Monk took nearly two months off before returning to the Vanguard in March.1 His body desperately needed a break but he couldn’t afford one. Despite being a busy year, 1966 had been a financial disaster: Thelonious took home only $17,735, thanks to Columbia’s decision to reduce his advances and his diminished recording output.2 Financially, he could barely keep it together. Besides two private school tuitions, he paid significantly higher rent on the Lincoln Towers apartment and continued to maintain the place on West 63rd. And then in the spring of 1967, they moved again within the Lincoln Towers complex, to a twentieth-floor apartment.3
To supplement his income, Thelonious occasionally took on paying students. One of his students in 1967 was Lem Martinez-Carroll, a rising junior at Northwestern University who happened to be home for the summer. Born in Harlem to Puerto Rican and African-American parents, Martinez-Carroll had some classical training and an abiding interest in jazz and gospel, but when he heard Monk perform solo piano, he decided he wanted to study with him. When Martinez-Carroll shyly broached the question, Monk replied, “ ‘Yeah, I give some lessons. It’s going to cost you.’ Back then, I think it was $25 for a forty-five-minute lesson, which was real costly then.” His teaching methods were somewhat unorthodox, but they were hardly strange. After the first lesson, Monk gave Martinez-Carroll a copy of a lead sheet for Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” and had him learn it in three different keys.4 Monk did not speak much, choosing instead to teach by demonstration. This irritated Martinez-Carroll: “His style of teaching was abrasive. I’d be playing and he would take my hand off the keys. I’d look at him and he’d sort of brush me aside, sit down and say, ‘No, that’s not right. No, you’re not doing it,’ and play it correctly. It was frustrating for me because I was working from the genre of communication or something written and he was working from demonstration.” Still, he recognized Monk’s genius and recalled some astounding moments. “Once he demonstrated some gospel music for me. . . . His left foot was going and these octaves and the bass with these gospel chords. . . . I think he played ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’ and I almost imagined him getting ready to sing.”5 Martinez-Carroll ended the lessons in late August. “I told him I was going back to Illinois to college, and he asked me what school, so I said Northwestern. He didn’t respond. So in a way, I was a little hurt. You know I’m a black dude attending a university and he never acknowledged it.”6
Monk may have been thinking about his own son, who was just two years younger than Martinez-Carroll. Toot had just endured his most difficult year at Cherry Lawn, both academically and socially. The racial dynamics on campus changed slightly when the school recruited a few more black students through Project Upward Bound, a federal poverty program that afforded low-income youth an opportunity to attend elite schools.7 The black students hung out together and Toot fell into the crowd, much to the discomfort of school director Ludwig C. Zuber, who accused the kids of self-segregation. Toot defended their choice: “I remember telling Mr. Zuber, ‘What about five white kids? Is that a gang? Is that a band?’ ” The final straw came when Toot decided to grow an Afro. “They were livid. . . . You’re talking about Black Power, and the Afro was the first symbol of that. . . . Zuber was so pissed that he suspended me. I knew he wasn’t going to call Thelonious Monk and tell him that ‘we are suspending your son from school because of his haircut,’ especially when all the white kids were growing their hair long, you dig? So instead of sending me home, he gave me a ten-day suspension on campus doing manual labor. I had to dig out the foundation for the new school office building.”8
Toot left Cherry Lawn in the spring of 1967, and on his own initiative transferred to Kingsley Hall, a boarding school in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where, unbeknownst to his parents, he had to repeat tenth grade. During his year at Kingsley Hall, he joined the basketball team and learned about some of the other neighboring prep schools when they had away games. One school, in particular, Windsor Mountain in nearby Lenox, Massachusetts, caught his attention. Or more accuately, one girl caught his attention. Her name was Adrienne Belafonte, daughter of entertainer and activist Harry Belafonte. Toot promptly applied to Windsor Mountain. “Of course, I did not know that Adrienne Belafonte was a senior. So when I get there the next year, she’s gone. Her little sister Shari was there, but she’s twelve years old.”9 But Randy Weston’s son, Azzedin, was also there, and Boo Boo joined him the same year, having graduated from Green Chimneys.
Perhaps the bigger crisis Monk faced was the loss of Harry Colomby. In July 1967, Colomby moved to Southern California. His client John Byner was doing well, and he believed the time was ripe to fulfill a lifelong dream to produce movies. And he wasn’t making much money working for Monk. His commissions rarely topped $6,000 a year, and by the time he left teaching in 1967, he was earning about $17,000 annually.10 Colomby’s departure angered Thelonious, who had been feeling a little neglected for the past year or two. Colomby tried to ease the transition by passing the management duties to his brother Jules—a job he happily accepted.11
Meanwhile, Monk kept working—nightly at the Vanguard, a week at Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike, a concert at Stony Brook, New York, and down to Austin, Texas for the Longhorn Jazz Festival—where the band endured a horrible sound system and stifling heat in a poorly ventilated auditorium.12 In May, Monk and the quartet returned to the West Coast for ten days at Shelly’s Manne-Hole, before heading south of the border for Mexico’s first jazz festival. With the backing of American Airlines, George Wein put the package together and paid Monk a cool $4,000 for three days of work.13 Billed with Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, and the Newport All-Stars, Monk’s quartet performed for near-capacity crowds at Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts, the National Auditorium, and then drove out to Puebla for the second annual Festival de Puebla, dedicated primarily to classical music.14 Not only was Monk’s quartet well-received, he broke with his usual routine by sitting in with Gillespie’s band and by playing a duet with Dave Brubeck. The idea was Teo Macero’s, who had come down from New York to record Brubeck. Both artists were game, and with backing by Monk’s rhythm section they took the stage together at Puebla’s Reforma Auditorium and jammed on an improvised blues in Eb, based loosely on Ellington’s “C Jam Blues.” Thelonious took charge, with Brubeck responding to Monk’s dissonant jabs. Their impromptu duet works up until the end, when Monk says “Let’s go,” and then plays the theme to signal the final cadence. Brubeck, in turn, mimics what Monk plays but neither Ben Riley nor Larry Gales seemed to have gotten the message. At that point, Monk gets up from the piano and can be heard saying to Brubeck, “You got it,” and immediately walks offstage as the crowd applauds.15 Brubeck recalls, “The rhythm section kept going after I felt Monk and I had finished, so I had to run after them and play an ending.”16
Nellie, Monk, and the rest of the band extended their stay in Mexico a few days and turned the trip into a much-needed vacation. Residing at the elegant Alameda Hotel in Mexico City, the Monks went sightseeing with Rouse and his partner, Sandra Capello, who was traveling with the band for the first time. “We visited some of the ruins and the old churches. Thelonious seemed to be in a very good mood, though he hardly spoke.”17 When they returned to New York the third week of May, his mood shifted dramatically upon hearing the unexpected news that Elmo Hope was dead. His death was apparently preventable. Bertha Hope recalls what happened. “His left leg had been swelling for some time and I had been trying to get him to see a doctor. He had gone to Roosevelt Hospital before, because they had experience with addicts dealing with health problems, but Elmo did not want to go back there because he felt like he was part of an experiment. It was humiliating. So he went to St. Clare’s, but they didn’t have any idea how to deal with someone who was on methadone treatment. What they were doing put a bigger strain on his heart and I felt like I was constantly fighting with the staff. . . . I thought he was coming home. But then pneumonia set in and that caused cardiac arrest.”18 On May 19, 1967, forty-three-year-old Elmo Hope died at St. Clare’s Hospital, the same hospital where Barbara Monk took her last breath.
It was almost too much for Monk to bear—first Bud, now Elmo. Then in July, John Coltrane joined the ancestors after losing a battle with liver cancer. He was only forty. “Coltrane’s death seemed to be the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Toot recalled. “All of these deaths took the wind out of his sails, and he didn’t seem to recover. I never saw my father get it back together after somebody died.”19 Perhaps it is fitting that the year ’Trane passed away, so too did the Five Spot. In 1967, the Termini Brothers finally gave up, turning one of the most important venues in jazz history into a pizza joint called “Izzy’s Corner.”20 The only good death that year was the demise of the reviled cabaret card. Mayor John Lindsay killed it with a bill, ratified almost unanimously by the city council.21 An end of an era, indeed.
• • •
Monk spent most of the summer between the Vanguard, the Village Gate, and the road, where the quartet was part of an extravagant package headlined by pop singer Dionne Warwick and others.22 He suddenly found himself playing before stadium-sized audiences, not as the main attraction but frequently as the opening or closing act. In San Diego, for example, Monk’s band did not come on until after midnight, and by that time half of the over 7,000 fans who piled into the International Sports Arena had already left. As Leonard Feather put it, “I wouldn’t give a detergent a spot like that.”23 No matter where on the roster Monk appeared, however, accusations and complaints about Monk’s “ennui” or the band’s “predictable manner” prevailed.24 He even dropped down in Down Beat’s International Critics Poll, falling from fourth the previous year to sixth, behind Earl Hines, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Cecil Taylor, and Herbie Hancock.25 George Wein attempted to break up the routine by inviting Monk alone to the Newport Jazz festival, to perform with Dizzy and Max Roach in an all-star ensemble designed to “depict the beginnings of bebop.” Thelonious was reluctant but Wein implored Harry Colomby to persuade him otherwise: “It will not be a long set. They will probably just play about twenty or twenty-five minutes, and it should really be interesting. . . . [I]t is a very important favor to me that he does this.”26 Money was the deciding factor; Thelonious earned a grand for a half-hour gig.27 The gathering fell far short of Whitney Balliett’s expectations. No one impressed him save Monk, who was “stewing enjoyably in his own inexhaustible juices.”28
While the critics demanded a new and fresh direction from Monk, his fans continued to deify him, the press persisted in making him a side show, and scholars found him worthy of serious interrogation. His name appeared in encyclopedias and college syllabi, and he was even the subject of an experimental film Doug Quackenbush made from stills he shot in 1964.29 Between his failing health, exhaustion, and financial pressures, Monk struggled to keep all the attention in perspective. Family and close friends noticed disturbing changes in his behavior. “I remember visiting my uncle [Thelonious] at Lincoln Towers,” Clifton Smith remembered, “and he was staring at me for a long time, and then he said ‘Did you know that I was a genius?’ ” Clifton’s response was rather noncommittal, so Monk angrily pressed him. “So you don’t think I’m a genius, huh? . . . Let me tell you, motherfucker. How many geniuses do you know?”30 His niece Evelyn tells a similar story, though from her perspective recognizing his fame was as much a source of panic as pride. “He was pacing back and forth for a long time, and then he suddenly blurts out, ‘You know, I’m a living legend? I’m a fuckin’ living legend!’ He was alarmed. He had read it in an encyclopedia or something and it really moved him. . . . He talked about that for weeks and weeks. It took a while for him to digest that concept.”31
Ironically, just as Monk struggled to “digest” his fame, Christian and Michael Blackwood approached him during the summer of 1967 to be the subject of a documentary film. The Blackwood brothers worked for a television station in Cologne, Germany, but their cinema vérité films of other artists aired across Europe. Once they got through to Thelonious and Nellie and assuaged whatever suspicions they may have harbored, Monk proved to be a willing subject—that is, whenever they were able to find him. Michael Blackwood explains: “It was really complicated to get in touch with Monk or Monk’s people. . . . One day Nellie agreed to let us come over to shoot at his house. We set a time and then knocked on the door, but no one answered. We kept knocking because we could hear someone inside the apartment. Finally, we looked through the mail slot and saw Monk sitting down watching television. So we started to make some big racket and he finally came to the door. When he opened it he said simply, ‘Oh, hello.’ ”32 Once they got rolling, however, he turned out to be a compelling and camera-friendly subject.33 They caught him at home and around his neighborhood, during a concert in Atlanta, a recording session at Columbia, and about three nights at the Vanguard. They also traveled with Monk and Nellie for ten days in Europe. And while he may not have self-consciously played to the camera, he performed nonetheless—holding forth in the kitchen of the Vanguard, spinning in circles at JFK Airport, strolling regally along Amsterdam Avenue while friends and admirers paid their respects. The final products were two highly acclaimed hour-long films, Monk and Monk in Europe, both broadcast on European television in 1968. These same films were also recut two decades later, providing the bulk of the footage for Charlotte Zwerin’s documentary “Straight, No Chaser.”34
Unbeknownst to the Blackwood brothers, Monk’s two-week European tour35 had all the makings of a compelling drama. It was Wein’s sixth time presenting Monk to the Europeans, and the impresario was determined to break with routine. So in place of the quartet he proposed a nine-piece band, packaged with the Miles Davis quintet, Archie Shepp, and Sarah Vaughan. The European promoters loved the idea.36 Joachim Berendt, organizer of the Berlin Jazz Festival, was so excited that he practically begged Teo Macero to record the band live in Germany.37 But there was one problem: Monk wasn’t interested. Robert Jones, Wein’s colleague and road manager on the tour, remembers: “We had a lot of difficulty getting him to go. . . . He appeared to be somewhat frightened by the fact that he would be responsible for organizing the group. We were using Hall Overton’s charts, for a group that was somewhat differently voiced. So I think he was a bit concerned about how this was going to work.”38 Eventually, he came around but insisted on choosing the band. He, Nellie, and Wein sat down together and came up with Phil Woods, trombonist Jimmy Cleveland, and Johnny Griffin, who had already moved to France. Wein wanted Clark Terry, but “Monk had some misgivings.” Instead, Thelonious insisted on bringing Ray Copeland and agreed to include Terry on two numbers, “Blue Monk” and “Epistrophy.” And, of course, he rounded out the band with his regular quartet.39
Thelonious was still reluctant to go when his niece, Jackie, asked to come along. He always had a special relationship with Jackie, given her passion for music, and she had long dreamed of going on tour with her uncle. A recent divorcée and mother of a five-year-old, she did not want to miss yet another opportunity. Monk agreed on the condition that she leave her daughter behind, though he was less than enthusiastic about going himself.40 Hours before their departure, George and Joyce Wein and Nellie had to plead with Monk to leave the apartment, while Robert Jones, Jackie, and the rest of the band waited anxiously at JFK. Jones: “I am waiting at the door of the plane. We’ve now held the flight for about fifteen minutes. And Joyce and George drive up in their car on the tarmac and out come Nellie and Thelonious.”41 But Thelonious still wouldn’t budge. Jackie recalled, “When they got there, Thelonious would not get on the plane. Everyone was trying to persuade him, Bob Jones, Nellie, and Nica who came to the airport to see them off.”42 Eventually, they convinced him to board the plane and took off before he could change his mind.
They were scheduled to land in London Friday morning, October 27, and perform that same night at Hammersmith Odeon, but none of the band members had seen the music, nor had they rehearsed as a unit. Monk had all the charts in a large, dark purple folder but was reluctant to share the music. He finally relented, designating Jackie the music’s official caretaker.43 She knew that some horn parts had to be transposed. “All night long on the plane, Phil, Ray and Jimmy wrote out and copied the various parts.”44 The next day, they had just enough time to shower, rest a couple of hours, and rehearse in the late afternoon. “These guys are trying to go through the tunes,” Jones recalled, “Monk is sitting at the piano, with his head down like he’s asleep. Finally, he goes to sit in the auditorium with Nellie to listen, about five rows back. Then he goes back to the piano. I think it was Phil or Johnny who said, ‘Monk, what do we do here?’ And he perked up. ‘Naw, it should go like this.’ He perked up a bit and they went through a couple of the tunes.”45
Jones left the rehearsal fearing the worst. The concert was sold out and the audience was anxious to see Monk’s first big band performance outside of the United States. When the quartet came out instead, the audience’s disappointment was palpable. One angry critic went so far as to cast Rouse as “the world’s first fully automated tenor saxophonist.”46 But once the larger ensemble took the stage for the second half of the concert, some magic happened. Jones: “Monk hits the first tune and it goes off unbelievably. The place leaped up. Suddenly, Monk was transfixed. It was really working, it was amazing.” He danced. He smiled. He directed the band. “The place went bananas in the end,” said Jones.47 The band only played four tunes (“Evidence,” “Oska T,” “Blue Monk,” and “Epistrophy”), and the ensemble passages were predictably rough for a band with one rehearsal, but they satisfied the audience, as well as a few skeptical critics.48
The London concert energized Monk. That night he and Jackie dropped in on Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln at Ronnie Scott’s and an inspired Monk sat in with the band.49 The next evening at Rotterdam’s De Doelen Hall, the band and especially Monk gave a lively performance. He really stretched out on “Oska T” and an unusually swift version of “We See,” and their rendition of “Blue Monk” practically brought down the house.50 The band was still a bit ragged, but they were clearly coming together with every performance. By the time they reached Berlin on November 4, Monk wanted to add another tune to the big band’s repertoire. Joachim Berendt found an arranger who had worked with the Clark-Boland big band, who did his best to reconstruct Hall Overton’s arrangement of “I Mean You” from the record. They rehearsed long hours to get it right and premiered it at Baden-Baden two days later.51 Berendt was pleased with the band’s performance, but thoroughly disappointed with Columbia Records for their absence. Despite Teo Macero’s initial enthusiasm for recording the big band in Europe, no one from Columbia followed through.52
The tour temporarily ignited Monk’s creative juices, but the Blackwood brothers’ roving camera also revealed signs of exhaustion, frustration, and fleeting moments of detachment.53 Sometimes he is seen sitting or standing by the piano while the band plays, seemingly disengaged from the proceedings. Other times he appears disgruntled, as in his exchange on stage with Ray Copeland, which leads him to impatiently stop the band in its tracks.54 And then he had to deal with a litany of dumb questions from the press:
Journalist for Danish Television: What is more important in your work, playing the piano or composing?
Monk: Doing both.
Journalist: Mr. Monk, you always wear different hats and caps in your concerts. Do they have an influence in your music?
Monk: [Laughing] No. [He then pauses and says with sudden and utmost seriousness] Maybe they do, I don’t know.
Journalist: Do you think the piano has enough keys, eighty-eight, or do you want more or less?
Monk: I mean, it’s hard work to play those eighty-eight.55
Hard, indeed. Monk did not always want to be there. He grew tired of the stage and the spotlight and the spectacle, and after the first couple of performances he pretty much stopped dancing altogether. In Copenhagen, Monk wandered off during intermission, prompting a frantic search through the concert hall at Tivoli Gardens. Robert Jones finally found him in one of the smaller rehearsal rooms playing hymns and old gospel songs on a raggedy, out-of-tune, upright piano. For a minute he was quite animated, explaining to Jones, “These pianos sound just like the ones I used to play.”56 He finished the tune but then it was back to work. When he wasn’t working, according to Jackie, he chose to stay in his hotel room and rest. By the time they got to Stockholm, he became physically ill and vomited.57
Nellie was also showing signs of fatigue. Jimmy Cleveland did not think she ever rested. “She’d wipe his face, and she’d press his shirts, get his shirts from the laundry, and dress him, and make him eat, and tell him it’s time to get out of bed, and it’s time to get your shower, and it’s time to get your clothes on, we got such and such time to get to the hall, we gotta do this, we gotta do that—and he needed that.”58 And she handled the money, travel arrangements, and, if she knew enough of the language, acted as interpreter. She worked so hard that she was usually too exhausted to attend the concert.59 Nellie, now forty-six, was beginning to slow down just when Thelonious needed more attention and care. In what might be the most poignant moment in the Blackwood brothers’ film, Nellie talks out loud as she walks around the hotel room helping Monk get dressed and out of bed. Complaining about missing one of the concerts, she muses, “You know, I really have to see some of those pictures they were taking. Because sometimes I’m flying around, I feel like a bird in the wings. And I wonder if I don’t like it.”60
Despite a packed itinerary, Monk and Nellie enjoyed some leisure time together, including a memorable excursion into East Berlin. Thelonious was anxious to go there after having seen televised images of East Germany. As with all travelers crossing into the German Democratic Republic, they had to declare whatever cash they had and purchase a minimum amount of East German marks, and whatever was not spent had to be given back. When they returned to Checkpoint Charlie (the entrance at the Berlin wall), Nellie balked at the idea of giving all the money back. Then the guards discovered Monk’s prized $1,000 bill on a money clip. Luckily, the Blackwood brothers were part of the entourage. Michael Blackwood: “I had to explain to them in German that [the money] was a kind of good-luck charm. We explained that he was a cultural figure and he lives in his own world.”61 According to Jackie, Monk was quite animated over the prospect of losing his money. “He told them, ‘You ain’t taking my thousand dollars,’ and they didn’t. I think one of the guards also recognized him.”62
They returned home on November 9 and took a couple of weeks off before heading to Chicago for a week-long gig at the Plugged Nickel and a three-week engagement at the Vanguard.63 Monk used his free time to complete two new compositions. “Boo Boo’s Birthday” is a loping, medium-tempo number with a tricky melody and a five-bar bridge. “Ugly Beauty,” a medium-slow dirge in a minor key, was originally conceived in standard (4/4) time, but when Ben Riley played along for the first time he thought it worked better as a waltz. Monk agreed, giving birth to his first and only composition in 3/4 time.64 Monk debuted “Ugly Beauty” in mid-November while taping a CBS television show called Gateway.65 Anxious to put both tunes on vinyl, Macero arranged a couple of recording sessions in December. The first session on the 14th yielded an acceptable rendition of “Green Chimneys” and a fine version of “Ugly Beauty”—though it took five takes and an angry exchange when Monk found out Macero was letting them play without recording them.66 When the quartet returned to the studio a week later, they left having recorded only one usable version of “Boo Boo’s Birthday.” Much of the time was devoted to simply learning the song—Rouse had to transpose the melody in the studio, and even Monk had difficulty with the melody. “It has a funny amount of bars,” he confessed. “I’m just naïve like they are. I make up something and I don’t even know what it is, so I look at it again myself. It’s new to me!”67 So new it took eleven takes to get it right.68 Monk had hoped to do one more tune—his still unrecorded holiday song, “A Merrier Christmas.” Macero had promised to record it the previous year, but nothing came of it. Monk pressed the case, suggesting that it’s appealing because it “has a Christmas sound. . . . I didn’t do a way out, all kinda weird things, you know.”69 Unfortunately, Macero dropped the matter; Monk never recorded it.
Monk and Macero were under enormous pressure to complete another LP. So when Charlie Rouse missed the next recording session on Valentine’s Day 1968, because of his father’s death, they proceeded without him.70 The trio recorded a spirited version of “Thelonious,” a slow, sexy take of Alan Rankin Jones’s “Easy Street,” and a new twelve-bar blues Monk called “Raise Four” because the intervals were based on the augmented fourth (or flatted fifth). On “In Walked Bud,” however, they did add a fourth member to the band—vocalist Jon Hendricks, who later explained his presence on the date as pure serendipity. He happened to drop by the studio and Macero invited him to record. Hendricks recalls coming up with the lyrics on the spot, a tribute to Powell’s bebop days, when his collaborators included Dizzy, Oscar Pettiford, Don Byas, and the like.71 Perhaps they were written off the cuff, but three years earlier Columbia had commissioned him to write lyrics for “all of Monk’s tunes,” as the company contemplated featuring Hendricks on an all-Monk LP.72 Like so many Columbia projects, it never came to fruition, but not because Monk objected. On the contrary, he once described Hendricks as “the only one I want to lyricize my music.”73 In the end, Monk was pleased with the lyrics and even happier to have completed another album. He needed that advance; in 1967 Thelonious took home only $18,324, and had to pay a big tax bill to boot.74
The marketing department really got behind this LP, which was titled Underground. The jazz market was shrinking and Monk’s sales were steadily declining, so they decided to take a different tack: remake Monk into an icon for a younger generation. They hired John Berg and Dick Mantel to create a bizarre cover shot of Monk playing an old upright piano with a machine gun strapped to his back inside what is supposed to be a secluded haunt of the French underground.75 The elaborate set included a couple of chickens, a cow, the accoutrements of war, bottles of vintage wine, a slim young model dressed in the uniform of the French Resistance (perhaps a younger version of Nica?), and a Nazi prisoner of war tied up in the corner. This spectacular photo punned on Monk’s role in the jazz underground—though by then it was ancient history. It also tapped into contemporary images of revolutionary movements—the Black Panthers, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, etc.—but renders them benign by drawing on narratives of the “Good War” against fascism. The press release for Underground minces no words: “Now, in 1968, with rock music and psychedelia capturing the imagination of young America, Thelonious Monk has once again become an underground hero, this time as an oracle of the new underground.”76 Remarkably, the press release devoted more ink to the cover art than to the music itself, predicting that Underground would become “the most provocative and talked-about album cover in the history of the phonograph record.”77 Even Gil McKean’s liner notes obsess over the image; he manufactures a fictional account of Monk as a WWII hero reliving his glory days (“With a cry of ‘Take that, you honkie Kraut!’ Capitaine Monk shot him cleanly and truly through the heart”).78
A few days after the last recording session, Monk and the band took off for what had become an annual winter migration to California—a couple of weeks at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop, then downstate to Shelly’s Manne-Hole.79 For the first time in twenty years, Leonard Feather gave Monk an unflinchingly positive review, along with a mea culpa: “This writer was among those who mistakenly looked to him for the technical splendor one finds in a virtuoso instrumentalist.”80 Feather’s assessment appeared in the wake of Ralph J. Gleason’s adoring defense of Monk. Gleason dismisses complaints that Monk’s music has grown stale and Charlie Rouse needs to go. His Jazz Workshop performances still possessed “all the mysterious combination of humor, lyricism, quaintness, and melancholy that has marked his work from the beginning.” And like Feather, Gleason revealed a glimmer of nostalgia for the old days when jazz was jazz—not the angry soundtrack of revolution or rock fusion. “I find that I laugh a great deal when Monk is playing and it is a nice kind of laughter. It makes me feel good and it is a compliment to an old friend.”81
But Columbia was less interested in reaching old friends with Underground. They wanted new friends and a bigger market share. Perhaps it is coincidence, but when Underground hit the stores in late April,82 Thelonious just happened to be back in the Bay Area—the counter-cultural capital of the world. The quartet played the University of California, Berkeley, another week at the Jazz Workshop, and then three incredible nights at the Carousel Ballroom (it would later move and become the Fillmore West)—a San Francisco club better known for booking the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane than jazz artists.83 Monk played opposite the San Francisco–based rock group the Charlatans and Dr. John the Night Tripper (Mac Rebennack), whose synthesis of psychedelic rock and New Orleans rhythm-and-blues attracted a young audience.84 Dr. John’s piano playing impressed Thelonious almost as much as the group’s name: “That name is a motherfucker!”85 The feeling was mutual. The question, however, was whether the Night Tripper’s followers felt the same way about the High Priest. Columbia’s massive ad campaign tried to ensure they would, declaring “the beginning of a New Monk success. Because with great songs like ‘Raise Four’ and ‘Easy Street’—plus another great cover photo that’s just out of sight, the Rock generation will be clamoring for more and more Monk.”86
That the “rock generation” did not run out to buy Underground surprised no one save Columbia’s marketing department. They mistakenly believed that selling Monk, or jazz for that matter, was all about packaging and the music was secondary. (This is not to say that packaging doesn’t matter; after all, Underground did win a Grammy for best album cover.) Monk fans and jazz lovers bought Underground not for the photo, but because he delivered four new compositions. And yet, while sales were respectable, the reviews were mixed. Martin Williams, perhaps Monk’s most consistent champion in the world of American jazz criticism, was lukewarm toward the LP. He worried that “the younger Monk survived his years of neglect (and even ridicule) somewhat better and more productively than he is surviving success.” Like so many of his colleagues, he slyly hinted at his own nostalgia for the bygone days by praising the latest Riverside reissues.87 Whereas the old-guard critics pined for Monk to revisit the past, the folks at Columbia were slowly coming to the conclusion that he ought to follow Miles Davis’s path and update his music for a hipper audience.
• • •
Thelonious had more pressing concerns than record sales. He wasn’t feeling well. Leonard Feather noticed a change in Monk, a subdued quality to his performance—no dancing, no pacing, “no elbow-struck note clusters. He just sat there, the beard almost motionless, the expression impenetrable.”88 By the time he left L.A. for Chicago, he had withdrawn completely, forcing him to cut short his engagement at the Plugged Nickel and cancel a recording session for Columbia.89 Simultaneously, Nellie came down with a severe case of the flu and was out of commission for three weeks. Her multiple jobs as wife, road manager, business manager, mother, caregiver, and accountant were clearly taking a toll on her health, well-being, and their general state of affairs. Crucial paperwork was neglected. Contracts and agreements remained in envelopes unsigned. The tax returns were exceedingly late.90 And Nellie lacked the time and energy to see her husband perform. Nica had now assumed sole responsibility as his New York escort. Village Vanguard owner Max Gordon remembered Nica saying, “ ‘I asked Nellie to come tonight. . . . But you know Nellie, always tired.’ ”91
In May, Nellie reached out to her niece Evelyn, who was now married with a five-year-old daughter and was eight months pregnant. She agreed to move her whole family in to the Monks’ apartment in order to help care for her uncle and look after Boo Boo (and to a lesser degree, Toot, now seventeen and entering his senior year) while they were on tour over the summer. Evelyn had barely settled into Lincoln Towers when Thelonious faced one of the worst crises of his life. “Nellie was packing and Monk was sitting in the back room in one of those oval, low straw chairs,” Evelyn recalled. “I walked in the room and noticed something kind of strange. I went back and said, ‘Aunt Nellie, Thelonious doesn’t look right.’ She said, ‘What’s wrong with him? I’m trying to get these clothes packed and we need to get out of here in the morning.’ Then I went back and was listening to see if I could hear him breathing, and he just was not sounding right. So I took the chair and pushed it forward. He just fell on the floor and didn’t move. He was foaming at the mouth. I ran and got Nellie, but as soon as she saw him she started screaming, ‘Don’t cut out on me! Don’t, don’t pull a Bud Powell on me!’ ”92 Fortunately, her sister Skippy was there, and she immediately ripped his shirt apart, cleared his nasal passages with her mouth, and kept him alive. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital where he lay in a coma for several days.
Family members on both the Monk and Smith sides kept vigil. “When he finally came to, there were tons of us sitting on the bed. We were all in there. After he came to, he started walking up and down saying, ‘Y’all thought I kicked the bucket! Thought I was getting ready to split. Thought I was gonna cut out! Ain’t that a bitch?’ He was laughing. He was just glad to be alive.”93 No one knows what caused this episode, though most family members speculate that it might have been drug-related. He was still taking Thorazine for depression, vitamin shots from Dr. Robert Freymann, marijuana, and alcohol, and the substances in combination probably did more damage than any single drug. But a few things changed following this ominous incident. First, Thelonious began cutting down his alcohol consumption. Second, he no longer visited Dr. Freymann, though the New York State board for professional medical conduct made that decision for him when it suspended Freymann’s medical license for administering narcotics to known addicts.94 Finally, Nellie launched her own investigation into healthy alternatives. She discovered the healing qualities of natural carrot-based juices and tried to develop a regimen to improve her husband’s health.95
No one from Columbia dropped by to see Thelonious, and in lieu of a get-well card he received an impatient phone call wondering why he had missed yet another recording date. Nellie explained that he had been hospitalized and was too ill to work. When Teo Macero asked the company to waive the studio charge, he got the memo back with a handwritten note from Roy Friedman in the business office stating, “I gave you a no-charge on a Monk session earlier this year. This one is charged.”96 It was deducted from his next check.
• • •
Thelonious could have used more than a couple of weeks’ rest before going back on the road, but he had to make a living. As a musician, he had no medical insurance to pay for his hospital stay. The summer was particularly grueling because it was almost entirely taken up by a national tour sponsored by the Schlitz Brewing Company. The “Schlitz Salute to Jazz” covered twenty-one cities in nine weeks, and with Dionne Warwick as the headliner and Cannonball Adderley, Herbie Mann, Jimmy Smith, Gary Burton, Miriam Makeba, and Hugh Masekela on the roster, large crowds were guaranteed. By most estimates, the twenty-one performances reached some 55,000 people and generated about $850,000.97 In between the tour, Monk’s quartet made other appearances at jazz festivals in Toronto, Pittsburgh, and Hampton, Virginia.98 He was well received most of the time, but many Monk fans found him disappointingly subdued, especially those who came to see hijinks. One writer left the Toronto Jazz Festival pleased with the music but still feeling a bit shortchanged: “His latest headgear was on the small side and he remained seated throughout a 60-minute set that began, of all things, a few minutes early. The only real eccentricity he allowed himself was a crashing elbow thrust as he closed the set.”99
Throughout the tour, Thelonious and Nellie usually stayed in their hotel room, though occasionally Monk emerged to shoot pool with Jimmy Smith or if he detected a Ping-Pong table anywhere in the vicinity.100 After a while, the concerts became routine and the coliseums and fairgrounds began to look alike. The first stop on the tour, Winston-Salem, may have held some significance. It was the first time Thelonious stepped foot in his birth state since he left as a four-year-old child. They only spent one night there, and Monk’s nearest relatives were at least 150 miles away, but he also showed no signs of nostalgia or curiosity. For Monk, Winston-Salem was just another gig—the stop before Philadelphia.101 A more memorable stop occurred outside the tour, at Jackie and Rachel Robinson’s five-acre estate in Stamford, Connecticut. On Sunday, June 30, the former baseball hero-turned-leader held an “Afternoon of Jazz” benefit for the children of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose life had been snuffed out in April by an assassin’s bullet. And just three weeks prior to the gathering, Robert Kennedy suffered a similar fate in Los Angeles. (Sadly, Robinson had buried his own mother in May.) Kennedy’s assassination left a pall over the Stamford concert, as some 2,000 guests turned to the music of Monk, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Cannonball Adderley, Lionel Hampton, Billy Taylor, Marian McPartland, and Clark Terry to help renew their spirits, give them faith in a hopeful future.102 But for most Americans, especially black Americans locked in the crumbling ghettoes, the spring and summer of 1968 was a period of rage and frustration. One hundred and twenty-six cities broke out in violence after King’s death; Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave their iconic raised-fist salute at the Olympic Games in Mexico City, to symbolize black unity and protest black poverty; the streets outside the Democratic National Convention became a combat zone as antiwar protestors battled police in the streets of Chicago.
Thelonious was moved by these events. He still wondered about his contribution beyond playing benefits, though in 1967 a group of black artists affiliated with the Organization of Black American Culture had decided that he deserved a place alongside Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Stokely Carmichael, Billie Holiday, Muhammad Ali, John Coltrane, and W. E. B. DuBois, when they collectively created the “Wall of Respect,” a mural celebrating black history located on Chicago’s Southside.103 But in 1968, Thelonious contributed directly to improving race relations during a tense situation—a contribution that Monk himself was probably unaware of.
The story begins in Palo Alto, California, an affluent, white college town in the shadows of Stanford University.104 Across the Bayshore freeway from Palo Alto stood East Palo Alto—then a poor, predominantly black, “suburban ghetto.” Given the high levels of poverty and unemployment, some likened it to another country. Inspired by African independence and rising black nationalist sentiment, some local activists proudly nicknamed the town “Nairobi.” In 1966, the Nairobi Day School, an independent school committed to African-centered education, was founded, and two years later a campaign was launched to hold a referendum on making Nairobi the town’s official name. The campaign was not antiwhite. On the contrary, supporters of the name change believed that if they could instill a sense of pride of place in the community, they could improve schools and neighborhoods, develop a stronger economy, and ultimately make Nairobi an attractive place for all families, irrespective of race. On April 3, the Municipal Council voted to hold a hearing on the name change; the next day, Dr. King was assassinated. Potential cooperation gave way to anger, as young people participated in sporadic looting and burning. The posters, ads, and black and orange bumper stickers urging “Yes on Nairobi” took on an aura of militancy.105 As racial tensions rose, a group of Palo Alto liberals tried to attract middle-class blacks to integrate white residential neighborhoods.106
Enter Danny Scher, a sixteen-year-old Jewish kid born and raised in Palo Alto in an upper-middle-class family. A jazz fanatic, he was a rising junior at Palo Alto High School during the racially tense summer of 1968. Everyone knew Danny because a year earlier he single-handedly produced Palo Alto High School’s first jazz concert, inviting none other than pianist Vince Guaraldi and the vocal group Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. And every Wednesday during lunch, he hosted a jazz “radio show” on campus—though the “station” consisted of a mic, a few strategically placed speakers, and a turntable. On his own time, he had begun working for concert promoters in the Bay Area and got to know Darlene Chan, who had produced U.C. Berkeley’s first series of jazz concerts and worked for critic Ralph J. Gleason. “My dream was to bring Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington to Palo Alto High School,” Scher recalled. “Monk was my first choice, so I asked Darlene [Chan] how to get in touch with him, and she gave me Jules Colomby’s number. I called Jules, said I wanted to book Monk at my high school. I think he said it would be about $500. Eventually, he sent me a contract, some pictures of Monk and copies of the Underground record. I had to have the school principal sign the contract.”107
Since Monk already had a three-week engagement at the Both/And Club in San Francisco in late October, Scher secured the auditorium for Sunday afternoon, October 27, and booked two other bands—Jimmy Marks Afro Ensemble and Smoke, featuring Kenny Washington.108 With Monk’s quartet headlining and the proceeds dedicated to the International Club, Scher thought he’d have an instant sell-out. Not so. He had trouble moving the two-dollar tickets so he persuaded some of the proprietors on his newspaper route to buy ads in the program and place posters promoting the concert in their store windows. With ticket sales still slow, Scher decided to pitch the concert in East Palo Alto. “So now I’m putting up posters in East Palo Alto and the word on the street is, ‘So Monk is coming to lily-white Palo Alto? We’ll see it when we believe it.’ The black guys I met were skeptical, so I told them to just show up in the school parking lot on Sunday, and if you see Monk buy a ticket.”109
Now all he had to do was make sure Monk and the band got to the gig. A few days before the concert, Scher called Monk at his hotel just to remind him where he needed to be. Monk replied, “Well, I don’t know anything about that.” Turns out, he had never seen the contract, and the band had no way to get from San Francisco to Palo Alto and back in time for the first set. But Monk dug the kid’s chutzpah and agreed to do it, especially after Scher volunteered his brother to shuttle the band back and forth.110 Sunday afternoon, black and white kids from both Palo Altos gathered in the parking lot waiting to see if Monk would show. When the van pulled up and Monk, Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales, and Ben Riley stepped out, the crowd lined up to buy tickets. In the end, Monk’s quartet gave the racially mixed, near-capacity audience an excellent show. They played for over an hour. Monk was called back by thunderous applause to play an encore—a solo piano rendition of “Sweetheart of All My Dreams”—and then graciously apologized for not playing another one: “I gotta play in the city tonight, dig?”111 With that, Thelonious bid farewell, Danny paid his fee in cash, and his brother shuttled the band back to the Both/And Club with plenty of time to spare. A couple of days later, Jules called Danny asking for the money. “I told him I paid Monk. He asks, ‘What about my commission?’ I said, ‘Well, Mr. Colomby, I never had a signed contract. So if you want your commission you should talk to Mr. Monk.’ ”112 Scher would grow up to become one of the most successful concert promoters on the West Coast.
Neither Thelonious nor sixteen-year-old Danny Scher fully grasped what this concert meant for race relations in the area. For one beautiful afternoon, blacks and whites, P.A. and East P.A., buried the hatchet and gathered together to hear “Blue Monk,” “Well, You Needn’t,” and “Don’t Blame Me.” Nine days later, the referendum on East Palo Alto becoming Nairobi was soundly defeated by a margin of more than two to one.113
• • •
Monk stayed out West for nearly six weeks, adding the Jazz Workshop and Shelly’s Manne-Hole to his itinerary.114 But he was also there for an important recording session. Teo Macero and others from A&R wanted to produce something radically different from the quartet and solo piano LPs he’d been putting out since he joined Columbia. Inspired by the previous year’s European tour, Macero wanted to make a big-band record, but something extravagant and hip with crossover appeal. He wanted a bigger sound and fresh charts, fused with a little rock and a little R&B. Leonard Feather recommended hiring Oliver Nelson as the arranger—intuitively an obvious choice, if Columbia’s main goal was to get a hit. In 1968, Nelson had the golden touch. A fine saxophone player and a band leader in his own right, he was better known for his compositions (e.g., “Stolen Moments,” “Afro-American Sketches”) and arrangements. In 1966, he won a Grammy for arranging Wes Montgomery’s album, Goin’ Out of My Head, and in 1967 won the Down Beat poll for best arranger. In the mid-1960s, he turned his attention to scoring for film and television and moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote background music for the hit television show Ironside. So many lucrative projects enabled Nelson and his wife, Audre, to purchase a lovely ten-room home in the View Park–Windsor Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles.115
Monk and Nelson agreed to the project, but the kind of collaborative working relationship Thelonious developed with Hall Overton never materialized. First, given Nelson’s many obligations, he had little time to work on the music; Macero first approached him well into October with plans to record November 19 and 20.116 Second, Monk and Nelson hardly interacted before the session. Harry Colomby, who was brought in as a kind of impromptu music director, accompanied Monk and Nellie to the Nelsons’ palatial home and regarded their visit as a metaphor for their working relationship and artistic differences. “We go to Oliver Nelson’s house and it’s neat and pristine, everything in place. He’s schooled, an academician, from a totally different world. And then here’s Monk, smoking a cigarette, ashes defyng the law of gravity and he’s nowhere near an ashtray. He’s pacing and looking around and Nelson is like, ‘Oh, my tapes!’ He doesn’t want ashes everywhere, and he especially doesn’t want his house to go down in flames. The record came out sort of like his house: arranged so clean and neat.”117
The only noteworthy collaboration was between Nelson and Macero, who not only helped select the band but slipped in three of his own compositions! Thelonious was taken out of the process, reduced to being the featured piano player and little more. And the band was big—three trumpets, five saxophones, three trombones, two drummers (alternating), bass, and guitar.118 In Nelson’s hands, Monk’s music was flattened out, the jagged edges smoothed over, and the record as a whole was overproduced. On tunes such as “Little Rootie Tootie,” “Trinkle Tinkle,” and “Let’s Cool One,” the ensemble passages are overwrought, and when Monk isn’t soloing his voice is practically drowned out. In order to simplify “Brilliant Corners,” Nelson audaciously changed the melody, reducing the original A-section to the first four bars repeated and altering Monk’s unique seven-bar bridge by adding an extra measure. The rhythm is machine-like and doesn’t swing, partly because the drum parts were written out. Because Riley couldn’t read the drum parts, on all but two songs Macero replaced Ben Riley with drummer John Guerin, a studio musician who began his career with Buddy DeFranco.119 While Guerin was a fine drummer, Riley’s absence changed the feel of the music. Nevertheless, Nelson scores a few successes. While his arrangement of “Straight, No Chaser” also strays from the original melody, it works and the ensemble (backed by Riley) seems to propel Monk forward rather than get in his way. The surprising innovation here is a four-bar tag where the rhythm shifts from 4/4 to 6/4 time. More importantly, nowhere on these tracks does Monk adjust to accommodate Nelson’s artistic vision. On “Reflections,” for example, his dissonant, authentic statement of the melody practically steamrolls over the saccharine flute and horn backing. Time after time, Monk makes sure his piano is the dominant voice.
Nelson’s arrangements left much to be desired, but they were not as bad as Macero’s compositions. All three were geared to the pop-and-rock market, right down to the under-three-minute format. “Consecutive Seconds” sounds as if it had been pulled from a British Mod movie soundtrack. A simple repeated phrase played over a go-go beat and blues changes, the song is an awkward vehicle for Monk, but he makes the best of it.120 “Just a Glance at Love” is a pretty, very simple ballad in waltz time, clearly meant for popular consumption. Monk stays true to the melody and his dissonant sound, but Nelson’s syrupy ensemble arrangement restores the tune to its intended realm of “easy listening.” The final track, “Thelonious Rock (Teo’s Tune),” was written expressly for the “turn on and tune out” generation. Mercifully, Monk sat out on this one and it was never released.121
Much to everyone’s surprise, Monk was cooperative during these sessions and committed to making the best album possible. Saxophonist Gene Cipriano remembers, “The vibrations were right, the energy was great, and Monk was just wonderful!”122 None of this surprised Harry, who enjoyed their brief reunion. In Monk’s view, “It was a job, it was a gig. He hardly ever said, ‘I don’t like this.’ ”123 Truth be told, his desire for a hit record never waned.
Macero needed a hit. Some Columbia execs considered Monk a liability and he hoped to prove them wrong. In an effort to save money, he completed the record under budget by canceling what was to be a third day of recording. But the costs still exceeded $6,000, with Oliver Nelson receiving a $2,300 arranger’s fee, copying costs amounting to $400, and miscellaneous expenses (musicians’ salaries, studio rental, travel) surpassing $4,000.124 When Columbia released Monk’s Blues in April of 1969,125 the A&R and sales departments had high hopes. It was universally panned. Doug Ramsey derided Nelson’s arrangements as “assembly line workmanship,” and Martin Williams called them “alarmingly trite,” “limp,” and “hackneyed.” He accused Nelson of ruining Monk’s music with “professional slickness . . . a quality which Monk’s music doesn’t need and can’t use,” and he questioned the inclusion of Macero’s compositions: “Does a major jazz composer need help writing a blues and a ballad?”126
Nelson took the heat for Monk’s Blues, but privately Williams blamed Macero and Columbia Records. He tried to temper his criticism because he still believed he had some influence over Macero. A couple of weeks before publishing his withering New York Times review, Williams penned a letter to Macero proposing a reunion between Monk and Milt Jackson. “[S]ome of the best records in modern jazz were made by the two of them. Don’t worry about repertory too much. But get a good polyrhythmic bass player and drummer—Ron [Carter] and Tony [Williams]? [Eddie] Gomez and [Jack] de Johnette?” He also recalled one night at the Five Spot when Monk expressed an interest in recording with Lionel Hampton. “It nearly came off. It still could.”127 Hollie West of the Washington Post echoed Williams, though he made his views public. He dismissed Monk’s Blues as a “venture in arid territory,” called for Rouse’s resignation, and wanted Dizzy or Lionel Hampton to make a record with Monk. But he placed most of the blame on Columbia, especially Macero, for failing to show “much imagination in finding new contexts for his man.”128
Macero heard the criticisms, but neither he nor his bosses were interested in nostalgic reunions. They wanted to expand Monk’s audience, and that meant more rock, more pop, more R&B. In fact, just days before the release of Monk’s Blues, Macero floated a plan for an LP with Monk and popular blues singer Taj Mahal. A long-time Monk fan, Taj Mahal had actually approached Harry Colomby about working with him, who in turn passed the idea on to Macero. Needless to say, Macero thought it was a “brilliant album concept.” “In this way we could bring Monk into the current bag of soul/blues and Taj Mahal would have fabulous musical backing.”129 Although there is no evidence to suggest Monk opposed the collaboration, nothing ever came of it.
A few months later, Columbia’s A&R department came up with another joint Monk project, this time with a hot new group called Blood, Sweat and Tears. A jazz-influenced rock group with strong instrumentals and a heavy brass sound, BS&T seemed a likely choice for the kind of musical product Columbia was looking for. There was another incentive, however: The band’s drummer was none other than the youngest Colomby brother, Bobby. Macero got A&R to authorize nearly $3,500 for the session and even asked the design department to come up with an album cover, “something psychedelic—way out.”130 But this idea, too, died on the vine, in part because Thelonious simply wasn’t interested. He tolerated rock and roll, but he was never a fan. When asked about the music in an interview three years earlier, he replied, “Well, my wife tells me it gives her a stomach ache. It don’t do that to me, I can listen to it, but as she explained it, it don’t have that tone and it don’t tell a story.”131 On another occasion, he was a bit more dismissive. “That’s not lasting. That is not music. . . . And they’re not musicians, either, most of them. But you take, like, Peter, Paul, and Mary. They’re musicians, and what they’re doing that’ll last.”132 (Of course, it is no small matter that Peter, Paul, and Mary had hired Monk to open for them at the Hollywood Bowl!)
Irrespective of Monk’s opinions on rock and roll, we must acknowledge that the initiative for the aborted project came straight from the company, not from any of the artists involved. “We would have been ecstatic to record with Monk if that’s what he wanted,” Bobby Colomby mused. “But this idea had nothing to do with the project I had in mind.” Indeed, Bobby proposed an LP of Monk with strings, ballads only. “Not that boring crap. I wanted to use some real interesting score writers who understood his music, and it wouldn’t sound like they were just doing his voicings for strings. . . . I wanted to create an environment rather than step all over what he’s doing.” Monk loved the idea and was anxious to proceed. But apparently it wasn’t hip enough. Columbia killed it before Bobby Colomby could even come up with a budget.133
• • •
The day after the final Monk’s Blues session, the quartet spent Thanksgiving week at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco and then returned to New York . . . as a trio. Larry Gales jumped ship. He and his wife, Mabel Gales, had separated and he began seeing Rose Roberts, the pretty and talented pianist he had befriended when the quartet played the It Club. He decided to remain in L.A. with Rose. They married as soon as his divorce became final. Monk was disappointed, but he and Nellie gave their blessings and there were no hard feelings. “We went to see them at the Roosevelt Hotel where they were staying,” Rose recalled, “and Nellie said, ‘You guys make a nice couple.’ ”134 Gales had no trouble finding work: he joined the Bobby Hutcherson–Harold Land quintet for a stint, and then worked with Erroll Garner at the Century Plaza Hotel’s Hong Kong Bar.135
Back in New York, Monk hired bassist Walter Booker and started working at the Club Baron in Harlem.136 A scion of an academic family, Booker grew up in Washington, D.C. and attended Howard University, where his father was the head of pharmacology. He attended medical school, but gave it all up for music. An original member of the JFK Quintet, he had worked with Donald Byrd, Sonny Rollins, Ray Bryant, Milt Jackson, Chick Corea, and on and off with Cannonball Adderley when Rouse recommended him to replace Larry Gales.137
As one might expect, Booker was “scared to death” his first few nights on the job. “The way he acted had me kind of uptight. I was already insecure.” But in no time they grew close, and Monk would hang out with him on breaks and offer something akin to fatherly advice. “He saw me struggling with the music, so he pulled me aside and said, ‘You don’t have to try so hard. Just relax and play what you feel.’ ” The lessons were not limited to music. “One night, he saw me hittin’ on some girl at the club or something. He said to me, ‘Be sure that you want to have her for a girl or have her for a friend, because if you make love to a girl she ain’t gonna be your friend. Because you can have a friend, like Nica’s my friend, and I wouldn’t touch her. She’s the best friend I ever had.’ I never forgot that.”138
Life with Monk was peaceful for the first couple of weeks, but then he suffered another unexpected loss: Ben Riley quit after nearly five years and the split wasn’t entirely amicable. With Monk’s health failing, gigs were canceled. Riley could no longer afford the financial uncertainty. He not only left Monk but he chose to withdraw from the music scene altogether. He took a job at a Long Island school working in the audio-visual department, and he worked for the YMCA.139 Monk was now faced with the unenviable task of hiring a new drummer. Mickey Roker tried out a couple of nights, then Art Blakey sat in one weekend, but once Roy Haynes became available the problem was solved. “When Roy joined the band,” Walter Booker told me, “it was heaven. Roy knew all his music.”140 Monk’s new band debuted at the Village Vanguard at the end of January 1969, and then performed in concert at the Fillmore East as a sextet with Ray Copeland and trombonist Bennie Green.141 Monk wasn’t feeling well that night, so “Nica gave him a whole bunch of uppers,” Booker recalled. “He was up for days. We were supposed to go to Chicago and Monk was acting strange. Roy Haynes came all the way to the airport with us. He was waiting for Monk to ask him to go on the gig. Monk just ignored him the whole time. . . . Roy didn’t want to go without being asked. He was really pissed.”142 Haynes gathered up his drums and took a cab back home, while the rest of the band looked on in confusion. Monk ended up hiring Wilbur Campbell to open at the Plugged Nickel.143
The situation grew worse. Nellie did not travel with Monk on this trip; instead she sent Nica. It is not clear what set him off—amphetamines, a post-manic crash, illicit drugs—but a week or so into the gig he had to be hospitalized. Nellie flew out to be with him and take him home. It was then that Monk was diagnosed with a biochemical imbalance.144 Neither Nellie nor Nica fully understood what that meant, but it became clear that he needed different treatment. Thus began a long search for the right doctor, accompanied by a mountain of medical bills. Indeed, the health care needs of the entire household became a financial drain, especially with Monk’s diminishing income. Just prior to Monk’s hospitalization, Nellie needed major dental work—upper bridgework, gum surgery, extractions, root canals—which set them back $3,390.00.145
Monk was out of commission for nearly two months. Both Walter Booker and Roy Haynes moved on, leaving Thelonious without a rhythm section. When he and Rouse returned to work in May for a short stint at the Village Gate, he hired Victor Gaskin and Buster Smith, but with the next engagement over a month away he could not retain them.146 And then Thelonious suffered another emotional setback when Coleman Hawkins, his mentor, friend, and hero, grew quite ill. He had a feeling that Hawk was also about to join the ancestors, so he went to visit him and insisted that Evelyn accompany him. “We had been up late playing Yahtzee,” she recalled, “and Thelonious woke me up to go to Bean’s house. I was tired and didn’t want to go, but then he said, ‘I gotta go see Bean. Bean’s getting ready to split. So how would you feel if something happened to me and you deny me my last request? So how would you live with that shit for the rest of your life?’ So we go and on the walk up there he gives me a history of his and Bean’s relationship—how he never worked for anybody but Bean, and that Bean taught him to never compromise your music because if he did he wouldn’t be who he is today.” Nica was already there when they arrived, and so was Barry Harris. They stayed for a little while, exchanging few words as Thelonious paced nervously back and forth. Monk left with several LPs under his arm, parting gifts from Hawkins.147 About a week later, on Friday, May 16, Hawkins was admitted to Wickersham Hospital on 58th and Lexington, diagnosed with bronchial pneumonia. Throughout the weekend he drifted in and out of a coma. When it was clear that the end was imminent, Nica and Monk spent all of Sunday with him, along with Eddie Locke, Barry Harris, the Reverend John Gensel, and family members.148 His daughter Collette Hawkins was taken by Monk’s reaction: “He was panting and he was repeating something like ‘Bean is going to die.’ He kept repeating it. . . . He would move side to side. He was just outside of his room going up and down, just outside the door. I felt so bad. He was so upset.”149 Hawkins died early Monday morning. “When he got back to the house, he paced for three days,” recalled Evelyn. “He did not sleep, he hardly talked. Very rarely did Thelonious play records, especially someone else’s music. But he played those albums Bean had given him for three days. I don’t remember him saying a word during that time.”150
Monk struggled to come to terms with Hawkins’s death. He barely worked that summer, and in the eyes of friends and family he became tense and withdrawn. On Monday, July 7, he and Miles Davis got into a fight at the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park. Monk’s quartet, with Wilbur Ware and drummer Ed Blackwell, was part of a double-header, with Miles’s group performing first.151 Miles had begun experimenting with groove-based, free improvisation that borrowed heavily from rock, funk, even South Asian music. Thelonious reacted vehemently, furiously pacing backstage and mumbling to himself. When Miles got off the bandstand, Monk confronted him. “Why are you playing that bullshit for these people?” he asked. “They going out, they work all week, pay their money to see a show, and you all out there bullshittin’!” Miles angrily defended his music: “Man, Monk. You just don’t know what we’re doing, you’re not hip to what we’re doing!” Evelyn, who witnessed the entire exchange, thought they were about to come to blows. Miles didn’t want to hear it, but Thelonious continued to elaborate. “So everybody’s playing to the chord. You’re just playing to the chord. I know what you doing. I don’t care what you’re playing. It’s got to be pleasing to the ear. And that stuff you all’s playing sounds like shit!”152 Miles eventually walked away, but it didn’t end there. When Monk’s group took the stand, he was in for a rude awakening. “They played beautifully, and it did sound like music, pleasing to the ear. But he didn’t get the kind of applause that he would normally get. And he certainly didn’t get the reaction Miles got. It was awful.”153
They made up a couple of weeks later, when Monk and Miles played opposite each other at the Village Gate,154 but it became increasingly clear that “the people” dug Miles’s new direction. Even longstanding Monk defender John S. Wilson favored Davis’s fusion experiments to Monk’s well-worn numbers. In reviewing their respective performances at the Holmdel (New Jersey) Jazz Festival, Wilson declared Miles “brilliant” and wrote of Monk that “time has apparently stood still. . . . [W]hat at once seemed odd and angular in his composition and performance has now become so familiar as to seem almost routine.”155 It wasn’t always like this. At Monterey a couple of weeks later, it was Miles’s group that was booed (with shouts of “We want some music!”) and Monk, in concert with Bobby Bryant and the festival big band, that “brought the crowd to its cheering feet.”156
Thelonious had more pressing problems than competing with the rock craze. Jules Colomby and Jack Whittemore failed to coordinate his schedule, resulting in double bookings and cancellations, and he was still working with half a band.157 At Monterey he used drummer John Guerin, from the Oliver Nelson session, and twenty-one-year-old bassist Jiuni Booth.158 When he went to Boston a few days later for a week-long engagement at the Jazz Workshop, he hired locals—veteran drummer Alan Dawson, a Berklee School of Music faculty member, and one of his prized students, a young bassist named Nate “Lloyd” Hygelund.159 A white guy sporting a thick moustache and shoulder-length hair, he embodied the Sixties youth look. Monk kept Hygelund through the rest of the year, but he had yet to settle on a drummer (Dawson was a regular in Dave Brubeck’s band). When they played the Cellar Door in Washington the week of October 6, Monk hired drummer Billy Kaye. (He also let the audience know that he turned fifty-two that week by playing “discordant versions of ‘Happy Birthday’ in each set.”160)
Monk returned from the road in mid-October determined to find a new drummer. He really had no choice, because he was scheduled to leave for another European tour at the end of the month. He scoured the city until he found his man—or boy. In a Harlem club he heard a skinny seventeen-year-old kid named Austin “Paris” Wright. He had an unorthodox way of holding his sticks and he sometimes swayed side to side when he played, but the boy could swing and that’s what Monk was looking for. Thelonious did not hire Paris directly but instead called his father, Herman Wright, a bassist who had played with the likes of Yusef Lateef, Terry Gibbs, Dave Brubeck, and Sonny Stitt, to ask permission to take his son on the road. After all, Paris Wright was still in high school and the tour meant missing six weeks of school. His parents consented, but Thelonious, in his own fatherly way, encouraged Paris to continue his studies on the road. When Monk broke the news to his family, Toot was none too pleased. “He comes in the house and says, ‘Oh man, I heard this badass young drummer tonight. This cat’s got some fire. I’m really digging him. . . . I think I’m gonna take him to Europe with me.’ Imagine how I’m feeling. I’m 18, he’s 17, and I’m thinking, ‘Damn, he’s not taking me on the road.’ I’ve been in the house practicing ten, fourteen hours a day, but then I wasn’t out there playing. I think my dad sensed I was scared, so when he hired Paris that lit a fire under me.”161 Eventually, Paris and Toot met and they became the best of friends. Wright took him around Harlem to jam sessions, introduced him to a younger generation of musicians. “And the next thing I know I’m in this clique of badass young cats—Billy Gault, Carter Jefferson, Frank Mitchell, John Stubblefield, Jiuni Booth. It changed my life musically.”162
Monk and Nellie left for London on October 29 and checked into the White House, Ltd. in Regent’s Park, literally setting up camp there until December 1.163 Monk’s usually frenetic tour schedule was broken up by a three-week engagement at Ronnie Scott’s club. After performing at Hammersmith Odeon as part of London’s Jazz Expo ’69, the quartet taped a television program at Ronnie Scott’s. Both performances were marred by Monk’s young rhythm section—particularly Wright, who barely had time to rehearse before arriving in Europe.164 Thelonious granted Wright very few drum solos, as well. After taking a nearly four-minute solo on “Oska T” during the Ronnie Scott’s Club taping, we hear very little solo work from Wright for the rest of the show.165
On November 6, Monk and Nellie hopped a plane to Berlin for the “Berliner Jazztage” Festival, where he participated in a special seventieth birthday tribute to Duke Ellington. Several artists participated, including Miles Davis and Lionel Hampton, and Thelonious was one of six pianists brought on to perform solo pieces. Monk dug deep into his Duke bag and pulled three numbers from his 1955 Riverside LP—“Sophisticated Lady,” “Caravan,” and “Solitude”—and surprised the diehard Monk fans with a rendition of “Satin Doll.” For someone who rarely played Duke’s music, he exhibited an astonishing mastery over the material. His funky, rumbling, stride version of “Caravan” stole the show, producing enthusiastic applause and shouts of delight. The festival organizers decided to end his set with a piano duo opposite the stride master Joe Turner, backed by bassist Hans Rettenbacher and drummer Stu Martin. Some called it a cutting session, but their “Blues for Duke” is more of a homage to the song’s namesake as well as a musical exercise in mutual admiration.166
The band reunited at Ronnie Scott’s on the 10th of November, where they played every night for three weeks, giving them an opportunity to really gel. On December 1, they took off on a whirlwind tour of Germany, Italy, and France—eight cities in eight nights. By the time they performed in front of television cameras in Cologne, the group was more in sync and Wright and Hygelund were comfortable with the music. Monk also played faster than usual on tunes like “Straight, No Chaser” and “Bright Mississippi.”167 The repertoire was limited to tunes that had been in the book for some time, but Thelonious used the occasion of the tour to introduce a new standard: Richard A. Whiting, Newell Chase, and Leo Robin’s gorgeous 1929 ballad “My Ideal.” It happened to be a favorite of Coleman Hawkins, and both Ernie Henry and John Coltrane made lovely recordings of it.168 Perhaps it was his tribute to his lost friends? Or maybe Hawk’s recording of “My Ideal” was among the discs he gave Monk before he died?
The tour ended in Paris, with a concert at the Salle Pleyel, where Thelonious had played his first European concert to a rather hostile audience. Now, fifteen years later, he received a reception worthy of a star, and the entire concert was televised. No surprise that Monk and Rouse played well together; indeed, Rouse appeared so comfortable with the music he sometimes appeared vacant. Monk, too, also seemed to be on autopilot. What all the film evidence reveals is a fatigued Thelonious, stiff and diffident but thoroughly focused on playing his instrument. The days of dancing and stage antics are gone forever, but his music was still full of surprises. Paris Wright, on the other hand, was all there but visibly nervous. He handled himself well on “Bright Mississippi,” “Light Blue,” “Straight, No Chaser,” and “I Mean You,” but halfway through the concert Monk called Philly Joe Jones from backstage to sit in with the band. Jones had been living in Paris for nearly a year, working on and off with Archie Shepp and leading his own band. Jones looked terrible—he was gaunt, missing his front teeth, and appeared fragile—but he gave young Wright a drum clinic. On “Nutty” he provided a spark that had been missing throughout most of the concert. The band picks up the tempo and Monk comes alive, playing against Jones’s polyrhythms.169 The audience went wild for Philly Joe and responded favorably to the entire concert. So did most critics. Jazz Hot’s Natasha Arnoldi concluded, “Even if he hasn’t played anything new in the last decade, it is more out of stubbornness than for lack of imagination. His impulsive creativity remains, and his alternate universe fascinates us with the infantile qualities, unpredictability and false naivete . . .”170 The program closes with a strange interview conducted by bassist Jacques Hess, who seemed a little annoyed by Monk’s brief answers.
Before Monk and Nellie returned, he agreed to participate in a remarkable television project produced by Bernard Lion and his old friend Henri Renaud. The half-hour Jazz Portrait: Thelonious Monk offered a rare glimpse of Monk sitting comfortably before a nine-foot Steinway, performing a variety of solo piano pieces between conversations with, and commentary by, Renaud. The setting is relaxed and Thelonious plays beautifully, putting all he has into “ ’Round Midnight,” “Thelonious,” “Crepuscule with Nellie,” and “Nice Work.” The performances are interspersed with photos of Monk and other musicians, insights into Monk’s place in jazz history, and shots of Monk and Nellie at the airport and traveling by cab.171 At one point, in the middle of one of Renaud’s commentaries, the camera catches Thelonious smiling. He may not have understood most of Renaud’s French, but he knew he was being treated with respect. It was a far cry from the world of Columbia Records, impatient critics, and fans clamoring for change.
• • •
The Monks were back home in time for the holidays and for the quartet to open at the Vanguard. In the end, Thelonious wasn’t wild about his rhythm section, so he brought back his old friend Wilbur Ware and hired Ed Blackwell, a dynamic drummer originally from New Orleans who was a regular member of Ornette Coleman’s band, but had also worked with Archie Shepp, and the late Eric Dolphy.172 The band was ready, but Thelonious was not. He wasn’t feeling well, and one night lashed out at Rouse when he was unable to play a song Monk requested. They argued right there on the bandstand. Wilbur Ware recalls, “Thelonious was kind of ill and he was saying things that really hurt Charles’s feelings.”173 That was the last straw for Rouse. He knew Monk was sick, but could no longer handle his moodiness and strange behavior. It was wearing thin. He called Nellie the next night and gave notice.174