite. He, Rouse, and Nica were scheduled to return to New Castle on October 21 to face charges, but Thelonious had a severe breakdown at Penn Station and was taken to Rivercrest Sanitarium in Long Island City for psychiatric treatment.113 Attorneys Joseph Delaney and Dudley Warren represented Nica, while Monk and Rouse retained the distinguished attorney Theophilus Nix—only the second African-American lawyer to be admitted to the Delaware bar.114 Judge Hatton was patently hostile to Nix. Because no court stenographer was assigned to the hearing, Nix asked to use a recording device. Hatton tried to block it, but Nix had already received permission from a higher court. They clashed over other issues as well. Both attorneys wanted to bar the press, but the judge refused. Most importantly, Nix wanted the narcotics charge dismissed because the police conducted an illegal search and seizure of the car. He wanted all charges against his clients dropped, including the two counts of assault and battery, and saw no reason for Monk to appear in court. Hatton refused to drop the charges and ordered the case be bound over to the Court of Common Pleas.115 Monk eventually pleaded guilty to breach of peace and assault and battery, and was fined $123.50, but the possession charges against him and Rouse were dropped.116 Nica, however, remained free on bail while she waited for a trial date. She felt that her future hung in the balance.117
Meanwhile, Monk stayed in the hospital throughout much of November.118 Ironically, while he struggled to come to terms with his treatment at the hands of the Delaware police, a flurry of articles appeared celebrating his international importance. Frank London Brown’s feature article for Down Beat hit the stands just days after Monk’s arrest, and a few weeks later, Down Beat critics selected Thelonious’s LP Monk’s Music one of the five best albums of the year.119 Jazz Standard Music Publishing Company released a book of transcribed Monk piano solos under the title, Thelonious Monk’s Piano Originals: Revealing Instincts of the Genius of Jazz.120 And in the November issue of Jazz Review, critic and composer Gunther Schuller published an extraordinary essay evaluating Monk’s complete recorded works, from the Minton’s tapes to his most recent Riverside discs. He concluded his lengthy essay praising Monk’s originality. “[I]n these times of standardization and bland conformism we should be grateful that there are still talents such as Thelonious Monk who remain slightly enigmatic and wonderful to some of us.”121
But under the circumstances, no tribute album, book, article, or critics poll in the world could help him. The NYPD stripped him of his right to work for a third time.122 Nellie could not handle caring for Thelonious, working, and taking care of the kids, so she sent them off to stay with their aunt Marion in Queens. Marion had just bought a house in a new subdivision—so new, in fact, that there were only three completed homes on the block. Toot, who was entering third grade, remembers the neighborhood being so small that “they didn’t have a school building.” Instead, he and Boo Boo attended a kind of parochial “one-room schoolhouse” with a heavy emphasis on religious instruction.123
Monk got out of the hospital in time to play Town Hall just after Thanksgiving, one year after his triumphant concert with ’Trane at Carnegie Hall.124 Sharing the bill with Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, and Jimmy Giuffre, Monk’s quartet had lost some of its luster as far as critic John S. Wilson was concerned. He praised Monk for being “the most individual” of all the leaders, though he placed the blame for the quartet’s failings squarely on Rouse’s shoulders. Describing Rouse as “a far less exhilarating performer than his predecessor, Johnny Griffin,” he suggested that his lack of a strong musical personality rendered the group “more placid . . . than it once was.”125
Monk had to wonder if his moment in the sun was over. If so, his fears were quickly allayed when Colomby called with the news that the CBS television show The Twentieth Century wanted to film Monk’s band at the Five Spot. Hosted by Walter Cronkite, The Twentieth Century was a prime-time half-hour documentary program that aired on Sunday nights. Relying mostly on archival footage, the program was designed to examine important historical events, but twice a year it aired a one-hour special meant to examine more contemporary issues. These one-hour specials were produced by Stephen Fleischman, a former Communist still sympathetic to the Left who somehow dodged the worst of McCarthyism. Fleischman had already produced a couple of controversial episodes, including an exposé of prison conditions in America.126 Now he set out to explore the culture and attitude of college students—the generation narrator Walter Cronkite labeled “the most baffling in our history.” Calling it “Generation Without a Cause,” the bulk of the segment was devoted to interviews with white students at Rutgers University who described themselves as conformists concerned about marriage, family, home ownership, and obtaining a good job. Fleischman then wanted to juxtapose the “typical” college student with the “Beat generation,” young people whose posture was one of political detachment but engagement with matters of art and culture. Jazz was their music and the Five Spot their hangout.127
Monk must have found the filming itself rather baffling. CBS bused in about eighty-odd students from Rutgers who filed into the Five Spot around 8:00 a.m.128 They were almost entirely white and very preppy—indeed, when the camera pans the room the first time all we see are white faces. As Harry Colomby put it, “They looked like an advertising agent put them together. All white. They politely applauded. It was like the beginning of political correctness.”129 Although the students sat attentively, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, nodding their heads silently to Monk’s “Rhythm-a-ning,” they did not look like the usual Five Spot crowd. Missing was the club’s famous diversity of race, age, and status.130 The band looked exhausted if not uninterested, probably because they had been up all night. At one point, the director had a young man come on the bandstand and read some bad poetry (“Sometimes, I’m really convinced/we are sterile dishes/watching with ever beginning patience/ germs/to see if they will grow”) while Monk played a rather somber rendition of “Pannonica.”131
Monk had gone six years without a cabaret card after being prosecuted for a crime he did not commit. And now the NYPD held him hostage again, but this time for what they considered an especially egregious violation: assaulting a fellow officer. As the holiday season approached, the future felt uncertain. He didn’t work in December and had nothing lined up for January. Then Harry Colomby and his brother Jules approached Monk with an enticing proposition: a concert at Town Hall featuring Monk’s music for big band. Jules, along with promoter Marc Smilow, would produce the concert and Riverside could record it. Thelonious loved the idea. He had not heard his music in a big band context since his days with Dizzy Gillespie’s band. But before he could do anything, he needed the right arrangements and a band good enough to play them.