Thelonious worked the day Ronnie died and the day of the funeral. Fans who crowded into the Five Spot each night had no clue how much their hero was suffering. Many came to see the eccentric genius do his thing, so if he danced to the bar and drank himself numb, or spun himself into a kind of mental seclusion, most would chalk it up to his performance. It wasn’t that hard for Monk to mentally and emotionally withdraw before the audience’s eyes because his shows had become routine. So routine, in fact, that even the critics who once adored Monk had begun to complain. Thelonious typically breezed in around 11:00 p.m., made a beeline for the kitchen to drop off his coat and maybe get a quick bite, ambled to the bar to pick up his doubleshot of Old Grand-Dad bourbon, arriving finally at the piano, where he’d launch in to an unaccompanied piece such as “Don’t Blame Me.” He would then turn the proceedings over to Frankie Dunlop for what impatient Monk fans regarded as an interminably long drum solo, returning to the bandstand long enough to announce “Butch Warren will play a bass solo.” Meanwhile, Thelonious would disappear to the back or head straight to the bar. Finally, he’d call the quartet together and they would play four or five tunes, closing out what usually amounted to a forty- or fifty-minute set with “Epistrophy.” And during these tunes he’d often lay out, dancing near the piano or in the alcove behind the bandstand. He’d repeat the same routine over the course of four sets each night.1
The repertoire might have been limited, but he knew how to make the same songs sound fresh each time. The fans kept coming because Thelonious always created excitement and the band always swung. But the routine sometimes dulled the sense of adventure that had come to define Monk’s music. Critic/poet Amiri Baraka worried that Thelonious was playing himself into a cul-de-sac, suggesting that his sudden fame and the backing of a big record label might be the culprits. He warned, “once [an artist] had made it safely to the ‘top’, [he] either stopped putting out or began to imitate himself so dreadfully that early records began to have more value than new records or in-person appearances. . . . So Monk, someone might think taking a quick glance, has really been set up for something bad to happen to his playing.” To some degree, Baraka thought this was already happening, and he placed much of the blame on his sidemen. “[S]ometimes,” he conceded, “one wishes Monk’s group wasn’t so polished and impeccable, and that he had some musicians with him who would be willing to extend themselves a little further, dig a little deeper into the music and get out there somewhere near where Monk is, and where his compositions always point to.” 2
Baraka wasn’t entirely off. Thelonious worked with an excellent group of musicians, but he hardly had a “great” band. The days of great bands were long gone, because all the greats had become leaders. Monk often lamented the lack of musicians who could really master his music, which partly explains the limited repertoire. But the band’s problems were not exclusively musical. Frankie Dunlop had grown bored and felt he was underpaid. He also had his sights on possibly leaving music and becoming an actor. Butch Warren, who had drug problems when he joined the band, also suffered from sudden mood swings he couldn’t understand.3 Charlie Rouse was dealing with a number of personal issues. He was still battling his drug demons, despite the loving efforts of his friend Orelia Benskina. They collaborated together on the song “Un Dia,” which he recorded on his 1963 release Bossa Nova Bacchanal, and later that year he performed in her stage show, “Princess Orelia’s Afro-Pot Purée.” As Rouse began contemplating leaving Monk and possibly becoming a leader, the former Les Jazz Modes manager had begun overseeing his own career.4 Around the same time, Rouse’s marriage to Esperanza deteriorated and he became romantically involved with a young woman named Sandra Capello. When they met, Rouse was on the verge of making a clean break from heroin, though from her account she gave him the boost he needed. Early in their relationship, she often accompanied him to Dr. Robert Freymann’s office for methadone treatment. Within a year he had freed himself from the drug completely. “He was a different person. . . . We started going to church together in the Village.”5
For Monk, coping with Ronnie’s death proved exceedingly difficult. His illness grew worse, his bipolar episodes became more frequent, and so did his drinking and drug use. His income increased, but so did the demands on his time and the pressure to create something new. Friends and handlers such as Nica, Macero, the Colomby brothers, the Termini brothers, the critics bold enough to speak their mind, and family members bombarded him with suggestions—hire this person, fire that person, put together another big band, record another solo LP, reunite with Coltrane, ad infinitum. . . . And all the while, he had to submit to more interviews and live under greater press scrutiny. Barry Farrell of Time had finished conducting some thirty interviews by early fall, and as he spent the next few weeks distilling his observations into a 5,000-word essay, Thelonious had to take time out to sit for his cover portrait. The artist, Russian painter Boris Chaliapin, grew frustrated with Monk because during the course of four sittings he always fell asleep.6 Chaliapin called it strange; I would call it exhaustion.
The third weekend in September, Monk made his debut appearance at the Sixth Annual Monterey Jazz Festival. It had taken him six years to get an invitation, and it came at the last minute. The quartet was scheduled to play Saturday the 21st, and then Monk was to perform the following afternoon with the Monterey Festival Orchestra, but for unknown reasons Monk’s big-band appearance was canceled.7 Instead, the quartet played another set on Sunday. Judging from the spirited applause, the audience didn’t seem to mind. Monk stuck with his standard repertoire, but raised the bandstand with a few thrilling moments. During his unaccompanied introduction to “Sweet and Lovely,” he played little stride passages at breakneck speed, à la Art Tatum, to the shock and delight of the crowd.8 Critic Ralph Gleason later declared Monk’s appearance the festival’s “outstanding musical performance.”9
Thelonious and Nellie came home to the alarming news that Bud Powell had been hospitalized for tuberculosis. Monk last saw Powell when he passed through Paris on tour, and even then he looked terrible. When he learned that Bud had to be confined to a sanatorium for several weeks with medical bills mounting, Thelonious sent money.10 On Sunday afternoon, October 27, Oscar Goodstein held a benefit at Birdland to raise funds for Powell’s medical expenses.11 Musicians rallied to the cause. Monk made a brief appearance on his way back from the Five Spot, where he played a benefit for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) that had been scheduled at the exact same time as the Powell fundraiser. It was a follow-up to the “Sit In for Freedom” concert held at the Five Spot the previous Sunday.12 Still haunted by the four black girls killed in Birmingham, Monk did not want to miss this event. Three weeks later, he was the featured artist at a “Cocktail Sip” sponsored by the Bronx chapter of CORE. Held at Goodson’s Town Cabaret just a few blocks from Lyman Place, the event raised money for Sarah Collins, who had lost her eyesight and her sister, Addie Mae Collins, in the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.13
• • •
Early in the fall, Jules Colomby and Marc Smilow arranged another big-band collaboration with Monk and Hall Overton, this time at the newly completed Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center. Jules secured the hall for November 29, Overton and Monk began working on new arrangements and assembling a band, and Teo Macero prepared to record the event.14 Thelonious agreed with Hall that the last big band was too bottom heavy tonally, so they replaced the tuba and French horn with soprano saxophone and cornet. They hired Steve Lacy and Thad Jones, as well as Eddie Bert (trombone) and Phil Woods (alto saxophone) from the original Town Hall concert, and a relative newcomer named “Dizzy” Reece on trumpet. The Jamaican-born Reece had cut his professional teeth in London in the 1950s and moved to New York in 1959. He had made a few LPs for Blue Note; one included an original composition he titled “Variations on Monk.”15 After a difficult search for a suitable baritone player, they settled on Gene Allen, a big band veteran whose resume included Louis Prima, Claude Thornhill, and Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band.16
Overton completed the charts some time in November and they began rehearsing at his loft on Sixth Avenue. Then, on November 22, President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot in Dallas, sending shockwaves throughout the nation and the world. But his death had an even more immediate effect on Monk’s life and work. First, the Philharmonic concert was postponed until December 30. Second, Barry Farrell’s Time magazine cover story, slated to run on November 29, was pushed back. The magazine substituted a color portrait of the newly sworn-in President Lyndon Baines Johnson, reportedly destroying the three million copies they had already printed bearing Chaliapin’s portrait of Monk.17 The unexpected delay turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Judging from the rehearsal tapes made at Overton’s loft in December, the band wasn’t ready. A week before the concert, the musicians were still wrestling with Overton’s arrangement of “Four in One” and Monk had just decided to include “Light Blue.”18 Overton went so far as to request an extra rehearsal at the end of the week and a serious dress rehearsal the morning of the concert (Monday, December 30).19 To complicate matters, Dizzy Reece couldn’t make the new date so they brought in trumpeter Nick Travis, a friend and bandmate of Gene Allen in Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band.
The Philharmonic concert was one of the year’s most anticipated events in the jazz world. Jules Colomby and Smilow flooded the city with publicity and marshaled the press to cover the event.20 John S. Wilson published a rather long profile on Monk and Overton the day before the concert. Following the obligatory descriptions of his eccentric behavior and colorfully “cluttered” apartment, Wilson relays Monk’s thoughts on the concert. “It will be different music . . . different personnel and a different place.” What wasn’t different was his aesthetic vision—to make a big band swing like a small ensemble with more power. “A lot of people notice this free sound and don’t know that they notice it,” Monk explained. “That’s why I like the small group—it flows with so much freedom. You get the bigger band to flow the same way by the way you write the music and the way you play it.”21
Close to 1,500 people filed into Philharmonic Hall—short of a sell-out crowd, but a decent showing nonetheless. Critics and players came out in force, since December 30 fell on a Monday (musicians’ night off), and few went home disappointed. It was not Town Hall redux. For one thing, the evening was divided into three parts with two intermissions, beginning with the big band, then an interlude with just the quartet, and finishing with the big band.22 The ten-piece band not only performed more songs this time but Overton wrote all new charts. His arrangement of “Evidence,” in which he had the band restate the melody underneath the soloists, offered a brilliant example of contrapuntal writing. The brighter instrumentation, supported by Frankie Dunlop’s driving rhythm, gave compositions like “Bye-Ya” and “I Mean You” greater power and clarity. Moreover, Thelonious debuted a brand new composition he titled “Oska T,” named for beloved Cincinnati jazz disc jockey Oscar Treadwell. A simple sixteen-bar tune made up of two repeating eight-bar phrases, Monk had written it to be arranged for big band.23 He also surprised everyone with an unaccompanied rendering of “When It’s Darkness on the Delta,” an old paean to the South written by New Yorkers Jerry Livington, Marty Symes, and Al Neiberg. Some jazz and Dixieland groups performed it in the 1950s after it was resurrected for the film “South of Dixie,” but otherwise the song was destined for obscurity.24 The audience responded to Monk’s five-minute rumination on the melody with thunderous applause. The big finale (before the closing theme of “Epistrophy”), was a nearly fifteen-minute romp through the intricate “Four in One.” Reminiscent of his take on “Little Rootie Tootie,” Overton arranged Monk’s solo from his Live at the Black Hawk LP for the entire horn section.25 The crowd loved it. Before the night was over, the Schaefer Brewing Company presented Monk with an award for “his extraordinary achievement as an innovator, composer, and leader of modern jazz.” Too bad they misspelled his name.26
Most critics effused over the concert, declaring the evening an unqualified success and singling out “Four in One” as the evening’s masterpiece.27 “Joy returned to jazz last night in Philharmonic Hall” is how George Simon opened his review for the Herald-Tribune. The unspoken foil, of course, was the angry political noise of the avant-garde. By contrast, “this was a swinging affair, full of the basic foot-tapping feeling that was there when jazz began.” He praised Overton’s charts, compared Monk’s playing with that of Ellington, and described the evening as a party: “everybody, including the musicians, had a good time. . . . Jazz evenings like that are a joy indeed.”28
• • •
A triumphant concert was the perfect capstone to an incredible year. Monk had his share of setbacks, but he also enjoyed international critical acclaim and made more money than ever before. His gross receipts for engagements amounted to $53,832, and royalties came to $22,850. An impressive figure, to be sure, but we must remember that a band is a business. After deducting what he paid in salaries, hotels, travel, supplies, union dues, commissions (both to Harry Colomby and Jack Whittemore of Shaw Booking Agency), and taxes, the Monks ended up with $33,055.29 The press exaggerated Monk’s earnings, attributing most of his newfound wealth to his Columbia contract.30 But Columbia’s accounting books tell a different story. About $1,400 of Monk’s advance for Criss Cross went to sidemen’s salaries, piano tunings, instrument rental, and miscellaneous costs.31 Although the quartet was recorded live several times throughout the year, Monk was not always entitled to an advance because (during his lifetime, at least) these recordings were released as individual tracks on compilation records. He received a token advance of $500 for his Tokyo recording, but Columbia actually charged him $844 for his recorded performance at Newport.32 The most egregious example of how the label did business is illustrated in Columbia’s handling of the Philharmonic concert. All costs were deducted from Monk’s advance: stagehands ($525), sidemen ($970.71), copyists ($90.52), Hall Overton’s arranging fee ($1,400), and unnamed “costs” (mainly recording expenses and fees charged by the Philharmonic) amounting to $2,689.39. The charges whittled Monk’s $10,000 advance to $4,324.38.33 Columbia initially failed to deduct Jules Colomby’s $2,000 producer’s fee, so they took it from Monk’s future advances in four $500 installments.34
Thelonious had other problems to contend with. As soon as his seven-month engagement at the Five Spot ended the last week of January,35 Frankie Dunlop gave notice. It came as a surprise; the quartet had been preparing for another European tour in February. After nearly two years, he was ready to move on. As Monk explained it, “He wants to be an actor. He wants to do pantomime or something.”36 By “pantomime” he meant impressions, and Dunlop was a master at it. His ability to capture Monk’s gestures, voice, and cadences left most people in stitches. He teamed up with Leo Morris and a dancer named Maretta to create a stage show he called “Jazz Pantomime.” A mélange of music, dance, and comedic impressions of famous jazz artists, Dunlop mounted the show off-Broadway and performed it at benefits.37
Monk desperately needed a drummer. Besides his forthcoming tour, he had record dates lined up for January 29 and 30. Fortunately, he had someone in mind. From the end of December through January, Joe Termini had booked a series of piano trios to play opposite Monk. The pianists changed—Bobby Timmons, Junior Mance, and Walter Bishop, Jr.—but the drummer remained the same. His name was Ben Riley. A tall, quiet, handsome fellow all of thirty years old, he kept good time, had a strong sense of swing, and had a penchant for the ride cymbal and snare. During his break, Riley sat at the bar checking out Monk, but when Riley was on the bandstand, Monk usually retired to the kitchen. Weeks passed before Monk spoke to Riley, and his first words were, “Who the hell are you, the house drummer?”38 So when Harry Colomby called him on January 29 to come down to the 30th Street Studio to record with Monk, Riley thought it was a joke and hung up. Colomby called back to reassure him that he was genuine and to say that they were waiting for him at the studio. “We never rehearsed,” Riley recalled. “Monk just came out and started playing. He knew I would listen. He saw me sitting there every night at the Five Spot when his band came on. . . . He knew I was onto what he was doing, because I was listening. I heard him when he played with ’Trane, Shadow Wilson, and Wilbur Ware.” 39
Riley didn’t realize that the first session was rehearsal. They spent the entire three hours in the studio working on various pieces but recorded only one track—“Shuffle Boil”—and it was rejected. Monk last recorded it with Gigi Gryce nearly a decade ago, so the whole band came to it cold. Because he had written it with an alto saxophone in mind, the high notes were beyond the range of the tenor. He refused to change it and Rouse rebelled: “ ‘What are you trying to make me do?’ [Monk] just said, ‘It’s on the horn.’ Then when I heard it back, this strange sounding stuff came out, right and pretty. He said, ‘You see how it sounds? The tenor is full up there—fuller than a soprano.’ ”40 Butch Warren also had to learn a tricky bass line that was part of the melody, and Thelonious decided to take it at a swifter tempo than what he originally recorded. The only usable track from the session was an unaccompanied version of “Nice Work If You Can Get It.”41
The next day yielded better results. They remade “Shuffle Boil,” although Rouse faltered on the melody and sounded tentative throughout, and Riley was still finding his bearings. They also recorded a respectable version of “Epistrophy.” Riley knew the melody and the rhythms, but he sometimes overwhelmed the band with the steady splash of his ride cymbal.42 Before their three hours were up, however, the group delivered one fine version of “Stuffy Turkey.” Based on “Rhythm” changes, the A-section is from a riff tune Coleman Hawkins made famous back in the 1940s titled “Stuffy.” Hawkins claimed composer’s credit for it, but pianist Sir Charles Thompson claimed he coauthored. Others have insisted that the tune originated with Monk.43 Whoever wrote it, Thelonious associated the tune with Hawkins, and, given their resurgent friendship during this period, he probably recorded it as a tribute to him. He certainly made it his own, writing an entirely different bridge and arranging the melody so that the piano echoes the tenor’s voicing of the melody.44
The band returned to the studio on February 10. Determined to complete an album, Macero booked two three-hour sessions, but even with six hours of studio time they came away with only two usable tracks.45 Once again, Monk mined his musical archive for “new” material, resurrecting the old Harry Warren-Al Dubin tune “Lulu’s Back in Town,” and pulling out his own “Brake’s Sake,” another song from the record he made with Gigi Gryce. Needless to say, Macero was disappointed; he was under enormous pressure to turn in an LP before Monk left for Europe. Thelonious wasn’t happy, either, because it meant his $10,000 advance had to wait.46 He was pleased with his new drummer, however. Riley recalled, “After we finished the session, he said, ‘Do you need any money? I don’t want anybody in my band being broke.’ I said, “Excuse me?” He repeated himself and asked, ‘Do you have a passport? You better go get it because we’re leaving for Europe on Friday.’ That’s how I knew I got the gig.”47
Riley got his passport, and on Friday, Valentine’s Day 1964, boarded a plane with Charlie Rouse, Butch Warren, Thelonious and Nellie, and George and Joyce Wein for a seventeen-day tour that took them to Amsterdam, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Paris, Milan, Zurich, Marseilles, Brussels, and Solingen, West Germany. The trip gave Thelonious and Nellie a chance to get to know the newest member of the band. They learned that he was born in Savannah, Georgia, but grew up in Harlem’s Sugar Hill. As a kid he studied with anyone who would teach him, hung out with other young drummers like Jimmy Cobb and Phil Wright, and sat in with Cecil Scott at the Club Sudan. He also attended jam sessions organized by Art Blakey and sat in wherever he could. In 1954, he enlisted in the army, served as a paratrooper, and played in the army band. When he got out in 1956, he was ready to turn professional and quickly developed a reputation as a solid yet versatile hard bop drummer. He worked with a number of artists, including Randy Weston, Mary Lou Williams, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Nina Simone, Johnny Griffin, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, and Woody Herman.48
Yet, for all of Riley’s experience, filling Frankie Dunlop’s shoes wasn’t easy, and some people in Monk’s inner circle did not think he was up to the task. Nica, for one, initially opposed Riley and lobbied for Billy Higgins, but Monk was unequivocal. He explained, “This is my band and I know who I want in my band.”49 Monk not only wanted someone who could swing all the time, but a drummer willing to listen—listen to the band and listen to advice. Thelonious helped Riley become the drummer he needed, and in so doing he made him a better musician. Early on, Monk told him, “You can’t always like every song the best. Another player might like the song more than you, and his beat might be better than your beat.” In other words, the drummer need not always establish the beat but may follow others who swing more, and doing that required a more conversational style. Monk would often play little figures that demanded a response from Riley.50 Monk also instructed him not to be so busy “playing that Roy Haynes shit” and to just swing. “Just learn how to swing and make everybody move to certain places and then the rest will take care of itself.”51
When Riley asked Monk about rehearsing, he replied, “Why do you want to do that, so you can learn how to cheat? You already know how to play. Now play wrong and make that right.”52 As with every musician who played with Monk, it was trial by fire. During the band’s first performance at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, midway into the set Monk walked to the mic and announced, “Now, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. Now, Ben Riley will play a drum solo for you.”53 For a moment, Riley was caught off-guard, but he composed himself and delivered a fine unaccompanied solo. Later in the dressing room, Thelonious pulled him aside and said proudly, “How many people do you think could do what you just did? You didn’t know all of the different songs, but you swung through all of that. . . . Why would you want to rehearse?”54 Riley proved to be a good student and a loyal band member; he would go on to spend five years with Monk. “ ‘[T]hat was like going to the university. I mean, you had your highest, you had one of the highest points of your musical career working with him.”55
But during the tour Riley was still just a freshman at the University of Monk, and the existing recordings reveal him finding his way to the material. The audiences seemed pleased with the band, even though Monk’s repertoire had changed little since his last European tour. He added “Brake’s Sake” and “Stuffy Turkey” from the LP in progress, and occasionally played “Four in One,” but stuck mostly with the songbook of the last two years. Nevertheless, he played to sell-out crowds who responded most enthusiastically when they recognized a tune. He did have some trouble in Paris, where the quartet was booked to play two concerts back-to-back: the Alhambra on Saturday, February 22, and La Maison de l’ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française) the following night. The band arrived on the 22nd with little time for a decent sound check. The piano was poorly tuned, tinny, and the action inadequate. The condition of the instrument compromised the band’s dynamics and compelled Monk to play even fewer notes than normal.56 In an interview the next day with Jazz Magazine’s Michel Delorme, Monk complained, “The piano is no good at [the Alhambra]. What a sad piano they got on the stage. . . . They should be able to hear the piano is no good.”57 Delorme thought Thelonious and his band played well under the circumstances, but he was less concerned with the condition of the piano than what he perceived to be a growing staleness in the band’s makeup and repertoire. He politely suggested that Monk break out of the quartet format and record with a sextet, big band, or other combos. He also asked Monk if he planned a different repertoire for the Maison de l’ORTF concert. The question annoyed him, so he turned it back to Delorme:
Monk: I don’t know, I probably will. [Pause] What you saying? What. You saying I should play the same tunes or what?
Delorme: Mmm. I don’t know. I don’t mind anyway.
Monk: You saying something. You ought to know. I mean, what would be the hippest? Play the same songs or play something else?58
He did play the same songs, though the longer program allowed him to add a few more tunes such as “Four in One” and “Hackensack.”59 But there were no surprises. This disappointed critic Michel-Claude Jalard, who wrote one of the few bad reviews of the tour. He felt Monk had fallen into a routine, essentially imitating himself and drawing on his “memory of past improvisations” rather than generating the kinds of fresh ideas he was known for. The problem lay less with the material than with his approach to improvisation.60 Jalard’s critique was a glimpse of what was to come.
Despite the substandard piano and critical responses, Paris turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. Bud Powell, Francis Paudras, and his wife, Nicole, surprised Monk and Nellie at the airport when they arrived Saturday afternoon. Thelonious hugged Bud and looked him over. Journalists surrounded Thelonious, peppering him with questions, but Monk ignored them. They never took their eyes off each other.61 Powell and Paudras attended the concert that night. Paudras found Monk’s performance “electrifying” and Powell was delighted. Powell had been anticipating Monk’s visit for some time: A week earlier he sat at the piano in Paudras’s flat (where he now resided) and belted out half a dozen Monk tunes, including “Stuffy Turkey.”62 After the concert, Nellie and Thelonious invited Francis and Bud to dinner at Gaby and Haynes in Montmarte, Paris’s first soul-food restaurant and musicians’ hangout. “[Thelonious] sat opposite Bud and took care of him all night, mobilizing all the waiters to make sure Bud had everything he wanted,” Paudras remembered. “When we got back home, Bud asked me to put on a record by Thelonious and started dancing to it the way Monk had done while the musicians took their choruses.”63
They moved on to Milan. Monk filled the Teatro dell’Arte, drawing one of the largest crowds for a jazz concert in the theater’s history. Hardcore Monkians filled the house. Just a few months earlier, Italian Monk fans almost caused a riot after they purchased their copies of Criss Cross, only to discover that both sides of the disc were identical—there was no side B.64 Monk vindicated his label by giving a terrific show. Critics Giancarlo Testoni and Arrigo Polillo found Monk’s performance intelligent—“neither polemical nor pompous” but “concentrated and luscious.” Their praise extended to his sidemen, including Ben Riley, who was singled out for being “free of smugness and [possessing] a sensitive attention to tone.” In the end, they proclaimed the evening “one of the best jazz shows of the season.”65
Two nights later, they were at Kongresshaus in Zurich where Monk gave another successful concert. After the show, a tall, lanky black man with a heavy accent came backstage and introduced himself as Dollar Brand—one of those unusual names Monk dug. He told Monk that he was a piano player from South Africa who had just arrived in Switzerland with his wife, singer Bea Benjamin, and his band, bassist Johnny Gertze and drummer Makaya Ntshoko. They had fled their country in the aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960. The trio had a regular gig at the Café Africana and he invited Monk and Nellie to come hear them if they had the time. He didn’t stay very long, but before he left, “[I] thanked him for the inspiration. He looked at me for a time and then said: ‘You’re the first piano player to tell me that.’ ”66
Inspiration might be an understatement. The twenty-nine-year-old Brand (who would soon change his name to Abdullah Ibrahim) earned the nickname “South Africa’s Monk.”67 A founding member of the short-lived “Jazz Epistles,” South Africa’s most influential modern jazz ensemble, Brand was introduced to Monk’s music by his bandmate, alto saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi. “Kippie would talk to me about Monk before I’d heard of any of his records. I was saying: ‘Monk? What’s this Monk thing?’ And then, man, I heard the music and I said ‘aaaaaah! I can dig this . . . so this is Monk!’ Kippie would be screaming about how Monk was playing the same type of sound you could hear in so-called tribal music up in the Northern Transvaal.”68 Brand’s first LP as a leader, recorded in 1960, was titled Dollar Brand Plays Sphere Jazz and included “Misterioso,” and “Just You, Just Me”—a favorite Monk standard.69 In 1963, Duke Ellington recorded Brand’s trio in Paris and he was about to release the LP. He had composed all but one song on the album, and that song was Monk’s “Brilliant Corners.” And even his original pieces possessed strong Monk influences. “Ubu Suku” knits together phrases from two standards Monk played: the first bar of “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” and the second bar of “You Are Too Beautiful.” It shares some similarities with “Crepuscule with Nellie,” including the bass figure in the fifth measure of the melody.70 Whether or not Monk ever grasped the impact he had had on Brand, he did discover that night in Zurich just how far his music had traveled.
The real extent of his fame hit home a couple of days later when someone handed Monk the latest edition of Time. There, on the cover of the February 28, 1964 edition, his painted image stared back at him. It was his image, all right, but was it his story? Barry Farrell described a strange, reclusive genius, with an eccentric taste for hats, little connection to reality, a childlike demeanor, who depends on women to care for him (Nellie and Nica), and, often in the same breath, portrays a family man, honest and pure, deserving of his long-awaited recognition. The writing was eloquent but somewhat schizophrenic. He quoted Monk vehemently protesting the “mad genius” label, and then he went on to reproduce it by recounting incidents in which he had been confined to mental institutions or speculating on his drug use. If Thelonious, Nellie, and Harry Colomby had hoped the article would help mainstream Monk’s image, they were disappointed. In one particularly damaging passage, Farrell wrote: “Every day is a brand-new pharmaceutical event for Monk: alcohol, Dexedrine, sleeping potions, whatever is at hand, charge through his bloodstream in baffling combinations.”71
By the end of the piece, Farrell took an interesting turn, suggesting that Monk isn’t so colorful or controversial after all, especially compared to the brooding Miles Davis, the mystical Sonny Rollins, or the volatile Charles Mingus.72 Here he hit on one of the main points of the piece: Monk is a good guy because he is not caught up in the “racial woes [that] are at the heart of much bad behavior in jazz.”73 Invoking a recent Time magazine editorial on “Crow Jim” in jazz (Farrell may have even written it), Farrell was referring to black artists who criticized whites like Dave Brubeck and Stan Kenton for exploiting “their music,” and who employed jazz as a vehicle for black protest. Like most white liberals uncomfortable with rising black militancy, Farrell felt betrayed by the strident racial politics of Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite or the “angry” sounds of the “New Thing.”74 Monk, much to Farrell’s relief, was above the fray.
In some respects, Farrell had little new to say. Most stories about Monk dating back to the late 1940s dwelled on his strange behavior, childlike aura, late-night wanderings, uncompromising attitude, the women in his life, even narcotics. What is different, however, is that Farrell pushed racial politics to the foreground. Monk’s story isn’t just about Monk. For some he was the symbol of black genius; for others he was the last bastion of color-blindness in an increasingly polarized world. One reader, self-identified as “an aspiring young Negro artist raised in a ghetto, and a member of the Negro blues school,” praised the article for its “authenticity” and for illuminating the “forces that shape the Monk-type personality.” Another reader challenged the article’s characterization of Monk’s stage behavior, arguing that it “is vital to the dignity, humor and discipline of his music.”75 Still others read it as classic racial stereotyping. Critic Ralph J. Gleason called the piece “revolting” and “libelous to jazz,” and castigated Time for turning Monk into “the symbol of the native genius . . . sweaty and bizarre, so as not to ruffle the preconceptions of Time-thought.”76 While praising Farrell for writing “an accurate, well-rounded portrait in depth of a complex personality,” Leonard Feather nevertheless concluded that the essay might actually harm jazz and race relations. To middle America, the Negro jazz musician comes across as both drug-addicted and a clownish buffoon donning a funny hat. “Not too long ago such verbs as shuffle and grin were part of the Southern white’s primitive concept of the Negro. Are we to return to that also?” Feather implicitly placed some of the blame on Monk for the way he behaved in public, suggesting that more deserving musicians were overlooked because they have “never enjoyed what is presumably Time’s idea of a rich, full, adventurous, newsworthy life. [Art] Tatum and [Jack] Teagarden never wore funny hats; [Erroll] Garner, [Count] Basie, and [Oscar] Peterson do not get up and dance in the middle of their performances; Gillespie does not arrive every day at a brand-new pharmaceutical discovery.”77
To black nationalists and other radicals, the Time article constituted an attack on one of their heroes. Writer Theodore Pontiflet published a sharply worded salvo in the Harlem-based Liberator magazine criticizing what he considered Farrell’s obsession with Monk’s relationship with the baroness. The implications of the Time piece, he argued, not only rendered black women to “the background reduced to the domestic chores” but “warns white America that in these days of talking integration and on the fatal eve of passing a watered-down civil rights bill, they should remember that it could mean more of their daughters will be bringing home an occasional black genius.” Pontiflet suggested that Monk was unaware of his own exploitation, thus unwittingly reinforcing the dominant image of him as naïve and child-like. Throughout the entire ordeal—he writes, “Thelonious Monk and his wife Nellie remain as pure as honey. The patron baroness? She was part of the deal—the bitter part of the sweet.”78
Ironically, the left-wing Pontiflet shared much in common with the right-wing National Review critic Ralph de Toledano. They both treated Monk as a kind of idiot savant, unaware of the world around him, and they both believed he embodied their political position. De Toledano praised Monk for not confusing music with politics. “Like most of the best jazzmen . . . he doesn’t believe that he must make his art a sledge hammer to pound away at political themes.”79 And yet, in spite of de Toledano’s plea for color-blindness in jazz, he nonetheless embraced a racialized construction of jazz as more physical and emotional than cerebral. He chided Monk for being too cerebral, for not tapping into his “soul,” and for removing any sense of “dance” from his music!80 In other words, while Monk is not too black politically, musically de Toledano finds he’s not black enough.
Meanwhile, Columbia’s executives were ecstatic about the Time feature and made sure copies were sent to all of their affiliates.81 No one there seemed concerned with Monk’s portrayal or the substance of the piece. The piece also had a positive impact on Monk’s children. Boo Boo and Toot basked in their father’s fame, becoming local celebrities themselves at their respective boarding schools. Because Toot was older, he felt the effects more immediately. “Remember, the cover of Time magazine was reserved for the likes of Dag Hammarskjöld, Winston Churchill, Robert Frost, Bertrand Russell, those kind of people. So Thelonious Monk shows up on the cover of Time magazine and suddenly, everybody was inviting me to dinner all the time.”82 Boo Boo’s world was also affected. Green Chimneys headmaster Sam B. Ross, Jr., wrote a brief letter to Time thanking the magazine for its rich accounting of Monk’s “long musical career,” adding “his daughter attends our boarding school.”83 That letter was all a young Belgian man named Geert de Meulenaere needed to fulfill a dream of his. He had attended Monk’s concert in Antwerp on February 29, but failed to get the pianist’s autograph, so he sent a letter to the school in care of “Miss Barbara Monk.” It was a cute gesture and it could not have come at a better moment. Ross and other administrators and faculty at Green Chimneys were planning to feature Monk in a benefit concert for the school in neighboring Danbury, Connecticut, on April 14.84 Thus, alongside a flurry of articles about Monk’s impending concert, the local press published the Green Chimneys press release about the endearing letter from Antwerp. It was yet another reminder why Thelonious Monk was not to be missed.85
The banner emblazoned across the Time cover—“Jazz: Bebop and Beyond”—became the concert’s theme. They mimeographed hundreds of flyers with Monk’s likeness drawn by a student modeled on the Time cover, and offered patrons the opportunity to have their name listed in the program for a small donation of $2.00.86 Monk’s quartet nearly filled Danbury’s Palace Theater, delivering two exciting sets. While Charlie Rouse “had little to say that night,” according to the town’s local critic, Monk put on a piano clinic. “At one time or another, Monk emulated with his piano each of the instruments on the stage with him much like a teacher shows his young pupil what to work toward.”87 During intermission, Mayor J. Thayer Bowman reminded Thelonious that his beloved Danbury was known as “the Hat City,” and in a gesture of goodwill and good humor, he presented Monk with “an ‘LBJ’ hat.” Mayor Bowman’s gesture was not lost on Thelonious, for it was President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s visage that displaced his on the cover of Time magazine. Monk graciously thanked him and promptly replaced the lamb’s wool chapeau he was wearing with the white felt ten-gallon.88
And what about Monk? What did he think about Farrell’s story? According to Ben Riley, the article “made Thelonious feel very good about himself because I think finally he understood that there were a number of people very interested in what he was playing and what he was doing.”89 He didn’t change, Riley said. If anything, the attention made him want to play more, and fortunately there was no shortage of work—at least for the time being. But he did have complaints and used the occasion of another major profile, by Lewis Lapham for the Saturday Evening Post, to challenge Farrell and other journalists who had painted him as a crazy eccentric. “That’s a drag picture they’re paintin’ of me, man,” he told Lapham just a couple of weeks after the Time story appeared. “A lot of people still think I’m nuts or somethin’ . . . but I dig it, man; I can feel the draft.”90 He even hinted that his sudden fame may have more to do with his image than his music. “I was playing the same stuff twenty years ago, man . . . and nobody was painting any portrait.”91 Harry Colomby also used the occasion to do some damage control. Besides emphasizing the fact that Monk wasn’t one of those angry musicians who hated whitey, he portrayed his client as a hardworking musician who went straight home to Nellie every night and cared for his family. Colomby told Lapham, “He’s so straight, it makes you nervous.”92 Lapham himself even took a swipe at Farrell, insisting that Monk was neither crazy nor eccentric but rather “an honest man in a not-so-honest world. . . . Monk never learned to tell the convenient lies or make the customary compromises. That he should have been proclaimed the complete and perfect hipster is an absurd irony.”93 And yet, for all his defense of Monk’s sanity, Lapham fell for the oldest myth of all: “An emotional and intuitive man, possessing a child’s vision of the world, Monk talks, sleeps, eats, laughs, walks or dances as the spirit moves him.”94
For a so-called “child,” Monk was tactful and shrewd enough to keep his criticisms of Time oblique. He understood the importance of publicity and did not want to burn any bridges. He did have one complaint about the piece that he was willing to share with the public: he insisted that Nellie never called him “Melodius Thunk.” “That’s a lie, man. I never heard my wife call me that. It’s those reporters, man, you can’t trust them.”95
• • •
Monk returned to the studio on March 9 to finally finish his next LP, wittily titled It’s Monk’s Time. After two weeks of “rehearsal” on tour, the band found its groove. The three-hour session yielded a third and final version of “Shuffle Boil” and a brilliant solo rendition of “Memories of You” to complete the album. They also had time to record a track for the next LP. A new composition titled “Teo,” it was Monk’s small gift to his patient producer.96 Based on Eddie Durham’s “Topsy,” a favorite of Monk’s back in the days of Minton’s, it was an ideal vehicle for Rouse, who still sounded a bit tentative on “Shuffle Boil.”
Meanwhile, Jules Colomby and Marc Smilow had planned another Monk big band collaboration with Hall Overton. Except for Ben Riley and Jerome Richardson on baritone (he replaced Gene Allen), Monk and Overton agreed to employ the same band from the Philharmonic concert. Colomby booked Carnegie Hall for Monday night, March 30, but by the second week of March the ensemble had yet to rehearse and the arrangements weren’t ready. Monk wanted to revisit the 1959 Town Hall repertoire (“Four in One” was the only tune retained from the Philharmonic concert), but because the original charts had perished in the last fire, Overton had to reconstruct them from the recording.97 Jules Colomby had no choice but to postpone the concert until June. Still reeling from poor ticket sales from the last concert, Colomby lost his $500 deposit as well as money spent on advertising.98 Thelonious, on the other hand, lost no sleep over the matter. He appreciated having some time off. He also appreciated the great review Life magazine had given him for his newly released Monk: Big Band and Quartet in Concert. The writer Chris Welles called it “interesting and exhilarating,” and “a surprisingly successful attempt to adapt his ideas to a large 10-piece band.”99 But more than anything, he appreciated finally receiving his advance check for completing It’s Monk’s Time, which came to $7,292 after all the deductions.100
Monk and the band were back on the road in early April, first for an engagement at Le Jazz Hot in Montreal, and then back across the border to play the first annual Cornell University Jazz Festival on April 18.101 They returned to Canada on the 26th for a concert at Toronto’s legendary Massey Hall. Eleven years earlier, a quintet made up of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach gave, by some accounts, the greatest modern jazz concert . . . ever. While Monk wasn’t about to wrest that distinction away from his old pals, he earned high praise from most of the local critics and the 1,000 fans who turned out to hear them, despite showing up an hour late. Of course, sharing the bill with a mediocre Canadian band made Monk’s group sound even better. Critic Patrick Scott noted that whereas Monk played with “great beauty, rhythmic compulsion and warmth,” the thirteen-piece Don Thompson band was “so utterly dreadful that I found myself wishing someone would reactivate the custom of booing and hissing an offensive performance.”102 The lone dissenting voice was long-time Monk detractor Helen McNamara. She called Monk’s improvisations “ponderous,” the order of solos “monotonous,” and concluded that the band “never seemed to get off the ground.” Not surprisingly, she praised Don Thompson’s band for its “exuberance” and, in a direct inversion of Scott, presumed the audience “must have felt that they had been compensated [for Monk’s poor performance] by hearing some first class musicians.”103
From Toronto they flew to Washington, D.C., for a two-week engagement at the Bohemian Caverns. Opening night, Monk was three hours late because he and Nellie couldn’t get a cab to stop for them.104 Aside from the opening night mishap, the band had a good run at the Caverns and Rouse and Warren enjoyed being home again. Warren especially missed D.C., and he was “growing tired of making records.” By the end of the gig, he’d decided to leave the band. He stayed with Monk through the next two gigs—a week at the Jazz Workshop in Boston and two concerts in Southern California. Typically, most jazz groups couldn’t afford to travel cross-country for two days’ worth of work, but Monk’s quartet flew out to L.A. to open for the newest folk music sensation, Peter, Paul, and Mary. The trio had just won a Grammy for “Blowin’ in the Wind” and achieved enough clout to select their own opening acts.105 They chose Monk and no one else. The quartet performed before a huge crowd at the Long Beach Arena on Friday, May 22, and to an even larger audience at the Hollywood Bowl the next night. The Hollywood Bowl concert alone drew 13,500 people.106
When the band returned East, Warren promptly moved back to Washington into what amounted to a musical and social void. He worked briefly on a local television show and made at least one record with Bobby Timmons,107 but then he literally disappeared—broke, homeless, drug-addicted, and sick. He eventually checked himself in to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, the district’s psychiatric facility, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.108 Meanwhile, Monk had to scramble to find a bass player, especially since the Carnegie Hall concert was just two weeks away. Overton initially called Richard Davis, an excellent, classically trained bassist originally out of Chicago, but Monk preferred someone with whom he was familiar—James “Spanky” DeBrest.109 They had recorded together with Blakey in 1957 and Monk always appreciated his big tone.
They rehearsed at Overton’s loft and, once again, Eugene Smith had the foresight to tape some of those sessions. The band sounded less polished than in previous rehearsals, and both Monk and Overton knew it. Listening to the tapes, one senses a kind of panic seizing both leaders, while most of the band members appear relaxed and confident. Having participated in the Town Hall concert, Phil Woods and Charlie Rouse thought they could master the material fairly easily, but two days before the concert they had difficulty with the phrasing on “Monk’s Mood.” At one point Hall genuinely asks, “Is there something wrong with your part there, on the A-section?” Likewise, throughout the rehearsal Monk interjects, corrects, and makes demands on the band.110 By the final rehearsal on Saturday, June 6, just hours before the concert, the band still had not mastered all of the music—particularly “Four in One” and “Little Rootie Tootie.” But by the end of the session, Thelonious seemed satisfied with the results. Long after the rehearsal ended, Overton could be heard saying to someone over the phone, “I’m not too worried about it, Monk seems to be in good spirits, playing.”111
He was in good spirits when he walked on stage that night sporting a clean gray suit and the white cowboy hat given to him by the Mayor of Danbury.112 Unfortunately, Carnegie Hall was half empty and the event was strangely put together. During the first half of the program featuring the quartet, the stage director decided to put a spotlight on Monk whenever he got up from the piano and danced or wandered about.113 The reviews were mostly bad. John S. Wilson liked Monk’s playing but thought the quartet “was weighted down by a heavy-handed, monotonous rhythm section.” He also felt the big band was underutilized, preferring shorter solos and more ensemble playing.114 Dan Morgenstern in Down Beat also blamed the rhythm section for the band’s problems. He forgave Spanky DeBrest, knowing he was a last-minute replacement, and lamented the loss of Frankie Dunlop, dismissing Riley’s playing as “leaden and clumsy.” Monk, however, was “in brilliant form, venturing some dazzling, Tatumesque runs” during his solo rendition of “Don’t Blame Me.” Still, Morgenstern saw the potential and considered the Monk-Overton collaborations to be of immense historical value. “The band had a sound and texture all its own,” he concluded, “and one would venture to say Overton and Monk have come up with the first truly original approach to big band writing in more than a decade.”115
Monk survived Carnegie Hall and headed back on the road to play concerts in Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, though he was still without a permanent bass player.116 For the Newport Jazz Festival, the first weekend in July, Bob Cranshaw took over the bass duties. An extremely versatile musician, at age thirty-one he had played with just about everyone, from Teddy Wilson and Coleman Hawkins to Carmen McCrae and Lee Morgan.117 When the quartet took the stand at Freebody Park Saturday night, July 3, Cranshaw knew the music and was ready to play his heart out. But no one else on the bandstand seemed to share his enthusiasm. “It was kind of strange,” he said later. “The band didn’t seem very happy. It’s like no one had any energy.”118 The quartet sounded good, but by this time they could play a set in their sleep.119 Thelonious generated excitement as usual, though his real shining hour occurred earlier in the afternoon when he participated in a piano workshop featuring solo performances by Joe Sullivan, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Toshiko Akiyoshi, and Billy Taylor. The event, a capsule history of jazz piano narrated by Taylor, drew a crowd of 2,000 despite intermittent downpours. (Most workshops typically attracted between three and four hundred.) Brubeck was given top billing, but Willie “the Lion” and his protégé Thelonious stole the show. They both picked “Tea for Two” as their vehicle of choice and turned the workshop into a veritable clinic. In John S. Wilson’s words, in a matter of minutes the two men “summarized half a century of piano jazz.”120 Monk might have been reminiscing about Meade Lux Lewis, the wonderful pianist he’d met on the JATP tour when he worked with Coleman Hawkins nearly two decades earlier. Just two weeks before the workshop, Lewis died in a terrible car accident in Minneapolis.121
The band had a three-week hiatus before the next gig—the Ravinia Festival in Chicago. The huge summer-long outdoor arts festival was held every year in Ravinia Park, a bucolic, privately owned and operated park on Chicago’s North Shore. The annual festival offered a wide range of music, dance, and theater experiences, though it was best known for Shakespeare. The quartet performed two much-anticipated concerts, July 29 and 31, drawing excellent crowds.122 The new bassist wasn’t feeling it, however. “Ravinia wasn’t fun for me,” Cranshaw recalled. “I was still young and I was ready to play, ready to hit! But I felt like I was surrounded by a bunch of grumpy old men. Of course, they’d been traveling a lot and were probably tired and I can understand that, but that’s not where I was at.”123 He quit the band as soon as they returned to New York.
Thelonious was none too pleased. The quartet was scheduled to begin a month-long engagement at the Village Gate in four days.124 Out of desperation, he hired Don Moore, a bassist ironically associated with the jazz avant-garde. He had toured with Bill Dixon and Archie Shepp as a member of their pianoless quartet, and then moved to Copenhagen in 1963, where he joined the experimental band, the New York Contemporary Five. The group recorded several Monk compositions, including “Crepuscule with Nellie,” “Monk’s Moods,” and “Epistrophy.”125 Moore had also worked with Steve Lacy and Roswell Rudd, whose quartet focused almost exclusively on Monk’s music.126 Thus while Moore may have been familiar with Monk’s work, the bands with whom he played were all pianoless and treated Monk’s music as a point of departure for greater freedom. Now Moore had to play Monk with Monk.
The quartet opened on August 4 to rave reviews, though none of the critics paid attention to the new bassist.127 Flip Wilson warmed up the crowd, and percussionist Mongo Santamaria’s band and Gerry Mulligan’s quartet shared the bill, but the evening was all about Monk, since it had been two years since he last played the Village Gate and six months since his last club date. Nellie and Nica were there, and so were Harry Colomby and his younger brother Bobby. A student at City College, Bobby was also an aspiring drummer who, like his brothers, fell in love with Monk’s music. That night he helped a bemused critic understand the changes to “Bright Mississippi.”128
Doug Quackenbush, a thirty-four-year-old photographer with an almost obsessive fascination with Monk, was also in attendance that week. He had been a diehard Monk fan ever since he first heard his Blue Note recordings as an aspiring teenage trumpet player growing up in Detroit. Quackenbush moved to New York and camped out at the Five Spot to see Monk and ’Trane, but by then he was carrying a Nikon alongside his trumpet case. He worked as a fashion photographer, but spent much of his free time shooting musicians, building a stunning portfolio that included memorable shots of Billie Holiday. But one night at the Five Spot, with the violence in Birmingham weighing heavily on his conscience, he found in Thelonious a reassuring and compelling subject. “Here was a man ‘being himself,’ ” he observed, “not just in his music, but in his whole being. He looked the way he sounded, whether he was playing or dancing. I decided that I wanted to make pictures of what that looked like.”129
When the set was over, he introduced himself and followed up with phone calls to Nellie. He eventually eased whatever suspicions she had, but nothing really happened . . . until that night Quackenbush showed up at the Village Gate. He took some pictures of Monk’s band from a distance and a few shots of the empty dressing room. He stayed through the last set and fortuitously ended up sharing a cab with Don Moore, who told Quackenbush that the next day—Sunday, August 9—the band had a gig at the Music Barn in Lenox, Massachusetts. Moore told him, “if I really wanted to go, I should show up in front of Monk’s West 63rd Street apartment and hope for the best—a ride.”130 He showed up and got better than he had hoped for: a ride with Thelonious and Nellie in the black Cadillac limousine sent to shuttle them to Lenox. Nellie remembered Doug and greeted him warmly, inviting him to sit up front with the chauffeur.131 Seated across from Monk and Nellie were Charlie Rouse and Sandra Capello. As they sped along the Taconic Parkway, Thelonious praised the Cadillac for its comfort and ranted on about his ongoing ordeal to find an adequate replacement for Butch Warren. Without naming Don Moore, he “asked why bass players couldn’t play their instrument” and then lamented the premature passing of Oscar Pettiford (he had died four years earlier in Copenhagen).132
After the Music Barn concert, he fired Moore. Quackenbush stuck around, however. For the next three months, he and his Nikon became the eye on the wall. He took over six hundred shots of Thelonious, in black-and-white and color, creating one of the most comprehensive and compelling visual portraits of the man—second only to Nica’s collection of Polaroids taken over the course of two decades.133 In those three months with Thelonious, Quackenbush learned that the secret to who Monk was and how he was able to create such imaginative art stood outside the frame of his viewfinder: “Nellie was Thelonious’ anchor to reality,” he observed. “She handled all the practical matters; finances, booked tickets for their tours. Laid out his clothes each day. I nicknamed her ‘General Backup.’ She once told me that she wouldn’t even let him hammer a nail into the wall to hang a picture. She realized that his hands were essential to the family’s income. She took care of the practical so he could concentrate on the creative.”134 Nellie had always been his personal assistant. Now, for all practical purposes, she had become the road manager.
• • •
On Sunday, August 16, the quartet took a day off from the Gate to play the Ohio Valley Jazz Festival in Cincinnati. Still without a permanent bassist, Monk hired Alvin Jackson out of Detroit. Jackson was a peculiar choice. He struggled with the music when he worked for Monk in 1959 at Detroit’s Club 12, and he struggled with the music now. According to one eyewitness account, Jackson was “bewildered by the changes.”135 After the gig, Ben Riley suggested they call Larry Gales, whom he knew from his days with Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Johnny Griffin. In fact, Gales and Riley were the rhythm section for the Davis-Griffin LP, Lookin’ at Monk.136 Rouse also knew Gales; he’d used him before for one of his own record dates.137 A native New Yorker, Gales began studying privately with George Duvivier at age eleven and spent two years at the Manhattan School of Music. Before that, however, he sang with the doo-wop group the Twilighters, earning a reputation as one of the most talented falsettos in the Bronx.138 At twenty-eight, the wiry and bespectacled Gales may have been the quartet’s youngest member, but he had an impressive résumé.139 And he had the big, rich tone Monk liked, a good sense of time, and he was dependable. When the quartet returned to the Gate the third week of August, Gales was on the stand every night learning the tunes. By the end of the month, the quartet had become a band.
Monk was pleased with his new bassist and relieved that his frustrating summer had finally come to a close. He had much to look forward to: a month-long gig at the Vanguard, a couple of trips to California, another round of recording sessions. But all of this paled compared to the news that Bud Powell was coming home.