NOTES

Unless indicated otherwise, all interviews cited were conducted by author.

Prelude

1 Paul Bacon, “The High Priest of Be-bop: The Inimitiable Mr. Monk,” Record Changer 8, no. 11 (November, 1949), 9.

2 Benetta Bines interview, January 30, 2004.

3 Nat Hentoff, The Jazz Life (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978, orig. 1961), 184.

4 Lewis H. Lapham, “Monk: High Priest of Jazz,” Saturday Evening Post (April 11, 1964), 72.

5 André Hodeir, Toward Jazz, trans. Noel Burch (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 162.

6 John F. Mehegan, “Crepuscule with Monk,” unpublished manuscript, December 1963, pp. 2–3, copy located in Monk vertical files, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.

7 Bill Evans, liner notes to Monk (Columbia CS 9091).

8 Quoted in Valerie Wilmer, “Monk on Monk,” Down Beat (June 3, 1965), 20.

9 Ben Riley interview with Quincy Troupe, Media Transcripts. Used by permission.

10 “Monk Rehearsal, 1963–64,” CCP 103, W. Eugene Smith Loft Tape Collection, Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University.

11 Thelonious Monk rehearsal tape, circa 1960, Thelonious Monk Family Archives, in author’s possession.

12 Frank London Brown, “More Man than Myth, Monk Has Emerged from the Shadows,” Down Beat (October 30, 1958), 16.

1 “My Mother Didn’t Want Me to Grow Up in North Carolina”

1 “Strictly Ad Libs,” Down Beat (November 14, 1957), 10; Nellie Monk quoted in Valerie Wilmer, “Monk on Monk,” Down Beat (June 3, 1965), 21.

2 Julius W. Monk, Julius Monk’s Baker’s Dozen (New York: Random House, 1964), p. xvi.

3 Local 802 of AFM Directory (Newark: International Press, 1947).

4 U.S. Census, Population Schedule: 1930: Salisbury, Rowan, North Carolina; ED: 36, p. 10 B; Julius Withers Monk to William James Monk, December 5, 1942, Archibald Monk Family Bible, North Carolina State Archives. Coincidentally, the Chicago Defender’s column “Onion for the Day” ran a humorous article—prompted by TV Guide’s error mistaking Malcolm X for Elijah Muhammad’s son—identifying celebrities with similar last names who could be mistaken as relatives. The list included “Julius and Thelonious Monk.” Little did they know! Chicago Defender, May 27, 1964.

5 Franz Recum, “Monk Family Record—James Monk of Moore County - North Carolina,” Compiled for Julius Withers Monk (typescript, 1943), expanded as Monk Family Record. Hereafter, Recum, “Monk Family Record.”

6 Julius Monk to “Uncle William,” December 5, 1942, Photostat copy in Recum, “Monk Family Record.”

7 Monk, Julius Monk’s Baker’s Dozens, dust jacket copy.

8 See David Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary, Slavery in North Carolina, 1748–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Walter E. Minchinton, “The Seabourne Slave Trade of North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 71 (January 1994), 1–61.

9 Monk Family, Seventeenth Annual Family Reunion—August 30–September 1, 1996, Greenville, NC (mimeograph in author’s possession); Franz Recum, “Monk Family Record.” According to the Monk family record lists, the number and age of Archibald Monk’s slaves are based on the 1850 and 1860 Slave Schedule, but the document also includes the names of two, Channa and Isaac. According to the family tree compiled by Erich Jarvis, with assistance from several black Monks, Channa or Chaney was the daughter of John Jack Monk. Since she was born around 1812, only one person was old enough to have been her father and he was born around 1797. This would have been John Jack.

10 Aaron Hargrove Estate, Division of Negroes, May Term 1835, Estate Records, Sampson County, North Carolina, microfilm, North Carolina Division of Archives and History; “Deed of Gift, Aaron Hargrove to Harriet Monk,” January 6, 1827, “Negro Girl by the name of Chaney about nine years of age,” Sampson County, NC Real Estate Conveyances, Book 21, pg. 611, microfilm, North Carolina Division of Archives and History.

11 Archibald Monk settled on a plantation owned by Squire John Ingram (who also presided over his marriage), but focused most of his attention on running the general store with his brother Cornelius, serving as postmaster for Newton Grove, practicing medicine, and seeking public office. Among other things, he was appointed Superintendent of Public Instruction for Sampson County and he served as a representative in North Carolina’s House of Commons from 1830–1834. Franz Recum, “Monk Family Record”; Charles H. Bowman, “Archibald Monk: Public Servant of Sampson County,” North Carolina Historical Review 47, no. 4 (October 1970), 339–369.

12 Monk Family, Seventeenth Annual Family Reunion—August 30–September 1, 1996, Greenville, NC (mimeograph in author’s possession). No one knows much about Kaplin; apparently, he was lighter than Solomon and was able to pass for white. His name cannot be found in the Census. However, Solomon’s name does appear in the 1880 Census in Sampson County and he is listed as “Mulatto.” I don’t think the story is apocryphal. U.S. Census, 1880, Population Schedule: Sampson County, Westbrook, ED 196.

13 See, Franz Recum, “Monk Family Record”; Charles H. Bowman, “Dr. John Carr Monk: Sampson County’s Latter Day ‘Cornelius,’ ” North Carolina Historical Review 50, no. 1 (January 1973), 52–72. Monk Family, Seventeenth Annual Family Reunion—August 30–September 1, 1996, Greenville, NC (mimeograph in author’s possession).

14 U.S. Census, 1860, Slave Schedule—Slave Inhabitants: Sampson County, p. 49; Franz Recum, Monk Family Record.

15 Monk Family, Seventeenth Annual Family Reunion—August 30–September 1, 1996, Greenville, NC (mimeograph in author’s possession); U.S. Census 1860, Slave Schedule—Slave Inhabitants: Johnston County, “Willis Cole Plantation,” p. 213.

16 Williams S. Powell, North Carolina Through Four Centuries (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 22–24; Theda Purdue, Native Carolinians: The Indians of North Carolina (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 2000); Marilyn Haas, The Seneca and Tuscarora Indians (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1994).

17 Monk Family, Seventeenth Annual Family Reunion—August 30–September 1, 1996, Greenville, NC (mimeograph in author’s possession).

18 “Will of Willis Cole,” Johnston County, State of North Carolina, 1832, Record of Wills, 1760–1859, Vol. 1, Johnston County, North Carolina Archives; U.S. Census 1860, Slave Schedule—Slave Inhabitants: Johnston County, “Willis Cole Plantation,” p. 213; U.S. Census 1860, Agriculture Schedule—Johnston County, Bentonville, “Willis Cole plantation.”

19 Richard Reid, “Raising the African Brigade: Early Black Recruitment in Civil War North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 71 (July 1993), 266–301. My understanding of emancipation and reconstruction is informed by W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935) and Stephen Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2003).

20 Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr., Bentonville: The Final Battle of Sherman and Johnston (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 43–46.

21 Roberta Sue Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen: Race Relations During Presidential Reconstruction, 1865–1867 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 1–12; Jeffrey J. Crow, A History of African Americans in North Carolina (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, Department of Cultural Resources, 1992); Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 116–159.

22 Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 49–50, 111–119.

23 U.S. Census, 1870, Population Schedule—Sampson County, North Carolina, Westbrook Township, p. 26

24 Jeffrey J. Crow, Paul D. Escott, and Flora J. Hatley, A History of African Americans in North Carolina, rev. ed. (Raleigh: Office of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 2002), 90–93.

25 U.S. Census, 1870, Population Schedule—Sampson County, North Carolina, Westbrook Township, p. 26. Choosing a name after emancipation was an awesome responsibility that freed people took quite seriously. We need to remember that enslaved black people were not granted surnames. With freedom, most adopted their masters’ surnames, though in some instances, they shed their master’s name altogether, choosing names such as “Freeman,” “Lincoln,” “Washington,” or names indicating their profession (“Green,” “Bishop,” etc.).

26 “Will of Blaney Williams,” Sampson County, State of North Carolina, Record of Wills, Sampson County, Book 1, May Term of Court, 1852, page 414, microfilm.

27 “John Lucas of Eastern North Carolina Descendants and Related Families,” Entries: 61464 www.ancestry.com; U.S. Census, 1880, Population Schedule—Sampson County, North Carolina, Westbrook Township, E.D. 196, p. 13; Division of the lands of John C. Monk, Deed, July 5, 1877 partitioned land among Anne E Monk, Flora H Monk and J Catherine Monk, Sampson County Record of Deeds, Book 46, pg. 200, North Carolina State Archives.

28 Their eldest child, Vera Elisa Cole, was born in 1878. She was followed by John Jack (b. 1880), Eulah (b. 1881), Alonzo (b. 1883, d. 1906), Lorenzo (b. 1886), Bertha (b. 1888), Thelonious (b. 1889), Theodoras or Theodore “Babe” (b. 1890), Squire Lee (b. 1894), and Hettie Fernandez (b. 1897). Monk Family, Seventeenth Annual Family Reunion—August 30–September 1, 1996, Greenville, NC (mimeograph in author’s possession). Incidentally, Bertha is a male child. The family reunion document lists Theodore’s birth year as 1891, but according to other sources such as his draft registration card, his birthdate is listed as December 10, 1890.

29 U.S. Census, 1900, Population Schedule: Wayne County, ED, 104.

30 Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 436–37.

31 David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson, eds. Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); H. Leon Prather, Sr. We Have Taken a City: Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898 (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Press, Inc., 1984); The Wilmington Race Riot Commission, 1898 Wilmington Race Riot – Final Report, May 31, 2006, http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/1898%2Dwrrc; Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).

32 Crow, Escott, and Hatley, A History of African Americans in North Carolina, 116–117; Anderson, Race and Politics, 296–312.

33 U.S. Census, 1900, Population Schedule: Wayne County, ED, 104. According to his children’s birth certificates, Thelonious Monk could read and write and was recorded as having received “common school” education. See Marion Barbara Monk, Birth Certificate #75749 [original is 403], January 18, 1916 North Carolina State Board Of Health, Bureau Of Vital Statistics.

34 U.S. Census, 1900, Population Schedule: Wayne County, ED, 104.

35 U.S. Census, 1920, Population Schedule, Johnston County, Bentonville, ED 41, p. 6B

36 On the life of St. Tillo, see John J. Delaney, Dictionary of Catholic Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 159. Sam Stephenson suggests that Hinton and Sarah may have derived the name from Reverend Fredricum Hillonious Wilkins, the distinguished pastor from Durham, North Carolina. “Thelonious Monk—Is This Home?” Oxford American 58 (2007), 114. While Thelonious is certainly a unique name—a name he proudly passed on to his more famous son—he was not the only one. I found at least four other people with the same name born between 1869 and 1911: Thelonius Melancon (white, male, b. 1869) of St. James, Louisiana; Thelonius Duncan (black, male, b. 1907) of Bamberg, South Carolina, and Thelonius Laws (white, male, b. 1911) of Somerset, Maine. [U.S. Census, 1920, Population Schedule: Police Jury Ward 3, St James, Louisiana; U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Tampa, Hillsborough, Florida; U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule, Bamberg, Bamberg, South Carolina; U.S. Census, 1920, Population Schedule: Ripley, Somerset, Maine.]

37 Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872–1901: The Black Second (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1981), 4–6; Alan D. Watson, Edgecombe County: A Brief History (Raleigh: North Carolina Dept. of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and HIstory, 1979), 78.

38 By the time Henry was born, Lucy Knight had already been married and widowed twice, first to Isaac Batts and then to David Barlow. See Cynthia, Herrin comp. Edgecombe County, North Carolina, Vital Records, 1720–1880 (online database, www.ancestry.com); Tarboro, NC Genealogy and Library Association (comp.), Early Families of Edgecombe Co North Carolina, Its Past and Present (The Tarboro Society for Genealogy and Biography, 1881).

39 “Will of Peter Knight,” 1809, Edgecombe Co. Will Abstracts 1793–1823, North Carolina State Archives, U.S. Census, 1860, Slave Schedule: Edgecombe County, Deep Creek Township, p. 164.

40 Since the plantation was owned by Peter Hedgepeth and Charity Braswell, Clara apparently could not decide if she was a Hedgepeth or a Braswell. On the marriage registry she is listed as Clara Braswell, but on her daughter’s death certificate, she is recorded as Clara or Clearly Hedgepeth. See Cynthia Herrin comp. Edgecombe County, North Carolina, Vital Records, 1720–1880 (online database, www.ancestry.com); Tarboro, NC Genealogy and Library Association (comp.), Early Families of Edgecombe Co North Carolina, Its Past and Present (The Tarboro Society for Genealogy and Biography, 1881); Standard Certificate of Death, Georgiana Williams, Filed November 1, 1921, North Carolina State Board of Health, copy in Edgecombe County Registrar of Deeds, Tarboro, NC.

41 Letter to Ruth, unsigned, March 18, 1966, Batts Family Papers, Manuscript Collections Special Collections Joyner Library East Carolina University.

42 Georgianna was the eldest of six children—three brothers (Blunt, b. 1869; Peter, b. 1874; and James, b. 1877), and two sisters (Emma, b. 1871 and Sena, b. 1876). U.S. Census, 1870, Population Schedule: Edgecombe County—Deep Creek Township; U.S. Census, 1880, Population Schedule: Edgecombe County—Deep Creek Township, ED 62.

43 U.S. Census 1880, Population Schedule: Edgecombe County—Deep Creek Township, ED 62.

44 U.S. Census, 1870, Population Schedule: Edgecombe County—Deep Creek Township. In 1860, John Knight owned 28 slaves. U.S. Census, 1860, Slave Schedule: Edgecombe County.

45 U.S. Census, 1870, Population Schedule: Edgecombe County—Deep Creek Township. On Speer Batts as a fiddler, see Marion White interview with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990, Media Transcripts Inc. For film Thelonious Monk: American Composer. Used by permission from Avalon Archives, Ltd.

46 Robert Hinton, The Politics of Agricultural Labor: From Slavery to Freedom in a Cotton Culture, 1862–1902 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 115. On the exodus of African-Americans, see Nell Irvin Painter, The Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 1977); Stephen Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 317–363.

47 Joe A. Mobley, “In the Shadow of White Society: Princeville, a Black Town in North Carolina, 1865–1915,” North Carolina Historical Review 63, no. 3 (July 1986), 340–384. “Freedom Hill” eventually was incorporated as Princeville, North Carolina’s first independent black town.

48 According to the Census, they were unemployed for eight months out of the year. U.S. Census, 1880, Population Schedule: Edgecombe County: Upper Conetoe Township, p. 87C. Note that in the 1880 Census Speer’s name is either misspelled or not fully legible, but he appears as “Spur Batts.”

49 “Speen [sic] Batts and Georgeanna Knight,” May 8, 1884, Marriage Register, Edgecombe County, Edgecombe County Courthouse, Tarboro. On the marriage register, Speer’s age is listed as thirty, but the Census consistently places his birth at around 1856. I’m guessing that twenty-eight or twenty-nine is probably a more accurate figure.

50 I have not been able to figure out when Henry or Clara Knight died, but he is still living on the Batts plantation as late as June of 1897. He was called on to testify in a land dispute after the death of the owner, now Benjamin Batts, son of Isaac. “D.B. Batts vs. H. L. Staton,” Case on Appeal, Superior Court, June Term 1897, Edgecombe County, North Carolina, typescript copy in Batts Family Papers.

51 Hinton, The Politics of Agricultural Labor, 127; Watson, Edgecombe County, 89.

52 Hinton, The Politics of Agricultural Labor, 119–125; E. Tunney Cobb, Jr., “Race Relations in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, 1700–1975” (B.A. Honors Thesis, UNC, 1975), pp. 35–45; Anderson, Race and Politics.

53 The birth certificates for Barbara’s three children indicate their mother’s birthplace as Hamilton Township, Martin County. Given that Barbara was born eight years after they married, it is likely that Georgianna had given birth before but lost her children, but we will never know since the state of North Carolina did not begin to maintain birth and death records until 1913.

54 “Rocky Mount Becomes Area’s Largest City,” Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, July 6, 1976; “Rocky Mount, The Railroad Town,” Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, July 6, 1976; Lisa Hazirjian, “Negotiating Poverty: Economic Insecurity and the Politics of Working-Class Life in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, 1929–1969” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2003), 26. Hazirjian’s dissertation is by far the best scholarly work on Rocky Mount’s history.

55 Prior to meeting Thelonious, Georgianna briefly married a laborer named Alex Williams, though it is not clear how they met or where and when they actually wed. Tragically, Alex Williams died very soon after they settled down in Rocky Mount. In fact, Barbara is listed in the 1910 Census as “Barbara B. Williams” rather than Barbara Batts, the name she would consistently give as her maiden name. U.S. Census, 1910, Population Schedule: North Carolina, Edgecombe County, Rocky Mount Township, ED 26. Alex Williams is identified as her late husband on Georgianna’s death certificate. Standard Certificate of Death, Georgiana Williams, Filed November 1, 1921, North Carolina State Board of Health, copy in Edgecombe County Registrar of Deeds, Tarboro, North Carolina.

56 Marion Monk’s birth certificate indicates that both parents had formal schooling. North Carolina State Board Of Health, Bureau Of Vital Statistics, Certificate Of Birth: Marion Barbara Monk, Certificate #75749 [original is 403], January 18, 1916.

57 U.S. Census, 1910, Population Schedule: North Carolina, Edgecombe County, Rocky Mount Township, ED 26.

58 Booker T. Washington High School, Rocky Mount’s first “colored” high school, wasn’t built until 1924, and the first high school for black children in Edgecombe County was established in 1920. Oliver R. Pope, Chalk Dust: An Autobiographical Account of a Dedicated Negro Teacher to Educate and Mold Young Lives (New York: Pageant Press, 1967), 114–115; R. D. Armstrong, “Black Citizens Entering Mainstream of Area’s Life,” Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, July 6, 1976.

59 U.S. Census, 1910 Population Schedule: North Carolina, Edgecombe County, Rocky Mount, ED 26; Rocky Mount, N.C., Directory, 1912–1913 (Rocky Mt. and Richmond, VA: Hill Directory Co., 1912), 45; Hazirjian, “Negotiating Poverty,” 30. Initially, they lived at 570 Pennsylvania Avenue, but by the time of the 1912–13 city directory, they had moved a few doors down to 510 Pennsylvania Ave. By this time Barbara is using Batts instead of Williams, though the directory misspells her name “Betts.”

60 Rocky Mount, N.C., Directory, 1912–1913 (Rocky Mt. and Richmond, VA: Hill Directory Co., 1912), 26–27. Unfortunately, I could not determine to which church they belonged since most black Baptist church records from Rocky Mount for this period have been lost or destroyed. The most likely candidates were Little Hope Baptist Church on South Church, Primitive Baptist Church on Gay near Pearl, St. James Baptist Church on Thomas, or Mt. Zion Baptist Church on Pearl near Thomas.

61 Copy of Thelonious Monk, Sr., Draft registration card, State Archives, North Carolina, microfilm roll 1765640.

62 Hazirjian, “Negotiating Poverty,” 36–38.

63 Olivia Monk, Pam Kelley Monk, Conley F. Monk, Jr., Marcella Monk Flake, Evelyn Pue, interview, August 6, 2007.

64 U.S. Census, 1910, Population Schedule: North Carolina, Edgecombe County, Rocky Mount, ED 26. Note: in the 1910 Census, Thelonious’s name is spelled “Theolonious.” On the 1914–15 City Directory, he appears as Cornelius. Rocky Mount, N.C., Directory, 1912–1913 (Rocky Mt. and Richmond, VA: Hill Directory Co., 1912), 186; Rocky Mount, N.C., Directory, 1914–1915 (Rocky Mt. and Richmond, VA: Hill Directory Co., 1915), 152.

65 Marriage License, North Carolina, Office Of Registrar Of Deeds, Edgecombe County, August 20, 1914; Rocky Mount Directory: 1908–1909, Vol 1 (Hill Directory Co.: Rocky Mount, 1908), p. 129.

66 Monk’s birth certificate and other documents refer to this block as Green Street. A Green or Greens Avenue also popped up occasionally on early maps, which only generated more confusion. But many other maps and city directories identify the street in question as Red Row, both before and after Monk’s birth. In previous editions of this book, I used “Green Avenue,” but thanks to the indefatigable research of Jim Wrenn, I’m now confident of the precise location. The most accurate designation would be “Green St./Red Row” but I have opted just for the former since it is less clumsy.

67 According to Marion’s birth certificate, she was Barbara’s second child, and the first was listed on her birth certificate as “born alive and now dead.” North Carolina State Board Of Health, Bureau Of Vital Statistics, Certificate Of Birth: Marion Barbara Monk, Certificate #75749 [original is 403]. Such tragedy was not unusual. At the time, approximately 42% of all deaths in Edgecombe County were infants under two years old, or mothers during childbirth. The Edgecombe County Health Department was formed in 1916, in part to respond to the exceedingly high infant mortality rate in the county. For African-Americans, the situation was even worse. Black women had their babies at home and were attended to by midwives, in part because hospital care was generally unavailable. The Edgecombe General Hospital set aside a handful of beds for black patients, and no black doctors were on staff. Seriously ill patients often had to travel to Chapel Hill or Durham for medical treatment. E. Tunney Cobb, Jr., “Race Relations in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, 1700–1975” (B.A. Honors Thesis, UNC, 1975), 49–50.

68 North Carolina State Board Of Health, Bureau Of Vital Statistics, Certificate Of Birth: Marion Barbara Monk, Certificate #75749 [original is 403], January 18, 1916. Their midwife, Lucy Cooper, born a slave in 1849, attended to all of Barbara’s deliveries. She was also a neighbor and long-time acquaintance of the Monks; in 1910 she lived around the corner from their place on Dunn Street with her son, four grandchildren, and a boarder. On Lucy Cooper, see U.S. Census, 1920, Population Schedule: North Carolina, Edgecombe County, Rocky Mount, ED 19; U.S. Census, 1910, Population Schedule: North Carolina, Edgecombe County, Rocky Mount, ED 26; U.S. Census, 1900, Population Schedule: North Carolina, Edgecombe County, Rocky Mount, ED 13. In 1910, Cooper and her family lived on the corner of Dunn and South Street.

69 Copy of Thelonious Monk, Sr., Draft registration card, microfilm roll 1765640, Card #No. 613 Signed June 5, 1917, National Archives, Washington D.C.

70 I’m grateful to Jeffrey Sammons for pointing out reasons that black men might have wanted to be drafted or chose to enlist in the military. See also, Jeanette Keith, “The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917–1918: Class, Race, and Conscription in the Rural South,” Journal of American History 87, no. 4 (March 2001), 1356–58; Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., “Apathy and Dissent: Black America’s Negative Responses to World War I,” South Atlantic Quarterly 80 (Summer, 1980), 322–38.

71 North Carolina State Board Of Health, Bureau Of Vital Statistics, Certificate Of Birth: Thelonious Monk, Certificate #342, October 10, 1917. On Thelonious’s birth certificate, Lucy Cooper’s name is misspelled “Copper.” It is correctly spelled on the other two Monk children’s birth certificates, as well as in the census and city directories.

72 Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, October 10, 1917. City clean-up and maintenance crews spent much of the day repairing dirt roads that had been damaged by the storm. Rocky Mount Telegram, October 11, 1917.

73 North Carolina State Board Of Health, Bureau Of Vital Statistics, Certificate Of Birth: Thelonious Monk, Certificate #342, October 10, 1917. By the time Thelonious and Thomas were born, Lucy Cooper lived at 204 Bassett Street. Rocky Mount City Directory; U.S. Census, Population Schedule, 1920: North Carolina, Edgecombe County, Rocky Mount, ED 19.

74 Dr. Margaret Battle, “The Great Flu Epidemic of 1918,” Rocky Mount Telegram, July 6, 1976.

75 North Carolina State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Certificate of Birth: Thomas William Monk, Certificate #5, January 11, 1920.

76 The new address and the boarders are recorded in the 1920 Census, which was taken in April of that year, four months after Thomas’s birth. The names listed in the census schedule read Warnie and Annie Wares, but the writing is really illegible. We do know that Annie was 33 and her husband 43 years old at the time. U.S. Census, 1920, Population Schedule: North Carolina, Edgecombe County, Rocky Mount, ED 19.

77 Francois Postif, “ ’Round ’Bout Sphere” Jazz Hot 186 (April 1963), 22. Monk said the same thing to Nat Hentoff, “Just Call Him Thelonious,” Down Beat (July 25, 1956), 15.

78 Peter Keepnews, “Young Monk,” in The Thelonious Monk Reader, ed. Rob van der Bliek (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 6. [Essay originally published in the Village Voice, August 8, 1989, pp. 18, 20–21.]

79 Standard Certificate of Death, Georgiana Williams, Filed November 1, 1921, North Carolina State Board of Health, copy in Edgecombe County Registrar of Deeds, Tarboro, North Carolina.

80 Hinton and Sarah and Lorenzo appear in the 1920 Census, although their ages are incorrect. Hinton is listed as a farmer but Lorenzo is shown as having no occupation, which leads me to believe that he might have been incapacitated in some way. U.S. Census, 1920, Population Schedule: North Carolina, Johnston County, Township of Bentonville (January 22, 1920); on the date of Hinton’s death, see Seventeenth Annual Family Reunion—August 30–September 1, 1996, Greenville, NC.

81 Thanks to Roy L. Hudson of the National Railway Historical Society for helping me map out the Monks’ train travel to New York.

2 “What Is Jazz? New York, Man!”

1 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990; on the streetcar routes, U.S. Works Progress Administration, City of NY, “Transportation Facilities, Public and Institutional Buildings,” Area M-1, 1934.

2 On Louise E. Bryant, U.S. Census, 1920, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 31-383.

3 Ibid.

4 Chicago, Inter-Ocean (February 5, 1905); Macon, Georgia Telegraph (February 1, 1905).

5 Phipps Community Development Corporation, Phipps Houses Review (brochure, n.d.); Gordon Heath, Deep are the Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 9.

6 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990. The Henrietta School also launched an adult education program in 1909, in which they provided instruction in janitorial work, cooking, dressmaking, homemaking, etc. See Seth M. Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 147.

7 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990.

8 Mary White Ovington, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (New York: Schocken Books, 1969, orig. 1911), 40–41.

9 The Columbus Hill Chronicle 1, no. 1 (April 1915), 1–3; Ibid., 1, no. 2 (May 1915).

10 “Slums Must Go, Women Declare,” New York Times, December 21, 1919.

11 Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: the Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 113; see also, James Ford, Slums and Housing, with Special Reference to New York City (Westport: Negro Universities Press, orig. 1936), 328.

12 Ovington, Half a Man, 39. See also Ovington’s essay, “Vacation Days on San Juan Hill—A New York Negro Colony,” Southern Workman 38 (November 1909), 627–634.

13 “Black and White War in a Crowded District,” New York Times, July 15, 1905; “Race Rioters at it Again,” New York Times, July 18, 1905; “Mr. Devery on the Police,” New York Times, July 27, 1905.

14 “Police Kill Negro in Race Riot; Seven Hurt,” New York Times, May 27, 1917.

15 “Negro Guardsmen in San Juan Hill,” New York Times, July 4, 1917; “Hayward Begins Inquiry Into Riot,” New York Times, July 5, 1917.

16 Stephen L. Harris, Harlem’s Hell Fighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2003); Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

17 Scheiner, Negro Mecca, 19, 26–27.

18 Based on my analysis of the 1920 and 1930 U.S. Census Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 383, and the New York State Census, 1925, New York County—Enumeration of Inhabitants, Assembly District 5, Election District 51.

19 Interview with Alberta Saunders, April 1, 2004.

20 Mavis (Wilson) Swire interview, March 8, 2004. In 1930, Ms. Wilson lived at 224 West 64th St., and about three years later they moved to a nicer tenement on West 63rd across the street from the Phipps Houses. U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 383.

21 Barry Farrell, “Loneliest Monk,” Time 83 (February 28, 1964), 85.

22 Mavis Swire interview, March 8, 2004.

23 The black slang term “ofay” is pig latin for “foe.”

24 Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 286.

25 Ibid., p. 286.

26 Interview with Alberta Saunders, April 1, 2004.

27 “City’s Crime Spots Shown by Survey,” New York Times, December 14, 1923.

28 “Negro’s Wild Shots Wound 2, Cause Panic,” New York Times, June 10, 1926.

29 James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 1930), 186–188; Arnold Shaw, The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 89–92; Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Da Capo, 1994, orig. 1968), 132–137.

30 Herbert Gutman’s statistical survey showed that the San Juan Hill neighborhood in New York had a disproportionately large community of black musicians and actors. See Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1850–1925, 507.

31 Mary White Ovington, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (New York: Schocken Books, 1969, orig. 1911), 125.

32 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

33 Greater New York Federation of Churches, The Negro Churches of Manhattan (New York City): A Study Made in 1930 (New York: Greater New York Federation of Churches, 1930), 30; Manhattan Address Directory, 1925, 1929, 1933–34; New York Times, July 21, 1926; Thomas Monk, Jr., interview, February 16, 2004. Biographers in the past have mistakenly claimed that Barbara Monk attended St. Cyprian’s Colored Episcopal Chapel, and others have insisted that she was a Methodist and raised her children as Methodists. Both assertions are wrong. She was a committed Baptist until around 1950, when she converted to the Jehovah’s Witness faith.

34 Heath, Deep are the Roots, 65.

35 Greater New York Federation of Churches, The Negro Churches of Manhattan, 31.

36 Civil List, NYC Civil List, “Officials and Employees of the City of New York,” The City Record, 1925, microfilm roll 16.

37 “Find City Schools Cold to Negroes,” New York Times, April 30, 1915.

38 Morroe Berger, Edward Berger, and James Patrick, Benny Carter: A Life in American Music, vol. 1 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1982), 12.

39 Monk mentions Batavia in an interview with Lewis Lapham. See Lewis H. Lapham, “Monk: High Priest of Jazz,” Saturday Evening Post 237 (April 11, 1964), 73.

40 “More Fresh Airs Arrived Today,” Batavia Daily News, August 3, 1923.

41 Ibid.

42 “Children Will Return to New York Tomorrow,” Batavia Daily News, August 16, 1923; “Colored Mascot Sorry to Leave,” Batavia Daily News, August 17, 1923. All other biographers have mistakenly identified him as the mascot of Engine Company No. 40 located in the neighborhood, but my research into the FDNY archives reveals that he never served in such a role and they did not have a tradition of mascots. I believe writers simply took the information that he was a mascot for the fire department and looked for the closest fire station, not unlike the claim that his mother was a member of St. Cyprian’s Chapel.

43 “Thelonius Monk Back with Kids,” Batavia Daily News, July 25, 1924; “Past and Present,” Batavia Daily News, July 26, 1924; “Fresh Air Children Going Home Friday,” Batavia Daily News, August 6, 1924.

44 Jackie Bonneau interview, October 30, 2008.

45 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990.

46 Ibid.; New York Times, May 6, 1923, June 5, 1923, June 3, 1924, June 16, 1924, June 23, 1926.

47 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990.

48 The first evidence of Thelonious Monk, Sr.’s presence in New York is from the 1925 Census. New York State Census, 1925, New York County—Enumeration of Inhabitants, Assembly District 5, Election District 51, p. 490. He is still listed in the Rocky Mount city directory in 1924 as “T. Lonis Monk,” but he does not appear in the 1925 directory. In fact, he does not show up again in the city directory until 1938, when the next directory appears. Telephone Directory: Rocky Mount, Nashville, Spring Hope, Whitakers, and Enfield, NC (New Bern, NC: Home telephone and telegraph, 1924), p. 25; Rocky Mount, N.C., City Directory, 1925 (Rocky Mt. and Richmond, VA: Hill Directory Co., 1925); Hill’s Rocky Mount, N.C., City Directory, 1938 (Rocky Mt. and Richmond, VA: Hill Directory Co., 1940), 202.

49 Interviews with Thomas Monk, Jr., Theolonious Monk, Evelyn Smith, Benetta Bines, January 30, 2004; Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990; Peter Keepnews, “Young Monk,” 6; U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 31-383. Barbara’s occupation is listed as “cleaner children’s court.” Although she held a city job, the New York City Civil List did not include domestic and maintenance workers in most Manhattan city institutions. See NYC Civil List, “Officials and Employees of the City of New York,” The City Record, Jan–June, 1930, microfilm, roll 9.

50 The make-up of 243 West 63rd Street is derived largely from a careful reconstruction of every household using the 1930 Census [see U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 31-383.] See also, Nathaniel Shepard, Jr., “Neighborhood: San Juan Hill, ‘Eden’ to the Eyes of a Playwright,” New York Times, April 12, 1976. On the response to Barbara Monk and her family by neighbors, see Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990; Author interviews with Geraldine Smith, Edith Smith, Thomas Monk, Theolonious Monk.

51 One of these block parties took place on Monk’s fourteenth birthday. “Party for Children Today,” New York Times, October 10, 1931.

52 Copyright registration, Thelonious Monk and Denzil Best, “Bimsha Swing” (sometimes listed as “Bemsha Swing” or “Bemesha Swing”), Bayes Music, Registration Number: EU 297366, dated December 15, 1952, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Monk knew the meaning of Bimsha or Bemsha when he co-wrote the tune. As he said in an interview with Francois Postif, the word comes “from the Antilles.” Francois Postif, “ ’Round ’Bout Sphere,” Jazz Hot 186 (April 1963), 24.

53 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990.

54 Pearl Gonzalez, “Monk Talk,” Down Beat (October 28, 1971), 12. In those days it was not unusual for a family relocating to give away their pianos, given the cost and difficulty of moving these “white elephants.” Abandoned pianos were so common in San Juan Hill and Harlem that they became a fire hazard. Also, radios had begun to replace pianos as the more popular form of home entertainment. “Blocked Fire Exits Found by Thousand,” New York Times, August 27, 1930. The first reference to the make of Monk’s piano is from Herbie Nichols, who visited Monk frequently in the mid-1940s. Herbie Nichols, “The Jazz Pianist—Purist,” Rhythm (July, 1946), 11.

55 Author interview with Thomas Monk, Theolonious Monk, Charlotte Washington; Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990.

56 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990; Leslie Gourse, Straight No Chaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), 7.

57 When exactly Thelonious, Sr. left is still not clear. He does not appear anywhere on the 1930 Census, but a boarder by the name of “Claude Smith” shows up in the Monk household. He is listed as thirty-six years old from North Carolina and an employee of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Given that no one in the family remembers a boarder living with the Monks, it is possible that “Smith” could have been a pseudonym for Thelonious, Sr., who might have felt compelled for some reason to hide his true identity. I don’t know why; perhaps he was in trouble with the law? Given that Barbara was employed full-time, it is unlikely that they were receiving relief and had to hide the fact that she was married. Or, the boarder might really be a railway worker named Claude Smith, but where would he sleep in an already overcrowded two-bedroom apartment? There is absolutely no evidence that Barbara Monk was involved with any other men besides her husband, and given her strong religious views she would not have been living with a man out of wedlock. U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 31-383 (April 1930).

58 Hill’s Rocky Mount, N.C., City Directory, 1938 (Rocky Mt. and Richmond, VA: Hill Directory Co., 1938), p. 20; Hill’s Rocky Mount, N.C., City Directory, 1940 (Rocky Mt. and Richmond, VA: Hill Directory Co., 1940), p. 236; U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: North Carolina, Rocky Mount City, ED 33-30. Neither Eulah nor Hettie lived with their respective husbands, and they both worked as domestics. The address of the property was now 124 Dunn Street instead of 112 because the numbers had been reconfigured as more homes were built on the block. (There was neither a 120 nor a 124 Dunn Street in the 1910 Census.) Family members confirmed that Theodore “Babe” owned the property, now listed as 124 Dunn Street. Olivia Monk, Pam Kelley Monk, Conley F. Monk, Jr., Marcella Monk Flake, Evelyn Pue, interview, August 6, 2007.

3 “I Always Did Want to Play Piano”

1 Les Tomkins interview with Thelonious Monk, 1965, http://www.jazzprofessional.com/interviews/Thelonius%20Monk.htm.

2 Grover Sales, “I Wanted to Make it Better: Monk at the Black Hawk,” Jazz: A Quarterly of American Music 5 (1960), 34.

3 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990. He once told an interviewer, “I would have loved to play trombone.” Jean-Louis Noames, “Monk Entre Deux Sommes,” Jazz Magazine 124 (November 1965), 47.

4 Monk interview with Russ Wilson, KJAZ San Francisco, April 17, 1960, recording in author’s possession.

5 “Overton, Monk at the New School,” June 20, 1963, CCP 104 (Disc 4), W. Eugene Smith Tapes, Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University; Sales, “I Wanted to Make It Better,” 34; Monk interview with Russ Wilson, KJAZ San Francisco, April 17, 1960.

6 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990; Les Tomkins interview with Thelonious Monk, 1965; See also Gonzalez, “Monk Talk,” 12.

7 Barry Farrell, “Loneliest Monk,” Time 83 (February 28, 1964), 85.

8 It has been difficult to reconstruct Simon Wolf’s life, beyond what Gordon Heath has left us in his memoir. Nevertheless, there are documents that reveal his age, background, occupation and address (he generally lived on the Upper West Side, having moved between 111th and 114th Streets). Simon Wolf, World War I Draft Registration Card #31-9-168A, June 5, 1917; Manhattan Address Directory, 1921.

9 Gordon Heath, Deep Are the Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 22; Interview With Gordon Heath, by Camille Billops, February 18, 1975, Hatch-Billops Collection. Heath recalled in the interview that Wolf studied with Mischa Elman, whom he identified as the first violinist for the New York Philharmonic, but Elman was never a regular member of the Philharmonic. In the book he simply identifies Wolf’s teacher as the concert master but did not mention his name. Based on the evidence available, Wolf had already identified himself as a professional performer around the time of World War I, so it is likely that Alfred Megerlin was his teacher. I am grateful to Richard Wandel, Associate Archivist of the New York Philharmonic Archives, for helping me figure this out. (Wandel e-mail to author, March 22, 2004.)

10 Heath was born September 20, 1918.

11 Heath, Deep are the Roots, 23.

12 Ibid., p. 35.

13 Sales, “I Wanted to Make It Better,” 34.

14 Morroe Berger, Edward Berger and James Patrick, Benny Carter: A Life in American Music, vol. 1 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1982), 14–16.

15 H. Flemming: “A Posthumous Salute to Freddie Johnson,” Coda, 4, no. 9 (1962), 3.

16 Mark Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 101; Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music is My Mistress (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 106; John Edward Hasse, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 75-79, 14-108, 140-42, 279; Draft Registration Card, William A. Procope, 3317, September 12, 1918; Berger, Berger and Patrick, Benny Carter, vol. 1, pp. 15–16.

17 U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule, Manhattan Borough, ED 383.

18 Alberta Saunders interview, February 10, 2004 and April 1, 2004.

19 U.S. Census 1920, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 457, p. 457; New York State Census, 1925, New York County—Enumeration of Inhabitants, Assembly District 5, Election District 51, p. 286; U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 374.

20 Alberta Saunders interview, February 10, 2004.

21 Gourse, Straight, No Chaser, 10. Gourse gives no citation for evidence that he studied under “Professor” Buster Archer, or that Monk substituted for him in his late teens. No surviving family member I spoke with remembers hearing about this, and there is no evidence that Barbara Monk continued to attend services at Union after they moved to 145th Street. Unfortunately, Union’s archives were destroyed in two separate fires. Besides, even if he did take lessons from Archer, he could not have been older than twelve years old since Union Baptist Church had already relocated to Harlem from West 63rd Street by 1930. Greater New York Federation of Churches, The Negro Churches of Manhattan, 30; Manhattan Address Directory, 1925, 1929, 1933–34; New York Times, July 21, 1926.

22 Thomas Monk, Jr., interview, February 16, 2004.

23 New York Times, June 26, 1928; The Children’s Aid Society, Seventy-Sixth Annual Report, 1928, p. 42. Thanks to Victor Remer, archivist at the Children’s Aid Society, for access to these valuable reports. AICP stands for the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor.

24 The Children’s Aid Society, Seventy-Sixth Annual Report, 1928, p. 41; New York Times, May 1, 1930.

25 Mavis Swire interview, March 8, 2004; “When I Was a Little Girl at the ‘Center,’ ” letter from Mavis Swire to Gil Snow, n.d., in Ms. Swire’s possession.

26 Theo Wilson interview with Liz Hinton, October 29, 2004, New York City.

27 Mavis Swire interview, March 8, 2004; “When I Was a Little Girl at the ‘Center,’ ” letter from Mavis Swire to Gil Snow, n.d., in Ms. Swire’s possession.

28 “Negro Child Centre in 63rd St; Budget of the Columbus Hill Settlement, Endowed by Rockefeller, Is Exceeded.” New York Times, May 1, 1930; “Columbus Hill Centre Will Reopen Soon; Closing is temporary for repairs, not permanent, due to lack of funds, officials say,” New York Times, May 2, 1930.

29 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990.

30 Thomas Monk, Sr. interview with Phil Schaap, WKCR, Thelonious Monk Birthday Broadcast, 1984.

31 Assignment for Mr. Marks, March 3, 1933, Thelonious Monk Composition book, Spring 1933, Monk family papers. On the other hand, Monk’s days at camp left him with a deep fascination with the country. In the same composition book three weeks earlier, he wrote that his favorite magazine was Boys Life, the official monthly of the Boy Scouts. Secretly, I think he wanted to be a Boy Scout himself. He liked, among other things, the “section . . . which teaches you necessary things while camping. Most boy scouts read them and I think it is a good magazine to read.” Assignment for Mr. Marks, February 9, 1933, Thelonious Monk Composition Book, Spring 1933.

32 Thelonious mentions playing at the community center in Robert Kotlowitz, “After Hours: Monk Talk,” Harper’s Magazine 223 (November 15, 1961), 21.

33 Interview with Nellie Monk, February 8, 2002; on Taylor’s address and family background, U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 383.

34 Quoted in Peter Keepnews, “Young Monk,” 8.

35 Correspondence from Jeni Dahmus, Archivist, The Juilliard School, November 10, 2000.

36 Nellie Monk interview, January 12, 2002.

37 “Student Cumulative Record, Board of Education, City of New York—Thelonious Monk,” Files of Stuyvesant High School. The only school records available are from junior high and high school. I examined the original version of his report card, which is in the possession of Stuyvesant High School. Evidently, when students graduate from junior high to high school, their report card goes with them, which is why JHS 69 grades are listed alongside his Stuyvesant grades.

38 “Student Cumulative Record, Board of Education, City of New York—Thelonious Monk,” Files of Stuyvesant High School.

39 Jackie Bonneau interview, October 30, 2008.

40 Files of Stuyvesant High School, “Student Cumulative Record, Board of Education, City of New York,” Thelonious Monk; Conversation with Renee Leveen, administrator, Stuyvesant High School.

41 NYC Civil List, “Officials and Employees of the City of New York,” The City Record, Jan–June, 1930, microfilm, roll 9; “Tenement ‘Santa’ Slain By Robbers,” New York Times, August 26, 1935; “Narcotics Sold in the Street,” New York Times, June 24, 1933; “Narcotics Raiders Bare ‘Catacombs,’ ” New York Times, February 2, 1939.

42 This story is repeated in Gourse, Straight, No Chaser, 8.

43 Stuyvesant High School, The Indicator: Class of January 1933 (New York, 1933); Stuyvesant High School, The Indicator: Class of January 1934 (New York, 1934); Stuyvesant High School, The Indicator: Class of June 1935 (New York, 1935). I’m grateful to Ms. Renee Leveen for granting me access to the original Stuyvesant yearbooks.

44 Files of Stuyvesant High School, “Student Cumulative Record, Board of Education, City of New York,” Thelonious Monk.

45 Assignment for Mr. Marks, March 15, 1933, Thelonious Monk Composition Book, Spring 1933. The passage to which he refers appears in the opening paragraphs. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (New York: Signet Classics, 1997), 14.

46 Assignment for Mr. Marks, March 13, 1933, Thelonious Monk Composition Book, Spring 1933.

47 Assignment for Mr. Marks, March 24, 1933, Thelonious Monk Composition Book, Spring 1933.

48 Thomas Monk, Sr. interview with Phil Schaap, WKCR, Thelonious Monk Birthday Broadcast, 1984; U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule, Manhattan Borough, E.D. 376.

49 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990.

50 Marv Goldberg, More Than Words Can Say: The Ink Spots and Their Music (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998); New York Amsterdam News, June 26, 1954. You can also hear Francis on The Ink Spots, The Beautiful Music Company (MCA MSD-35253 [1991]), and The Ink Spots, Their Greatest and Finest Performances (Reader’s Digest Music MSD3-37113 [1997]).

51 Nellie Monk interview, January 12, 2002.

52 Ibid.; Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

53 Department of Health, City of New York, Certificate of Death, Etta Smith, #7446, Municipal Archives. The Smiths lost another daughter, Rosa Smith, some time between late 1930 and 1932. She appears on the 1930 Census but by the time Etta died there are only three surviving siblings. U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Brooklyn Borough, ED 24-1559.

54 Department of Health, City of New York, Certificate of Death, Nellie Smith #17062; State of Florida, Certificate of Death, Elisha Bennett Smith, #12469; U.S. Census, 1880, Population Schedule: Sumter, Georgia, p. 124D.

55 Dr. Anna Lou Smith interview, April 7, 2004.

56 Ibid.; U.S. Census, 1880, Population Schedule: Sumter, Georgia, p. 124D; State of Florida, Certificate of Death, Elisha Bennett Smith, #12469; Interviews with Judith Smith, Evelyn Smith, Clifton Smith, and Benetta Bines, January 30, 2004. According to Nellie Smith’s death certificate, she had resided in New York for ten years at the time of her death in 1936. Department of Health, City of New York, Certificate of Death, Nellie Smith #17062.

57 U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Brooklyn Borough, ED 24-1559; Interviews with Judith Smith, Evelyn Smith, Clifton Smith, and Benetta Bines, January 30, 2004; Department of Health, City of New York, Certificate of Death, Etta Smith, #7446, Municipal Archives.

58 Nellie Monk interview, January 12, 2002.

59 Brown, “More Man Than Myth,” 45.

60 U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule, Manhattan Borough, ED 375; Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

61 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

62 Ibid.

63 U.S. Census, Population Schedule, Manhattan Borough, 1930, ED 375; Interviews with Monk/Smith family, January 30, 2004. Brereton made several recordings with the Noble Sissle Orchestra, some of which appear on Sidney Bechet, The Sidney Bechet Story 4-CD Set (Proper Box 18 [2001]); Lena Horne, Complete RCA-Victor Black & White Masters (Jazz Factory 22827 [2002]); Anthology of Big Band Swing 1930–1955 (Decca GRD2-629 [CD]). Also, he can be heard on Sarah Vaughan, Sarah Vaughan Sings with John Kirby and his Orchestra (Riverside RLP 2511 [1946]).

64 U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule, Manhattan Borough, ED 376; Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990; Mavis Swire interview, March 8, 2004; Interviews with Monk/Smith family, January 30, 2004.

65 Les Tomkins interview with Thelonious Monk, 1965.

66 Nellie Monk, interview, January 12, 2002.

67 See New York Age, March 31, May 19, June 16, 1934; March 9, March 16, 1935. The histories of the Apollo all agree that Amateur Night began in 1934, but they do not make a distinction between the Monday night competitions and the Wednesday night “Amateur Hour.” The black press, like the New York Age, reveal a more complicated story. Jack Schiffman, Harlem Heyday: A Pictorial History of Modern Black Show Business and the Apollo Theatre (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1984), 110; Ted Fox, Showtime at the Apollo (New York: Da Capo, 1993, orig. 1983).

68 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990.

69 Nellie Monk interview, January 12, 2002. Monk told writer Frank London Brown the same thing in 1959: his band kept winning “until the manager grew tired of paying the same amateur every week.” Frank London Brown, “Magnificent Monk of Music,” Ebony 14 (May 1959), 124.

70 New York Age, February 18, 1939; New York Age, July 29, 1939; see also, John H. Thompson, “Over 5,000 Amateurs have Appeared on the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Hour in 7 years,” Amsterdam News, June 15, 1940.

71 Amsterdam News, March 10, 1934.

72 Thomas Monk, Sr. interview with Phil Schaap, WKCR, Thelonious Monk Birthday Broadcast, 1984.

73 James M. Doran, Herman Chittison: A Bio-Discography (The International Association of Jazz Record Collectors: Monograph 2, 1993), 7–9. Monk could not have seen Chittison live again until 1940, when he finally returned to the states after a six-year residency in Europe. By 1942, Monk would have caught his hero on the weekly CBS series “Casey, Crime Photographer,” also known as “Flashgun Casey.” Chittison played “Ernie,” the house pianist at the fictional “Blue Note Café,” Casey’s main haunt where the cases were often solved. Many young pianists listened to the show religiously just to catch a few bars of Chittison’s piano. Horace Silver, who was eleven years younger than Thelonious, remembers: “I’d put my ear to the speaker so I could hear him more clearly. When he finished, I’d run downstairs to the kitchen where the piano was and try to copy some of what I had heard him play.” See Horace Silver, Let’s Get to the Nitty Gritty: The Autobiography of Horace Silver, ed. Phil Pastras (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 21; J. Randolph Cox and David S. Siegel, Flashgun Casey, Crime Photographer: From the Pulps, to the Radio and Beyond (Yorktown, NY: Book Hunter Press, 2005).

74 One can certainly hear this on recordings he made with singer Arita Day, recorded in Paris in 1934. Herman Chittison, 1933–1941 (Classics 690).

75 U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED: 364; Thomas Monk, Jr. interview, February 16, 2004; Alberta Saunders interview, February 10, 2004; For a description of the Friday night dances at the Center, Mavis Swire interview, March 8, 2004; “When I Was a Little Girl at the ‘Center,’ ” letter from Mavis Swire to Gil Snow, n.d., in Ms. Swire’s possession.

76 Thomas Monk, Jr., interview, February 16, 2004.

77 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

78 Ibid.; Interviews with Monk/Smith family, January 30, 2004.

79 The Best family resided at 315 E. 100th St. His father worked as an elevator repair man for an apartment building. U.S. Census, 1930, Manhattan Borough, Population Schedule: ED 31-810. On Denzil Best’s music background, Pat Harris, “None Better than Best with a Brush,” Down Beat (April 20, 1951), 18; Burt Korall, Drummin’ Men: The Heartbeat of Jazz – The Bebop Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 22–25; Ira Gitler, Jazz Masters of the Forties (New York: Da Capo Press, 1966), 190; “Drummer Denzil Best Dies of Skull Fracture,” Down Beat (July 1, 1965), 14.

80 George Simon, “Bop’s Dixie to Monk,” Metronome (April 1948), 34; also reprinted in George Simon, Simon Says: The Sights and Sounds of the Swing Era, 1935–1955 (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1971).

81 Hentoff, “The Private Word of Thelonious Monk,” Esquire (April 1960), 134.

82 Files of Stuyvesant High School, “Student Cumulative Record, Board of Education, City of New York,” Thelonious Monk.

83 New York Times, January 23, 1921; Harold G. Campbell, “High School Has a Boom,” New York Times, September 24, 1933.

4 “We Played and She Healed”

1 Alonzo White interview, February 23, 2004; Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990.

2 Thelonious Monk interview with Valerie Wilmer and John “Hoppy” Hopkins, March 16, 1965, cassette tape in author’s possession. I am extremely grateful to Ms. Wilmer for sharing a copy of this incredible taped interview.

3 Peter Keepnews, “Young Monk,” 9.

4 The only reference I’ve ever found for the evangelist’s name comes from Leslie Gourse (Straight, No Chaser), but her source, an elderly man who did not know Monk when I spoke with him, is questionable. There is no evidence of a Reverend Graham on the circuit, or anyone who had the nickname Texas Warhorse. Nevertheless, without evidence to the contrary, I will use this name to identify her.

5 Monk interview with Valerie Wilmer, March 16, 1965.

6 Peter Keepnews, “Young Monk,” 9.

7 Nat Hentoff, “Just Call Him Thelonious,” Down Beat (July 25, 1956), 15. To Time magazine’s Barry Farrell, he summed up his trip in five words: “we played and she healed.” “The Loneliest Monk,” Time 83 (February 28, 1964), 86.

8 Pearl Gonzalez, “Monk Talk,” Down Beat (October 28, 1971), 12.

9 Monk interview with Valerie Wilmer and John Hopkins, March 16, 1965. An edited version of this quote appeared in Wilmer’s article, “Monk on Monk,” Down Beat (June 3, 1965), 20–22.

10 Tammy L. Kernodle, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 182.

11 Charlotte Washington interview, April 5, 2004.

12 Monk interview with Valerie Wilmer and John Hopkins, March 16, 1965.

13 There are at least three denominations associated with the “sanctified” church: Holiness, Apostolic, and Pentecostal. The Holiness church have some identifiable African roots, but in its official capacity can be traced back at least to the 1880s. Unlike the Apostolic and Pentecostal churches, the Holiness church does not accept speaking in tongues as a doctrinal necessity, and in fact some Holiness churches reject it outright. Apostolics, on the other hand, reject Holiness and Pentecostal emphasis on the trinity, believing in the oneness of God as embodied in Jesus Christ. See, Cheryl J. Sanders, Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4–5; Hans Baer, The Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1984). One of the most fascinating essays on the sanctified church remains Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981).

14 Sanders, Saints in Exile, 7.

15 Geraldine Smith Interview, February 12, 2004.

16 Clarence Boyer, The Golden Age of Gospel, photos by Lloyd Yearwood (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 19. See also, James Daniel Tyus, “A Study of Four Religious Cults Operating Among Negroes” (M.A. Thesis, Howard University, 1938), copy in Dupree African American Pentecostal and Holiness Collection, 1876–1989, Schomburg Center for Black History and Culture, NYPL (Hereafter, Dupree Collection).

17 Jerma A. Jackson, Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 27–33.

18 Jackson, Singing in My Soul, 36–39.

19 Meharry H. Lewis, Mary Lena Lewis Tate: “A Street Called Straight” (Acts 9:11): The Ten Most Dynamic and Productive Black Female Holiness Preachers of the Twentieth Century (Nashville: The New and Living Way Publishing Co., 2002), 3–5, 10.

20 Lewis, Mary Lena Lewis Tate, 19. Evangelists also take instruction from Luke 4:18, 19.

21 For descriptions of these Pentecostal revivals; beginning with the first revivals at the historic Azusa Mission in Los Angeles in 1906, see Wayne Warner, ed., Touched by Fire: Eye-Witness Accounts of the Early 20th Century Pentecostal Revival (Logos International: Plainfield, NJ, 1978); Boyer, The Golden Age of Gospel, 13–18; Lewis, Mary Lena Lewis Tate, 22.

22 There are many descriptions of Pentecostal services and revivals; my own description here derives largely from Boyer, The Golden Age of Gospel,13–17; Warner, ed., Touched by Fire.

23 Wilmer, “Monk on Monk,” 21.

24 Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 101–111; Jackson, Singing in My Soul, 49–65.

25 Harris, Rise of the Gospel Blues, 99. There has been much written on the rise of gospel music in the twentieth century. Some of the essential texts include, Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (Limelight Editions, 1997); Bernice Johnson Reagon, We’ll Understand It Better By And By: Pioneering African-American Gospel Composers (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1992).

26 Jackson, Singing in My Soul, 50.

27 Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Searching for Tindley,” in We’ll Understand it Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers, 37–52; Horace Clarence Boyer, “Charles Albert Tindley,” in We’ll Understand It Better By and By, 53–78. See also Charles Tindley, New Songs of Paradise (Philadelphia: Paradise Publishers, 1916), copy in Box 15, Dupree Collection.

28 Monk uses this title when he introduces the song on a German television program in 1963. Thelonious Monk, “By and By, When the Morning Comes,” SWF-TV Baden Baden, Germany, March 2, 1963, unreleased recording in author’s possession. Incidentally, Monk’s titling of the song generated a great deal of confusion for record producers and discographers unfamiliar with black sacred music. Tindley was not given composer’s credit for the song. Instead, the song has been attributed to Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, who had composed an entirely different tune called “Bye and Bye,” a syrupy love song for the musical theater production of Dearest Enemy. The error is reproduced even in the most substantial discography to date, Chris Sheridan, Brilliant Corners: A Bio-Discography of Thelonious Monk (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2001), 95 and 121. Dearest Enemy premiered on Broadway in 1925 and was made into a film in 1955. See Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Rodgers and Hart: A Musical Anthology (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 1984). A similar though less severe example of this problem is Columbia Records’ decision to use Monk’s title, “This Is My Story, This Is My Song,” for his version of “Blessed Assurance.” Once again, Monk called the song by the first line of the chorus (or the refrain). See Thelonious Monk, Straight, No Chaser (Columbia CL2651).

29 Clark Terry, In Orbit (Riverside RLP12-271).

30 Reagon, “Searching for Tindley,” 51.

31 Sanders, Saints in Exile, 61–65; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3–97, for the most substantive treatment of the ring shout.

32 Religious scholar Hugh Roberts goes so far as to suggest that Monk’s dance was a form of sacred expression, an act of worship. He wrote: “even the improvisatory dance with shuffling feet and churning elbows that became one of Monk’s trademarks . . . was part of his individuation and individual religious expression. Though he apparently used it to check out the rhythm of the music that was playing either audibly or in his inner ear, it was a holy dance—a dance to his individuational, musical objectification of God’s will.” Hugh J. Roberts, “Improvisation, Individuation, and Immanence: Thelonius [sic] Monk,” Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology 3, no. 2 (Fall 1989), 50–56.

33 Lewis, Mary Lena Lewis Tate, 22–23; see also, Boyer, The Golden Age of Gospel, 19.

34 Lewis, Mary Lena Lewis Tate, 24.

35 Mary Lou Williams, “Autobiographical Notebook, #2,” manuscript, p. 173, Personal Papers, Mary Lou Williams Collection.

36 Mary Lou Williams, “Then Came Zombie Music,” Melody Maker (May 8, 1954), 11; on the jazz scene in Kansas City, see Tammy L. Kernodle, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 50–51; Linda Dahl, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (NY: Pantheon Books, 1999), 190; Nathan W. Pearson, Jr., Goin’ to Kansas City (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 98–99.

37 Marcellus Green interview, November 11, 2003. I can’t establish an exact date for Monk’s gig with Andy Kirk, but Thelonious Monk, Jr., has also confirmed the story that Kirk hired Monk. Thelonious Monk, Jr., interview, April 4, 2005. Leslie Gourse also acknowledges Monk’s brief stint with Andy Kirk, but she claims it was for the reopening of the Cotton Club. This is impossible because it reopened in 1936 and closed in 1940. Leslie Gourse, Straight No Chaser, 39.

38 Ad for Moten’s band, Kansas City Call, June 14, 1935. See also, Pearson, Jr., Goin’ to Kansas City; Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix, Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz (New York and London: Continuum, 2001), 305–309.

39 Douglas Henry Daniels, One-O’Clock Jump: The Unforgettable History of the Oklahoma City Blue Devils (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 164–180; see also, Stanley Dance, The World of Count Basie (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980); Count Basie, Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie, as told to Albert Murray (New York: Random House, 1985).

40 Douglas Henry Daniels, Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester ‘Pres’ Young (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 188–89.

41 Quoted in Shipton, A New History of Jazz, 308.

42 Monk interview with Valerie Wilmer and John Hopkins, March 16, 1965.

43 Frank London Brown, “Magnificent Monk of Music,” Ebony 14 (May 1959), 124.

44 Thomas Monk, Jr., Interview, February 16, 2004; Charlotte Washington Interview, April 5, 2004.

45 Thomas Monk, Jr., Interview, February 16, 2004.

46 Ibid.; Charlotte Washington Interview, April 5, 2004; Alonzo White interview, February 23, 2004.

47 Department of Health, City of New York, “Certificate of Death, Nellie Smith #17062,” Municipal Archives, Manhattan.

48 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004; Anna Lou Smith, interview, April 7, 2004.

52 Thomas Monk, Sr. interview with Phil Schaap, WKCR, Thelonious Monk Birthday Broadcast, October 10, 1984; T. S. Monk, Jr., interview with Phil Schaap, October 10, 1994.

5 “Why Can’t You Play Music Like the Ink Spots?”

1 Nellie Monk interview, January 12, 2002.

2 Charlotte Washington interview, April 5, 2004.

3 Mavis Swire interview, March 8, 2004.

4 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

5 Theolonious Monk, interview, January 30, 2004.

6 Thomas Monk, Jr., Interview, February 16, 2004; Alonzo White interview, February 23, 2004; Monk family group interview, January 30, 2004.

7 New York State Census, 1925, New York County—Enumeration of Inhabitants, Assembly District 5, Election District 46, p. 326; U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, 31-374 (April 1930); New York City Directory, 1931–1932. Below is a list of all the Richardson children and their ages according to the 1930 Census: Wilbert 13; Rubie 12; Linette 11; Rose 8; Archibald 6; Lunsford about 18 months.

8 Alonzo White interview, February 23, 2004.

9 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004; Nellie Monk interview, January 12, 2002.

10 Evelyn Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

11 Thomas Monk, Jr., interview, February 16, 2004.

12 Theolonious Monk Interview, January 30, 2004.

13 Nat Hentoff, “Just Call Him Thelonious,” Down Beat (July 25, 1956), 15.

14 Orrin Keepnews, “Thelonious Monk’s music may be first sign of be-bop’s legitimacy,” Record Changer (April 1948), 5, 20; also reprinted in Orrin Keepnews, The View From Within, 112.

15 Valerie Wilmer and John “Hoppy” Hopkins interview with Monk, March 16, 1965; Peter Keepnews, “Young Monk,” 11.

16 Pianist and writer Herbie Nichols was the first to identify his Klein. Herbie Nichols, “The Jazz Pianist—Purist,” Rhythm (July 1946), 11–12.

17 International Musician 37, no. 9 (March 1939), 20.

18 Emilie Elkin Khair, Passion’s Piano: the Eddie Heywood Story, Based on the Private Account of Evelyn Heywood About Her Beloved Music Man, Eddie (Atlanta, GA: Care Publishing House, 1997).

19 Jean Clouzet and Michel Delorme, “L’amertume du prophète,” Jazz Magazine, 9, no. 93 (April 1963), 38. Further evidence of Monk’s relationship with Heywood as well as the older generation of stride pianists is a wonderful photograph of Monk, Art Tatum, and Eddie Heywood together shooting the breeze in Rhythm magazine. See John R. Gibson, “A Cavalcade of the Negro Dance Musician,” Rhythm (July 1946), 22.

20 Billy Taylor interview, January 26, 2004. I can date Taylor’s visit fairly accurately because Benny Goodman played at the World’s Fair in September of 1939. Ross Firestone, Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 272.

21 Paul Matthews, “Billy Taylor Interview (Part 2),” Cadence (November 1995), 23.

22 Billy Taylor Interview, January 26, 2004.

23 Matthews, “Billy Taylor Interview,” 24.

24 Billy Taylor Interview, January 26, 2004. He also tells a version of this story in Leslie Gourse, Straight, No Chaser, 16. Much is made of the “fact” that James P. Johnson lived in Thelonious Monk’s neighborhood. However, he was not living there when Monk began playing music. In 1930, he lived in Queens on 108th Avenue, and by the time Monk appears on the scene he was firmly ensconced in Harlem, at 267 West 140th Street. See U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Queens Borough, ED 1161.

25 Matthews, “Billy Taylor Interview,” 25.

26 Willie “The Lion” Smith, with George Hoefer, Music on My Mind: The Memoirs of an American Pianist (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 155.

27 Ibid., 253.

28 Teddy Wilson, with Arie Ligthart and Humphrey Van Loo, Teddy Wilson Talks Jazz (New York and London: Continuum, 2001), 114.

29 Those who have defended Monk from critics who assert that he has no “technique” tend to point to moments when he sounds like James P. Johnson or Art Tatum or Teddy Wilson. Examples abound, from Frank London Brown’s 1958 interview (p. 15) to Gunther Schuller, “Thelonious Monk,” Jazz Review (November 1958), 23, not to mention Mary Lou Williams’s comment about Monk’s technique in the previous chapter. (For an exhaustive list of examples and an excellent discussion of why proponents of Monk rely on these exceptional moments to prove he has technique, see David Kahn Feurzeig, “Making the Right Mistakes: James P. Johnson, Thelonious Monk, and the Trickster Aesthetic,” [Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1997], 45–61.) In other words, it is when Monk sounds like someone else that he demonstrates “technique” and facility. If we buy this line of reasoning, then we might conclude that all he learned from the Harlem stride pianists was how to play like them, not techniques that might advance his own approach to the piano. I concur with musicologist David Feurzeig, who shows us that what we think of as Monk’s “eccentric,” unorthodox, and dissonant playing owes a great deal to James P. Johnson and company. Besides Monk’s characteristic “bent notes” (which we hear on Johnson’s recording of “Mule Walk”), Feurzeig identifies what he calls “trickster elements” in both of their music. These elements include “discontinuity, harmonic conflict, splattered notes, and a loping unevenness” (p. 61). Although it is beyond the scope of this book, Feurzeig makes a persuasive case for an affinity between Johnson and Monk, though he is skeptical of the idea that Monk spent any considerable time with Johnson.

30 U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 581. On the history of the Kuna, see James Howe, A People Who Would Not Kneel: Panama, the United States, and the San Blas Kuna (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998).

31 George Hoefer, “Little Benny Harris,” Down Beat (September 12, 1963), 38.

32 Quoted in Dick Hadlock, “Benny Harris and the Coming of Modern Jazz,” Metronome 78, no. 10 (1961), 18.

33 Hoefer, “Little Benny Harris,” 38.

34 Ibid.; Hadlock, “Benny Harris,” 18–19; Leonard Feather, Inside Be-bop (New York: J. J. Robbins and Sons, 1948), 85.

35 Mike Hennessey, Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 6–24; George Hoefer: “Klook: Kenny Clarke’s Early Recordings,” Down Beat (March 28, 1963), 23; Burt Korall, “View from the Seine,” Down Beat (December 5,1963), 17; Shapiro and Hentoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 347–48; Ira Gitler, Jazz Masters of the Forties (New York: Da Capo, 1983, 2nd ed.), 175–179.

36 Ira Gitler, Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 52; James M. Doran and Barry Kernfeld, “White, Sonny,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd ed., edited by Barry Kernfeld. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/J481800 (accessed February 23, 2009). Leonard Feather identified White as Clarke’s cousin, but I’ve not been able to confirm this and given the frequent errors in Feather’s text, I’m a bit skeptical. (Feather, Inside Be-Bop, 8.) On White, see also Donald Clarke, Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 171–72.

37 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990.

38 George Simon, “Bop’s Dixie to Monk,” Metronome (April 1948), 34; slso reprinted in George Simon, Simon Says: The Sights and Sounds of the Swing Era, 1935–1955 (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1971). The official spelling of “Massapequa” has no “h” on the end, but it is frequently spelled “Massapequah.”

39 On Jimmy Wright’s recordings, see Tom Lord Jazz Discography, CD-Rom, Version 4.4.1. In 1939, he resided at 64 West 128th St. [See Local 802 Directory.]

40 Albert Vollmer, “Purnell, Keg,” In The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd ed., edited by Barry Kernfeld. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/J365600 (accessed February 24, 2009). Purnell lived at 55 West 110th in 1939, then moved to West 113th in 1941. [See Local 802 Directory.]

41 Minutes of Regular Membership Meeting, October 11, 1935, Records of AFM Local 802, microfilm, Tamiment Library.

42 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Without A Song: New York Musicians Strike Out Against Technology,” in Dana Frank, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Howard Zinn, Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 121–155. On the decline in record sales and overall conditions of the industry in the 1930s, see David W. Stowe, Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 94–140; Shipton, A New History of Jazz, 318–319; Ted Gioa, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 136–37.

43 Kelley, “Without a Song,” 138; New York Times, November 5, December 13 and 19, 1934.

44 David W. Stowe, Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 122–23, 127; Samuel B. Charters and Leonard Kunstadt, Jazz: A History of the New York Scene (New York: Da Capo Press, 1981), 262–63.

45 Minutes of the Executive Board, February 4, 1947, Records of AFM Local 802. It should be noted that scale for dance bands in general was lower than scale for concert performers. In 1936 musicians in dance bands received a minimum of $42.00 for a seven-day work week consisting of five hour evenings and three matinees (a total of forty-four hours), concert performers earned $60.00 for six evenings for four-hour performances, or twenty-four hours of work. And they were entitled to an additional $10.00 for Sunday evening concerts. Not surprisingly, film studio musicians fetched the highest rates, earning $200.00 for a five-and-one-half-day work week not exceeding thirty-three hours. AFM Local 802, Price List Governing Special and Regular Engagements of the Associated Musicians of Greater New York (Newark, 1936), 44.

46 Kernodle, Soul on Soul, 76–77; Stowe, Swing Changes, 122–127.

47 Stowe, Swing Changes, 122.

48 Ibid., 129.

49 Simon, “Bop’s Dixie to Monk,” 34.

50 Red Callender and Elaine Cohen, Unfinished Dream: The Musical World of Red Callender (London and New York: Quartet Books, 1985), 40–41.

51 Dr. Anna Lou Smith, interview, April 7, 2004.

52 “Geraldine McMillan and James Smith,” Marriage license, June 27, 1938, Vol. 6, no. 13432, Office of the City Clerk, Manhattan.

53 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004; Jackie Bonneau interview, October 30, 2008. Evidently, Geraldine was three months pregnant when she and Sonny married.

54 “Six Trade Schools Will Reopen Today,” New York Times, January 7, 1935; “Trade School Chartered,” New York Times, April 17, 1935; New York Times, September 18, 1938; New York Times, September 23, 1938; New York Times, January 4, 1940.

55 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

6 “They Weren’t Giving Any Lectures”

1 This description of Minton’s was constructed out of many different sources, all cited below. The reference to the bathroom door slamming, however, comes from George Hoefer, “Thelonious Monk in the ’40s,” Down Beat (October 25, 1962), 43–44. And one can hear Monk’s name shouted, usually by musicians but perhaps by audiences, too, on some of the recordings made by Jerry Newman cited below.

2 Nat Hentoff, “Just Call Him Thelonious,” Down Beat (July 25, 1956), 15–16; Neither Bud Powell, nor Charlie Parker, were on the scene then, and Mary Lou Williams doesn’t settle in New York until 1943, months after Charlie Christian had already died of tuberculosis. And as for Dizzy, Monk’s recollection is that the great bebop trumpeter appeared at Minton’s “very rarely.” Orrin Keepnews, “Thelonious Monk’s Music,” 5, 20, also reprinted in Keepnews, The View From Within, 112.

3 Ira Gitler, Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 85.

4 Ralph Ellison, “The Golden Age, Time Past,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Signet Books, 1964), 200.

5 U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service, Historic Preservation Certification Application: The Cecil Hotel, Location of Minton’s Playhouse, Submitted by 106-10 W. 118th Street Low-Income Housing Partnership, July 3, 1986; also author observations.

6 There is almost no biographical information on M. H. Minton. Using the 1920 census, I was able to establish his birthplace and birth year as well as his residence on West 140th Street in Harlem. He was married to Ella Minton but had no children. I found it particularly interesting that he was identified as “Mulatto” rather than Negro, which suggests he was light-skinned and, in some circumstances, might have been able to pass for white. U.S. Census, 1920, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 1439.

7 Wilbur Sweatman, Sweatman’s Jazz Band (Crescent 10058); Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 260.

8 Percival Outram, “Activities Among Union Musicians,” New York Age, January 28, 1933.

9 Willie “The Lion” Smith, Music on My Mind, 159.

10 Percival Outram, “Activities Among Union Musicians,” New York Age, January 28, 1933.

11 Alan Groves and Alyn Shipton, The Glass Enclosure: The Life of Bud Powell (New York and London: Continuum, 2001), 25. Rex Stewart talks about Caldwell, but he never mentions him playing at Minton’s. See Rex Stewart, with Claire P. Gordon, Boy Meets Horn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 65–57, 72–75.

12 Minton’s ad, Amsterdam News, December 21, 1940; U.S. Census, 1920, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 1353; U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 31-905. Garvin Bushell is among those listed as residents of the Hotel Grampion.

13 See advertisement in Amsterdam News, January 11, 1941. All other sources except for an early interview with Kenny Clarke place Hill’s hiring in October of 1940, but I have found no evidence for this. He might have been in negotiations with Minton then, but he was still playing at the Savoy and Vanderburg was publicly identified as manager of Minton’s Playhouse. See Burt Korall, “View from the Seine,” Down Beat (December 5, 1963), 17; Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told by the Men Who Made it (New York: Dover, 1966, orig. 1955), 339.

14 “Teddy Hill Drawing ’em At Minton’s,” Amsterdam News, February 15, 1941.

15 Alyn Shipton, Groovin’ High 36, 88; Shapiro and Hentoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, 348–49.

16 Mike Hennessey, Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 17–24; Hoefer, “Klook,”, 23; Korall, “View from the Seine,” 17; Shapiro and Hentoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 347–48’ Ira Gitler, Jazz Masters of the Forties (New York: Da Capo Press, 1966).

17 Shipton, Groovin’ High, 45, 87–88; DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, 219. It is worth noting that bassist John Simmons also included tenor saxophonist Kermit Scott as one of the original members. See “Interview with John Simmons, by Patricia Willard,” Tapes 1–9, NEA Oral History Project, Washington, D. C. 1977, p. 53, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.

18 U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 31-902. He was born April 10, 1919 [Social Security Death Index]. By the time he started working at Minton’s, he was living close by at 352 West 117th, apt. #54. See Local 802 of AFM Directory (Newark: International Press, 1941), 120. Fenton had just done a live radio broadcast for WNYC on February 15, 1941 with Young, Shad Collins (trumpet), John Collins (electric guitar), and Harold “Doc” West on drums. Lester Young, Historical Prez - Lester Young 1940–44 (Everybody’s EV-3002).

19 James Patrick, “Al Tinney, Monroe’s Uptown House, and the Emergence of Modern Jazz in Harlem,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies II (1983), 165.

20 The story that Clarke initially planned to hire Sonny White comes from Hennessey, Klook, 38. However, Hennessey claims that White turned him down because he was touring with Billie Holiday. He had already left Holiday by the time Clarke put the band together. What is more likely is that he was committed to Benny Carter’s orchestra. For more on Sonny White, see Donald Clarke, Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 171–72.

21 Les Tomkins interview with Thelonious Monk, 1965.

22 Hennessey, Klook, 14.

23 Ibid., 46–47.

24 Scale for a member of a dance band, working a seven-day schedule with Sunday matinees was $42.00 a week. Monk worked only six nights a week, so I am estimating what he might have received. AFM Local 802, Price List Governing Special and Regular Engagements of the Associated Musicians of Greater New York (Newark, 1936), 44.

25 Doug Long, “Duke Groner Interview,” Cadence 9, no. 4 (April 1983), 18.

26 Paul Chevigny, Gigs: Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 57–59; Maxwell T. Cohen, The Police Card Discord (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993). On the Waiters’ Union strikes in 1940, see “Restaurant Strike Enters Second Year,” New York Times, January 20, 1940; “Marathon Pickets Pass 700th Day at Chore with Café Fight as Far from Peace as Ever,” New York Times, December 22, 1940; “Waiters to Cool Heels,” New York Times, October 18, 1941; “AFL Urges Waiters to Fight Cabaret Tax,” New York Times, May 13, 1944.

27 George Hoefer, “Thelonious Monk in the ’40s,” Down Beat (October 25, 1962), 43. While nearly all observers agree that not much dancing took place at Minton’s, they differ on the extent to which audiences came to hear the music. Hoefer recalls, “No one sat and listened much, except on rare occasions when someone like Helen Humes sang a number with the band.” (p. 43). Yet, Duke Groner tells us, “it wasn’t noted for dancing, it was just for listening.” Long, “Duke Groner Interview,” 14.

28 Long, “Duke Groner Interview,” 13; Reg Cooper, “Roche, Betty,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd ed., edited by Barry Kernfeld. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/J383500 (accessed February 24, 2009); Ellington, Music is My Mistress, 222–223.

29 Charles Walton, “Bronzeville Conversation with Duke Groner,” Oral Interview from Jazz Institute of Chicago, www.jazzinstituteofchicago.org; Long, “Duke Groner Interview,” 13.

30 Long, “Duke Groner Interview,” 13; DeVeaux, Birth of Bebop, 217–227; and especially the various recordings made by Jerry Newman. See below.

31 George Hoefer, “Thelonious Monk in the ’40s,” 43. Thelonious loved Laurence. When critic Stanley Dance asked him to name the greatest dancer he’d ever seen, he unequivocably answered “Baby Laurence.” Then again, virtually every musician to whom he posed the same question gave the same reply. Laurence was universally revered by modern jazz musicians. See Stanley Dance, “Three Score: A Quiz for Jazz Musicians,” Metronome (April 1961), 48. On Baby Laurence, see Jaqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 94–96; Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994, orig. 1968), 337.

32 Long, “Duke Groner Interview,” 13. In Monk’s words, “Monday used to be a night that nothing was happening, but they used to have ‘Monday Night At Minton’s,’ as they called it. And generally, the show that was at the Apollo, they used to come in and eat and drink, and they’d have a party for them. That helped some, too. And all the different bands, and everybody, would always come in, and hear us play. And so it got around, about the way we were playing.” Quoted from Les Tomkins interview with Thelonious Monk, 1965.

33 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 139–140.

34 Patrick, “Al Tinney,” 177. Tinney remembers the union rep, Bob Roberts, coming to Monroe’s fairly often, but because they were working past 4:00 a.m., they were facing other violations.

35 Alyn Shipton, Groovin’ High, 87–88, 91–93; Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 134, 136–37; Donald L. Maggin, Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 115–126.

36 The use of “flatted fifths” (or augmented 4ths) and augmented and diminished 9ths.

37 Patrick, “Al Tinney, Monroe’s Uptown House,” 150–159. Specific personnel come from the original acetates of recordings made by Jerry Newman at Monroe’s in 1941. He wrote the names down on the labels and these originals are in the possession of Bob Suneblick, who graciously passed this information to me.

38 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 140. Although Charlie Parker also established a presence at Monroe’s, he didn’t show up in earnest until 1943. In fact, according to Al Tinney, neither Parker nor Dizzy had any appreciable presence at Monroe’s in those early days. Patrick, “Al Tinney,” 159–160.

39 Shapiro and Hentoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, 337.

40 Hennessey, Klook, 43–44; see also Samuel B. Charters and Leonard Kunstadt, in their popular text Jazz: A History of the New York Scene; Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 139–140; DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, 219; Gitler, ed., Swing to Bop, 75–108 passim. Given the recorded evidence from Minton’s it seems as if Monk rarely played the blues. While he would go on to write a number of blues pieces (“Blue Monk,” “Functional,” “Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are,” etc.), he only recorded two blues pieces during his first few recording sessions with Blue Note: “Misterioso” from July 2, 1948, and “Straight, No Chaser” (July 23, 1951).

41 Hentoff, “Just Call Him Thelonious,” 15.

42 Sir Charles Thompson, interview, August 11, 2003.

43 Ira Peck, “The Piano Man Who Dug Be-bop,” PM (February 22, 1948), p. M7.

44 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 262.

45 Korall, “View from the Seine,” 17.

46 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 139.

47 Patrick, “Al Tinney,” 158.

48 Shapiro and Hentoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, 342; Hoefer, “Thelonious Monk in the ’40s,” 43. Jerry Newman recalls seeing Monk working on the piano in the afternoon when he was setting up his sound equipment.

49 Long, “Duke Groner Interview,” 15; Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 134; Peck, “The Piano Man Who Dug Be-bop,” M7.

50 See Chapter 17.

51 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990.

52 Bassist Red Callender remembers how hard he worked in New York: “By the time you get off you’re exhausted. During our breaks we’d go out the back door to the alley, stand around drinking, smoking weed, chewing bennies—anything to keep going because the gig was so long.” As a result of hanging outside in the cold while sweaty from the gig, he came down with pneumonia. Red Callender, Unfinished Dream, 54–55.

53 Peck, “The Piano Man Who Dug Be-bop,” M7.

54 Sales, “ ‘I Wanted to Make it Better,’ ” 36.

55 Nat Hentoff, Jazz Life, 188.

56 Scott DeVeaux, “ ‘Nice Work if You Can Get It’: Thelonious Monk and Popular Song,” Black Music Research Journal 19, no. 2 (Fall 1999), 169–186.

57 Sales, “I Wanted to Make it Better,” 35.

58 Leonard Feather, Inside Be-Bop (New York: J. J. Robbins and Sons, 1949), 7; Hennessey, Klook, 42.

59 The A section of their 32-bar composition is built on chromatic harmonic movement (C#7–D7 and D#7–E7).

60 All three definitions from Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, MA: C.&G. Merriam Company, 1929), 739. According to critic George Simon in a profile on Monk published in 1948, “epistrophe” comes from “a botanical term that means ‘the reversion of the abnormal to the normal.’ ” It’s not clear where Simon got this definition, especially since the only botanical use of the term refers specifically to the “position assumed by the chloroplasts upon . . . the cell walls, upon exposure of the plant to diffuse daylight.” Simon, “Bop’s Dixie to Monk,” 35.

61 Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, MA.: C.&G. Merriam Company, 1929), 739.

62 In fact, when Clarke first recorded the song in 1946 with his own band, rather than improvise on the original chromatic progressions, the band reverts to “I Got Rhythm” changes in the A-section. It is a bit surprising given that the band comprised some of the finest modern jazz artists on the scene, including pianist Bud Powell, trumpeters Fats Navarro and Kenny Dorham, and saxophonist Sonny Stitt. Kenny Clarke, Kenny Clarke: 1946–1948 (Classics CD 71171).

63 Certificate of Copyright Registration, “Epistrophy; Music by Kenneth Clarke Spearmen and T. Monk,” E unp. No. 371980, Received June 2, 1941.

64 Certificate of Copyright Registration, “Harlem is Awful Messy; Words and Music by Oran Page, Joseph Guy, and Thelonious Monk (words and melody),” E unpub. No. 270021, Received September 16, 1941. Unfortunately, the original lead sheet has long been lost and there is no extant copy.

65 Long, “Duke Groner Interview,” 17.

66 Hentoff, “Just Call Him Thelonious,” 15.

67 Hennessey, Klook, 47.

68 Hentoff, “Just Call Him Thelonious,” 15–16; see also, Les Tomkins interview with Thelonious Monk, 1965.

69 Hoefer, “Thelonious Monk in the ’40s,” 43; Liner notes, Charlie Christian, Vox Presents Charlie Christian (Vox VSP 302); Chris Sheridan, Brilliant Corners, 1–2; Liner notes, Harry Sweets Edison and Hot Lips Page, Sweets, Lips and Lots of Jazz (Xanadu 123); Liner notes, Thelonious Monk, After Hours at Minton’s (Definitive Records, DRCD1197); See also, Ross Russell, Bird Lives!: The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie Parker (New York: Charter House, 1973), 136.

70 Once the war started, glass-based acetates replaced aluminum due to war rations, but all of his recordings of Monk at Minton’s took place in the spring and summer of 1941, before Pearl Harbor.

71 Hoefer, “Thelonious Monk in the ’40s,” 43; Chris Sheridan, Brilliant Corners, 1–2.

72 Hoefer, “Thelonious Monk in the ’40s,” 43.

73 Les Tomkins interview with Thelonious Monk, 1965.

74 Bob Bernotas, “Johnny Griffin interview,” www.melmartin.com/html_pages/Interviews/griffin.html

75 Trumpet Battle at Minton’s (Xanadu 107); also available on Thelonious Monk, After Hours at Minton’s (Definitive Records, DRCD1197).

76 “My Melancholy Baby” was composed by Ernie Burnett and George A. Norton, although there are other claimants to the melody and lyrics. See William Emmett Studwell, The Popular Song Reader (New York and London: The Haworth Press, 1994), 29.

77 “My Melancholy Baby,” solo piano recorded in Paris, June 1938. Herman Chittison, Herman Chittison, 1933–1941 (Classics 690).

78 First appeared on Joe Guy/Billie Holiday, Harlem Odyssey (Xanadu 112); also Thelonious Monk, After Hours at Minton’s (Definitive Records, DRCD1197).

79 Willie “The Lion” Smith, Music on My Mind,155.

80 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 207.

81 Pianist Cecil Taylor developed the notion of the piano as an “orchestral” instrument. For Taylor’s ideas, see Cecil Taylor, “Sound Structure of Subculture Becoming Major Breath/Naked Fire Gesture,” liner notes to Unit Structures (Blue Note CDP 7 84237 2); also quoted in Andrew W. Bartlett, “Cecil Taylor, Identity Energy, and the Avant-Garde African American Body,” 279. Similar comments on Taylor’s “comping” can be found in Robert Levin’s liner notes to Coltrane Time (Blue Note CDP 7 84461 2); Jost, Free Jazz, 75.

82 Long, “Duke Groner Interview,” 14

83 Don Byas, Midnight at Minton’s (Onyx 208); Sheridan, Brilliant Corners, 7. Sheridan suggests that the date of the recording could have only been late May (May 20–21, 1941) because that was the only time Don Byas was in New York. Sheridan also lists Taps Miller as a regular drummer at Minton’s, but from my research he was a singer, tap dancer, and trumpet player.

84 Les Tomkins interview with Thelonious Monk, 1965.

85 Newman quoted in Hoefer, “Thelonious Monk in the ’40s,” 44.

86 Herbert H. Nichols, “The Jazz Life,” New York Age, July 5, 1941. Nichols knew the scene first-hand because he had become a regular at Monroe’s Uptown House as early as 1938 and showed up frequently at Minton’s just to hear Monk. A. B. Spellman, Four Lives in the Bebop Business (New York: Limelight Editions, 1985, orig. 1966), 157.

87 “A History of WKCR’s Jazz Programming: An interview with Phil Schaap, conducted, transcribed, and edited by Evan Spring, October 5th, 1992,” http://www.columbia.edu/cu/wkcr/jazz/schaap.html.

88 Unissued recording, WKCR archives, Columbia University.

89 Mary Lou Williams, Mary Lou Williams Story 1930/1941 (EPM Musique, Jazz Archives No. 116 159002). These four bars were also recorded by pianist Al Haig as “Opus Caprice” and again by Sonny Stitt as “Symphony Hall Swing.” See Hennessey, Klook, 48.

90 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990.

91 Peck, “The Piano Man Who Dug Be-bop,” M7.

92 Hennessey, Klook, 48.

93 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 144. Duke Groner also talked about Monk’s drinking. See Long, “Duke Groner Interview,” 15. See also, Jacques Ponzio and Francis Postif, Blue Monk: Portraits de Thelonious, 59–62.

94 Peck, “The Piano Man,” M7; Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, 341. By the time Monk submitted his Selective Service registration card in December of 1941, he reported that he was unemployed. Registration Card, Thelonious Monk, Order #3447, Selective Service Records, New York State.

95 Hoefer, “Thelonious Monk in the ’40s,” 43.

7 “Since You Went Away I Missed You”

1 Selective Service Classification Record, Local Board 23, Thelonious Sphere Monk, 3447, p. 109, Selective Service Records, New York State. He submitted his Selective Service registration card on October 18, 1940, received his questionnaire on October 6, 1941. On December 15 they sent out the first notice of his classification; I’m assuming he received it the next day since it came from the neighborhood.

2 Registration Card, Thelonious Monk, Order #3447, Selective Service Records, New York State.

3 Ibid.

4 Not only was the U.S. military still segregated, but blacks were deemed unfit for combat until 1944. See, Mary P. Motley, ed., The Invisible Soldier: The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War II (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975); Bernard C. Nalty, The Right to Fight: African-American Marines in World War II (Washington, D.C., History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps: Supt. of Docs., U.S. G.P.O., 1995); Neil A. Wynn, The Afro-American and the Second World War (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975).

5 Cootie Williams and his Orchestra, “Fly right,” first appeared on Sounds of Harlem, vol. 3 (Col C3L33).

6 Scott DeVeaux, “Bebop and the Recording Industry: The 1942 AFM Recording Ban Reconsidered,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 41, no. 1 (Spring 1988), 126–165; Anders S. Lunde, “The American Federation of Musicians and the Recording Ban,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 12, No. 1 (Spring 1948), 45–56; James P. Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890–1950 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 137–161.

7 Millinder was at the Savoy through most of July and the first half of August. “Where the Bands are Playing,” Down Beat (July 1, 1942), 22; “Where the Bands are Playing,” Down Beat (August 1, 1942), 22; “Where the Bands are Playing,” Down Beat (August 15, 1942), 22.

8 Sales, “I Wanted to Make it Better,” 34; on Gillespie with Millinder, see Shipton, Groovin’ High, 103; Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 162–163.

9 Fenton recorded with Millinder in July 1942. Lucky Millinder, Apollo Jump (Affinity 1004).

10 Frank Driggs and Barry Kernfeld, “Millinder, Lucky,” In The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd ed., edited by Barry Kernfeld. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/J301700 (accessed January 17, 2009); Charles Garrod, Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra (Zephyrhills, FL: Joyce Record Club, 1994); “Lucky Millinder Dies,” Down Beat (November 3, 1966), 11; Bob Rusch, “Al McKibbon Interview,” transc. Kea D. Rusch, Cadence 13, no. 3 (March 1987), 15–16.

11 Jacques Ponzio and Francis Postif, Blue Monk, 70.

12 Minutes of the Trial Board, September 8, 1942, AFM Local 802, microfilm reel 5320, p. 268.

13 Ad, Amsterdam News, September 5, 1942.

14 Minutes of the Trial Board, September 8, 1942, AFM Local 802, microfilm reel 5320, p. 268.

15 Minutes of the Trial Board, October 27, 1942, AFM Local 802, microfilm reel 5320, pp. 320–321.

16 Ibid.

17 He can be heard with Al Sears on the compilation disc, Ridin’ the Riff (Charly CRB 1128).

18 Minutes of the Trial Board, November 4, 1942, AFM Local 802, microfilm reel 5320, pp. 326–327.

19 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004; Nellie Monk interview, January 12, 2002; Alonzo White interview, February 23, 2004.

20 Thomas Monk, Jr., interview, February 16, 2004.

21 Before moving to Lyman Place, the Smiths lived briefly on Home Street, then Prospect Avenue. They were also the first black family to integrate Lyman Place, which had been predominantly Jewish. Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

22 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004; ad in New York Times, April 25, 1943. On Bridgeport Brass during World War II, see www.heritageresearch.com/War%20Facilities; Oral histories in “Bridgeport Working: Voices from the 20th Century,” http://www.bridgeporthistory.org.

23 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004; Dr. Anna Lou Smith interview, April 7, 2004.

24 Nellie Monk interview, January 12, 2002; Dr. Anna Lou Smith interview, April 7, 2004; Permanent Record: Miss Nellie Smith, Florida Normal and Industrial Institute, Smith; State of Florida, Certificate of Death, Elisha Bennett Smith, #12469.

25 Thomas Hunt and James C. Carper, eds., Religious Higher Education in the United States: A Source Book (New York: Garland, 1996), 362; “Brief History of Florida Memorial University,” http://www.fmuniv.edu/About_Us/history.htm. Coincidentally, novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston had also arrived in St. Augustine around the same time as Nellie and took a summer teaching job at Florida Normal and Industrial College. Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2003), 350–351.

26 Dr. Anna Lou Smith, interview in Los Angeles, April 7, 2004.

27 Thelonious met Bud at “a juice joint uptown,” as he recalled. Hentoff, “Just Call Him Thelonious,” 16.

28 U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule, Manhattan Borough, ED 31-1226 (April 18, 1930), sheet 18 B; Eugene Holley, Jr., “The Education of Bud Powell,” Village Voice (June 28, 1994), 9; Groves and Shipton, The Glass Enclosure, 10–11.

29 William Powell quoted in Groves and Shipton, The Glass Enclosure, 10; Holley, Jr., “The Education of Bud Powell,” 9.

30 Holley, Jr., “The Education of Bud Powell,” 9; Groves and Shipton, The Glass Enclosure, 11; see also, Carl Smith, Bouncing with Bud: All the Recordings of Bud Powell (Brunswick, ME: Biddle Pub., 1997); Guthrie P. Ramsey, In Walked Bud: Earl “Bud” Powell and the Modern Jazz Challenge (forthcoming).

31 Michael C. Johanek and John L. Puckett, Leonard Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School: Education as if Citizenship Mattered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 136.

32 On Elmo Hope, see Ira Gitler liner notes, Elmo Hope Trio (Hi Fi Records 616); John Tynan, “Bitter Hope,” Down Beat (January 4, 1961), 16; David H. Rosenthal, Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 55; Stuart Broomer, “Elmo Hope Omission,” Coda 271 (January-February, 1997), 36–37; Ira Gitler, Masters of Bebop (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001), 130–31; Bertha Hope interview, July 15, 2003.

33 “Another Youth Shot by Policeman,” Amsterdam News, November 30, 1940; “Shot By Cop, May Not Live,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 7, 1940; “Policeman Faces Lawsuit for Shooting Harlem Boy,” Amsterdam News, January 18, 1941.

34 Ira Gitler liner notes, Elmo Hope Trio (Hi Fi Records 616); Tynan, “Bitter Hope,” 16; Bertha Hope interview, July 15, 2003.

35 Marion White interview, with Quincy Troupe, December 1, 1990.

36 Elmo Hope enlisted on March 6, 1943, World War II Army Enlistment Records, 1938–1946, National Archives.

37 Paul Slaughter, “1970 Reflections,” Jazz Hot, 306 (April 1982), 14.

38 Hentoff, “Just Call Him Thelonious,” 16.

39 This story, related by Francis Paudras, contains the seeds of truth but some of the details are off. Clarke suggests that Oscar Pettiford was the bassist that night but he doesn’t join the Minton’s crew until spring of 1943, after Clarke left Minton’s. I’m also assuming that Powell’s initial introduction at Minton’s occurred before 1943. Paudras, Dance of the Infidels, 144.

40 Jean Clouzet and Michel Delorme, “L’amertume du prophète,” Jazz Magazine 93, no. 9 (April 1963), 39.

41 Groves and Shipton, The Glass Enclosure, 11.

42 Clouzet and Delorme, “L’amertume du prophète,” 39.

43 Mary Lou Williams, “Mad Monk,” Melody Maker (May 22, 1954), 11; also, Mary Lou Williams, “Autobiographical Notebook, #2,” p. 274, Mary Lou Williams Collection, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.

44 Ponzio and Postif, Blue Monk, 53; Chan Parker, My Life in E-Flat (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 14.

45 Malcolm X, Autobiography, 71; Gerald R. Gill, “Dissent, Discontent and Disinterest: Afro-American Opposition to the United States Wars of the Twentieth Century” (unpublished book manuscript, 1988), 166–67; Gitler, Swing to Bop, 115–16; Tyler, “Black Jive,” 34–35. Sonny Rollins remembered musicians putting pinpricks in their arms to convince the induction officers that they were drug addicts and thus not fit to serve, though he himself would have been too young to serve in the Second World War since he was born in 1930. Eric Nisenson, Open Sky: Sonny Rollins and His World of Improvisation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 25.

46 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 119–20.

47 Babs Gonzalez, I Paid My Dues (New York: Lancer Books, 1967), 29–30.

48 Gill, “Dissent, Discontent, and Disinterest,” 164–68; George Q. Flynn, “Selective Service and American Blacks during World War II,” Journal of Negro History 69 (Winter 1984), 14–25.

49 Selective Service Classification Record, Local Board 23, Thelonious Sphere Monk, 3447, p. 109, Selective Service Records, New York State.

50 Evelyn Smith interview, June 21, 2007.

51 Ellen Dwyer, “Psychiatry and Race During World War II,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 61, no. 2 (2006), 123–126.

52 Richard Dalfiume, Fighting on Two Fronts: Desegregation of the Armed Forces, 1939–1953 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1969); Herbert Garfinkel, When Negroes March: The March on Washington Movement in the Organizational Policies for FEPC (Glencoe, IL.: Free Press, 1959); Lee Finkle, “The Conservative Aims of Militant Rhetoric: Black Protest During World War II,” Journal of American History 60 (December 1973), 692–713; Neil A. Wynn, The Afro-American and the Second World War; Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 298–325; Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75 (December 1988), 786–811; Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 301–48; George Lipsitz, A Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 14–28; Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 124–26.

53 Paula F. Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph: Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Garfinkel, When Negroes March; Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 298–325.

54 A. Burran, “Urban Racial Violence in the South During World War II: A Comparative Overview,” in Walter J. Fraser, Jr., and Winfred B. Moore, Jr., eds., From the Old South to the New: Essays on the Transitional South (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers, 1981), 167–77; Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., Race Relations in Wartime Detroit: The Sojourner Truth Housing Controversy of 1942 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984) and The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977).

55 Capeci, Jr., Race Relations in Wartime Detroit; Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response, 319, 327; Gail Williams O’Brien, The Color of Law: Race, Violence and Justice in the Post-World War II South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

56 See Stuart Cosgrove, “The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare,” History Workshop Journal 18 (Autumn, 1984), 78–81; Bruce M. Tyler, “Black Jive and White Repression,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 16, no. 4 (1989), 31–66; Steve Chibnall, “Whistle and Zoot: The Changing Meaning of a Suit of Clothes,” History Workshop, 20 (Autumn 1985), 56–81. LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 202; Eric Lott, “Double V, Double-Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style,” Callalloo 11, no. 3 (1988), 598, 600; Ben Sidran, Black Talk (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 110–111.

57 Director of FBI to Legat, Tokyo (163–2971), cablegram, September 3, 1970, Thelonious Monk FBI File.

58 Jimmy Butts, “Harlem Speaks,” Jazz Record (May 1, 1943), 6. In the previous issue, Butts announces Sonny White’s induction and adds, “He was a favorite at Minton’s Play house uptown. . . .” “Harlem Speaks,” Jazz Record (April 1, 1943), 8.

59 Fenton enlisted on August 18, 1943, in Camden, N.J. See “Nicholas Fenton, U.S. Army World War II Enlistment Records, 1938–1946,” National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 64.

60 Gitler, Jazz Masters of the 40s, 150–55; Nat Hentoff, “An Oscar,” Down Beat (March 21, 1957), 17; George Hoefer, “Oscar Pettiford,” Down Beat (June 2, 1966), 25.

61 There are amateur recordings of these jam sessions made by Bob Redcross on February 15, 1943. They can be heard on Birth of Bebop (Stash ST 260) and on the CD boxed set, Charlie Parker - Complete Collection (Sound Hills SSCD-8017/34).

62 Les Tomkins interview with Thelonious Monk, 1965.

63 New York Age, May 1, 1943; Nat Brandt, Harlem at War: The Black Experience in World War II (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 169–170; Capeci, The Harlem Riot of 1943, 17.

64 Capeci, The Harlem Riot of 1943; Brandt, Harlem at War, 183–207.

65 Nellie struggled in many of her classes. During the fall semester, she earned B’s in accounting and physical education, a C in Bible lit, and took incompletes in business arithmetic, English composition, and shorthand. By the spring semester, it appears as if she planned to remain in school and complete a degree, because she signed up for several general education classes—U.S. History, English composition (again), art, and reading. (At the time, Florida Normal granted a two-year degree but the administration was petitioning to make it an accredited four-year college.) But within a week she dropped these classes in favor of courses for which she had incompletes. She took the second half of accounting and earned a solid A, received a C in business arithmetic, and D’s in both typing and shorthand. College Transcript, Permanent Record: Miss Nellie Smith, Florida Normal and Industrial Institute.

66 Dr. Anna Lou Smith, interview in Los Angeles, April 7, 2004.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid.; State of Florida, Certificate of Death, Elisha Bennett Smith, #12469.

70 Plans were finalized in December of 1941 and construction began the following year. It was not completed until January 1, 1949. See Map of plan for Amsterdam Houses in “Findings of the State Commissioner of Housing in Re: A Low Rent Housing Project Located in the Borough of Manhattan” (December 1941); “Amendment to Loan & Subsidy Contract, Amsterdam Houses, NYS-5,” BOX OO64C6, New York Housing Authority Papers, Wagner Archives. The plans for such a project date back to at least 1940. Simon Rosenzweig to Peter Grimm, July 19, 1940, BOX 0054C5, FOLDER #9, New York Housing Authority, Wagner Archives.

71 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

72 Certificate of Copyright Registration, “I Need You So: Music by Thelonious Monk, Lyrics by Thelma Elizabeth Murray,” E unpub No. 348068, Received September 24, 1943.

73 Jackie Bonneau interview, June 17, 2005. Jackie not only got to know Ms. Murray late in her life, but she played me a tape of Murray at the piano playing and singing gospel music.

74 Certificate of Copyright Registration, “I Need You So: Music by Thelonious Monk, Lyrics by Thelma Elizabeth Murray,” E unpub No. 348068, Received September 24, 1943; “I Need You So,” Lead Sheet, submitted with Copyright Registration form. Used by permission of the Thelonious Monk estate.

8 “I’m Trying to See If It’s a Hit”

1 Arnold Shaw, Fifty-Second Street: The Street of Jazz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1983, orig. 1971); Patrick Burke, Come in and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 156–79. The clubs on East 52nd retained an informal whites-only policy well into the 1940s, according to pianist Billy Taylor. See Gitler, Swing to Bop, 304.

2 Shaw, Fifty-Second Street, 256.

3 Burke, Come In and Hear the Truth, 178–79; Lewis A. Erenberg, Swinging the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 208; Shaw, Fifty-Second Street, 255–56, 257–58; Chan Parker, My Life in E-Flat, 14; Gitler, ed., Swing to Bop, 125, 304–309; W. O. Smith, Sideman: The Long Gig of W.O. Smith (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1991), 150–151; “Police ‘Warn’ 52nd Street Riot May Come from Mixing,” Amsterdam News, July 22, 1944.

4 “Where to Go in New York,” Jazz Record (July 1, 1943), 5.

5 Ibid., 5.

6 Charles Woideck, Charlie Parker: His Music and Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 18–19; Lawrence O. Koch, Yardbird Suite: A Compendium of the Music and Life of Charlie Parker (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999 rev. ed.), 29–32; Shipton, Groovin’ High, 118–120.

7 Shipton, Groovin’ High, 118–120.

8 Jimmy Butts, “Harlem Speaks,” Jazz Record (December 1943), 7; Billy Taylor interview, January 26, 2004; Shipton, Groovin’ High, 119. Thomas Fitterling misdates the gig as August of 1943, and identifies Monk as the regular pianist until he is replaced by George Wallington. Fitterling, Thelonious Monk, 35.

9 Quoted in Shipton, Groovin’ High, 119.

10 Ibid. 119; Billy Taylor, interview, January 26, 2004.

11 Ponzio and Postif, Blue Monk, 131.

12 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 206–207.

13 Ibid., 206. See also, Pat Harris, “Oscar Pettiford Now on Cello Kick,” Down Beat (December 29, 1950), 20.

14 Paul Matthews, “Billy Taylor Interview (Part 2),” Cadence (November 1995), 24.

15 Billy Taylor interview, January 26, 2004.

16 Kernodle, Soul on Soul, 86–91; Dahl, Morning Glory, 123–136.

17 Dahl, Morning Glory, 137–141; Dustin Prial, The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 123–132; David W. Stowe, Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 66–67.

18 Williams, “Mad Monk,” 11.

19 “Autobiographical Notebooks, #3,” p. 298, Mary Lou Williams Collection.

20 “Autobiographical Notebooks, #3,” 298–99, Mary Lou Williams Collection. She tells a more dramatic and funnier version of the same story in her interview with John S. Wilson. In that version, Monk still had his tam on his head and upon her startled reaction he ran into the closet and “the clothes fell on him.” I chose the less quoted and less comical version of the story since it was written much closer to the time the incident occurred, and it seems less embellished. See Mary Lou Williams, interview by John Wilson, July 26, 1977, Transcript, NEA/Institute of Jazz Studies.

21 “Autobiographical Notebooks, #2,” p. 268, Mary Lou Williams Collection.

22 Williams quoting Monk in Kernodle, Soul on Soul, 114.

23 Mary Lou Williams, “Mad Monk,” Melody Maker (May 22, 1954), 11.

24 Korall, Drummin’ Men, 128–131; Leslie Gourse, Art Blakey: Jazz Messenger (New York: Schirmer Trade Books, 2002), 21–33; Joe Goldberg, Jazz Masters of the 50s (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988, orig. 1965), 45–47; Thomas Tolnay, “Art Blakey’s Jazz Message,” Down Beat (March 18, 1971), 14–15.

25 Wayne Enstice and Paul Rubin, Jazz is Spoken Here: Conversations with 22 Musicians (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 30; see also, “Art Blakey Interview: Part II” (taken and transcribed by Bob Rusch), Cadence 9 (September 1981), 12; Peter Danson, “Art Blakey: An Interview by Peter Danson,” Coda 173 (1980), 15.

26 Linda Dahl, Morning Glory, 193.

27 Gunther Schuller, “Thelonious Monk—Reviews: Recordings,” Jazz Review 1 (November, 1958), 23.

28 “Autobiographical Notebooks, #4,” p. 469, Mary Lou Williams Collection; Dahl, Morning Glory, 193.

29 “Autobiographical Notebooks, #4,” p. 468, Mary Lou Williams Collection.

30 Teddy McRae interview with Ron Welburn, Jazz Oral History Project, October 6 and 8, 1981, IJS, p. 629.

31 Lead sheet submitted with Certificate of Copyright Registration, “The Pump: Music by Teddy McRae and T. Monk,” E unp. No. 363022, Received February 5, 1944. It is built on an ascending five-note phrase created from arpeggiated dominant seventh chords (A^b7–D^b7) that end on the sixth.

32 Benetta Bines and group family interview, January 30, 2004.

33 Monk and Smith group family interview, January 30, 2004.

34 Certificate of Copyright Registration, “The Pump: Music by Teddy McRae and T. Monk,” E unp. No. 363022, Received February 5, 1944; Certificate of Copyright Registration, “You Need ’Na: Music by Teddy McRae and T. Monk,” E unp. No. 363023, Received February 5, 1944.

35 Certificate of Copyright Registration, “Nameless: Music by Thelonious Monk,” E unp. No. 371340, Received April 14, 1944.

36 A number of bands began using it to close their sets, much like “Epistrophy.” Indeed, when Monk was playing in the Gillespie-Pettiford group at the Onyx Club, they were using it regularly under the title “Mop Mop.” DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, 292.

37 Leonard Feather, The Jazz Years: Earwitness to an Era (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), 105.

38 “Hall Overton, Monk at the New School” June 20, 1963 CCP 104 (Disc 4), W. Eugene Smith Tapes, Center for Creative Photography/Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University; on the date he composed it, see Simon, “Bop’s Dixie to Monk,” 35. His role in originating the term had been a pet peeve for Monk throughout 1963. In an interview with Francois Postif, he explained: “I remember it was when I first started writing my own compositions. I did a piece called ‘Bip-Bop’—perhaps the word be-bop comes from there!” Postif, “ ’Round ’Bout Sphere,” Jazz Hot (April 1963), 25. In the Time magazine profile, he told author Barry Farrell that the term “Bebop” is a corruption of his phrase, “Bip Bop,” though he doesn’t mention it as a song title. Barry Farrell, “Loneliest Monk,” Time 83 (February 28, 1964), 86.

39 DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, 99; John Chilton, The Song of the Hawk: The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 160–168.

40 Coleman Hawkins, Coleman Hawkins—A Documentary: The Life And Times Of A Great Jazzman (Riverside Records, RLP 12-117/118).

41 Chilton, The Song of the Hawk, 175–202.

42 Fletcher Henderson’s 1933 recording of Hawkins’s composition, “Queer Notions,” was essentially a study in whole-tone scales. See Fletcher Henderson, Study in Frustration: The Fletcher Henderson Story (Columbia C4L19), disc 3.

43 Johnson quoted in Gitler, ed., Swing to Bop, 122.

44 Hawkins, Coleman Hawkins—A Documentary.

45 Shipton, Groovin’ High, 124–126; Morgenstern, Living with Jazz, 318–320.

46 Collette Hawkins dates Monk’s hire to December 1943, but all other evidence suggests that Thelonious did not begin to sit in until later in the winter. Collette Hawkins interview, November 5, 2004. It is possible that Monk was hanging around Hawkins and his group throughout this period since his gig at Kelly’s Stable lasted throughout December, January, and February. See Down Beat (December 1, 1943), 18; Down Beat (January 1, 1944), 18; Down Beat (January 15, 1944), 18; Jazz Record (March 1944), 2.

47 Harris, “None Better than Best with a Brush,” 18; Chilton, The Song of the Hawk, 212–213; Korall, Drummin’ Men, 25. Chilton claims that Stan Levey was Hawkins’s drummer before Denzil Best replaced him, but Levey himself doesn’t say that. According to Levey’s own recollections, he only sat in with Hawkins’s band at the Down Beat Club (along with Charlie Parker) one night when Denzil Best was late. See Korall, Drummin’ Men, 117.

48 Mary Louise Adams, “Almost Anything Can Happen: A Search for Sexual Discourse in Urban Spaces of 1940s Toronto,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 19, no. 2 (Spring 1994), 220–222.

49 Selwyn Warner told John Chilton that “Monk did arrangements for the band; so too did Benny Harris and Denzil Best.” Chilton, The Song of the Hawk, 213.

50 Hawkins, Coleman Hawkins—A Documentary.

51 Warner quoted in Chilton, The Song of the Hawk, 213.

52 Ibid., p. 213.

53 Hawkins only expressed a mild complaint that Benny would “fluff a few notes now and then,” and even that was more a gesture of sympathy than criticism. Hawkins felt that Harris was blowing out his lip and he could not understand how that could happen to someone so young and talented. “When he was sixteen years old he was around here playing like a son of a gun.” Hawkins, Coleman Hawkins—A Documentary.

54 “World’s Greatest Saxophonist at Yacht Club Nitely,” Amsterdam News, May 13, 1944. Sheridan and Chilton place the Toronto and Boston tours in May, but the Amsterdam News is clear that when Hawkins opened at the Yacht Club on April 28, he had just returned from Toronto and Boston with the same band. They also insist that Monk opened at the Down Beat Club after it had changed hands and was renamed, but the contemporary evidence from the black newspapers suggest otherwise.

55 “World’s Greatest Saxophonist at Yacht Club Nitely,” Amsterdam News, May 13, 1944; New York Age, April 29, 1944.

56 “Open House Jam Session, starring Coleman Hawkins, Master of the Tenor Saxophone, Friday May 19—9-4, DownBeat Club,” Handbill in author’s possession; “Coleman Hawkins and Orchestra Feature New Compositions,” New York Age, May 27, 1944.

57 Arnold Shaw, Fifty-Second Street, 180.

58 Hoefer, “Little Benny Harris,” 13; Stan Levey’s recollections in Korall, Drummin’ Men, 25.

59 Bill Gottlieb, “Thelonius [sic] Monk—Genius of Bop,” Down Beat (September 24, 1947), 2.

60 Background information on Coulsen’s family (as well as the correct spelling of his name, which is often spelled “Coulson”) has been culled from the 1930 Census manuscripts. See U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 31-1040.

61 Gitler, ed., Swing to Bop, 79. Randy Weston also compared Coulsen with Miles Davis. Randy Weston lecture, Duke Ellington Society, New York Chapter, 1967. Audio tape, Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library.

62 Korall, Drummin’ Men, 25.

63 Quoted in Leonard Feather, “Coleman Hawkins,” in The Jazz Makers: Essays on the Greats of Jazz, eds. Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff (New York: Rinehart and Co.,1957), 172.

64 Randy Weston interview, February 22, 1999; Ira Gitler, “Randy Weston,” Down Beat (February 27, 1964), 16–17, 36.

65 Spellman, Four Lives in The Bebop Business, 158–159.

66 Pettiford stayed on at the Onyx club after Dizzy left and hired Hartzfield, Guy and Johnston. Shaw, Fifty-Second Street, 270.

67 Herbert Nichols, “Jazz Milieu,” Music Dial (August 1944). In an unpublished autobiographical essay quoted extensively in A. B. Spellman’s book, Nichols mistakenly identifies the date of the Music Dial piece as 1946. (Spellman, Four Lives, 162.) He confused it with another piece he wrote on Monk in Rhythm Magazine in 1946, which I discuss below.

68 Nichols, “Jazz Milieu.”

69 Ibid.

70 Evelyn Smith interview, July 6, 2005.

71 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

72 The Spotlite only lasted two years on the street. See Shaw, Fifty-Second Street, 329–330.

73 Smith played bass on the legendary “Body and Soul” recording of 1939.

74 W. O. Smith, Sideman, 147. The dates for the Spotlite gig are proposed by Sheridan, Brilliant Corners, 342.

75 W. O. Smith, Sideman, 147.

76 Ibid., p. 148.

77 On Washington, D. C.’s “Black Broadway,” see “Historic U Street,” http://www.gwu.edu/~jazz/venuesb.html.

78 Nap Turner quoted in “Jazzed in D.C.: Jazz Profiles from NPR,” http://www.npr.org/programs/jazzprofiles/archive/jazzindc.html. Nap Turner insists that the event occurred at Keyes, but Rouse himself only identifies the Crystal Caverns as the venue for his first gig before leaving with the Eckstine band in 1944. Also, Rouse doesn’t remember meeting Monk until he moved to New York, but given that Monk was a virtual unknown during his D.C. gig, he probably did not remember the meeting.

79 Peter Danson, “Interview: Charlie Rouse,” Coda Magazine 187 (1982), 5–6; David A. Franklin, “Charlie Rouse Interview,” Cadence 13, no. 6 (1987), 5–6; J. L. Ginibre, “La Longue Marche de Charlie,” Jazz Magazine 105 (1964), 20–21.

80 Amsterdam News, September 9, 1944.

81 Leonard Feather, “Reynolds-Hawkins: Double Header in Harlem,” Metronome (October 1944), 30.

82 At the Down Beat Club, they played opposite Billie Holiday and comedian Harry “The Hipster” Gibson, closing on New Year’s Eve, 1944. Occasionally, the band did a few one-night stands and matinees in the area, including a huge dance at Hartford’s Footguard Hall. Jazz Record (October 1944), 2; Chilton, The Song of the Hawk, 218.

83 Handwritten recording schedule, titles and matrix numbers, October 19, 1944, Joe Davis Papers, in possession of Bruce Bastin. I’m grateful to Mr. Bastin for copying these rare documents and making them available to me. It indicates, among other things, that the session took place between 7 and 10 p.m. and that there were no additional takes. Davis also wrote down the titles and matrix numbers on the back of some of his own sheet music (“The Night You Said Goodbye”). “Drifting on a Reed” and “Flying Hawk” were released as 78s on Joe Davis 8250; “Recollections” and “On the Bean” (Joe Davis 8251).

84 Joe Davis to Coleman Hawkins, October 19, 1944, Letter of Agreement, Joe Davis Papers in Bruce Bastin’s possession; Bruce Bastin, Never Sell a Copyright: Joe Davis and his Role in the New York Music Scene, 1916–1978 (Chigwell, England: Storyville Publications, 1990), 131.

85 These sides have been re-released on several different labels and in different formats, notably as Bean and the Boys (Prestige PR 7824) and Coleman Hawkins, Bean and Ben: Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, 1944–45 (HQ CD 04) [1990]. Scott DeVeaux provides an excellent transcription of Monk’s solo on “On the Bean” in DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, 329.

86 It was first recorded August 22, 1944 and released on the Hit label (7119).

87 Powell quoted in Paudras, Dance of the Infidels, 123.

88 Ibid., 123; see also, Groves and Shipton, The Glass Enclosure, 15.

89 Interview with Cootie Williams, by Stanley Dance, May 1976, Smithsonian Institution, IJS, p. 247.

90 Certificate of Copyright Registration, “ ’Round About Midnight,” Music by Thelonious Monk, Cootie Williams, Bernie Hanighen lyrics, publ. Advanced Music Corp, E pub. 127232, November 27, 1944. It was re-registered under a different title with lyrics. See Certificate of Copyright Registration, “Grand Finale,” Music by Thelonious Monk, Cootie Williams, Bernie Hanighen lyrics, publ. Advanced Music Corp, E pub 130672, April 13, 1945.

91 A recorded broadcast exists. Ella sang with the Williams Orchestra at the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C., August 6, 1947. Williams plays “ ’Round Midnight” in a medley, but Ella doesn’t sing.

92 Nellie Monk interview, January 12, 2002. According to Nellie, Williams only paid Monk $300 for “ ’Round Midnight.” Interestingly, it would be five years before singer Jackie Paris made the first vocal recording of “ ’Round Midnight.” Recorded November 12, 1949, it was first released on the National label (and later rereleased on a compilation LP called Advance Guard of the 40s (EmArcy 36016). He was accompanied by Eddie Shu on tenor, Dick Hyman (piano), John Collins (guitar), and bassist Tommy Potter. www.jackieparis.com/discography.

93 Chicago Daily Tribune, March 11, 1945.

94 Ad for Joe Davis 8250 in Chicago Defender, June 16, 1945.

95 Mary Lou Williams was listed as leader, but she used Hawkins’s rhythm section of Eddie Robinson (bass) and Denzil Best (drums). She also hired Bill Coleman on trumpet, Claude Green on clarinet, and Joe Evans on alto. The recording was first released on Asch 552–3.

96 Collette Hawkins credits her father with composing the song. Interview, November 5, 2004. Linda Dahl insists that Mary Lou Williams originated the melody. Dahl, Morning Glory, 191–192. I think all three musicians treated the line as a riff rather than a fully-developed melodic statement, and thus it occupied a position in the “public domain,” if you will. This may explain why no one seemed to complain when one of the others recorded the song under a different title. On the other hand, Williams might have felt silenced in the man’s world of jazz, and more importantly, she respected and admired both men. Perhaps a formal complaint of theft on her part just wasn’t worth the fallout.

97 It was an AFRS Jubilee transcription, Program no. 86. Carl A. Hällström and Bob Scherman, The AFRS Jubilee Transcription Series, http://home.swipnet.se/dooji/jubilee.htm; Tom Lord Jazz Discography. The original transcription version of “Mad Monk” was released on the Joyce Label LP 505.

98 Billy Taylor Interview, January 26, 2004.

99 He had Al Hall on bass and Jimmy Crawford on drums. It was first released as a ten-inch, The Billy Taylor Trio/Quintet (Savoy MG9035).

100 Billy Taylor Interview, January 26, 2004.

101 Chilton, The Song of the Hawk, 221; Sir Charles Thompson interview, August 11, 2003. On Thompson, see J. Chadwick, “Sir Charles Thompson,” Jazz Journal International 41, no. 4 (1988), 8; “Sir Charles Thompson,” in Stanley Dance, The World of Count Basie (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980), 333–338.

102 Chilton, The Song of the Hawk, 221–223; Tad Hershorn, Verve: Norman Granz–The Conscience of Jazz (forthcoming manuscript, Amistad Press, 2007), 15.

9 “Dizzy and Bird Did Nothing for Me Musically”

1 “Names Carry On With Big Jam Session in New York,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 13, 1945.

2 McLean quoted in Spellman, Four Lives in the Bebop Business, 202.

3 The band debuted on April 29, 1945. Amsterdam News, April 28, 1945; Al Monroe, “Swinging the News,” Chicago Defender, April 7, 1945. The common lore is that Thelonious led a trio with Max Roach and W. O. Smith to Philadelphia for a short engagement at some undetermined location in January 1945. The claim has been repeated continually because of what reportedly occurred on January 21, 1945. Bud Powell happened to be in Philadelphia, too, with Cootie Williams’s Orchestra, and when he dropped in to hear Monk’s trio, according to Francis Paudras, the police conducted a drug raid on the club and attempted to forcibly arrest Monk when he would not show his identification. Just then Powell intervened and shouted, “Stop that, man! You don’t know what you’re doing! The guy you’re pushing around just happens to be the world’s greatest pianist!” The officer then turned his attention on Powell and proceeded to beat him over the head with his billy club. Monk was supposedly taken into custody and held briefly for questioning while Bud was admitted to a hospital for treatment before being turned over to police. Paudras, Dance of the Infidels, 1–2, and it is repeated in every Monk biography: Ponzio and Postif, Blue Monk, 65; Fitterling, Thelonious Monk, 37; Gourse, Straight, No Chaser, 41. Even Sheridan’s discography has Monk, Max Roach and W. O. Smith in Philadelphia in January 1945 at some unknown location. (Sheridan, Brilliant Corners, 345.) The only source apparently is Paudras. Alan Groves and Alyn Shipton question Paudras’s account, suggesting that he conjoined two separate events. Groves and Shipton, The Glass Enclosure, 33–34. W. O. Smith, who allegedly was the bass player on the gig, only played with Monk once and that was at the Spotlite for one week in the summer of 1944. (See Chapter 8.) Most other accounts place the incident at Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station, where Powell allegedly became loud after drinking too much. He was arrested for disorderly conduct but released to the custody of his mother, who was living at Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. A month later, Powell was committed to Pilgrim State Hospital, a mental institution on Long Island. Furthermore, I have searched through all possible sources, including the black press, and found no evidence of this particular incident or of Monk being in Philadelphia that week. And when I asked Max Roach about it, he knew of Bud’s beating but said neither he nor Monk was there. Conversation with Max Roach, December 1996. Peter Pullman’s forthcoming biography of Bud Powell should clarify what happened that night, but I do know Thelonious was not there.

4 “Old Faces Missing as Duke Repeats Concert,” Chicago Defender, December 4, 1943; John Chilton, Who’s Who of Jazz (New York: Da Capo, 1985), 363.

5 Ad, Amsterdam News, April 28, 1945; Shipton, Groovin’ High, 142–44; Koch, Yardbird Suite, 62–64; Carl Woideck, Charlie Parker: His Music and Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 31.

6 Clouzet and Delorme, “L’Amertume du Prophète,” 38–39. Of course, this is a translation from Monk’s English to French back to English, thus in the process much of his unique language is lost. I’m grateful to Beth Coleman and Noubissie Thierry Kehou for their excellent translation work.

7 See, for example, Leonard Feather’s interview, “Yardbird Flies Home,” published in Metronome (August 1947), and John Fitch’s 1953 radio interview for WHDH Boston, both of which are reprinted in Carl Wodieck, ed., The Charlie Parker Companion: Six Decades of Commentary (New York: Schirmer Books, 1998), 65, 113.

8 Jimmy Butts, “Where They’re Playing,” Jazz Record (August 1945), 13; Sheridan, Brilliant Corners, 346.

9 See ad from Amsterdam News, June 2, 1945. Sheridan, Brilliant Corners, 346, determined the date of August 30.

10 Bob Rusch, “Al McKibbon Interview,” transc. Kea D. Rusch, Cadence (March 1987), 16–17.

11 Bastin, Never Sell a Copyright, 154.

12 Rusch, “Al McKibbon Interview,” 17.

13 Miles Davis interview with Quincy Troupe, June 16, 1988, taped interview Quincy Troupe Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. And edited version of these same recollections, see Miles Davis, with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 78–79.

14 Miles Davis interview with Quincy Troupe, June 16, 1988, taped interview Quincy Troupe Collection, Schomburg Center.

15 Ibid.

16 “Four Night Clubs Penalized,” New York Times, November 5, 1945. Miles Davis remembers Bird taking the band to Minton’s Playhouse after the police shut down the clubs. For him, the “drug and liquor license thing was only a cover, as far as a lot of black musicians were concerned, for the real reason, which was racism.” Drug trafficking and prostitution existed around 52nd Street for years, but “when the music came downtown from uptown, the black hustlers around that scene came downtown with it, at least a whole lot of them did. And this didn’t set too well with the white cops.” Miles Davis, Miles, 72.

17 The tour was to be longer and include the South, but when Southern venues insisted on dividing audiences by race, Granz withdrew the offer.

The date of the Philharmonic concert is not insignificant. For many years, historians, critics, and some musicians repeated the claim that Monk was supposed to be at a recording session for Savoy with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis on November 26, and that he simply skipped out—more evidence of Monk’s unreliability. It was quite a session, considered among Bird’s best recordings. If Monk was hired for the gig nobody told him. Works that repeat the myth include Ross Russell, Bird Lives!, 195; Ian Carr, Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998), 24. Miles says in his memoir about the date, “Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell couldn’t or wouldn’t make it. . . .” Miles Davis, Miles, 75.

18 Dave Bittain, “Tatum Tops Philly Concert; Four Others Reviewed,” Metronome (January 1946), 46.

19 Rusch, “Al McKibbon Interview,” 20.

20 Hershorn, Verve: Norman Granz, chapter 6.

21 “Cheers, Moans at L.A. Concert,” Down Beat (December 15, 1945), 2.

22 Ibid., p. 2; Hershorn, Verve: Norman Granz, chapter 7; Chilton, The Song of the Hawk, 234.

23 “Rhythm Round-Up,” Portland Observer, December 10, 1945.

24 Hershorn, Verve: Norman Granz, chapter 7, pp. 17–19. Monk ended up staying at a large house owned by a black woman named Kitty White. She was known for renting rooms to traveling musicians. Bernice Slaughter and Ed Slaughter, Jr., interview, February 13, 2007.

25 Portland Observer, November 22, 1945; Concert handbill, reproduced in Robert Dietsche, Jump Town: The Golden Years of Portland Jazz, 1942–1957 (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2005), 6.

26 Portland Oregonian, December 6, 1945.

27 Standifer quoted in Dietsche, Jump Town, 7; see also Paul de Barros, Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1993), 189.

28 Dietsche, Jump Town, 2. Lucky Thompson wasn’t there—he left the tour after the first concert. Ernest “Tom” Archia, a Texas-born tenor player known more for rhythm and blues, replaced him. On Tom Archia, see Robert L. Campbell, Leonard J. Bukowski, and Armin Büttner, “The Tom Archia Discography” (May 2007), http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/archia.html.

29 “Rhythm Round-Up,” Portland Observer, December 10, 1945.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Bernice Slaughter and Ed Slaughter, Jr., interview, February 13, 2007; Dietsche, Jump Town, 53.

33 Bernice Slaughter and Ed Slaughter, Jr., interview, February 13, 2007.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Hershorn, Verve: Norman Granz, 19.

37 Jazz Record (February 1946), 2; Chilton, The Song of the Hawk, 234–235.

38 Shipton, Groovin’ High, 153–157; Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 242–250.

39 The story of Gillespie’s and Parker’s California stay has been written about extensively, let alone debated. Some of the most obvious sources are Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 248–250; but also see Robert Reisner, ed. Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker (New York: Citadel Press, 1962); Russell, Bird Lives!

40 The recording was first released on Dial 1001, but can be heard on Dizzy Gillespie, Small Groups, 1945–1950: A Night in Tunisia (Giants of Jazz, CD53122). Personnel: Dizzy Gillespie (tp,vcl) Lucky Thompson (ts,vcl) Milt Jackson (vib,vcl) Al Haig (p) Ray Brown (b) Stan Levey (d).

41 Feather, The Jazz Years, 104.

42 Hawkins quoted in Chilton, The Song of the Hawk, 235.

43 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 253.

44 Ibid., 254.

45 The band included Sonny Stitt and Howard Johnson on altos; Ray Abrams, James Moody, and Warren Luckey on tenors; Kenny Dorham, Dave Burns, Elmon Wright, and Talib Dawud were among the trumpet section, Ray Brown and Milt Jackson stayed on from the sextet. Max Roach initially occupied the drum chair before Kenny Clarke took over.

46 Shipton, Groovin’ High, 181–183; Hennessey, Klook, 62–63; Kenny Clarke interview in Art Taylor, Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 192.

47 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 252.

48 Fuller quoted in Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 256.

49 Randy Weston recalls first hearing Monk play “ ’Round Midnight” with Hawkins at the Down Beat Club, and Herbie Nichols made reference to Monk originals played by the band at the Spotlite. Randy Weston, interview, February 22, 1999; Herbie Nichols, “The Jazz Pianist–Purist,” Rhythm: Music and Theatrical Magazine (July 1946), 12.

50 Lead sheet and Certificate of Copyright Registration, “Manhattan Moods: Melody by Thelonious Monk,” Walter Gil Fuller Claimant, E unp. No. 444530, Received October 28, 1945.

51 Herbie Nichols’s profile of Monk published in July 1946 refers specifically to “Ruby, My Dear.” Nichols, “The Jazz Pianist,” 12.

52 Lead sheet and Certificate of Copyright Registration, “Feeling That Way Now: Melody by Thelonious Monk,” Walter Gil Fuller claimant, E unpub. 8741, Received February 26, 1946.

53 The first title is mentioned in Herbie Nichols, “The Jazz Pianist,” 28; the second title comes from Steve Lacy interview, May 12, 1995, Paris, France. Lacy recalled Monk telling him that the song originally had lyrics, but I’m guessing that particular manuscript was burned in his first apartment fire in 1956. See Chapter 15.

54 Copy of original manuscript in Mary Lou Williams Collection, Rutgers University. I’m especially grateful to Annie Kuebler, the archivist in charge of Williams’s papers, for helping me track down this music.

55 Lead sheet and Certificate of Copyright Registration, “Playhouse: Melody by Thelonious Monk,” Walter Gil Fuller claimant, E unpub. 8742, Received February 26, 1946.

56 Chilton, The Song of the Hawk, 236.

57 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 252.

58 Ibid., 256.

59 Quoted in Shipton, Groovin’ High, 185.

60 These recordings were first released as Dizzy Gillespie ’46 Live At The Spotlite (Hi-Fly H 01), and re-released recently on a 2-CD set as Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, Showtime at the Spotlight: 52nd Street, New York City, June 1946 (Uptown 2754).

61 See ads in the Amsterdam News, February 16, 23, March 2, 9, April 6, 13, 20, 27, May 4, 11, 18, 25, 1946.

62 On Ramey’s distinguished career with Count Basie and Jay McShann, see Cameron Addis, “The ‘Baptist Beat’ in Modern Jazz: Texan Gene Ramey in Kansas City and New York,” Journal of Texas Music History 4, no. 2 (Fall 2004), 8–16.

63 “Dizzy Gillespie Band Plays Apollo,” Amsterdam News, June 29, 1946; “Dizzy, Thelma on Apollo Show,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 29, 1946; ad in New York Age, June 29, 1946.

64 Quoted in Hennessey, Klook, 65–66.

65 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 256.

66 John Lewis inteview, by Marian McPartland—Piano Jazz (PBS), recorded October 30, 1978, Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives NYPL; Hennessey, Klook, 54–55; Shipton, Groovin’ High, 189.

67 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 256.

68 Chico O’Farrill, who worked for Fuller, called it “ghost writing.” Gitler, ed., Swing to Bop, 255. Gil Fuller had a history of questionable practices. As Ingrid Monson points out in her book (Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa [New York: Oxford University Press, 2008], 39–40), in one incident he failed to pay Doc Cheatham, Maurio Bauza, and Frank Baristo for a recording session he put together for Mercury. After booking the studio, he literally slipped out the back door with the tapes. He was also expelled from Local 802 for bouncing checks.

69 Nichols, “The Jazz Pianist,” 11–12, 28.

70 John R. Gibson, “A Cavalcade of the Negro Dance Musician,” Rhythm: Music and Theatrical Magazine (July 1946), 22.

71 Nichols, “The Jazz Pianist,” 11.

72 Ibid., p. 12.

73 Ibid., p. 12.

74 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

75 He eventually caught up on his dues and Local 802 reinstated him the first week of February 1947. Minutes of the Executive Board, AFM Local 802, February 6, 1947.

76 Mary Lou Williams, “Autobiographical Notebooks,” #2, p. 271, Mary Lou Williams Papers.

77 Ira Gitler, “The Remarkable J. J. Johnson,” Down Beat (May 11, 1961), 17; George Hoefer, “Early J. J.,” Down Beat (January 28, 1965), 16; Joshua Berrett and Louis Bourgois, III, The Musical World of J. J. Johnson (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999).

78 Mary Lou Williams, “Autobiographical Notebooks,” #2, p. 271.

79 Mary Lou Williams, “Mad Monk,” Melody Maker (May 22, 1954), 11.

80 Ibid., p. 11.

81 Quoted in Eric Nisenson, Open Sky: Sonny Rollins and His World of Improvisation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 31.

82 Quoted in Ben Sidran, Talking Jazz: An Oral History (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 174–75. See also, George W. Goodman, “Sonny Rollins at Sixty-eight,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1999), 84; Stanley Crouch, “The Colossus,” New Yorker (May 9, 2005), 64–67.

83 Monk did not hire Rollins that year, in part because jobs were few and far between, but also because Rollins did not join the union until December of 1947. Minutes of the Executive Board, Local 802, December 2, 1947, microfilm reel 5276.

84 Spellman, Four Lives in the Bebop Business, 200.

85 Arthur Taylor interview, conducted by Warren Smith, July 26, 1994, Jazz Oral HIstory Project, Schomburg Center.

86 Randy Weston interview, July 30, 2003.

87 Both quotes from Ira Gitler, “Randy Weston,” 16.

88 Randy Weston interview, July 30, 2003.

89 Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones, 22.

90 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

91 Advertisement in Amsterdam News, April 12, 1947; and reproduced in Ken Vail, Miles’ Diary: The Life of Miles Davis, 1947–1961 (Sanctuary Publishing, 1997), 9; also posted on Jacques Ponzio’s “Round About Monk” website, http://www.sojazz.org/monk/thelonious05.html.

92 Ernie Washington worked between swing and bebop artists, playing with Ben Webster, W. O. Smith, and early on with Dizzy Gillespie. Jimmy Butts, “Where They’re Playing,” Jazz Record (September 1945), 13; W. O. Smith, Sideman, 40, 42, 109.

93 Certificate of Copyright Registration, “What Now: Melody by Thelonious Monk,” Walter Gil Fuller claimant, E unpub. 63809, Received February 21, 1947; Certificate of Copyright Registration, “I Mean You: Melody by Thelonious Monk,” Walter Gil Fuller claimant, E unpub. 63802, Received February 21, 1947.

94 Geoffrey Wheeler, “The (American) Sonora Label and Jazz of the 1940s,” IAJRC Journal 39, no. 3 (August 2006), 30. This version of “I Mean You” is available on Coleman Hawkins, Bean and the Boys (Prestige PRCD 24124-2).

95 Application for Registration of a Claim to Copyright in a Musical Composition, “I Mean You,” Composer/Author - Thelonious Monk, Copyright Owner–Walter G. Fuller, Monogram Music Co., Application Received February 21, 1947, Registration Number R-570813. The lead sheet Monk submitted is nearly identical to what Hawkins played, except for one glaring omission: the first four bars of the bridge are missing. While it’s possible Monk initially wrote it as a 28-bar song and his ex-boss contributed the four missing measures, this is an unlikely explanation. It was probably just a mistake in notating the music—one that Gil Fuller might have made.

96 Vox presents Charlie Christian (Vox VSP 302); Sheridan, Brilliant Corners, 5, 238.

97 Tinney quoted in Gitler, Swing to Bop, 120.

98 Quoted in Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 219. Johnson tells a version of this story in Gitler, Swing to Bop, 120–121.

99 Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop, 219.

10 “The George Washington of Bebop”

1 “William P. Gottlieb’s Life and Work: A Brief Biography Based on Oral Histories,” http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wghtml/wgbio.html; see also, William P. Gottlieb, The Golden Age of Jazz (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1995).

2 See Down Beat (August 27, 1947), 2, 18; “Well, Be-Bop!” Down Beat (May 21, 1947), 15.

3 See for example, “Bebop and Old Masters,” New Republic (June 30, 1947), 36; “The Jazz Beat: Memo on Bebop,” Saturday Review (August 30, 1947), 18–19; “Be-Bop??!!—Man, We Called it Kloop-Mop!!” Metronome (April 1947), 21, 44–45; Gilbert McKean, “The Diz and the Bebop,” Esquire (October 1947), 212–216; Jack Raes, “Que Pensez-Vous de Be-bop?” Hot Club Magazine (May 1947), 11, 13–14. For an historical accounting of the bebop debates, see Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 54–100; Bernard Gendron, “ ‘Moldy Figs’ and Modernists: Jazz at War (1942–1946),” in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 31–56.

4 Tadd Dameron, “The Case for Modern Music,” Record Changer (February 1948), 5, 16; Mary Lou Williams, “Music and Progress,” Jazz Record (November 1947), 23–24; Lennie Tristano, “What’s Right with the Beboppers,” Metronome (July 1947), 14, 31.

5 Bill Gottlieb, “Thelonius [sic] Monk—Genius of Bop: Elusive Pianist Finally Caught in Interview,” Down Beat (September 24, 1947), 2.

6 The same issue of Down Beat that carried Gottlieb’s profile on Monk also published his review (and photos) of the Thornhill band. Bill Gottlieb, “Thornhill, McKinley Are Superb; Auld’s New 9 Piece Band Answer to Bad Biz,” Down Beat, 3. Monk’s praise for Thornhill is quoted below.

7 All of Gottlieb’s photos can be viewed on “William Gottlieb: Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz,” http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wghtml/wghome.html.

8 Gottlieb, “Thelonius [sic] Monk,” 2.

9 Ibid., p. 2.

10 Ibid., p. 2.

11 Lorraine Gordon with Barry Singer, Alive at the Village Vanguard: My Life in and Out of Jazz Time (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corp., 2006), 63.

12 Descriptions of Monk’s room from author interviews with Thomas Monk, Jr., Theolonious Monk, Alonzo White, and Charlotte Washington; Ira Peck, “The Piano Man who dug Be-bop,” M7; “Creator of ‘Be bop’ Objects to Name and Changes in His Style,” Chicago Defender, March 27, 1948.

13 Born in 1918 in Georgia as Isaac Abrams and raised in Newark, Ike was probably still a teenager when he adopted the name “Quebec.” U.S. Census, 1930, Population Schedule: Newark, New Jersey, ED: 52. He knew his way around the music, having started his musical career as a pianist and dancer but picked up the tenor saxophone in 1940 as a member of the Barons of Rhythm. He played in a number of small bands around New York with Kenny Clarke, Benny Carter, Hot Lips Page, Frankie Newton, and the man whose tone he emulated—Coleman Hawkins. Claude Schlouch, In Memory of Ike Quebec: A Discography (Marseilles, France, 1983, rev. 3/1985); Michael Cuscuna, “Ike Quebec,” The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Ike Quebec and John Hardee (Mosaic 107, 1984).

14 Richard Cook, Blue Note Records: The Biography (New York: Random House, 2003), 19–21; Michael Cuscuna and Michel Ruppli, comp., The Blue Note Label: A Discography (New York and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 9.

15 Gordon, Alive at the Village Vanguard, 63.

16 Gourse, Straight, No Chaser, 48.

17 Cook, Blue Note Records, 6–18; Michael Cuscuna and Michel Ruppli, comp., The Blue Note Label: A Discography (New York and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), xi–xii, 8–16.

18 Gordon, Alive at the Village Vanguard, 33–36; “Lorraine Gordon: Administrator, Village Vanguard,” interviewed by Ted Panken, March 23, 2002, Artist and Influence, vol. 21 (New York: Hatch-Billops Collection, 2002), 115–116.

19 Quoted in Cuscuna, The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk, 3.

20 Cuscuna and Ruppli, comp., The Blue Note Label, 16–18.

21 Lorraine Gordon, Alive at the Village Vanguard, 68.

22 Greg Henderson, “Idrees Sulieman Interview,” Transcribed by Bob Rusch, Cadence 5, no. 9 (September 1979), 3; “Jazz Encyclopedia Questionnaire: Idrees Sulieman,” Vertical Files, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.

23 Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 35–38, 58–60; Richard Turner, “The Ahmadiyya Mission to Blacks in the United States in the 1920s,” Journal of Religious Thought 44, no. 2 (Winter-Spring 1988), 50–66; Richard Turner, Islam in the African American Experience (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997).

24 “Moslem Musicians,” Ebony (April 1953), 104–11; Claude Clegg, III, An Original Man; Art Taylor, Notes and Tones, 251; Mike Hennessey, “The Enduring Message of Abdullah ibn Buhaina,” Jazz Journal International 30 (1977), 6; Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?, 78–79.

25 “Moslem Musicians,” 111.

26 Ibid., 108. Leslie Gourse, Art Blakey: Jazz Messenger (New York: Schirmer Trade Books, 2002), 40. She claims he converted to Islam after returning from two years in Africa in 1949, but earlier interviews indicated that he had already launched a Muslim Mission with Talib Dawud in 1947.

27 Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?, 78; “Art Blakey Interview: Part I” (taken and transcribed by Bob Rusch), Cadence 7 (July 1981), 10–11. While the “seventeen” varied, original members included Sahib Shihab (Edmund Gregory) on alto; tenor players Musa Kaleem (Orlando Wright) and Sonny Rollins; Haleen Rasheed (Howard Bowe), trombone; trumpeters Kenny Dorham (another convert who had adopted the name Abdul Hamid), Ray Copeland, and Little Benny Harris; Cecil Payne (baritone sax); Bud Powell, Kenny Drew, and later Walter Bishop, Jr. (Ibrahim Ibn Ismail) held piano duties at different times; and Gary Mapp (bass). Steve Schwartz and Michael Fitzgerald, “Chronology of Art Blakey (and the Jazz Messengers),” http://www.jazzdiscography.com/Artists/Blakey/chron.htm; Henderson, “Idrees Sulieman Interview,” 6. Gourse mistakenly claims the Messengers began in 1949, after Blakey allegedly returns from Africa, but clearly the group is advertised as the Messengers as early as January of 1948, and all other indications suggest they were in existence for much of 1947. Gourse, Art Blakey, 36–38.

28 Korall, Drummin’ Men, 134–136; see also, “Art Blakey Interview: Part I,” 8–11; “Art Blakey Interview: Part II” (taken and transcribed by Bob Rusch), Cadence 9 (September 1981), 12–13; Peter Danson, “Art Blakey: An Interview by Peter Danson,” Coda 173 (1980), 15; Gourse, Art Blakey, 30–38.

29 For a fine analysis of Blakey’s drumming, see Zita Carno, “Art Blakey,” Jazz Review 3, no. 1 (January 1959), 6–10, and Korall, Drummin’ Men, 134–140.

30 Quoted in Korall, Drummin’ Men, 137.

31 Quoted in Michael Cuscuna, “Thelonious Monk—The Early Years,” The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk [Sleeve notes] (Santa Monica, CA: Mosaic Records, 1983), 3.

32 Alfred Lion quoted in Hentoff, The Jazz Life, 196.

33 All of these recordings can be heard on Thelonious Monk, The Complete Blue Note Recordings (Blue Note CD8 30363-2); for sequence and unissued takes, see Sheridan, Brilliant Corners, 17.

34 Bertha Hope showed me a manuscript of Elmo Hope’s that resembled the A-section of “Off Minor,” though the manuscript was not dated. Her discovery and her argument that Monk borrowed the melody from Elmo is persuasive, however. Bertha Hope interview, July 15, 2003.

35 Originally released on Roost 513, but can be heard on Bud Powell, The Complete Blue Note and Roost Recordings (Blue Note 1994).

36 Built on an AABA structure thirty-six measures long (he added four bars to the final A section), it contains numerous examples of rhythmic displacement that gives a sense of shifting time signatures. It has no tonal center and is built on whole-tone harmony as well as chromatic motion, creating a kind of wandering chordal movement that resolves in the first A section in D Major, and the final A section in Db Major.

37 Quoted in Richard Cook, Blue Note Records, 26.

38 A Harlemite of West Indian extraction, Taitt had worked in John Kirby’s band with Clarence Brereton—Geraldine Smith’s cousin from the neighborhood. It is likely that Brereton recommended Taitt to Monk. John Kirby, John Kirby and His Orchestra, 1945–1946 (Classics). I determined Taitt’s birth year and heritage from the U.S. Census, 1920, Population Schedule: Manhattan Borough, ED 819-839.

39 “Moslem Musicians,” 104.

40 Dieter Salemann (assisted by Dieter Hartmann and Michael Vogler), Edmund Gregory/Sahib Shihab: Solography, Discography, Band Routes, Engagements, in Chronological Order (Basle, Switzerland, 1986); Roland Baggenaes, “Sahib Shihab,” Coda 204 (1985), 6.

41 Sahib Shihab, “Jazz Encyclopedia Questionnaire,” Request from Leonard Feather, Vertical File: Sahib Shihab, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.

42 Nat Hentoff, The Jazz Life, 183.

43 Michael Cuscuna reviewed all of the recordings, including the rejected takes, and made the observation about Taitt’s obsession with “Stranger in Paradise.” Cuscuna, The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk, 7.

44 Geraldine Smith interview, February 12, 2004.

45 Amsterdam News, January 24, 1948.

46 Ira Peck, who interviewed Thelonious at his house just two or three weeks after the January 25th gig, describes the new phonograph in his article, “The Piano Man,” M7.

47 Paul Bacon interview, July 30, 2001.

48 Cuscuna, The Complete Blue Note Recordings, 3. I know what he wore because a photo of Monk on Fred Robbins’s show, taken by Frank Wolff, was published in Nard Griffin, To Be or Not to Bop (New York: Leo Workman, 1948), 9.

49 “Thelonious Monk,” (ca. early January, 1948), Blue Note Archives, Capitol Records. I’m grateful to Bruce Lundvall, Bev McCord and John Ray for their assistance gaining access to Blue Note’s files. The release was also recently reprinted in Gordon, Alive at the Village Vanguard, 60.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Thelonious Monk press release (ca. February 1948), Blue Note Archives, Capitol Records; and quoted in Ira Peck, “The Piano Man,” M7.

53 Lorraine Lion to George Hoefer, January 13, 1948, reprinted in Gordon, Alive at the Village Vanguard, 61. Note that the original letter was misdated 1947.

54 George Hoefer, “Pianist Monk Getting Long Awaited Break,” Down Beat (February 11, 1948), 11.

55 Ibid., 11. And he made a couple of slips, like identifying Danny Quebec West and Ike Quebec as the same person, or attributing Dizzy Gillespie’s composition “Emanon” to Monk. There is a possible explanation for Hoefer’s error regarding the authorship of “Emanon.” Recall that Monk’s original title for “52nd Street Theme” was “Nameless,” so it is easy to assume that “No Name” spelled backward is meant to be the same title, though the song is quite different. “Emanon” is a standard, fairly ordinary blues riff, uncharacteristic of anything Monk has ever written.

56 Ibid., 11.

57 Cuscuna, The Complete Blue Note Recordings, 3.

58 Hentoff, The Jazz Life, 184.

59 Gordon, Alive at the Village Vanguard, 66–67; on Ingersoll, see Roy Hoopes, Ralph Ingersoll: A Biography (New York: Atheneum, 1985).

60 In her memoir, Gordon refers to “Seymour Peck” when she actually meant Ira. Seymour was Ira’s older brother and a more prominent literary figure on the New York scene. He also wrote for PM and became a major drama critic and editor for the New York Times Arts and Leisure section (after surviving a bout of Red-baiting during the McCarthy period). He was killed in a car accident in 1985. Ira Peck followed his older brother’s path, writing drama, film, and television criticism for the New York Times, as well as juvenile biography and history for Scholastic. See Herbert Mitgang, “Seymour Peck: Times Editor for 32 Years, Killed in Crash,” New York Times, January 2, 1985; “Ira Peck,” Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2002, http://galenet.galegroup.com.

61 Gordon, Alive at the Village Vanguard, 66–67. Surprisingly, Peck never once mentions the fact that she is present during the interview.

62 Peck, “The Piano Man,” 7.

63 Ibid., 7.

64 Ibid., 7.

65 Alonzo White, interview, February 23, 2004.

66 Peck, “The Piano Man,” 7.

67 “Dizzy Writing Book on Be-Bop,” California Eagle, February 5, 1948.

68 See for example Tera Hunter’s brilliant book, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

69 Gordon, Alive at the Village Vanguard, 68; see also, Gourse, Straight, No Chaser, 55.

70 Jesse Hamlin, “A Life in Jazz,” Columbia College Today (November 2004), www.college.columbia.edu/cct/nov04/features2.php; Keepnews, The View from Within, 7.

71 Quoted in Rob Tocalino, “Keepnews and Monk: A Shared Legacy,” 8th Annual SF Spring Season—Official Program Book (SFJazz, 2007), 7; see also, Keepnews, The View from Within, 108.

72 Orrin Keepnews, “Thelonious Monk’s Music May Be First Sign of Bebop’s Legitimacy,” Record Changer 7, no. 4 (April 1948), 5; reprinted in Orrin Keepnews, The View From Within, 111.

73 Keepnews, “Thelonious Monk’s Music,” 20.

74 Ben Burns, Executive Editor of Ebony Magazine to Lorraine Lion, March 25, 1948, Blue Note Archives, Capitol Records.

75 Lorraine Lion, “Thelonious Monk Deserves Credit for Gifts to Jazz,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 14, 1948.

76 Dan Burley, “Thelonious Monk and His Bebop,” Amsterdam News, February 21, 1948.

77 “Creator of ‘Be bop’ Objects to Name and Changes in His Style,” Chicago Defender, March 27, 1948.

78 Ibid.

79 Sidney Lohman, “Radio Row: One Thing or Another,” New York Times, February 8, 1948. They played, “Just You, Just Me,” “All the Things You Are,” and Ike Quebec’s “Suburban Eyes,” available on Thelonious Monk and Art Tatum, The Vibes Are On (Chazzer, 2002). The emcee’s announcement is from an acetate copy from the Boris Rose Collection provided by James Accardi.

80 The Executive Committee did not get around to approving Monk’s contract with Minton’s until May 6, 1948. Minutes of the Executive Board, June 3, 1948, AFM Local 802, reel 5276. This may mean the gig was later than March.

81 New York Amsterdam News, April 24, 1948.

82 Paul Bacon, “The High Priest of Be-bop: The Inimitiable Mr. Monk,” Record Changer 8, no. 11 (November, 1949), 9–10.

83 Down Beat (February 25, 1948), 19.

84 Metronome (April 1948), 45–46.

85 Down Beat (April 21, 1948), 19.

86 Billboard (February 21, 1948), 117.

87 Paul Bacon interview, July 30, 2001.

88 See John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

89 Paul Bacon, “ ’Round About Midnight,’ ‘Well, You Needn’t,’ ” Record Changer, 7, no. 5 (May 1948), 18.

90 Cuscusna, The Complete Blue Note Recordings, 4.

91 Lorraine Gordon quoted in Gourse, Straight, No Chaser, 53.

92 Ibid., 53.

93 Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), 139.

94 Both Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden have talked about how modern jazz influenced abstract expressionism. For Lewis, 1948–1949 marked his embrace of a kind of bebop-influenced abstraction. See his “Jazz Band” (1948) and “Harlem at the Gate”(1949). See Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present (New York: Random House, 1993), 168–172. See also, Robin D. G. Kelley, “Breaking the Color Bind: A Decade of American Masters,” catalogue essay for African American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, X (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2003).

95 Nard Griffin, To Be or Not to Bop (New York: Leo Workman, 1948), 5.

96 Ibid., 2.

97 Ray Nance quoted in Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000, orig., 1970), 139.

98 Shaw, 52nd Street, 272; Shipton, Groovin’ High, 208.

99 According to Chris Sheridan, Monk had two stints at the Roost—May 4–16 (or longer) and June 15–27. Sheridan, Brilliant Corners. 355–56. Local 802 approved Monk’s contract with the Roost on June 3. Minutes of the Executive Board, June 3, 1948, AFM Local 802, reel 5276. Ira Gitler was a frequent patron and he was there the night Wardell Gray sat in with Monk. Ira Gitler interview, August 13, 2007.

100 “Interview with John Simmons, by Patricia Willard,” Tapes 1–9, NEA Oral History Project, Washington, D.C., 1977, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, pp. 58–59.

101 “Sydenham Seeks Aid to Bar Closing,” New York Times, March 1, 1948; “Sydenham Gets $137,000,” New York Times, March 8, 1948.

102 Amsterdam News, June 5, 1948; New York Times, June 7, 1948.

103 Director of FBI to Legat, Tokyo (163–2971), cablegram, September 3, 1970, Thelonious Monk FBI File.

104 The 1937 Marihuana Tax Act made possession or transfer of marijuana illegal throughout the United States, though exceptions were made for the pharmaceutical companies, who were required to pay an exorbitant excise tax. Several states had already outlawed marijuana use and possession, notably states in the Southwest where fear of the spread of marijuana was projected onto Mexican workers. Nevertheless, in New York and the rest of the country, the postwar period witnessed heightened policing of drug use and more draconian laws. African-Americans and Latinos, in general, and jazz musicians in particular, were often the target of raids, sting operations, and overall investigations. It is ironic that just four years before Monk’s arrest, the LaGuardia Commission released a report challenging the federal bureau of narcotics’ claims that marijuana is highly addictive, a source of crime and criminal activity, and is widespread. See H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800–1980 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982), 140; Curtis Marez, Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 131; La Guardia Commission, The Marihuana Problem in the City of New York (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Reprint Corp.,1973).

105 He was charged under Section 422 of the New York Public Health Law (1941), p. 134, and Section 1751a of the New York Penal Law (1941), p. 153.

106 Nellie Monk interview, January 12, 2002; also, same story was repeated by Marcellus Green interview, December 31, 2003.

107 Arnold Shaw, Fifty-Second Street, 180.

108 The ban was called partly in response to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 banning closed shops, sympathy strikes, and secondary boycotts. It not only weakened the bargaining power of all organized labor, but a provision in the act outlawed the AFM’s record-royalty fund. Any sort of industry paybacks to unions that did not involve actual services was deemed illegal under Taft-Hartley. However, when the AFM’s recording contracts expired on January 1, 1948, Petrillo announced the ban. This time the industry was in a strong position, having made and stockpiled many more records than it could release on the market at once. The ban lasted almost a full year, culminating in a small victory for the AFM. To replace the record-royalty fund, the industry agreed to establish a Music Performance Trust Fund that would finance free concerts and pay struggling musicians union scale.

109 This group can be heard on Milt Jackson/Sonny Stitt, In the Beginning (Galaxy XY 204).

110 “Interview with John Simmons, by Patricia Willard,” Tapes 1–9, NEA Oral History Project; Johnny Simmen and Barry Kernfeld, “Simmons, John,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd ed., edited by Barry Kernfeld. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/J410000 (accessed February 24, 2009).

111 Korall, Drummin’ Men, 59–69; Gitler, Jazz Masters of the Forties, 190.

112 All takes can be heard on The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk.

113 “Interview with John Simmons, by Patricia Willard,” Tapes 1–9, NEA Oral History Project, p. 60.

114 I must here acknowledge Milton Stewart, who suggests that Monk developed an “mbira” approach to the piano, in which the left and right hands play rhythmically separate melodies featuring alternating pitches in the middle and bass registers. It produces the effect of two independent instruments being played simultaneously. Milton Stewart, “Thelonious Monk: Bebop or Something Different?” Jazz Research Papers 5 (1985), 182–85.

115 Les Tomkins interview with Thelonious Monk, 1965.

116 Richard Boyer, “Profiles: Bop,” New Yorker (July 3, 1948), 26.

117 Ibid., 29.

118 Ibid., 28.

119 Ibid., 29.

120 Ibid, 31.

121 Charlotte Washington interview, April 5, 2004.

122 The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings (Mosaic MR10-129).

123 Subpeona for Alfred W. Lion, People of the State of New York vs. Thelonious Monk, called for trial on August 31, 1948, at 100 Centre Street at 10 AM, Blue Note Archives.