(February–May 1961)
It was after midnight before the firemen finally left. The culprit turned out to be old or faulty wiring. With no functioning electricity, Thelonious had to wait until daylight to inspect the damage. The next morning, while the kids slept over at the McKinneys’ place, he and Nellie slogged through a couple of inches of water to assess their losses. The place was a wreck. As with the last fire, the firefighters did more damage than the smoke and flames. “The firemen came and tore the place to shreds with their axes,” Toot recalled. “That was in the days when you know firemen, they just did their thing, just destroying and stealing and all kinds of wild stuff. Soaked everything, absolutely everything.” Most of their clothes were lost, along with tapes and records (including studio session tapes he had gotten from Riverside), and some important papers—including the charts from the 1959 Town Hall concert. Worst of all, Monk’s rented Steinway piano was burned beyond repair. He had had it just over four years—nearly long enough to take ownership. Fortunately, his sheet music was spared this time, as well as his precious Edison International Award.1
The water eventually subsided, and later in the afternoon Toot and Boo Boo joined their parents in an effort to salvage what was left. The snow came down even harder. As the four of them tried to cope with the losses, a rather tall, thin white man suddenly walked in. It was Ran Blake, the young pianist-cum-waiter whom Nica befriended at the Jazz Gallery. Monk had forgotten that he invited Ran over for a visit: “I rang the bell and walked in, and I think the four of them were sitting on a large bed—Toot and Nellie, Thelonious and Barbara. I can almost see the piano in ashes. . . . The place was in shambles. There was water all over the place, but outside there were no visible signs that there had been a fire. I didn’t know what had happened until I walked in. Evidently, the door must have been ajar.”2 For Blake, the entire experience was surreal. Here was his very first visit to his hero’s house and he walked right into the aftermath of a tragedy. He tried to make himself useful. First he called Nica in Weehawken, who gave him a list of contacts to call. She would have already been with the Monks if not for the snow. Blake braved the weather and picked up some dinner, and then reached out to other musicians and Nica’s contacts to rustle up supplies—second-hand clothes, blankets, food, and assorted sundry items. Blake’s kind gesture, however, made Thelonious and Nellie uncomfortable. “I remember embarrassing the Monks because I was calling around to places like the Vanguard, asking if I could get takeout food, and the Monks had more money than I did.” Nellie ended up returning most of these generous donations.3
Blake was most helpful caring for the kids while Monk and Nellie and the extended family tried to put their life back together. He took them out to restaurants and to buy clothes with money provided by the Baroness, and sometimes brought them uptown to his place on 113th and Amsterdam. Toot’s buddy Gregory Flowers frequently tagged along. His fondness for Toot and Boo Boo evolved into a warm friendship; a couple of times a year he would take them out for a meal and catch up. Nellie and Monk appreciated the role he played in the kids’ lives. Several years later, Blake ran into Nellie in the lobby of the Parker House Hotel in Boston and she shoved a couple of hundred dollars in his hand. “You did a lot for us,” she said.4
Monk and Nellie moved in with Skippy, whose apartment on Bristow Street in the Bronx had become a second home for Toot and Boo Boo. The kids were already enrolled in school there and Sonny, Geraldine, and their kids were only three blocks away.5 While the Graham brothers—the contractors who worked on the last renovation—performed their magic on 243 West 63rd Street, the Monks settled in for an indefinite stay. Skippy’s place was big enough for Nellie and Thelonious and Boo Boo and Toot to have two separate bedrooms, though quarters were tight nonetheless. Skippy and her partner, Tony Brown, had a fifteen-month-old baby they named Pannonica, and Ronnie still lived at home, although at twenty years old he preferred to be out and about.6 Monk’s work and travel schedule eased the pressure; he had engagements in Chicago and Boston in March and early April, and then it was off to Europe.
The immediate aftermath of the fire must have been surreal. Losing so much so quickly left Monk incredibly vulnerable, and yet the jazz world treated him like a god. Two days after the fire, Johnny Griffin and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis were in the studio with Orrin Keepnews recording an LP dedicated entirely to Monk’s compositions. Thelonious could not make the session. Griffin remembers hearing of the fire, which ultimately gave the session a greater poignancy and urgency.7 Monk did make it to Nola Studios on Wednesday night, February 22, for Abbey Lincoln’s record date. Max Roach, Lincoln’s fiancé and drummer on the session, invited Monk because she had written lyrics to “Blue Monk” and they wanted to get the composer’s blessings. She cast “Blue Monk” as a sage and “monkery” meant “the act of self-searching, like a monk does.”8
Most importantly, the band was swinging: besides Roach, she had Mal Waldron on piano, Coleman Hawkins, Eric Dolphy, Julian Priester on trombone, Art Davis on bass, and a twenty-two-year-old phenom on trumpet named Booker Little. Over Waldron’s slow, bluesy arrangement, and Little’s dazzling yet understated trumpet obligato, Lincoln belted out lyrics with which Monk could identify:
According to producer Nat Hentoff, Monk was quite “pleased.”9 He stuck around for most of the session, enjoying Lincoln’s vibrant interpretation of Randy Weston’s “African Lady,” her lyrical plea for reparations for slavery in 5/4 time titled “Retribution,” her swinging reading of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “When Malindy Sings,” and her poignant rendition of “Left Alone”—a lovely ballad Mal Waldron wrote as a vehicle for Billie Holiday. Monk listened intently and danced to at least one number. According to Ran Blake, who was also among twelve or fifteen spectators at Nola Studios that evening, “Monk was thrilled by Abbey’s voice. That smile. I don’t think he looked at me. His eyes were riveted on Abbey.”10 After the session, Thelonious went over to Lincoln and said, “I like the way you stand.”11 Then he leaned in a little closer and offered her some advice. As Lincoln tells it, “he whispered in my ear, ‘Don’t be so perfect.’ He meant, don’t be afraid to make a mistake.”12
The next night, Monk’s quartet played a concert at the Museum of Modern Art as part of its Jazz Profiles series. His first performance since New Year’s Eve at the Jazz Gallery, Monk showed up on time and the band kicked off at exactly 9:00 p.m. Besides his original compositions, he included four standards: “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Sweet and Lovely,” and an unaccompanied version of “Just a Gigolo.” As John S. Wilson observed, Monk played these tunes fairly straight without sacrificing his style: “the melody was never obliterated and the rhythmic attack was toe-tapping swinging.” It was as if he wanted to remind listeners that he was a traditionalist in the era where “modern art” was increasingly associated with the avant-garde. The audience dug the music, and he stuck close to the printed program until the end. Anxious to end the concert, Monk dropped a song from the repertoire, played the final tune as an encore, and hastily led his band off stage ten minutes early.13 Whatever his motivations, the audience left the museum “bewitched, bothered, and bewildered walking the streets, wandering quo vadis at 9:50.”14
Harry Colomby booked Monk’s quartet for a two-week run in mid-March at the Birdhouse in Chicago, a fairly new club on the Northside that served no alcohol15 and held afternoon press conferences for young writers from high school and college newspapers to interview the resident artists. Monk arrived early, and graciously fielded questions from a roomful of nervous teens. In response to one kid’s query into what he thought about Lawrence Welk, Monk broke up the room with his characteristically pithy and honest response: “I think he’s got a good gig.”16 The more telling interview was granted to professional jazz critic and columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times Gabriel Favoino. Monk was uncharacteristically talkative, but he also seemed to have an agenda. He wanted to establish two points: first, that he, in fact, pioneered modern jazz in the 1940s, and two, the “new thing” in jazz has nothing new to offer. “It’s been 20 years since any important changes have been made,” Monk explained. “The harmony didn’t do justice to the melody in those days. We had a different conception of phrasing and figuration. Nobody was writing much then. But we were game enough to make up our minds to go write this stuff.” While Monk waxed philosophically about his contribution to modern music, a group of skeptical young men playing chess overheard the exchange and chimed in. One asked, “When was the change of the ’40s complete?” Monk ignored the question. But then the young man followed up with, “What about Ornette Coleman, is that anything new?” “I haven’t listened to him that good,”Monk replied. “Like something was always happenin’. But I don’t think it’s going to revolutionize jazz.” Favoino, who found the whole exchange telling, concluded with a prescient remark: “And so it is always. Today’s trailblazers are tomorrow’s conservatives.”17
Chicagoans who packed the Birdhouse just about every night didn’t think of Monk as a conservative—not just yet. It had been nearly two years since he last played the Windy City, so the jazz community was out in full force to see the “eccentric” pianist and his new band—especially Frankie Dunlop, whose hard-driving rhythms and big sound electrified audiences.18 From Chicago, they flew to Boston for a week-long engagement at Storyville, returning home just long enough to pack for Europe.
It is startling to think that, at the age forty-three, the internationally acclaimed Thelonious Monk had only crossed the Atlantic once before, and that was seven years earlier. He felt excited, partly because he was to see more than Paris, and partly because impresario George Wein was paying him “as much or more than he would receive in a week at a night club.”19 But mostly because he was taking Nellie.
The European tour was a landmark event in Monk’s career, as well as George Wein’s. Unbeknownst to most artists on the tour, Wein was in dire financial straits. The year before he was forced to abandon Storyville (which had been resurrected by Ralph Snyder in name only at the Hotel Bradford), and the “riots” at Newport in 1960 forced Wein to abandon the festival the following year.20 The future of the Newport Jazz Festival was uncertain, and so was Wein’s income. Indeed, money was so tight that his wife, Joyce, had to take a job at Columbia Medical School just so they could make ends meet. This tour had to be a financial success, otherwise it might mean the end of Wein’s career as a concert promoter.21
In truth, Wein was juggling two separate tours. A week before Monk’s quartet was scheduled to arrive, Wein had already begun touring with the Newport Jazz Festival All-Stars, a traditional Chicago-style jazz outfit with the impresario himself on piano.22 They performed in Berlin on April 8 and were to appear at the Fourth Annual Essen (Germany) Jazz Festival on the 14th, along with Monk’s quartet, Bud Powell, and others.23 Monk’s entourage arrived the day they performed. Jet lag notwithstanding, the crowd’s enthusiasm energized Monk, and the presence of his old friend on the same bill thrilled him. Powell had been living in Paris a little over two years now.24 Since he was lined up to join the tour later, that night in Essen was just the beginning of a bittersweet reunion. Bittersweet because Powell looked terrible; he was visibly depressed, overweight, drinking heavily (which, for Powell, could mean one or two glasses of wine), and taking Largactyl—an anti-psychotic barbiturate prescribed for schizophrenia that left him lethargic and caused his hands to swell. He was miserable, living at the Hotel La Louisiane under what some observers perceived to be the iron rule of his wife, Altevia “Buttercup” Powell. She monitored his every move, kept him on Largactyl, and often locked him in his room when he wasn’t working.25 It was a delicate situation. Nellie and Buttercup were friends. Before they left for Paris in 1959, Buttercup and Bud visited the Monks’ apartment with their son Johnny, who was four at the time. Although Johnny was prone to tantrums and raised by a mother who disrespected and abused his father, Thelonious adored him and Toot and Boo Boo sometimes entertained him.26 From Nellie’s perspective, Buttercup was caring for Bud and handling his business affairs because she had a young son to raise. Bud, after all, was her sole source of income.27
The reunion was short-lived; the next morning Monk and company were off to Amsterdam for the next performance. But before the concert that night, Monk’s quartet had to head out to the town of Bussum to tape a show for Dutch television. Thijs Chanowski, the program’s director, found the whole affair challenging. The musicians simply walked into the studio and started playing without saying a word. He wasn’t sure how to shoot them, or how long they planned to play. All he knew was that he had fifteen minutes to fill and a small audience of young people he wanted to incorporate in the shot. As soon as the band took off, he started improvising with the cameras, using a series of wide shots and close-ups. “But just when I thought I had succeeded in getting Monk the way I wanted him,” Chanowski later recounted, “he stopped right in the middle of a number and walked out. It took quite some effort to talk him into continuing, but when he finally gave in and started to play, again, he never stopped.”28 He was pleased with the results. In the surviving clip, they play a sparkling version of “Rhythm-a-ning,” though the band appears tired and uninterested—all but Frankie Dunlop, who self-consciously smiles at the camera and revels in the attention. Thelonious stands up during the bass and drum solos and makes a half-hearted stutter step but he apparently did not feel like dancing.29
Fatigue did not stop the band from playing a full hour that evening in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw auditorium. The place was packed with admiring fans grateful to see the great Thelonious Monk in person. And judging from the broadcast made by a Dutch radio station, Monk was energized by the crowd and wanted to deliver a great show. The quartet opened with “Jackie-ing,” and moved through the better-known compositions—including “Crepuscule with Nellie,” “Straight, No Chaser,” “Evidence,” “Bemsha Swing,” “Well, You Needn’t,” “ ’Round Midnight,” “I Mean You,” and always closing with “Epistrophy.”30 Despite what proved to be a limited repertoire of about fifteen to twenty songs, Monk’s sets were never pre-planned, and, except for the opening and closing, the band never knew what was next until Monk began. But a couple of things distinguished the Amsterdam concert from the rest. First, he got up from the piano only twice—on “Straight, No Chaser” and “Evidence.” If he did dance, this would have been his chance. On most numbers he comped unceasingly, generating a dynamic interchange between the piano and the band. Second, unlike subsequent concerts, he did not grant John Ore a solo and Dunlop was featured only on the introduction to “Jackie-ing.” Over time, this would change, as Monk imposed a standard solo pattern of sax followed by piano, bass, and then drums. And yet, each performance was fresh because Monk refused to repeat himself, either in his comping or his solos. Thelonious had an uncanny ability to build an entire solo on Rouse’s last phrase, while finding ways to restate the melody. Just listening to half a dozen live versions of the same tune proves the point.31
The next night they played in Hilversum, a bucolic town just southeast of Amsterdam, and then on to Paris for a much-anticipated concert scheduled for Tuesday the 18th. Arriving in Paris on Monday, Monk took advantage of his night off to explore the City of Light with Nellie. After dinner, they met up with the rest of his quartet and paid a surprise visit to Bud Powell, who was playing at the Blue Note with Kenny Clarke and J. J. Johnson. What happened that night tells us something of the depths of love and admiration these two artists felt for one another. A young British writer named Alan Groves saw the memorable meeting unfold. Before Monk and his entourage arrived, Powell “sat virtually motionless, and it was only his hands that moved when he did play. He appeared to have no interest in his surroundings, and little interest in his music.” But when Monk walked in, “Suddenly he came alive, alert and animated. . . . The aloof and detached Monk, complete with dark glasses and hat, was suddenly as excited as Powell. Bud finished his set, and went over to sit with [them]. He and Monk chatted and giggled like children while Monk’s sidemen smiled indulgently.” A little later, Monk sat at the piano and played a solo piece.32 Thelonious and Nellie left, knowing Bud would be joining them again in a couple days on the Italian leg of the tour.
The next night, Monk and his band played two shows at the Olympia Theatre.33 The Parisians who had treated him with such hostility and disdain seven years earlier were now screaming in delight. French jazz critic Jean Tronchot bore witness: “[W]hen Thelonious finally appeared, in black shades and hat, the hall was ready to explode. He received a huge, triumphant ovation before he could even reach his piano!”34 The music fulfilled, if not surpassed, all expectations. “Like other great pianists,” waxed Tronchot, “Monk makes his instrument sound flamboyant, similar to Fats Waller. His playing, which would make a classical pianist tremble, evokes a sensational impression of power.” Tronchot declared Monk’s performance “probably the best [concert] of recent years.”35 It also established what would become a regular pattern for subsequent concerts on the tour. Besides opening with “Jackie-ing,” and including some of his best known tunes, he consistently played three or four standards, notably “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You,” “Just a Gigolo,” and “Body and Soul”—the last two for solo piano. Of course, he could not leave out “April in Paris.”36
Thelonious shared his triumphant moment with some old friends. Besides Powell, who showed up at the Olympia accompanied by his friend Francis Paudras,37 Henri Renaud stood backstage the entire time overcome with delight.38 As the man responsible for bringing Monk to Paris in 1954, the concert served as sweet redemption. Thelonious, Nellie, Henri, and his wife Ny enjoyed a warm reunion after the concert.
Thelonious could not have made it without his wife, to whom he paid tribute at every concert with a loving rendition of “Crepuscule with Nellie.” If anything, the trip brought the couple closer together and further defined her roles as personal manager, business consultant, and first line of defense. Although it was Nellie’s first trip to Europe, it could hardly be called a vacation. She packed and unpacked, picked out Monk’s clothes, collected the money and paid Monk’s sidemen, made sure the pianist was fed, rested, and on time, administered medications, dealt with hotel personnel, and employed her limited French whenever she could. Like Thelonious, she drank and indulged in some reefer, but she also did her best to keep away “well-wishers” carrying harder drugs.39 She also possessed a shrewd business sense. Knowing the importance of publicity, she was always on hand during interviews to help elaborate on Monk’s trademark one-word responses to journalists’ questions. And she was always looking out for bootleggers, who seemed to be everywhere in Europe. During their Paris stay, for instance, they had gone to a party in Monk’s honor at the home of a wealthy admirer. As soon as they walked in the door, Monk made a beeline to the baby grand. A few choruses into his song, Nellie suddenly heard a “click” that sounded like a recording device. She promptly whispered to Monk to stop playing and then explained to their host, “Thelonious is under an exclusive contract. . . . I hope you’re not going to tape this?” To which their host responded, “Juste pour un souvenir.” Nellie insisted that he shut off the machine and graciously offered to send him an album instead.40
Nellie and Monk did find some time to relax. After the Olympia concert, they enjoyed a free day in Paris and then traveled with Bud Powell and his working trio—bassist Jacques Hess and former Monk sideman Art Taylor—to Marseille for two performances at the historic Alcazar Theatre.41 Marseille was a sight to behold, both for its rolling hills and stunning seascape and its multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan population. It had long attracted Arab, African, and Afro-Caribbean migrants; in fact, the African quarter earned the nickname “little Harlem of Marseille.” The port city also was headquarters for the movement to end the French colonial war in Algeria—a war that had just begun when Thelonious first visited in 1954.42
From Marseille, the tour traveled by train on April 21 to Milan, Italy, where the quartet was scheduled to tape another television program and perform that night at the Teatro Lirico, the city’s oldest opera house built in the late eighteenth century.43 Much to Monk’s surprise, Bill Grauer from Riverside Records happened to be there. Grauer told Monk that he had flown in from London just to see Monk perform, but failed to mention that he and Giuseppe Barazzetta, the head of Riverside’s Italian distribution, had planned to record the concert. The idea was Alan Bates’s, Riverside’s British distributor, who thought a European release of Monk’s music would do well following the concert tour.44 But Grauer also saw the writing on the wall; he knew Thelonious was anxious to leave the label and was not inclined to go back to the studio with Keepnews. And he knew Riverside was in deep financial trouble. Recording a couple of “live” LPs could bring in much-needed revenue. In the long run, Grauer did Thelonious a favor by helping him fulfill his contractual obligations to Riverside, but the way he went about it only heightened Monk’s suspicions.
They were scheduled to play three cities in three days—Milan, Bologna, and Rome—from April 21 to 23. During those three days, Monk rarely left Bud’s sight . . . nor did Buttercup. Her presence seemed to have a dampening effect on Powell. Thelonious and Bud sat across from each other on the train, rarely uttering a word. The giggles and banter they shared at the Blue Note all but disappeared, and according to Hess his mood affected his playing. During the Milan concert, “Bud would have these blanks, like he didn’t remember where he was. Suddenly, in the middle of a piece, he would stop playing at the end of a chorus. I would take a chorus, then two or three, Art Taylor would take a couple and Bud was still absent. He’d be looking at his watch that he’d put on the piano, as if he didn’t know he was on stage.”45
Thelonious, on the other hand, knew exactly where he was. Buoyed by a week of strong performances and supportive audiences, Monk’s quartet came out swinging in Milan. From the opening chorus of “Jackie-ing” to the closing theme of “Epistrophy,” it sounds as if Thelonious is actually having a ball, reveling in Dunlop’s licks, echoing and countering Rouse’s phrasing, and making sure to leave space to hear John Ore’s bass. The Bologna and Rome concerts were more of the same, and the Italian critics loved it. Arrigo Arrigoni proclaimed that Monk “has destroyed every kind of pre-existing piano playing, opening unexplored horizons, and making a new potential of the instrument accessible. . . . What he has forged is a style that, beyond being unrepeatable, has no equal in its lucid expression of the human spirit.”46 Arrigo Polillo, the editor of Italy’s leading jazz magazine, Musica Jazz, saw all three performances. “In one concert they were slow taking off . . . but in another the understanding among the four was ideal, the punctuation of the effects was perfect even though not one note had been rehearsed and, on the contrary, it was improvised.”47 Polillo was equally impressed with Monk, the man, to whom he enjoyed unusual access. Of course, Nellie was on hand to run interference and translate, “rendering intelligible his spare and frugal mumbling.”48 She also gave her own assessment of her husband’s career, reminding her interlocutor that in spite of his recent popularity and critical acclaim, “it’s twenty-five years that he’s played the same way as today.”49 But Monk’s relative silence and dislike for interviews led Polillo to repeat the stereotype that he is “a giant child, full of good will and occasional whims. One is surprised when he acts like the rest of us. He lives only in his music which is a kind of halo, a personal radiation or environment.”50
The people closest to Monk knew better. He loved to live in the world, especially the world of the upper class. He never left the house unless he was nattily dressed, and as Charlie Rouse put it, “Thelonious wanted to be in the best restaurants and the best hotels, he was really first class.”51 George Wein quickly learned that a really good meal was one way to get Monk’s attention and break through his protective veneer. The veneer began to crumble when Wein introduced Thelonious to fettuccine Alfredo and Northern Italian cuisine. But for Monk’s money, nothing he devoured compared with the grand pêche Melba—a dessert consisting of peaches and vanilla ice cream smothered in a sweet sauce made from raspberries, redcurrant jelly, sugar, and cornstarch.52 He dug the fact that it was inspired by the great Australian soprano, Dame Nellie Melba, back in the 1890s when Auguste Escoffier, chef at London’s swanky Savoy Hotel, saw her perform at Covent Garden. Monk paid a price, however: Halfway into the tour his Nellie had to let out his suits to accommodate his indulgences.53
Between the Rome concert and the English leg of the tour, Monk’s quartet enjoyed nearly a week off. Wein, whose Newport All-Stars performed at the Olympia the night Monk and his group played Bologna, met up with Thelonious and Nellie in London and took them around the city in a rented Rolls-Royce. “T. loved grandeur,” as Wein put it. He also loved clowning. When people on the streets or in passing cars stared in awe at this elegantly dressed black man riding in the back of a Rolls Royce—chauffered by a white man, no less—he gazed back and “blessed them much as would the pope from his pope-mobile.”54 The long drives and meals in exotic restaurants really deepened their friendship, allowing Wein to see a side of Thelonious the jazz press had never seen.
In the wake of his triumphs in Germany, Amsterdam, France, and Italy, Thelonious was more than ready to take on England. He was rested, having had a week off in London, and Art Blakey’s group had joined the tour. (Monk’s twenty-year-old nephew, Alonzo, also joined them in London. He had just enlisted in the service and wanted to travel to Europe with the band before reporting to boot camp.55) But England wasn’t quite ready for Monk. For the first time since he arrived in Europe, he faced hostile criticism. Perhaps he should have expected it; a year earlier, British critic Michael Gibson published a lengthy piece on “Modern Jazz Piano” describing Monk as “technically suspect” and “pretentious,” ultimately concluding that he was a charlatan of sorts who had contributed little to modern jazz.56
Even critics sympathetic to Monk’s music thought the first two concerts at Royal Festival Hall (April 29) and Gaumont Hammersmith (April 30) were failures, less for the music than for his alleged “antics.” Writing for Melody Maker, Bob Dawbarn did not appreciate Monk’s dancing, which he executed “with all the grace of a captive hippo.” As he shuffled across the stage, spinning, his elbows churning, he “lit a cigarette, handing it to a startled member of the audience before resuming his seat at the piano.” When he did return to the keyboard, he entertained the audience by leaning forward on the piano bench almost to the point of falling over. Every time the crowd responded with “ooohs,” he did it again. At the end of the set, Dawbarn saw him “stumble into the arms of George Wein.”57 Historian and occasional jazz critic Eric Hobsbawm was also at Royal Festival Hall that night. He observed that many audience members dismissed the High Priest as a “clumsy bore” and walked out. Still, Hobsbawm praised Monk as one of the few original composers the jazz world has ever produced, though he didn’t think much of him as a pianist. He wrote in the New Statesman, “the line between planned experiment and artistic abdication or incompetence is hazy, as in modern painting; and Monk has neither the technical mastery nor the staying power which enables an Ellington or John Lewis to maintain a steady level. Nor has he the orchestral sense.”58
Monk bears some responsibility for the evening. Before the concert, he had had a little too much to drink. He divulged as much to Max Jones in an exclusive interview a couple of days later, though he also confessed to having thoroughly enjoyed the evening. “You get out there and you play music in that fine auditorium. . . . that’s not work, it’s a ball. I mean playing and drinking. It ain’t a drag.” What was a drag was when people began walking out halfway through the second set. He noticed and it hurt, interfering with his “vibrations” is how he described it. “But the majority stayed; that’s what matters.”59 Indeed, the majority did stay, because the band was tight and the music swung. There were no real complaints about the music, besides the sets being too short. Ronald Atkins would have liked to hear more, but “the musical intensity upheld throughout the five or six numbers performed, with minimal delay between each, left me quite satisfied.” He was particularly satisfied with Dunlop, who was always “tasteful and alert, using all his kit and quick to spot when special interpolations were required.”60
The rest of the tour was mixed. On May Day, Monk and Blakey played Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall to a lukewarm audience, appeared at Leicester’s De Montfort Hall the next evening before an overflow crowd of 1,800, and performed one concert in Birmingham on the 4th of May because slow ticket sales forced the cancellation of the first show. Attendance at the Sheffield concert the following night wasn’t much better.61 Wein had high hopes for Manchester, the next stop on the tour. Manchester was known as a real jazz town, and several months earlier Miles Davis had been warmly received for his performance at Free Trade Hall.62 And the people came, nearly filling the hall for the first concert. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers performed first, electrifying the audience. When it was Monk’s turn to come out, there was a slight delay and the crowd became a little restless. Thelonious finally appeared, opened with “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” and proceeded to play his usual repertoire, but with little energy or interest. He got up from the piano several times and danced or disappeared off stage. Thirty-five minutes into the set, he asked Dunlop to play a long drum solo.63 The crowd wasn’t having any of it. According to one observer, Thelonious was “jeered off the stage for his histrionics as much as for his music.”64 Manchester Guardian critic Harold Jackson admired Monk’s music on disc, but upon seeing him concluded that “his concert manner is his worst enemy. How can you concentrate on form, development, and so on when its originator is wandering unpredictably about the stage?”65
So what happened? George Wein’s recollections of that night sheds light on both the performance and the performer. The story begins before the curtain rose. Thelonious was in the dressing room drinking brandy with some friends and holding forth. By this time, Wein knew Monk well enough to know that “when he felt like talking, it was difficult to get him to stop.” A flight of stairs separated the dressing room from the stage, so Wein came down to tell Monk that it was time to go on stage. He returned to stage level expecting the pianist to be behind him ready to go. The rest of the band waited in the wings while Wein made a repeat trip to the dressing room. “After running up and down the stairs several times, I finally lost my cool and went to his dressing room and yelled, ‘Thelonious, get the hell on the stage!’” Taken aback, Thelonious glared at Wein and without uttering a single word “walked up the stairs, sat at the piano, played a chorus of one of his songs and proceeded to feature the drummer for approximately forty-five minutes of the sixty-minute performance. As he was returning to his dressing room with little or no response from the crowd, he had the defiant expressions on his face of a sulking Little Leaguer who purposely struck out because his coach yelled at him.” Wein confronted him: “‘What was that all about?’
“With his teeth clenched even harder than usual he said, ‘You hadn’t oughta yelled at me.’
“I replied, ‘Thelonious, I had to run up and down those stairs six times to get you on stage and I’m getting too old and fat to do that.’ . . .
“‘You mean you ran up and down those stairs six or seven times?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Then I don’t blame you for yelling at me.’”66
Now the audiotape proves that Dunlop’s “forty-five minute” drum solo lasted only about three minutes, but for Wein it must have felt like an eternity.67 Nevertheless, the backstage story tells us that Monk was in no mood to play. He felt disrespected and embarrassed, especially since Wein probably dressed him down in front of Nellie, his nephew Alonzo, and friends. At the same time, their confrontation marked a breakthrough in their relationship. Thelonious was willing to admit he was wrong and respected Wein for doing the right thing. Thelonious firmly believed in fairness and mutual respect. It didn’t happen again.
They finished the English leg of the tour with concerts in London and Bristol before crossing the Channel to play Zurich and Berne, Switzerland. In Berne, despite an out-of-tune piano, the quartet delivered a superb concert for an energized and appreciative audience. Besides the usual repertoire, Thelonious added a stripped-down version of Maceo Pinkard’s “Sweet Georgia Brown,” a tune he had introduced at his Museum of Modern Art concert a couple of months earlier. He boiled down the melodic line to a few staccato phrases, much the same way he transformed “Just You, Just Me” into “Evidence.” I suspect that George Wein might have inspired Monk to return to “Sweet Georgia Brown” since his own Newport Jazz Festival All-Stars played it regularly.68 Whatever the inspiration, we know that Thelonious altered the melody while on tour but continued to call it “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Oddly, he never played it again during the rest of the tour, and a year and a half would pass before he recorded it.
After Berne, they had a three-day respite in Switzerland before embarking on the final leg of the tour. Between May 14 and the 21st, the quartet played Munich (Deutsches Museum), Stockholm, Copenhagen, returned to the Netherlands for two concerts, and closed the tour with concerts at the German Jazz-Salon in Dortmund and Kongresshalle in Berlin. Although Thelonious was anxious to return to New York—after all, they had been living in hotels for over a month—the last few concerts raised his spirits. The Scandinavians, Danish, and Germans greeted the band warmly, and they responded in kind. Indeed, the quartet’s two Stockholm concerts may be arguably their best (recorded) performances of the tour.69 The Swedish jazz press had been covering “Bebopens Oversteprast” (the High Priest of Bebop) for a decade,70 making his first visit to the country one of the most anticipated events in recent years. Writing for Orkester Journalen, Bertil Sundin and Lars Werner flatly pronounced both performances, “One of our greatest jazz experiences.” Sundin observed Monk’s “complete control of his instrument,” adding that “‘I’m Getting Sentimental Over You’ . . . swung so much that one could hardly sit still.” Werner found his improvisations astounding: “Everything Monk played was meaningful and thematic, never any loose ends.”71 Writing for Estrad, another Swedish jazz magazine, Carl-Erik Lindgren was completely taken by Monk’s “majestic dominance on stage,” which was so overwhelming he “almost [forgot] to say how beautifully he plays.”72
Monk’s majesty was a matter of stagecraft. He came out in a slick plaid jacket, white shirt, dark tie, and one of his favorite driving caps. For the second concert that evening he sported a thick ski-bonnet—and not because he was cold. His antics and his music turned off at least one critic. Estrad’s Lars Resberg chose to boycott the concerts because Monk, in his view, exemplified a “crippled, sick, comical jazz.” Instead, he listened to the radio broadcast and wrote a nasty, hostile review that not only criticized Monk but his colleagues who praised him. “Here, we still cultivate a kind of degeneration of music, allowing each and all of us to experience and enjoy any kind of musical presentation.”73
In spite of the British critics, Monk left Europe on a triumphant note. George Wein was particularly pleased. He needed a success and he got one. Although he hardly got rich on his first European tour, “the facts that Thelonious acted so professionally and that the promoters showed a profit on the concerts helped serve to establish me as someone that European impresarios could work with and trust.” Thelonious also had much to be pleased about. He built up his international fan base, made decent money, had fun, and gave his lovely wife an adventure she would not soon forget. On the way home, Monk and Wein had already begun to talk about the next tour.