Sometime in the late 1940s, the baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter--a scion of the immensely wealthy Rothschild family--heard a recording of Thelonious Monk's " 'Round Midnight" while visiting New York. "I'd never heard anything remotely like it," she said many years later. "I must have played it twenty times in a row. Missed my plane. In fact I never went home." According to legend, she was so transformed by that "mournful, lazy, sexy-sounding ballad" she dedicated the rest of her life to jazz and jazz musicians.
She went by Nica, but she was also known as "the Jazz Baroness." For the next 40 years, she roared up to midtown clubs in her Rolls-Royce nearly every night, always in pearls and furs, smoking and drinking and tapping to the music well into her 70s. She was not just a jazz fan, but a great patron and passionate devotee who became Thelonious Monk's steadfast friend and champion, once nearly sacrificing her own freedom to keep him out of jail.
The Baroness is both a tribute to Nica and a search by her great-niece, writer and documentarian Hannah Rothschild. Rothschild felt compelled to investigate her great-aunt's life, she writes, partly because it is "an extraordinary story, a musical odyssey spanning both a century and the globe with all the ingredients of a melodrama: the heiress and the suffering artist; the butterfly and the blues; love, madness, war and death."
But, more importantly, Rothschild wanted to ask: Why? What was it about jazz that resonated so profoundly for Nica? What history shaped her motivations and influenced her sensibilities? Was she really a patron, or simply a dilettante, a groupie or--as some accused--a "bitter insinuation that a rich white woman is the black man's salvation?"
The last question, with its potential for harsh truths and diminished myths, may have originally been Rothschild's most urgent, but it fades as the book reveals Nica and Monk's enduring bond and the unlikely parallels between an unfathomably wealthy, Jewish, British heiress and a troubled but brilliant black man in mid-century America.
Drawing on a wealth of family archives and from interviews with the likes of Quincy Jones and Sonny Rollins, and aching with deeply personal connection, The Baroness is part biography, part study of a complex and tremendously influential family, and part crash course in the riotous history of jazz. --Hannah Calkins
Shelf Talker: Hannah Rothschild's second tribute (after the documentary The Jazz Baroness) to her great-aunt Nica, a wildly unconventional aristocrat who became Thelonious Monk's closest friend and patron.