(August 1948–August 1951)
Like most New Yorkers, Thelonious passed by the Manhattan House of Detention at 125 White Street many times. The ominous-looking building was only seven years old in 1948, having replaced the old city jail constructed in 1902. The newer and larger facility still retained its chilling moniker “the Tombs,” and for Monk the name was apt. It really didn’t matter that the walls of the visiting room and the chapel had just been freshly painted “with cheerful and pleasing color schemes,” or that inmates enjoyed access to a brand-new library that delivered materials to their cells.1 He spent much of his thirty-day sentence confined to a tiny single cell in the sweltering heat of July and August, surrounded by about 900 other inmates,2 alone, a bit shell-shocked, and without a piano. Occasionally, he played Ping-Pong in the rec room, wrote music when he could scrounge up something to write with, perhaps read a little, and spent too much of his time pacing back and forth until he could no longer stand. He slept very little because his rhythms were now determined by the regimentation of the prison system. His cycles of manic-depression probably increased as he struggled to stay sane in this unfamiliar caged world.
Frequent visits were the best antidote. Nellie came down to the Tombs as often as she could, though it sometimes meant taking precious time off from work. She had just taken a job as an elevator operator at the Taft Hotel on West 50th and Seventh Avenue.3 Monk’s siblings also came downtown to see him, along with their mother, whose health was rapidly deteriorating. These all-too-brief visits brought Thelonious a little comfort. Between visits, he had a lot of time to think and reflect—as all inmates do. In the past year he had been hailed bebop’s brilliant originator and led his first recording sessions. Now he was an inmate with a criminal record. In Monk’s world, reefer was almost as common as tobacco. But the world around him was changing; state and federal authorities were beginning to crack down on all narcotics, and city officials in particular set out to “clean up” 52nd Street and the Times Square area, which in their view had become a haven for crime, vice, and drug use.4 Thelonious had been caught in the dragnet.
He apparently saw Nellie in a new light. Not long after his release, they took a brief trip. By the time they returned, Nellie Smith had become Mrs. Thelonious Monk. She was twenty-six; he was just shy of his thirty-first birthday. Where they were married, and under what circumstances, remains a mystery. Some family members seem to remember a trip to Mexico,5 but according to Nellie’s sworn testimony in Surrogate’s Court, she was married in New York City in September of 1947. The month was probably correct, but she was a year off.6
The Smith family was ecstatic over the news. Sonny’s best friend was now his brother-in-law and the kids had known their uncle Thelonious since they were born. The Monks welcomed Nellie into the family, though Marion could hardly hide her disappointment that things never worked out between Thelonious and Rubie Richardson. The other Mrs. Monk was pleased, in part because her unpredictable and special middle child had finally found someone to take care of him and give her some more grandbabies. And as a devout Christian, she would not accept anything less than holy matrimony.
The newlyweds found a place of their own at a rooming house on Kelly Street in the Bronx, just a few blocks south of Sonny and Geraldine’s apartment on Lyman Place.7 Nellie’s meager wages at the Taft Hotel might have covered the rent, but Monk needed to earn a living so they could eat and get around the city. Finding work was easier said than done, however. As a result of his conviction, the NYPD revoked his cabaret card for one year,8 which meant he could not work in establishments that served alcohol in Manhattan. The loss of his cabaret card was far worse for Monk than thirty days in jail. Lorraine Lion, who never stopped working on Monk’s behalf, had already secured a gig for him in October at the Village Vanguard, a small basement club on Seventh Avenue and 11th Street. Fortunately for Monk, the Vanguard was then better known for poetry readings and folk music, and its reputation as a kind of bohemian outpost generating very little revenue kept the cops at bay. Owner Max Gordon couldn’t say no to Lorraine, though he had never heard of Thelonious. It may have been her sales pitch, or possibly her outfit. “I was on Fire Island with some friends,” she recalled. “I went into a little bakery there and saw a man sitting having coffee and a blueberry muffin, and I knew that he was Max Gordon. I sidled up to him in my yellow bathing suit and started to tell him about Thelonious Monk, and how Max had the club and I had the genius. He had never heard of Monk, but he said that he had a date open . . . we clinched the deal in ten minutes, with no contract, nothing.”9
Monk’s quartet opened at the Village Vanguard on October 14, 1948.10 He brought the usual suspects—Sahib Shihab on alto, Al McKibbon on bass, and Denzil Best on drums.11 As a precaution, Max Gordon decided to hold over pianist Billy Taylor and his trio, who had been backing a singer the previous week, to play opposite Monk just in case the audience didn’t like him. Even so, hardly anyone showed up. “None of the so-called jazz critics,” Lorraine remembered. “None of the so-called cognoscenti. Zilch.”12 She remembered Max having a fit. When Thelonious danced around a bit at the opening of his set and announced his tunes by addressing the audience as “human beings,” Lorraine thought Gordon was going to lose it. “What did you talk me into?” he cried. “You trying to ruin my business? We’re dying with this guy.”13
Billy Taylor also remembered the empty tables and the strange looks from the audience, but he recalls Gordon defending Monk tooth and nail. “You could dance there at the Vanguard,” Taylor explained, “so when the music was danceable people often got up and danced. So Monk had drums and so forth, so people assumed, well this is a quartet so they could get up and dance. But they couldn’t figure out what kind of dance to do to his music. It got to be funny. People would say to Max, ‘Well who is this? What’s going on?’ And he’d say, ‘This is Thelonious Monk, he’s a genius.’ And they would go back and try to dance again, and they would finally give up and say, ‘We can’t dance to this, so let’s check him out.’”14
Vanguard audiences had two weeks to check him out. From a commercial standpoint, the engagement turned out to be a disaster. In the long run, however, it proved to be life-changing. Thelonious found in Max Gordon a friend and champion whose club became one of Monk’s most sympathetic and supportive venues. And Mrs. Lorraine Lion found in Max the romantic spark she’d been missing in her own marriage. Apparently the feeling became mutual. Over the course of the next year, Lorraine would leave Alfred Lion for Gordon, and the couple would become a major force in the world of modern jazz—and certainly among Monk’s best allies in the cutthroat world of club owners.15
With virtually no regular gigs in sight, Thelonious was willing to take just about anything that came along. Sometimes he worked at the 845 Club on Prospect Avenue in the Bronx, leading an ensemble that included Art Blakey, Coleman Hawkins when he was available, and Ernie Henry on alto. When Henry wasn’t available, he turned to Jackie McLean, one of the young cats from the Sugar Hill gang whom he met through Sonny Rollins. Jackie had only recently made the switch from tenor to alto, but Monk was less interested in experience than in excitement and musicality. And McLean had both. “I was young and still not sure of myself, and it was a great experience working with Monk. I was nervous, and when I would think that I was asked to play by Monk it would give me the kind of encouragement that I think young people need. . . .”16 In McLean’s young eyes, Monk was a master musician and cultural icon.
Yet, in the eyes of club owners and the industry more generally, Monk was a liability. Times were so hard that Monk once took a job as a sideman for one of McLean’s gigs, playing background music at a cocktail sip for a measly twelve dollars. “I called up Monk and he was already there in his suit and tie and everything and he worked all night and got his twelve dollars and left.”17
Thelonious was hungry, literally and figuratively. Sonny and Geraldine helped when they could, but they were trying to raise five kids on meager wages. Monk’s siblings were not faring any better financially. Nellie and Monk lived on spaghetti and meatballs (one of Thelonious’s specialties18), collected bottles to return for the deposit, and bummed cigarettes from friends and acquaintances. Evelyn Smith remembers, “Nellie told a story when I was little about how they shared a cigarette. They had one cigarette that she had gotten from somebody on the job, and she smoked half of it and gave him the other half.”19 “Thelonious had trouble getting work even before he lost the [cabaret] card [a second time],” Nellie told writer Nat Hentoff. “Therefore, it wasn’t a sudden total calamity. People had told so many stories about his being unreliable and eccentric that it had always been hard.”20 The irony, of course, is that the very stories circulated in the popular press and by Lorraine Lion about his so-called eccentricities and odd behavior came back to bite him. In the minds of club owners, booking agencies, and A&R men, Monk’s alleged strange behavior rendered him unreliable. But so many rumors about him skipping an engagement or a recording session, as we’ve already seen, had more to do with the promoters using his name without his knowledge. The evidence suggests that Thelonious was indeed responsible when it came to a job. And yet, he could not change the dominant opinion. Weirdness—once a selling point—was now a source of unemployment.
One story told by Jackie McLean, and often repeated as an example of Monk’s odd behavior, reveals the depths of Monk’s poverty. “Monk was working up at the Audubon Ballroom, and I was working with him. During the course of the evening, I mentioned that my mother had made a chocolate pie, and Monk said that he wanted a piece of it, so I said yeah, just passing it off, like, the next time my mother makes a pie I’ll call you up. But after the gig was over I went downstairs and there was Monk waiting for me. He said, ‘I’ll walk you home, I’m going to get that pie.’ It was about four o’clock in the morning, it was weird. I was only seventeen years old, and my mother didn’t really like me out late.” When Jackie told Monk it was too late for company, he replied, “‘I don’t need to be company, I can wait for it and you can go in and get it and pass it out to me.’ So he walked all the way across Harlem, up to the top of the Hill, came up to the sixth floor, and stood in the hallway while I went inside and cut a piece of chocolate pie and put it in a piece of wax paper and passed it out to him. Then he thanked me and went downstairs.”21
His hunger manifested itself in other ways as well. He wanted a hit record, something that might generate some cash. Toward the end of 1948, a fellow San Juan Hill resident known as Frankie Alvarez approached Monk about putting a band together for a recording session with a talented crooner named Frank Paccione. Alvarez, a twenty-three-year old pop songwriter of Cuban descent whose given name was actually Frank Pelaez,22 believed he had two potential hits and a singer who could deliver the goods. Paccione, whose stage name was Frankie Passion, was also from the neighborhood. He was only twenty-one at the time, but he had already served two years in the service and, after being discharged in 1947, tried to make it as a pop singer in Los Angeles. His style—a cross between Frank Sinatra and Perry Como—failed to make an impression on Angelenos. Within a few months he returned to New York and Alvarez approached him about two songs he’d written: one was the swinging Sinatra-esque “Nobody Know, Nobody Cares,” and the other was a somewhat sappy ballad titled “Especially to You.”23 Alvarez wrote the latter hoping to interest WNEW disc jockey Martin Block, whose “Make-Believe Ballroom” had just been syndicated for a national audience. Alvarez took Block’s famous sign-off phrase, “Good Night to You, and You, and Especially to You,” and turned it into a song.24 The strategy, of course, was to persuade Block to adopt “Especially to You” as the show’s theme song, which would have netted a huge sum of money. (Block was already making over $22,000 a week to host the show.)
Monk readily took on the challenge, believing that if these tunes hit they could be his meal ticket. He wrote the arrangements and put together a quintet. The recording does not list personnel, but it sounds quite a bit like a younger Charlie Rouse on tenor, though he later denied it, and the trumpet player might be Idrees Sulieman, since he was a regular in Monk’s band, or Kenny Dorham. He may have hired Jerry Smith on drums and bassist Michael Mattos (a Brooklynite whom he’d met through Randy Weston) since he used them fairly frequently in the early part of 1949.25 “I can tell you that [Monk] was the MAN, the LEADER,” reported Paccione, “and we gave it all we had.”26 The band was in fine form and Monk wrote innovative arrangements. Perhaps too innovative for a young crooner hoping for a commercial success: Monk turned the two pop songs into parodies of the genre. On “Especially to You,” Monk backed Paccione’s smooth tenor voice with the horns playing dissonant chromatic obligato phrases—a technique he would employ a few years later in his hilarious recording of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” “Nobody Knows” works a little better. It swings, it showcases the whole band, and the humor is in your face. The lyrics are depressing and pitiful (“Nobody knows, nobody cares,/got their eyes closed to/just how mean she treats me”) but the tempo is bouncy and upbeat.27
Monk, Paccione, and Alvarez had high hopes for these recordings. Alvarez released both sides on his newly launched Washington label, but nothing happened. He sent copies to WNEW hoping Martin Block might hear “Especially to You,” and he hustled every available record store to carry the 78. Despite Thelonious’s brief moment of fame, even his name wasn’t enough to sell records. Paccione mused decades later, “I guess the bottom line is that it did not take off like we had hoped.”28
For Thelonious and Nellie, the Bronx was temporarily home. The 845 Club became his new hangout and occasional source of income. The club paid him very little, but he could work there without a cabaret card, since enforcement was more relaxed in the outer boroughs. Bud Powell was a frequent visitor, along with pianist Elmo Hope, who had recently moved in with his mother on Lyman Place a few doors down from Sonny and Geraldine. Although Monk befriended Hope in 1942, Hope had enlisted in the service soon thereafter and after his discharge toured with Joe Morris’s rhythm and blues band. His bandmates included bassist Percy Heath, drummer Philly “Joe” Jones, and a dynamic tenor saxophonist from Chicago named Johnny Griffin, whom Hope befriended and introduced to Monk and Bud. “They were like triplets, the three of them,” Griffin recalled. Once Griffin joined them, the trio became a quartet, though from his perspective he felt more like a student studying with the masters. “That was my education, those three pianists. That was my university training.”29 It was also fun. Griffin remembers one memorable night, Christmas Eve 1948, at the 845 Club. “Elmo and Bud played Christmas songs together. It was pretty funny. Monk sat back with that smirk on his face.”30
Monk and many other pianists also converged at a most unlikely spot—the backroom of a television repair shop. The proprietor, a middle-aged black man named Al Walker, was a brilliant pianist who never made it as a musician but turned his store into one of the uncharted landmarks in the history of the Bronx jazz scene. Musicians arrived in the wee hours and gathered around the grand piano he kept in the back of his shop. The jam sessions were legendary, and Monk was usually at the center of them. Clifton Smith was just a kid when his dad started bringing him to Al’s shop to hear the music. “Of course when Monk came,” Clifton explained, “they’d say, ‘Monk is coming. Monk is coming.’ Everybody flocked. I don’t think they recorded his music but I was there for a few of those jam sessions. Awesome! Awesome jam sessions. And they would stay in Al’s shop for a couple of days just playing music. I don’t know how many TVs they were fixing, but they were definitely jamming in there.”31
Hanging out at the 845 Club and Al Walker’s shop kept Monk’s spirits and his chops up, and it put him in touch with talented young players like Griffin, who later became one of his regular sidemen. Saxophonist George “Big Nick” Nicholas, who enjoyed a long-term engagement at Small’s Paradise in Harlem, hired Thelonious a few times in 1949.32 But finding work in New York just seemed impossible. Even after the Liquor Authority reinstated his cabaret card, the heart of the club scene—52nd Street—began its rapid disintegration in 1949. Many clubs closed down or became striptease joints, most of which had their liquor license revoked or suspended as part of the government’s crackdown on “burlesque.” The old brownstones were razed and new buildings took their place. Soon after Rockefeller Center added its new Esso building, the strip became hot investment property for various financial and commercial interests. National City Bank opened a branch on the block, Lord and Taylor announced plans late in the year to build a new store nearby, and the city acquired some corner properties on Sixth Avenue, which it sold to developers.33
Monk did what many musicians had to do now: find out-of-town gigs. Without the benefit of a manager or a booking agent, he secured a three-week engagement in March at the Beige Room, a small club situated in Chicago’s Hotel Pershing.34 He put together a quintet made up entirely of young, unknown New York–based musicians—alto saxophonist Freddie Douglass (clearly named after the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass), trumpeter Lowell Lewis, bassist Michael Mattos, and drummer Jerry Smith.35 One local artist who sat in at least once was a young vocalist named Frank London Brown. A second-year student at Roosevelt University, Brown sang primarily to help pay for college.36 He loved the music and had a special affinity for Monk—even then—but in 1949 he was drifting toward more literary and political pursuits. He and Thelonious would meet again.
Monk also found work at the Hi-Hat Club in Boston, though there he tended to use local players. Bostonians did not always understand or appreciate his music, but Monk was always willing to share ideas and take younger musicians under his wing. Pianist Jaki Byard was just beginning his career when he used to see Monk at the Hi-Hat. “The cats would say, ‘Is he kidding?’ I’d say, ‘That’s Monk, man!’ Every day we’d go to his house, where he was staying, and he’d walk around, he’d jot down tunes. He composed ‘Off Minor’ then, I remember he wrote a copy of that for me, and ‘Ruby, My Dear,” and a couple others.”37 Monk also met an alto player originally from Florida studying at the Boston Conservatory of Music. Quiet and studious, Gigi Gryce lived and breathed music. He wasn’t a kid; just eight years younger than Thelonious, he had already spent two years in the service as a member of the celebrated Great Lakes Navy band, and he continued his formal music studies in Hartford, Connecticut after he was discharged in 1946.38 Gryce looked to Monk as a mentor, if not a guru. Emery Smith remembered how Gigi “talked about Monk, it was like he was on cloud nine. In fact, he used to stutter when he talked about Monk’s music, trying to explain what Monk’s music was like. . . . He would kind of stammer because he was in awe of Thelonious.”39 Saxophonist Sam Rivers studied with Gryce in Boston. He remembered how Monk opened Gryce to greater harmonic and tonal freedom. After playing with Monk at the Hi-Hat, Gryce reported back to Rivers, “You can do anything with Monk and it comes out like it’s right, you know. If you make a mistake, Monk is listening and he will make it sound right.”40
Monk’s relative absence from the New York jazz scene did not stop him from influencing a new generation of musicians, many of whom were steeped in bebop and the music of Charlie Parker but were searching for more. A couple of critics began to acknowledge that Monk, indeed, had something “more” than running substitute chord changes at breakneck speed. Once again, his pal Paul Bacon published another smart review of his latest Blue Note releases—“Epistrophy” and “In Walked Bud”—in the November 1948 issue of The Record Changer, comparing him with the proverbial carpenter “lustily doing everything wrong, battling his materials, and coming up with the most uniquely beautiful houses in the world.”41 Several months later, Bacon reviewed Blue Note’s next release, which paired the trio version of “Ruby, My Dear” with the quartet recording of “Evidence” featuring Milt Jackson. He described “Ruby” as a “beautiful tonepoem, played with great feeling and color,” and praised his solo on “Evidence” for its unity, “a result of Monk’s habit of thinking of things as a whole, instead of a bar here and a bridge there.”42
But Bacon’s was a lone voice in the wilderness of North America. The only other serious critical praise Monk received that year came from across the Atlantic, in a small Swiss journal called the Jazz-Revue. Perhaps unbeknownst to Monk, Jean-Jacques Finsterwald and Julien-François Zbinden published a lengthy and thoughtful analysis of Monk’s entire recorded output in the April 1949 edition. “His playing is simple, his style austere and sober; he uses very few melodies and concentrates all his attention on a right hand with monodic style. In spite of his audacity, Monk uses absolutely logical harmonic structures, relatively simple phrases, and the system of whole tones, a mark of Debussy that he applies at the right time.” They describe moments in his music as “brilliant” and “joyous,” but also suggest that when he strays too far from the basic harmonic structure it can lead to “melodic impasses.”43
Unfortunately, the piece did nothing to stem the hostile attacks from the U.S. jazz press. Down Beat critics skewered Monk’s latest records. Commenting on “Epistrophy,” the reviewer wrote, “We have less and less patience with the far-fetched type of composition and inventiveness which are displayed by the much publicized Monk for a very simple reason. Nothing happens.”44 Similarly, the reviewer of the next release proclaimed that nothing in “Evidence” “is either interesting or exciting to us, though the Monk’s whole-tone harmonies and off-cadence rhythm doubtless will appeal to the more atonally minded of the jazz gentry.” “Ruby, My Dear” is merely dismissed as “abstract.”45
Even more than Down Beat, the publication of Leonard Feather’s much-anticipated book, Inside Be-Bop, dealt a devastating blow to Monk. Released in 1949, parts of it read like a response to all the press Monk received a year earlier declaring him the true founding father of bebop. Instead, Feather establishes Dizzy as the music’s progenitor, with Bird in the role as junior partner. He not only dismisses Monk in a paragraph, but he suggests that his opinions have the backing of the whole community of musicians: “Monk’s place in the jazz scene, according to most musicians in the bop movement, has been grossly distorted, as a result of some high-powered publicity work. He has written a few attractive tunes, but his lack of technique and continuity prevented him from accomplishing much as a pianist. In fact, Cootie Williams’ original 1944 recording of ‘ ’Round Midnight,’ arranged for a big band, is vastly superior to Monk’s own recording as an interpretation of the theme. Monk, who has been touted as a ‘genius’ and a ‘high priest of bebop,’ would wander in and out of Minton’s, often falling asleep at the piano.”46
What Feather called “high-powered publicity work,” of course, was only Lorraine Lion armed with a typewriter. While conceding that Monk “is an original thinker,” Feather insists he is “not a bebop pianist, nor do his solos have any of the mystic qualities attributed to them by some non-musical admirers.”47 Feather then positions Dizzy, Kenny Clarke, and Tadd Dameron as the key figures at Minton’s Playhouse, and he quotes Clarke describing how he wrote “Epistrophy,” never once mentioning Monk.48 In 103 pages, Feather essentially renders Monk invisible. Inside Be-Bop angered and upset Monk. According to family lore, Thelonious ran into Feather at Rockefeller Center one afternoon, probably in the early winter of 1949, grabbed him by the neck, and threatened to throw him over the guard rail overlooking the ice-skating rink. He was so angry, his eyes welled up as he shouted, “You’re taking the bread out of my mouth!”49
Thelonious had more than his own mouth to worry about: Nellie was pregnant and their first child was due in December. Once she began to show, she had to quit her job as an elevator operator at the Taft Hotel. With the temporary loss of her income, Monk and Nellie had no choice but to move back to his mother’s place on West 63rd Street.50 The neighborhood had changed dramatically now that the Amsterdam Houses had been finally completed just a few months earlier. Three thirteen-story high-rise dwellings and ten six-story low-rise apartments replaced the old tenements, casting a shadow on the only prewar housing left in the community—the Phipps Houses.51 While the daily noise from construction disappeared, the gargantuan housing project nearly doubled the population in the area.52 The community suddenly felt crowded, but so did the Monks’ tiny apartment.
The move proved mutually beneficial and timely. Not long after Nellie and Thelonious settled in, a passing bus struck Miss Barbara as she was crossing the street.53 Although it is not clear how badly she was hurt, given that she was already frail to begin with, her recovery took quite a long time, forcing her into early retirement. Fortunately, she received a monetary settlement from the city, much of which she used to help Marion buy a house in Queens. And, of course, she helped her son and his new wife whenever she could. Now that Barbara’s health had deteriorated to the point where she could no longer work, the responsibility for her care was now shared between Nellie and her new in-laws—Thomas, Trotyrine, and Marion. It wasn’t easy for Nellie, especially as she entered her third trimester. Thelonious became increasingly distraught, disappearing for days at a time.
The pressure to make money, the critical dismissal of his music, and the daunting responsibility of a child were too much for Thelonious. He turned to drugs to help him forget—bennies, weed, and occasionally heroin. He started hanging out in a “shooting gallery” on East 14th Street. He was never a bona fide junkie; he could go weeks without a fix.54 But Monk’s sister-in-law and her kids bore witness to those times when he, Sonny, Elmo Hope, and an array of other musicians would retire to the kitchen or head to the roof to get high. And when he disappeared, he often took his brother-in-law with him.
Sonny experimented, but he was not an addict. He looked up to Thelonious and enjoyed being around him. Monk’s nephew Clifton, who was seven at the time, loathed when his uncle came by the house “because he would take my father away. The building that we lived in had a courtyard and he’d come across the court and yell, ‘hey, come on downstairs.’ That meant we weren’t going to see my father for at least two days. . . . My mother hated it. He wouldn’t go to work. They would go out and party and hang out. Go to jam sessions. He’d come back and tell us about all the great musicians he heard. And she would say, ‘Yeah, but what about dinner?’”55
The day his son was born, Thelonious was nowhere to be found. On December 27, 1949, at 7:06 p.m., Nellie met her son for the first time and called him by his father’s name.56 It should have been a doubly joyous occasion, as it was also her birthday. Yet, during the labor and delivery, she was alone in the maternity ward of City Hospital, a wretched place on infamous “Welfare Island” in the East River, once referred to as the “hell in mid-channel” because it housed asylums, quarantines, and penitentiaries for vagrants, addicts, petty thieves, and the destitute.57 It was all she could afford. In fact, she received fine care at the hands of Dr. Fred Weissman, a young intern at City Hospital with a kind bedside manner who went on to become one of the city’s most distinguished neurologists.58
Nellie’s best friend, her sister-in-law Geraldine, came to the rescue in Monk’s absence. With just enough money to pay for a cab from the hospital back to West 63rd Street, Geraldine walked all the way from the Bronx to Welfare Island in the dead of winter in order to help Nellie and the baby get home.59 Nellie didn’t even have enough money for clothes, so Geraldine went to a local Goodwill and picked up baby blankets and enough random garments to make three outfits. More importantly, she brought comfort and knowledge of childbirth and infant care. Besides having five children of her own, Geraldine was in the final stages of completing her nursing credentials.60
Whatever ill feelings Nellie might have harbored toward her husband disappeared when she walked in the door to the inviting arms of her mother-in-law. When Thelonious finally showed up, he was ecstatic; he adored his son and doted on the boy like most fathers, and tried to do right by his namesake. (His own father’s absence may explain why he named his son Thelonious, Jr., rather than Thelonious III.) He certainly wanted to provide. His cabaret card had been reinstated, but a month after his son’s birth he still owed eleven dollars in back dues to the union. He petitioned Local 802 officials for a two-week extension, which they granted, and he was finally reinstated in mid-February.61 Jobs were still few and far between. Small’s Paradise offered him some Monday night gigs, and he eked out a little cash through non-union jobs. For at least the first few weeks, Thelonious kept his promise to his son and his wife . . . and then he began to disappear again.
Nellie had to find a way to manage without depending on Monk. She moved back in with Geraldine and Sonny in early spring and took a job tailoring at Marvel Cleaners on West 35th Street. The pay was minimal: $45.00 a week plus train fare, but it gave her an opportunity to apply her considerable skills as a seamstress.62 She was known for making incredibly stylish clothes without a pattern. Thelonious proudly wore ties, jackets, and shirts she made by hand, including a sharp herringbone number and a two-tone brown and yellow shirt of which he was particularly fond.63
Evelyn Smith, who was five at the time, vividly remembers Thelonious, Jr.’s, first days at Lyman Place. “Nellie said to me, ‘He’s going to sleep with you, OK? And if he wakes up give him this [pacifier].’ . . . And I slept with him for quite some time. I don’t know how long. I know I was sleeping with this little baby in my arms.”64 It wasn’t too long because within weeks Thelonious reorganized the West 63rd Street apartment, at his mother’s behest. She moved into the smaller bedroom and gave the larger bedroom to Thelonious, Nellie, and the baby . . . and the piano, which sat at the foot of their bed. Nellie and her son continued shuttling back and forth between Lyman Place and West 63rd Street. She did all she could to straighten Monk out, to get him off the hard drugs, and just to keep up his spirits. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, given how heroin flooded black communities after World War II. “I remember Nellie being very sad,” recalled Evelyn Smith.65
Thelonious caught a break when Norman Granz of Jazz at the Philharmonic hired him for an all-star recording session with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Scheduled for June 6, 1950, the rhythm section included Curley Russell on bass and Buddy Rich on drums. Using Monk on the date made perfect sense from both a musical and marketing standpoint. It was billed as a reunion of the masters of bebop. Dizzy and Bird had not been in the studio together in five years. And despite Monk’s virtual disappearance from the scene, Granz still believed he was a pioneer, though he described him in the original liner notes only as “a lesser light in modern jazz but, nevertheless, an important one.”66
To the serious boppers accustomed to the galloping tempos of Bird, Diz, and Bud, tossing Thelonious Monk into the equation might have promised something different, yet Monk was not leading the session, nor were his compositions part of the repertoire. It was Bird’s session and, except for the old standard “My Melancholy Baby,” all tunes on the date were Parker’s. Bird was hot at the moment and Granz knew it, having just produced and released his popular “Bird with Strings” recording of 1949, and having just ended a successful JATP tour featuring Parker.67 The session became the Bird and Diz show. Monk is practically drowned out. He makes himself heard only through some brilliant little introductions and few brief solos.68 Nonetheless, Monk is in fine form, responding to lines tossed out by Parker and Gillespie, building on his signature whole-tone phrases, and sharpening all the smooth edges with dissonance.69
Most of the time, Monk comps—a lot. He abandoned minimalism in order to compensate for drummer Buddy Rich, whose rhythmic sense clashed with the bop idiom. Rich, a swing drummer critical of bebop and the new crop of drummers whom he found too “busy,” was not the best choice for the session. Bird did not want him; he had unsuccessfully lobbied Granz to hire Roy Haynes.70 Monk’s on- and off-beat, dynamic comping provided the rhythmic spark lacking in Buddy Rich’s heavy metronomic four-four time. It’s as if Monk takes on the role of drummer, dropping accents that are as much rhythmic as harmonic. Granz’s motivation for using the white, nonbebopper Rich wasn’t just musical—it was political. He wanted to challenge social convention, proving to the world that jazz is the melting pot, the great unifier, bringing together artists of hitherto warring genres.71
Monk was happy to work again, in spite of his sideman role. Unfortunately, there were no more calls after that—no concert dates, no tours, and no other sessions. He did sit in whenever the opportunity arose. Sahib Shihab once saw Monk at Birdland, the club named after Charlie Parker located on Broadway just above 52nd Street. It had opened just before Christmas, 1949.72 Bird and Bud Powell played there fairly regularly during the first few months of its existence. Monk angered Birdland manager Oscar Goodstein by setting his drink glass on the brand-new piano. Shihab recalls Goodstein shouting, “‘Monk, Monk, remove that glass from the piano!’” Monk ignored Goodstein, launched into an unaccompanied ballad, took a sip of his drink, and then lit a cigarette and set it on the piano. By now Goodstein was fuming. “ ‘Monk, Monk, get that cigarette off the piano!’ ” Monk continued unruffled before a silent and befuddled audience. The only sound besides the music was Goodstein shouting. Once the song ended and the applause died down, Monk walked over to the microphone and announced: “I wish that management would not disturb the artist when he is working!”73 Goodstein found none of it amusing. He banned Thelonious from coming back.
By the time his son celebrated his first birthday, Monk was bottoming out. His membership in the union was finally terminated in December of 1950, after he failed to pay the 1 percent tax required of all members.74 Nellie’s recurring abdominal problems came back with a vengeance. During her pregnancy, the pain and nausea had disappeared, and when it came back, she went to a number of doctors who again dismissed her condition as psychosomatic. It wasn’t until May of 1951, when she was forced to check into Roosevelt Hospital with severe stomach pain and rapid weight loss, that doctors discovered she had an advanced abdominal ulcer. She was lucky to be alive. Geraldine, now a registered nurse, attended to Nellie during the surgery that removed two-thirds of her stomach. Her recovery was long; for weeks she survived on a “sippy” diet rich in cream and milk so that she might regain her weight.75
Nellie’s hospitalization was quite a wake-up call for Thelonious. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing Nellie, nor could he imagine his son’s life without her. He limited his outings and redoubled his efforts to find work. He also checked in more often on his mother, whose deteriorating health had left her largely bedridden. And if all the emotional and economic turmoil weren’t enough, in the spring of 1951 he learned that Jerry Newman, who now had his own record label (Esoteric Records), released more of his Minton’s recordings on an LP called Harlem Jam Sessions. Once again, no musician was paid.76
Meanwhile, Alfred Lion invited Monk back to the studio despite dismal sales of his first records. On a muggy Monday night, July 23, Monk, Milt Jackson, Sahib Shihab, Al McKibbon, and Art Blakey recorded six sides, the majority of which were new Monk originals. Indeed, the music was so new that two weeks after the session, Monk had not decided on titles for most of the songs.77 “Four in One” is a particularly treacherous melody made up of sixteenth-note phrases.78 “Straight, No Chaser,” which Lion initially scribbled down as “Nice Piece,”79 would eventually become one of Monk’s best-known blues. “Criss Cross” (whose working title was “Sailor Cap”80) was a revision of Monk’s contribution to the aborted collaboration with Mary Lou Williams and Bud Powell.81
The most noteworthy song on the date is a boppish line titled “Eronel.” Its importance lay not in its musical qualities, nor is it considered one of Monk’s better-known pieces. Indeed, “Eronel” is not even Monk’s song, despite the initial credit he received as co-composer. It is significant for the stories behind it—stories of love and theft. Pianist Sadik Hakim, a recent convert to Islam, co-wrote it with Idrees Sulieman.82 But it was Hakim who named it “Eronel”—Lenore spelled backwards—after an old flame of his. She was a young, attractive Jewish girl visiting from Kansas City named Lenore Gordon; he an African-American devotee of Ahmadiyya Islam. When they first met in the summer of 1944, he was still Argonne Thornton and she was but sixteen and escorted by her mother. He assumed the role of Lenore’s protector in the predatory world of jazz musicians and racist police officers.83
Their friendship remained on the precipice of romance, but she returned to Kansas City and in an effort to assert her own independence, the following year she married a man named Joe Baroni. “Everyone knew Baroni worked for the Mafia,” she recounted. She left him after a couple of months and then headed back to New York City, where she reunited with Hakim. “He said, ‘You move here and marry me.’ I said, ‘I already made the worst decision of my life. Why would I want to marry a musician? . . . You’re a great person but I don’t think I’m going to make another mistake.’ ”84
It would be nearly thirty years before they saw each other again. Still, Sadik held a torch for Lenore. He penned “Eronel” five years after she turned down his proposal.85
The story of “Eronel” reveals the depths of Hakim’s personal investment in the song. He and Sulieman believed they had something special, and tried to interest Miles Davis in recording it. He did add it to his repertoire briefly, though he disliked the bridge.86 So Sulieman took it to Monk, who kept changing one note—the last note of the second bar. “I said, ‘That’s the wrong note but play it again. Leave that note in. We’ll do the writers’ credits three ways.’”87 Monk did a little more than contribute one note. The chord voicings are his, as are little embellishments in both the A–section and the bridge, but the melody clearly belongs to Sulieman and Hakim. Unfortunately, when the record was released and the song copyrighted, only Monk’s name appeared. Both Sulieman and Hakim were hurt, and Sulieman spent a better part of his life giving Thelonious grief about the error. Years later, while they were all in Copenhagen, he appealed to Monk: “Why don’t you make a statement and tell them how it really happened?” But Thelonious would just smile and say, “They forgot it, ha ha.”88 It was only after Monk died that Thelonious Monk, Jr., restored their names as co-composers of “Eronel.”
Monk left the studio early that morning buoyed, hopeful that the session was a sign of things to come. He decided to stay home more often to play with his son and to sit with his mother. She was diagnosed with cancer and was not in a condition to be left alone for long stretches of time, though Thomas and Trotyrine dropped by every day.89 And she had her share of visitors. The beloved Miss Barbara had established a reputation in the neighborhood as a quiet caregiver, and now some of her neighbors returned the favor. Alice Crawford came often. She lived in the building and had known the Monks for many years. Alice and her sister were long-time Jehovah’s Witness devotees. She would sit and talk with Barbara, share copies of The Watchtower and Awake! magazines, and occasionally persuaded her to come to Kingdom Hall, but she never aggressively proselytized. Barbara was genuinely moved by the Witness message that Jesus now rules over the Messianic Kingdom in heaven and that he will soon cleanse the earth and restore it to paradise after the Battle of Armageddon.90 As a committed Baptist, she believed in the resurrection of Christ and knew he would come again, so the message the Crawford sisters brought did not seem too far from the Christian vision she knew. It was enough for her to convert. Thelonious was not religious at the time, but he had no choice but to accept her conversion. Although their refusal to salute any flag or participate in war probably amused him,91 he did not like the fact that Witnesses reject any medical procedures that involve blood or artificially prolonging life. Given her weakening condition, no one knew what medical treatment she might need. But he did all he could to accommodate her, sometimes spending hours at the piano playing her favorite sacred songs.92
On one of those summer evenings Monk spent sitting with his mother, Bud Powell decided to pay him a visit. It was a Wednesday—August 9, 1951, to be exact—and Bud decided they might hang out a bit since Thelonious wasn’t working. He was accompanied by a young woman and a man Monk had never met. Thelonious suggested they go outside and sit in the young woman’s car, so as not to disturb his mother. As they talked, two uniformed officers approached the car and flashed their badge. They were from the narcotics squad. Unbeknownst to Monk, Bud tossed a small glassine envelope in Monk’s direction and it landed near his feet. The officers noticed, seized it, and arrested everyone in the car without a search warrant.93 Within minutes Monk was in the back of a squad car on his way to Central Booking.