MONK :
Thelonious to you....
by Mary Barnet

As long as I knew her, beginning in 1966 when I was 15, Nika Rothschild Koenigswarter was a manager of the greatest jazz musicians, most notoriously Charlie Parker - but that was before my time. When I first knew her she was managing Thelonious Monk. One day she and I drove up to Harlem, where he lived in a luxurious high-rise with his wife and son and daughter. Left alone with Monk in his living room which boasted a beautiful baby grand, he asked me," Have you ever heard me play?" I had to admit I hadn't yet heard him and so he played for me.

Once I ran into him outside Gracie Square Hospital and later Nika told me he was receiving Lithium treatment for depression. After that I heard him play at the Vanguard in Greenwich Village, but soon he disappeared. Nika said he was too depressed to play and confided in me that he spent years in bed at her home in Weehawken, New Jersey before he finally died of a blood-clot.

Thelonious Monk was in on "be-bop" or just "bop" as it was later called from the time of its inception at a small Harlem club called "Minton's Playhouse." The club was a musician's hangout run by Teddy Hill who was a former swing-band leader. Beginning in 1941, the first band he hired included Monk and Kenny Clarke whose approaches to piano and drums, respectively, were innovative. They were joined by several others, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Charlie Christian, who came uptown after a night's work with Benny Goodman's band.

Monk is generally recognized as belonging, with Gillespie and Parker, in a Big Three of bop innovators.. He is noted as the composer of original and lyrical melodies - in contrast to the more usual practice of building from the chord structure of standard popular melodies. He first gained national, and world, prominence through recordings on the Blue Note label - now one of the few survivors among independent companies who first dared to promote this new brand of music.