She became Monk's muse and patron, giving him money, driving him to gigs and letting him rehearse and record at her home.Įventually, she had a song written about her titled "Pannonica," after her first name. She was a member of the powerful Rothschild family - and a jazz enthusiast. That white woman was the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. And once in Delaware when he was traveling with a white woman, when he was going to a gig, and the police pulled up and stopped him." Once for possession of heroin, which wasn't even his. "Thelonious was arrested multiple times," Kelley says. He was broke most of his life, and for years he couldn't play in New York City because the police revoked his cabaret card - a musician's license - after he was arrested. If I did I, would be bitter."Īnd Monk had a lot to be bitter about. There's so many things to do that I even didn't feel it. "You know, like, there's always something to occupy your mind, something to occupy your time. "It was so much happening," he said in 1964 to radio host David Kidd. But Monk remained relatively obscure - though he never let that get to him. These small groups all played Monk's compositions and some of them, like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, even became famous. Monk was there at the birth of bebop in the early 1940s, when the emphasis in jazz shifted from big bands to virtuosic small groups.
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