Thelonious Monk

After three weeks of uninterrupted rest, Nellie felt well enough to catch Monk’s last weekend at the Blackhawk, and they flew back together that Monday, November 2, 1959. They were anxious to go home. It had been two months since they had slept in their own bed or seen their children. With two weeks off, Monk brought the kids home to West 63rd Street and spent time with them, mostly in bed, playing cards, board games, watching television, and sleeping. He got up to play piano, take long walks around the neighborhood, and if the spirit hit him, prove to the younger cats that this slightly overweight forty-two-year-old could still handle his business on the basketball court. He dropped in on his brother and Trotyrine, Sonny and Geraldine and their kids, or he and Nellie headed across the Hudson to Nica’s house. Vacation ended on Tuesday the 17th, when he and Rouse went to Washington, D.C., to play at the Village Note through the weekend.¹

When Monk returned, Ornette Coleman had become the New York jazz world’s latest obsession. Martin Williams and the Termini brothers had arranged a special press preview at the Five Spot on November 17 to introduce Coleman and his band—Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Billy Higgins. It was meant as advance publicity for what was supposed to be a short engagement, and it worked better than anyone could have imagined. Critics and musicians who attended either hated or loved the group. Critic George Hoefer documented many of the responses: “‘He’ll change the entire course of jazz,’ ‘He’s a fake,’ ‘He’s a genius,’ ‘He swings like HELL,’ ‘I’m going to listen to my Benny Goodman trios and quartets,’ ‘He’s out, real far out,’ ‘I like him, but I don’t have any idea of what he is doing.’”² Bob Reisner, writing for the Village Voice, said the group “sounded their barbaric yawps to the great delight of many who are eagerly awaiting a new sound.”³

For the next couple of weeks, the city’s most eminent names in music, from Miles Davis to Leonard Bernstein, slipped into the Five Spot to hear the latest curiosity.⁵ Monk was no exception. He showed up with Charles Mingus. “It was very funny. I walked in with Monk. I said, ‘It’s a new guy, better than Bird.’ Monk walks in, spun around, says, ‘Hell, I did that twenty-five years ago, but I didn’t do it on every tune,’ and he walked out.”⁶ He didn’t walk out right away. He dug Billy Higgins, the young, smiling drummer from Los Angeles who never stopped swinging, no matter how far out the band went. That night, Monk put Higgins on his favored list of potential sidemen. A week later, Monk and Coleman were part of a huge Town Hall concert that included Count Basie, John Coltrane, Lee Konitz, the Art Farmer–Benny Golson “Jazztet,” and the Cecil Taylor Unit. Monk fronted a quartet with Rouse, a twenty-three-year-old bassist named Scott LaFaro, and drummer Elvin Jones—younger brother of cornetist Thad Jones. With both Cecil Taylor and Coleman also on the bill, Monk was cast as one of the old men, a role he shared with Basie. John Wilson wrote, “Mr. Monk, who is normally the ‘far out’ element on any program on which he appears, found himself in the unusual position of being a definite conservative on a bill that included Mr. Coleman and Cecil Taylor.”⁷

Ironically, Monk’s own rhythm section would soon be associated with the new music—LaFaro as a member of Ornette Coleman’s group and Jones as Coltrane’s drummer. New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett described the entire concert as “a vest-pocket history of most of the radical changes in jazz improvisation during the past couple of decades.” He was especially taken with Coleman, to whom he devoted nearly half of his review. But he did save some ink for Monk, praising his “slow, hymn-like rendering of ‘Crepuscule with Nellie’,” and singling out LaFaro and Jones for special recognition. Jones, he wrote, “proved that he is the only drummer besides Art Blakey who can manage Monk’s jarring rhythmic peregrinations.”⁸

Whereas Monk viewed Coleman and the new wave as upstarts, the emerging jazz avant-garde regarded Thelonious as their forefather. Coleman expressed his musical debt to Monk in his composition “Monk and the Nun,” recorded in May of 1959 for The Shape of Jazz to Come.¹² In interviews, Coleman frequently praised Monk as an exemplar of the kind of freedom he hoped to achieve. As he explained to critic A. B. Spellman, “Rhythm patterns should be more or less like natural breathing patterns. I would like the rhythm section to be as free as I’m trying to get, but very few players, rhythm or horns, can do this yet. Thelonious Monk can. He sometimes plays one note, and because he plays it in exactly the right pitch, he carries more music in it than if he had filled out the chord. I’d say Monk has the most complete harmonic ear in jazz.”¹³ When Don Cherry recorded a pianoless quartet album with John Coltrane just a few months after the Five Spot debut, the only non-Coleman composition they included was Monk and Denzil Best’s “Bemsha Swing.”¹⁴ Cherry considered Monk’s compositions ideal vehicles for Coleman’s harmolodic approach because “when you improvise [on Monk tunes] you play phrases where you can hear the harmonies too.”¹⁵

Coleman and Cherry took a lot from Monk, but their views on freedom diverged dramatically. Monk believed his own freedom, and that of the bass and horn, depended on the drummer’s ability to swing constantly. He liked expressive drummers who kept good time, avoided clutter, and never stopped swinging. On the other hand, Coleman and Monk had more in common musically than perhaps both artists realized: They both had firm roots in traditional jazz and black vernacular music. Coleman came out of a heavy blues tradition and folk idioms. His sense of rhythm is propulsive, his searching notes bend, cry, wail like the human voice. Whereas Monk held fast to a Harlem stride sensibility, Coleman never fully abandoned his rural, southern, and southwestern roots. Most critics missed these lingering traditional elements in Coleman’s music because they were caught up in the hype about the New Thing.¹⁶

More than Coleman, Cecil Taylor aligned himself with Monk, insisting that they both worked out of a much longer, deeper tradition. Indeed, Monk’s music was an early tool for Taylor’s own system of composition and improvisation—what he called “constructivist principles.” The basic idea was to compose, learn, and perform music by ear, to produce structured music that was not written down. A musical score, Taylor argued, “is subjugated to the feeling of jazz—they swung, ‘swing’ meaning the traditional coloring of the energy that moves the music.” At the time Taylor developed his constructivist principles, “We used a lot of Monk’s tunes. We used to take the Monk tunes out of themselves into the area in which I was going.”¹⁷

Now it is Christmas time, hear the bell ring pretty sounds.

Ting ting ting ting ting ting ting tong.

So we’ll make this Christmas better than the ones gone by.

We’ll have a merrier Christmas.

Yes, it is Christmas time, hear the bell ring pretty sounds.

Ting ting ting ting ting ting ting tong.18

Monk was no lyricist, but his words were heartfelt. He had had some rough holidays in the past and now looked forward to a “Christmas better than the ones gone by.” And he hoped the song might be a hit, giving him the wherewithal to make his family’s life merrier. After all, Irving Berlin did pretty well for himself with “White Christmas.” But, in the end, the quirky little 13-bar tune was inspired less by the prospect of financial security than the festive atmosphere and the strong family connection he felt being back home with the kids.

Thelonious and Nellie spent New Year’s Eve with Nica and friends for a raucous night of music and drinking. When the clock struck midnight, Monk was at the piano, accompanied by Donald Byrd and Hank Mobley on tenor, playing the only thing he could play at that moment: “ ’Round Midnight.”¹⁹ Whether it was the prospect of a new year, a new beginning, the stimulating atmosphere, or the double shots of Old Grand-Dad bourbon with Coke chasers, Monk was inspired. That night, he composed yet another new song, which he called “Classified Information.”²⁰

Monk and Rouse were back on the road the second week of January for a return engagement at Boston’s Storyville. For Monk, it was an opportunity for redemption after the debacle last spring that landed him in the state mental hospital. He hired bassist Scott LaFaro again, hoping he might become a permanent band member.²¹ Monk liked the way LaFaro broke up the rhythm and came up with inventive harmonies without ever losing his sense of swing. He still needed a drummer, however, so LaFaro suggested Paul Motian, a twenty-eight-year-old graduate of the Manhattan School of Music. The pair first recorded together with Tony Scott and Bill Evans in October 1959. Recognizing their wonderful rapport and chemistry, Bill Evans decided to hire both of them for his new trio in December.²² And with Evans now one of Riverside Record’s rising stars, Monk had no hope of keeping LaFaro and Motian permanently, even if he wanted to.

Meanwhile, Harry Colomby began working with Joe Glaser’s Associated Booking Corporation in an effort to keep Thelonious working while he, Joe Termini, and Termini’s attorney Benjamin Gollay worked behind the scenes to restore Monk’s cabaret card.²⁶ Among other things, Colomby booked Monk on a television special called “I Love a Piano.” Part of the ABC series Music for a Spring Night, the episode was set to air on March 16 and feature performances by Eugene List, Dorothy Donegan, and Cy Walter, as well as Monk.²⁷ Monk was also included in the “Jazz Profiles” series held at the Circle in the Square Theater. Located in the gorgeously renovated Amato Opera House on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, the theater was a performer’s dream: the acoustics were nearly perfect and the large rectangular floor-level stage surrounded on all sides by banks of seats created a uniquely intimate environment.²⁸ Monk planned to use his old rhythm section of Art Taylor and Sam Jones, but Jones came down with the flu and sent twenty-two-year-old Ron Carter in his place. The Detroit-bred bassist was a recent graduate of the Eastman School of Music but had spent the previous year recording and gigging with several different artists in and around New York.²⁹

The day after Valentine’s Day, Monk’s group opened at Pep’s Musical Bar in Philadelphia, a popular black nightclub at Broad and South Streets.³³ Every night for a week, Nica drove Monk, Rouse, and Ron Carter to Philadelphia and returned that night after the last set.³⁴ This time Taylor couldn’t make it, so Monk hired drummer Charles “Specs” Wright, a veteran on the Philadelphia scene.³⁵ A fine drummer influenced by Max Roach, Wright could swing the way Monk liked, but he was an inveterate junkie with a terrible reputation. He was known for visiting clubs during the day and convincing the owners that the resident bass player or the drummer had asked him to come by and pick up their instrument (it was common for musicians with more than one-night engagements to leave their bass or drums in the club). He would then hock the instrument for drug money.³⁶ Monk was warned, but he was never one to shy away from hiring addicts, as long as they could play and showed up to work on time. “Specs” worked well with the quartet, prompting Monk to hire him for his next engagement at the Minor Key, Detroit’s first jazz coffee house.³⁷

But just when Monk thought he had found a drummer, he lost his bassist. Ron Carter had many more opportunities to play in New York than Monk could give him, so he respectfully gave notice after the Pep’s gig. Several friends suggested Monk reach out to another Philadelphian, John Ore. Ore had played with David Amram’s group at the Five Spot and also recorded with Elmo Hope and Willie Jones, so Monk was already familiar with him. Nica was most adamant, and, in fact, formally introduced Ore to Monk. Monk had him come over to Nica’s place on March 4, during a terrible blizzard, to rehearse with the band.³⁸ The fact that he even made it over to Jersey in such bad weather put him in good stead with Thelonious, though it was his big sound and time-keeping that won him the job.

Thelonious did the best he could under the circumstances, but between the stress of Specs taking his advance and never showing up (for which Monk was docked $500!) and the weather (Detroit remained in the teens and twenties throughout the week⁴¹), Thelonious came down with a very bad cold. He flew back to New York the day he was supposed to tape the ABC program Music for a Spring Night, but bowed out at the last minute. A potential disaster became an opportunity for twenty-nine-year-old Phineas Newborn, Jr., who substituted for Monk with a florid, Tatumesque version of “It’s All Right with Me.”⁴²

March 26, Monk was back at Town Hall, sharing the bill with Max Roach, Kenny Dorham, Jackie McLean, and the phenomenal Nina Simone, whose memorable debut concert at Town Hall six months earlier had catapulted her to the national stage.⁴³ Unfortunately, this evening was memorable more for its problems than its performances. The mic malfunctioned and the line-up had to be shuffled because Simone was late. When she finally took the stage, critic John S. Wilson was not impressed with her piano playing, which in his words proved “that if one note is repeated often enough a jazz concert audience will eventually applaud.”⁴⁴ Wilson was ready to go home, until Thelonious Monk rode in on his black Steinway and saved the day. “Finally,” he sighed, “Thelonious Monk’s Quartet brought a brief note of individuality and jazz authenticity to an otherwise routine bill.”⁴⁵

Monk and Nellie spent the next few days preparing for another trip out west. Guido Cacianti gladly invited Monk back to the Blackhawk for a three-week stint in April. Because his gig at the Blackhawk coincided somewhat with Toot and Boo Boo’s spring break, they decided to turn the trip into a family vacation. The only significant challenge facing Thelonious was finding a drummer. He disliked using pick-up drummers only vaguely familiar with his music, and the Specs Wright incident underscored why he needed to establish a permanent band. Just days before he was scheduled to depart, Monk found a temporary solution. On April 5, Billy Higgins had to leave Ornette Coleman’s band because he lost his cabaret card due to previous drug arrests. Learning of Higgins’s impending return to California, Monk promptly hired him for the Blackhawk date, which not only allowed Higgins to work but pay his passage west.⁴⁶

The cards were stacked against Nica from the outset. She was tried in Wilmington’s Court of Common Pleas without a jury, and the judge apparently wanted to make an example of her. Her team of excellent attorneys argued that the ten dollars’ worth of marijuana had been illegally seized.⁴⁸ There was no search warrant issued, she was never informed of her rights, and the police detained her without charge until they found evidence to charge her. These were all violations of state law, her lawyers argued. But it didn’t matter. On April 22, the Baroness was convicted of unauthorized possession of narcotics and sentenced to three years in prison and a $3,000 fine. She immediately appealed the decision and was released on $10,000 bail. It wasn’t over, but at least she was free to go. Now she had to wait for the case to wind its way to the Delaware Superior Court docket.⁴⁹

Monk was already in San Francisco when Nica’s conviction was handed down. It is not clear if he had known about the trial or if he and Nellie had been in touch with Nica. We do know that Monk had his own troubles to contend with, beginning with his travels. Given the opening night debacle the last time he played the Blackhawk, he had begun to think the club might be jinxed. They were scheduled to open on April 12, but this time the band made it on time but Monk did not. On their way to LaGuardia Airport, the car blew a tire on the Triborough Bridge. Monk explained, “It took the man from the AAA a while to get there and in all the heavy traffic he had a time doing the job. We missed our plane, of course. Couldn’t get another one until today [April 13]. It sure bugged me, you know.” To make matters worse, the hotel cancelled his reservation, forcing Monk and his family to find alternative quarters.⁵⁰

The quartet played to a full house practically every night.⁵³ Monk dug Billy Higgins, whose uncanny ability to play freely while never losing his sense of swing reminded him a little of Roy Haynes. And the feeling was mutual. Higgins echoed the sentiments of so many young musicians who described working with Thelonious as an education. Though Higgins was only twenty-three, his work with Ornette Coleman had won him international acclaim as a leading innovator on his instrument. But as Monk reminded him, he still had a lot to learn, notably knowing “when not to play. . . . Monk can really hip a drummer to that, if he listens to him. He is a school within himself and in the little time I worked with him, I really learned a lot.”⁵⁴ They did not hang out much off the bandstand, largely because Monk and Nellie focused their attention on the kids.

Thelonious was upbeat throughout most of the trip. He enjoyed sightseeing with his family, riding the cable cars up and down the city’s hilly terrain, or just staying in the hotel room sleeping or playing games. On Easter Sunday, April 17, he appeared on Russ Wilson’s radio show Jazz Audition sounding relaxed and contented. Anyone who thought of Thelonious as taciturn and uncommunicative would have been surprised. He greeted Wilson warmly and graciously, talked about how his children are “a lot of fun,” spoke fondly (though briefly) about his early musical training, and answered Wilson’s questions honestly and directly. Sometimes his directness and humor flustered his host, like when Wilson asked, “Do you have any feelings or ideas about the use of the violin in jazz?” Monk didn’t miss a beat: “Well, I like all instruments, played right.” Wilson: “That’s true, of course, played right makes quite a difference.”⁵⁵

Everything went smoothly up until the last few days of the gig, when Orrin Keepnews showed up to produce a recording session with Monk’s quartet featuring drummer Shelly Manne. It was Bill Grauer’s idea. He hatched the plan with Lester Koenig, whose Contemporary label had made a killing with Manne and André Previn’s LP My Fair Lady. They believed a Monk/Manne meeting could produce enough music for two LPs, one for Riverside and the other for Contemporary. While it seemed to be a financial no-brainer, the collaboration proved an artistic disaster—especially since Thelonious wasn’t interested. Keepnews expanded the band by adding tenor saxophonist Harold Land and trumpeter Joe Gordon, who was a member of Manne’s ensemble. He saved money on studio space by recording at the Blackhawk in the afternoon. The session was scheduled for the 28th of April. Monk showed up tired and irritable, suffering from a bad cold. The repertoire was entirely Monk’s, and from the first take Manne deferred to Thelonious on every decision. This further irritated Monk, who believed that if he had to do the work of a leader, he ought to get top billing. The group got through two songs, “Just You, Just Me” and the new song he had composed at Nica’s, initially called “Classified Information.” Now he called it “Worry Later” because he couldn’t think of a better title. In any event, both recordings were pretty lackluster. They tried again the next morning, producing a rather boring rendition of “ ’Round Midnight.” By this point, Monk had closed himself off and Manne was uninspired, perhaps even embarrassed. According to Keepnews, “Shelly asked to be excused. He knew it wasn’t happening well enough, and thought the proper thing to do was to stop.”56

Keepnews came away angry, blaming Thelonious for the session’s failure. “I felt totally frustrated. My engineer and I had traveled cross-country, worked hard, and would have absolutely nothing to show for it. . . . [H]e had kept the date from happening properly by not even trying to compromise with his co-leader; more than that, he must have known all along that he really didn’t want to do it, so why hadn’t he spoken up and vetoed the project months ago?”⁵⁷ Of course, in Monk’s thirteen years as a recording artist he rarely had the opportunity to “veto” anything. Besides, he had begun to feel overshadowed by other Riverside recording artists, notably Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans. Harry Colomby had grown distrustful of both Grauer and Keepnews, and Monk noticed. But neither Keepnews nor Monk wanted to end the trip without an album. Thelonious agreed to a live recording that night with Land and Gordon added to the ensemble. With Higgins in the drum seat, he felt confident that the band could really swing, even if the two horn players did not know all the intricacies of his music. Monk did not make it easy for his sidemen. He resurrected a couple of older compositions—“Let’s Call This” and the treacherous “Four in One” (whose melody even Rouse had trouble navigating). With the exception of their rendition of “Evidence,” Monk chose to stay at the keyboard and use the piano rather than his feet to lead the band. The results are mixed, but there are some extraordinary highlights—notably the debut of “Worry Later.” Everyone sounds bright and joyful, and Monk’s flurry of whole tone runs sounds reminiscent of his earlier Blue Note recordings. He later changed the title to “San Francisco Holiday,” a fitting tribute to his working family vacation.⁵⁸

The Monks flew back home on May 2. Because Thelonious had no out-of-town gigs lined up, Toot and Boo Boo spent more time at West 63rd Street, although they continued to live with their Aunt Skippy and attend P. S. 61 in the Bronx. Colomby had not booked any more out-of-town engagements because he, Joe Termini, and Benjamin Gollay were in final negotiations to have Monk’s cabaret card restored. Termini promised Monk a long engagement at their new club called the Jazz Gallery. Located at 80 St. Marks Place, just a few blocks from the Five Spot, the Jazz Gallery opened around Christmas of 1959. A large square room with low ceilings, the new club was about three times the size of the Five Spot; it could seat up to 250 and the adjoining oval bar could accommodate nearly 100 more customers. The size of the space alone meant that the Terminis could afford more expensive acts, even big bands. The club earned its moniker for displaying work by mostly downtown artists.⁵⁹ The Terminis expected the State Liquor Authority to issue Monk a replacement card by the end of May, allowing him to open in June.⁶⁰

On May 17, composer Gunther Schuller paid homage to Thelonious by presenting a new work at the Circle in the Square Theater called “Variants on a Theme by Thelonious Monk (Criss Cross).” Schuller had an intense attraction to Monk’s “Criss Cross” ever since he declared it a “masterpiece” in Jazz Review two years earlier.61 Schuller drew on the composition’s abstract qualities and constructed four different variants or, literally, abstractions of the melody. Ironically, Schuller viewed “Criss Cross” as the perfect vehicle for “Third Stream” music and the experiments of the emerging jazz avant-garde—directions for which Monk had little or no sympathy. Schuller employed strings and a full ensemble of fairly diverse musicians, ranging from Bill Evans on piano, Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, to Ornette Coleman on alto. In fact, Coleman and Dolphy were the featured soloists. Both impressed the usually skeptical John S. Wilson with their “furious melee of urgent, discordant sounds.”⁶² I don’t know if Monk actually attended the concert, though the meaning of Gunther Schuller presenting his work as “serious music” wasn’t lost on him.

For Monk himself, the month of May proved relatively quiet. He did have one engagement—one that was particularly meaningful. He was invited to perform at the United Nations under the auspices of the U.N. Jazz Society. Barely a year old, the U. N. Jazz Society was founded by two African-American men: trumpeter/composer Bill Dixon and a former alto player named Richard Jennings. They initially considered forming a U.N. jazz ensemble, but instead organized Friday lunchtime lectures and performances. In the first year alone, the Society hosted composer George Russell, Cecil Taylor, Gunther Schuller, critic Martin Williams, Benny Golson, Art Farmer, Ornette Coleman, and Randy Weston.⁶³ Like many African-Americans, Thelonious admired the United Nations and felt a certain urgency to support its work. The U.N. had declared 1960 “The Year of Africa,” inspired largely by the wave of nations achieving independence. But what was conceived as a year of celebration turned into a year of protest when South African police massacred unarmed blacks demonstrating peacefully against apartheid laws. On March 21, nearly 7,000 people led by the Pan Africanist Congress converged on a police station in the township of Sharpeville. Some burned their pass books, others simply showed up without passes and offered themselves up for arrest. The police opened fire on the demonstrators, killing at least sixty-nine people including eight women and ten children, though the unofficial count was much higher. The massacre sparked more protests, strikes and violent uprisings all across the country. Nine days later the ruling Nationalist Party declared a state of emergency and detained over 18,000 people. The United Nations responded immediately, condemning the violence and the South African government.⁶⁴

When Monk led his quartet—Rouse, John Ore, and drummer Al Dreares—into the U.N. Secretariat building, he felt he was entering history in the making. So did the 125 people in the audience, many of whom believed that seeing Monk perform in New York in such an intimate setting was itself historic. Besides the society’s regular membership (diplomats and U.N. staff representing twenty-one countries), the event drew journalists and a few prominent musicians, including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin, composers Earle Brown and Luciano Berio, and Monk’s dear friend Randy Weston.⁶⁷ Most of the attendees came to hear Monk, but a few were there to check out multi-reed player Jimmy Giuffre’s quartet, with Steve Lacy (soprano sax), Buell Neidlinger (bass), and Dennis Charles (drums). Actually, a more accurate description would be Steve Lacy’s trio featuring Jimmy Giuffre: “Giuffre took my trio and called it a quartet,” Lacy explained. “At the time, he didn’t know what to do and found my trio interesting, but it didn’t work out very well. He fired me after two weeks. . . .”⁶⁸ Giuffre’s avant-garde outfit opened the concert with a couple of his original compositions and then audaciously played two Monk tunes.⁶⁹

Monk’s group performed five songs before a mesmerized, though unusually subdued, crowd. They were subdued for good reason: Bill Dixon had to ask the audience and the musicians to be “as quiet as possible” because U. N. General Secretary Dag Hammarskjøld was hosting dinner for the King of Nepal three floors below.⁷⁰ Afterward Monk complimented Lacy, who in turn invited him to come check out the group at the Five Spot, where they were opening for Ornette Coleman’s quartet.⁷¹ Lacy remembers Monk digging the band’s interpretation of his music. Neidlinger remembered otherwise: “Thelonious hated the way we played his music. . . . [T]he Baroness would drive him over. She’d sit in the car while he came into the kitchen to get a hamburger and a whiskey and storm around. There was a big, metal firedoor that he used to slam during our numbers. Of course, when Giuffre played Monk’s music, the chords were all wrong.”⁷² Still, he liked what Lacy was doing and told him so.

Monk was already familiar with Lacy’s music. In late 1958, Lacy recorded Reflections: Steve Lacy Plays Thelonious Monk, the first LP devoted entirely to Monk’s music by another artist. As soon as Lacy got his hands on a test pressing he personally delivered a copy to Thelonious. It was his way of formally introducing himself. “He appreciated [the album] a lot.”⁷³ The twenty-six-year-old soprano saxophonist had been a Monk devotee since at least 1955, though his path to the High Priest was unusual. Born Steven Norman Lackritz to Russian immigrants in New York City, Lacy started on piano, played clarinet, and then switched to soprano saxophone after discovering the music of Sidney Bechet. As a teenager, he studied with Cecil Scott and played with several Dixieland and Chicago Jazz revival bands. He did not come up through bebop like most “modern” musicians.74 And then he met Cecil Taylor. It was Taylor who literally took Lacy and his entire band to hear Monk, and it was Taylor who added a few Monk tunes to their repertoire.⁷⁵ By the time Lacy went into the studio to record Reflections, he had learned about thirty Monk tunes and “listened to Monk’s records hundreds of times.”⁷⁶

So when Monk asked Lacy to join his new quintet scheduled to open at the Jazz Gallery in a couple of weeks, the young saxophonist was ecstatic—and ready.

It was as if they were waiting for the resurrection. The crowd started filing in around 8:00. By 9:00, the cavernous Jazz Gallery was packed. Fans were four deep at the bar and every seat was occupied. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and anticipation. As one excited observer put it, Monk’s return to the club scene was “the most momentous thing to happen in jazz in the ‘Apple’ in the last eighteen months.”⁷⁷ Nine-thirty, no Monk. No problem. Monk’s group was playing opposite John Coltrane’s astounding new quartet, so there was plenty of music to be had.⁷⁸ Besides, the real aficionados did not expect Thelonious to show up on time. They knew he wouldn’t let them down, so they just drank a little more, smoked a little more, and listened to ’Trane. Then around 10:15, in walked Monk. The whole room let out a collective sigh, followed by a round of applause as he made his way to the bandstand, coat, hat, and all (despite the June weather). Reunited with Joe and Iggy Termini, surrounded by friends and enthusiastic fans, accompanied by Nellie and Nica, the night of June 14, 1960, could only be described as a “homecoming.” When asked how he felt, he was at a loss for words: “Yes, I like, you know, to be back, it’s nice.”⁷⁹

Nice indeed. He finally had some steady bread coming in, which allowed him to stay put in New York for a while. And he had a band. Rouse and Ore knew the music, and Lacy was eager to play and even more eager to listen to the master. Best of all, Monk found a drummer. Not just any drummer, the inimitable Roy Haynes. Haynes always had a way of lighting a fire under Monk’s band, no matter what the tempo. He knew he couldn’t keep Haynes forever, but he stayed for the length of the gig, which turned out to be sixteen weeks.⁸⁰ For Lacy, it was like being in school, or as he put it, “like about five schools rolled up into one.”⁸¹ “He had a way of teaching you without saying anything. . . . I had like slick tendencies. I wanted to be really modern and sharp and hip. . . . And he would correct me.”⁸² By “slick tendencies,” he meant that he would play a lot of complicated phrases that allowed him to show off his virtuosity on the horn, but he would stray from the melody as well as the rhythm. Monk’s injunctions were clear: “Don’t play all that bullshit, play the melody! Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head, or play off the rhythm of the melody, never mind the so-called chord changes. . . . Don’t pick up from me, I’m accompanying you!” He taught Lacy valuable lessons about composing and improvising: “The inside of the tune [the bridge] is what makes the outside sound good. . . . You’ve got to know the importance of discrimination, also the value of what you don’t play. . . . A note can be as big as a mountain, or small as a pin. It only depends on a musician’s imagination.” And always “Make the drummer sound good !”83 Above all, Monk taught Lacy to think independently, stretch out, even make mistakes. Learning to make mistakes, to listen, to tell a story with his horn, were not things he could have gotten from copying records or studying transcriptions of Monk’s music. These were “ideological, philosophical, and political” lessons. He even described his experience with Monk as “spiritual.” “He was a teacher, a prophet, a visionary.”⁸⁴

And a shrewd arranger. Monk knew exactly what he wanted from his band. He didn’t want the horns to play harmony. “He had us play unisons and octaves only,” Lacy explained, “because he said that that’s the hardest thing to do. . . . And he was right. It took us weeks to get a good sound. And finally when Rouse and I got our lines hooked up like that it was a beautiful sound. Monk would add the harmonies on the piano.”⁸⁵ Unfortunately, Riverside never recorded the quintet, and the only audio record we have was taken from a CBS radio broadcast of the Quaker City Jazz Festival in Philadelphia. Performing on August 26, 1960, about ten weeks into their stint together, Lacy sounds comfortable, and he and Rouse demonstrate just how “hooked up” their unison lines really are. Despite the poor audio quality (a symptom of performing outdoors at the huge Connie Mack Stadium), Haynes and Monk can be heard driving the beat forward. As a result, Lacy is much stronger rhythmically, more direct, and more “swinging” than most of his recorded work prior to joining Monk.⁸⁶

Monk was perennially late, but Joe Termini tolerated it since they always hired two groups. Coltrane’s quartet stayed for another week, then Joe Turner, followed by Gigi Gryce.⁸⁷ Termini couldn’t complain too much because Monk drew crowds, and when it was time to take the bandstand, he went to work. Most nights were pretty uneventful, though there were a few memorable exceptions. Like the night Harry Colomby picked Thelonious up to take him to work. When Colomby arrived at West 63rd Street, Ike Quebec was there visiting. Both men looked a little dazed, but Colomby thought nothing of it. Quebec asked for a ride to the 14th Street subway station and Colomby obliged. “As we near downtown, a cop pulls us over. Ike has this paper bag in his hands, which he slipped under a blanket in the back of the car. The cop asks what’s under the blanket? And Thelonious starts telling the cop that he’s late for work, he has to get to his gig, and so forth. So the cop lets us go and I drop Monk off in front of the Jazz Gallery.” He then took Quebec to the 14th Street station and before heading back to the Jazz Gallery he stopped off at a record store. “When I pull up to the Jazz Gallery, I see Thelonious out front pacing back and forth, nervous as hell. He lit in to me: ‘Where were you? What took you so long?’ Turns out, Ike did have something in the bag—heroin and needles, what Thelonious called ‘the works.’ I was shaken. I mean, I just imagined the headlines: ‘Schoolteacher and two musicians arrested for heroin possession!’ And we had just gotten his cabaret card back!”⁸⁸

In addition to the six nights a week Monk put in at the Jazz Gallery, his quintet made a few concert appearances. Besides the Quaker City Jazz Festival, they performed three days at the Apollo (July 29–31) as part of the Apollo Theater Summer Jazz Festival.⁸⁹ And despite inclement weather, Monk made a return appearance at the Randall’s Island Jazz Festival on Saturday, August 20, and in September performed three nights at Brooklyn’s Plaza Theater.⁹⁰ Surprisingly, Monk did not play the Newport Jazz Festival. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. On the second day of the festival, thousands of young fans eager to get into a sold-out concert featuring Ray Charles launched into a pitched battled with police. A full-scale riot broke out, as cops deployed tear gas and ducked flying beer bottles. The violence that night forced George Wein and Newport organizers to close down the festival.91 Meanwhile, Charles Mingus and Max Roach decided to boycott the proceedings and hold their own “Newport Rebels Festival” at Cliff Walk Manor, not far from Freebody Park. The musician-run alternative event openly protested George Wein’s inclusion of pop singers, the commercialization of the festival, racial inequality in the music business, and the general exploitative conditions jazz musicians endured. As Max Roach explained to the press, the proceeds from the Rebels Festival “will go to fight injustices that are plaguing the musician such as the cabaret-card fight, the unemployment tax . . . we are also trying to prove that the musician can produce, present, and participate himself.”⁹² The list of participants cut across generation and style (though the vast majority were black). They included Coleman Hawkins, Eric Dolphy, Roy Eldridge, Randy Weston, Gigi Gryce, Teddy Charles, Kenny Dorham, Ornette Coleman and his group, Jo Jones, dancer Baby Laurence, among others. Thelonious Monk’s name was invoked as a possible participant, but he never made it up there.⁹³

However, Monk did make it to another, more urgent event in the name of social justice. On Sunday afternoon, August 7, the New York chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized “Jazz Sits In,” a fundraiser in support of the Southern student movement. Besides Monk’s quintet, CORE recruited the Clark Terry quintet, singer Bill Henderson, and Jimmy Giuffre’s group.⁹⁴ It is fitting that the Village Gate would host the event; its owners, Art and Burt D’Lugoff, had a long association with radical and anti-racist causes dating back to the late 1940s.⁹⁵ “Jazz Sits In” was the first of several civil rights benefits in which Monk would take part. Like the recent events in South Africa, the sit-in movement in the South deeply affected Thelonious. The movement was still in its infancy, having begun seven weeks before the Sharpeville massacre. On February 1, four black students walked into the local Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat down at a whites-only lunch counter. Jim Crow laws prohibited blacks from sitting at the counter; they could only stand and eat. The young men, all of whom attended North Carolina A&T, were refused service, but would not move. The next day they were joined by twenty-three classmates, and by the third day three hundred African-American students packed into Woolworth’s and occupied every seat available. Within days the movement had spread across the country, with CORE emerging as the principal organizer. The New York chapter of CORE moved swiftly in support of the students, organizing sympathy boycotts and pickets of Woolworth’s and other dime stores in the city and raising money for bail and related expenses. Two and a half months later, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born.⁹⁶ The benefit afforded Thelonious an opportunity to meet CORE members, learn more about events in the South, and contribute to the movement he had come to admire.⁹⁷

The Jazz Gallery gig closed on October 2, giving Thelonious a much-needed and well-deserved hiatus. He took some time to rest on his laurels, which included best pianist in the Down Beat International Critics Poll, for a third year in a row, and the first annual Edison International Award, the Netherlands’ most prestigious music award—an honor he shared with Frank Sinatra.⁹⁹ Meanwhile, Roy Haynes gave notice. He was already one of the most sought-after drummers on the scene even during the Jazz Gallery gig, so he had no shortage of work.¹⁰⁰

The Terminis signed Monk on for another extended engagement at the Jazz Gallery, starting November 15. They agreed to a quartet this time, partly for financial reasons. Rouse and Ore were ready to work again, but Monk had yet to permanently fill the drum chair. When he heard that Frankie Dunlop was available, he immediately offered him the job.¹⁰¹ It had been three years since they last worked together at the Five Spot—the gig ending prematurely when the union rep pulled the young drummer off the job for failing to fulfill Local 802’s residency requirement. Now, just shy of his thirty-second birthday, Frankie Dunlop had built up his resume. Since those two nights with Monk, he had worked with Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Maynard Ferguson, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, and most recently Gigi Gryce.¹⁰² But Monk knew that he still had a lot to learn. As Dunlop recalled, school began promptly on opening night. Before taking the bandstand, Monk pulled him aside and said, “You want to solo and play fast all the time. All drummers are that way. When you’re playing fast, soloing, and throwing your sticks, you think you’re really playing. In your estimation, that’s the hardest. Well, you know, it’s really harder to play slow than it is to play fast, and to swing and create something while you’re doing it.” Dunlop nodded. Then when it was time to play, Monk counted out an extremely slow tempo. Every measure felt like a lifetime. Dunlop struggled to make something happen and maintain the tempo against Monk’s off-meter phrases. Then Monk suddenly got up from the piano to dance, leaving Dunlop and Ore alone to support Rouse’s solo. Monk sidled up alongside Dunlop and began cajoling him. “Okay. Get to me now. Swing it, pal. . . . Okay Frankie, come on now. Let me see you swing now. Shit. I told you it ain’t easy to swing when you’re playing slow. I told you that, didn’t I? Come on.”¹⁰³ Just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse, Monk shouts, “Drum solo,” Dunlop recalled. “‘Let me hear something Frank. Don’t be bullshittin’.’ I was trying to do things that I couldn’t do. Monk said, ‘And keep the time. Here’s the tempo. Don’t play some shit that you don’t know nothing about.’ I didn’t even know how to put a paradiddle in there, because I’d never played a paradiddle that slow. And whatever I played, Monk said that he wanted it to make sense. I couldn’t do any of my rudiments.”104 A trial by fire, but Dunlop survived. During the break, Thelonious underscored his point, giving his drummer advice he would never forget: “[Monk] said that, if you were swinging in jazz, it could go with any tempo, even a ballad.”¹⁰⁵

Monk could now say that he had a band. They rehearsed a little at Nica’s, but the Jazz Gallery became their rehearsal space, the place to hone their sound and find their groove. Joe Termini happily retained Monk’s band until New Year’s Day. For nearly seven weeks they were the Jazz Gallery’s mainstay while Gil Evans Big Band, Dizzy Gillespie’s quintet, and Dave Brubeck’s quartet passed through.¹⁰⁶

In the meantime, Rouse cut an album for the Epic label, his second as a leader since joining Monk.¹⁰⁷ Several months earlier, Orrin Keepnews produced Rouse’s first LP, Takin’ Care of Business, for the Jazzland label, an off-shoot of Riverside Records.¹⁰⁸ Monk encouraged Rouse to pursue his own music, but he must have also been a little envious. It had been almost a year and a half since he set foot in a recording studio. Riverside now had a stable of artists and Cannonball Adderley was the main attraction. Feeling slighted, Monk’s relationship with Orrin Keepnews deteriorated. “Whenever Orrin Keepnews called,” Toot remembered, “my father would whisper, ‘Tell him I’m not here.’ Orrin was always the one person my dad did not want to talk to.”¹⁰⁹ Chris Albertson, who joined Riverside’s staff in October of 1960, observed a marked chill between Monk and Keepnews. In fact, Albertson found Keepnews egotistical and difficult to work with. “Orrin had this grumpy look on his face. He doesn’t have much of an ear for music. He can’t tell when something is good or not so good, so he likes to remain neutral. He stands there stonefaced, cigarette dangling from his mouth, which made a lot of musicians uptight. . . . When I saw Orrin work, it was really the musicians producing the record.”¹¹⁰ Randy Weston felt the same way. “The guy thought he knew everything. He talked all the time and never listened.”¹¹¹

Occasionally Monk would drop by the office, located on West 46th in the Paramount Hotel, and just hang out. Once he plopped down in Chris Albertson’s office to check out the new guy. He was, after all, a curiosity; a jazz and blues lover born in Iceland, raised in Denmark, Albertson had been in the country only three years before landing the Riverside job.¹¹² “Monk just sat there for a while. After about fifteen minutes, he said out of the blue, ‘I wrote a kiddie song.’ So I say, sort of jokingly, ‘You think you might want to record it for us?’ He said, ‘Maybe.’ And he walked out.”¹¹³

Albertson’s observations were on the mark—relations between Monk and Riverside had soured. During the summer, Harry Colomby initiated an audit of Riverside on the suspicion that Monk was not receiving his full share of royalties. He found their accounting methods questionable, especially when Monk’s record sales began to top 20,000. “When I got the auditor’s report back, the very first thing that I saw on the first page was that ‘We accept their internal accounting methods.’ What was the point of that? I still saw a lot of ‘Oops, I forgot this, oops’ . . . I knew he would never get [his money] back.”¹¹⁴ The audit found no wrongdoing, but three years later, when Grauer died of a heart attack in Switzerland, Colomby alleges that Grauer had “a letter to Orrin, referring to me looking into [the finances] and being on to the fact that they had two or three sets of books.”115 Although Colomby never saw the letter, he is convinced of its veracity. And so was Thelonious, who left the company feeling that Riverside cheated him. In an interview three years later, Monk said of Riverside: “Some companies only think about making money. At least, they should give you the money they owe you.”¹¹⁶ Absent Riverside’s accounting records, it is impossible to prove that the company underpaid Monk, but other sources reveal that Grauer engaged in questionable business practices. For example, he convinced creditors to loan him large sums of money by inflating sales figures. The company printed many more LPs than they needed and shipped them out even when they did not have orders for all of them. This gave the false impression that sales were high, but it also meant a warehouse filled with returns—which they ended up dumping at discount record stores. The company went bankrupt the year after Grauer’s death.¹¹⁷

But by the end of 1960, Colomby had already seen the handwriting on the wall. He and Monk agreed that it was time to look for a new label. The only thing keeping Monk there was his contract: he owed Riverside two more LPs. And he had no real desire to work with Keepnews, not even to record a “kiddie song.”

The Jazz Gallery gig ended on an upswing. Monk and his crew rang in the New Year, 1961, and Nica and Nellie were on hand to celebrate. Thelonious had just learned that George Wein was planning his first European tour and wanted to include him. Harry Colomby was hard at work trying to either renegotiate Monk’s contract with Riverside or find a more appreciative label. And Monk . . . well, he was healthy and feeling good about the future. He had gone quite a while without a major breakdown and it felt good to be back at work in his home town.

Nica was also in a good mood. Reputedly a stingy tipper, she broke tradition and left the waiter a check for $100. His name was Ran Blake, and while waiting tables was not his forte (a few weeks earlier he was fired and then rehired after spilling drinks on James Baldwin and Sidney Poitier), he knew she liked her Chivas Regal with no ice, and, more importantly, he was a hell of a pianist and a Thelonious Monk devotee. A recent graduate of Bard College, Blake had been following Monk’s music since 1955, studying with Gunther Schuller at the Lenox School of Jazz, catching Monk and ’Trane at the Five Spot, incorporating Monkish harmonies in his own music. He had even written to Monk inviting him to participate on his college review. He worshipped Monk almost to a fault: Once, during a wedding gig in Boston, he played some Monk “tone clusters” to disastrous effect. “The bride was getting nauseated, and someone politely asked me to leave,” he recalled. But now he was in seventh heaven, having just moved to New York to study with Schuller and Bill Russo, he had some access to the Man himself. Blake will never forget the first words Monk uttered to him: “Kid, let me get some more of that fried rice.” He tried on several occasions to reach out to Monk for private lessons or conversation, but Thelonious politely put him off at first. But on New Year’s Eve, perhaps inspired by the festive atmosphere and overall good mood, Monk warmed up a bit and invited Ran to drop by the house. Clearly, he liked the kid, and Nica adored him.118

Monk spent the next few weeks at home, writing new music, practicing, and hanging out with Nellie and the children. The city experienced one of the most severe winters in modern history. The temperature remained below freezing for three weeks, and at times the snow reached waist-high. During the first weekend in February alone, eighteen inches of snow fell on Manhattan.¹¹⁹ That Saturday night, February 4, Thelonious ventured out to get some cigarettes and fresh air. He returned home around 11:00 p.m. and began kicking the snow off of his shoes when seven-year-old Boo Boo told her father that smoke was coming out the kids’ bedroom closet. When he opened the closet door he discovered the clothes on fire.¹²⁰ Toot and Nellie were in the master bedroom watching television. “I remember my father came running in the room,” Toot explained, “and he said, ‘Get up, get up, get up, we gotta get out! We gotta get out!’ And I remember him rushing my sister and me out the door and my mother looking. . . . My mother had some kind of animal coat—not alpaca—but something that cost a lot of money. She wanted it and it was burning. And I’ll never forget, she ran in to grab it out of the closet . . . and I remember my father saying, ‘Fuck the coat, Nellie. Get out of here,’ and he threw the coat back and just pushed us all out the door.”¹²¹

The Monks ran across the street to “Aunt” Rae McKinney’s apartment in the projects and called the fire department. The heavy snow caused a delay, but the crew arrived in time to extinguish the blaze before it spread. Monk was relieved no one was hurt. It could have been a lot worse. The fire in 1956 engulfed much of the apartment, but this seemed more contained. Or so he thought. When the axe-wielding firemen finished the job and headed back to the station, Thelonious went back in to inspect the damage. Suddenly it got very, very cold.

21

“Hell, I Did That Twenty-Five Years Ago”