[Shamefully, few in the jazz world came to Monk’s defense.]
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THE NIGHT THE COPS TRIED TO BREAK THELONIOUS MONK  
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Jeffrey St. Clair
August 18, 2023
PunterPunch
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_ Shamefully, few in the jazz world came to Monk’s defense. _

Monk at the Village Gate, 1968., Bernard Gotfryd. (Public Domain)

 

Usually Monk walked. He ambled across the city on feet as light as a
tap-dancer. He weaved his way down block after block, whistling,
humming, snapping his fingers. Monk liked to take different routes,
but most of them led eventually to the Hudson River, where the large
man in the strange hat would lean on the railing and watch the lights
of the city dance on the black water.

Wordsworth said that many of his poems collected in the _Lyrical
Ballads_were written to the rhythms of his long walks across the hills
of the Lake District.  Thelonious Monk composed some the most
revolutionary music of the 20th century out on the streets of
Manhattan, rambling down the sidewalks or staring out at the sluggish
river. Those fresh new sounds just flowed through his head as he
prowled the city: “Criss Cross,” “Coming on the Hudson,”
“Brilliant Corners,” “Manhattan Moods.”

But on a steamy August night in 1951 Monk missed his evening walk.
Instead he was sitting in a car outside his mother’s house with his
friend Bud Powell. Monk’s mother, Miss Barbara, had cancer and he
had been staying with her when Powell, the tormented genius, dropped
over with a couple of his friends.

Powell was agitated, manic, talking smack. He skittered around the
kitchen, bellowing a stream of invective. Monk wanted to calm Powell
down. Bud hadn’t been the same since that night in Philadelphia when
a racist cop split his head open with a truncheon. He was a little off
now, a little paranoid, a little skittish. Powell had grown so
unpredictable that even his old friend Charlie Parker refused to play
with him anymore, telling Miles Davis: “Bud’s even crazier than
me!”

More and more, Powell needed booze and junk just to steady his hands,
to force himself on stage, to dull the painful throb in his head. 
Sometimes the sound of Monk’s voice could ease him, settle him back
into a groove. On this fateful night, Monk suggested they go out in
the car to talk so that his mother and young son could sleep.

A few minutes later two New York City cops approached the car,
swinging nightsticks. They were from the narcotics squad, out to
harass the local junkies. When Powell saw the cops flash their badges,
he panicked. He franticly threw a small sleeve of heroin toward the
window. He missed. The packet landed at Monk’s feet. The cops picked
up the envelope, noticed the drug residue and promptly arrested
everyone in the car on charges of narcotics possession.

At the station, Monk denied that the heroin was his and said he
didn’t know who it belonged to. During his interrogation he
repeatedly refused to implicate Powell, who had been strapped into a
straightjacket and sent to the psych ward at Bellevue. Monk would
never snitch out Powell. Seven years older than Powell, Monk had been
his mentor, his friend, his nurse. He knew Powell was too frail to
handle prison and  later said he wasn’t about to “drag him
down.”

Thelonious Monk was never an addict. He flirted with heroin and like
most musicians he sometimes popped speed to play late night gigs and
swallowed downers to get to sleep in the morning. He smoked marijuana
now and then.  But Monk never lived for drugs, never allowed them to
shape the contours of his life or the textures of his music.

Monk’s bail was set at $1,500, a ludicrous sum given the few
crystals of heroin the cops were able to scrape off the glassine slip
and Monk’s impoverished condition.

Indeed, Monk was so poor in those days that he couldn’t even pay his
union dues, tagged at one-percent of his musical earnings or about $10
per year. Consequently, his membership had been revoked for two years.
Lacking money to pay for a doctor, Nellie had been forced to give
birth to Toot, the Monks’ first child, in the grim City Hospital on
so-called Welfare Island.

Monk hadn’t had many playing gigs in nearly three years. Some
musicians griped that Monk was too difficult to work with, that his
minimalist playing style was too irregular. Of course, most of these
complaints came from musicians who never actually appeared on stage
with Monk. Those who had played with him, like Sonny Rollins and John
Coltrane, praised Monk’s sympathetic and nuanced accompaniment and
unparalleled skills as a bandleader.

Even worse for his finances, Monk had gotten the reputation among club
owners as a malcontent. Monk had been banned from Birdland after an
altercation with the club’s manager.  Monk was picky about the
tuning of the pianos and he was pushy about getting paid. He wanted
money, not booze or dope.

Being destitute, Monk spent the night in the Tombs and was later
transferred to the dark pit of Riker’s Island, where he spent a
miserable 60 days.

Shamefully, few in the jazz world came to Monk’s defense. Many
viewed Monk as an outsider, a loner, an eccentric. Leonard Feather,
then the dean of jazz writers, had publicly derided Monk’s talent,
even going so far as to falsely assert that Monk hadn’t written the
bebop classic “Epistrophy.” Monk angrily confronted Feather one
afternoon at Lincoln Center, snatching the arrogant Englishman by the
collar and threatening to hurl him over the balcony. “You’re
messin’ with my bread, man,” Monk fumed.

The word spread around town. Monk was violent, erratic, dangerous.
People stayed away, turned their backs on the composer of “Round
Midnight.”

Only Alfred Lion at Blue Note Records worked to raise money for
Monk’s bail. But Lion could only scrap together a few hundred
dollars. According to Robin Kelley’s glorious
biography, _Thelonious Monk: the Life and Times of an American
Original
[[link removed]],_ the
NAACP legal fund refused to take his case, saying that they didn’t
“touch anything involving narcotics.” Eventually Lion was able to
hire attorney Andrew Weinberger to take Monk’s case.

As Monk languished in prison, working in the bakery, his wife Nellie,
sick with an almost crippling intestinal disorder, tried to keep the
family afloat earning a few dollars a week working at a local laundry
and at night by mending clothes. She was also taking care of their
18-month-old son and Monk’s ailing mother.  Each Sunday Nellie took
the long bus ride out to Riker’s for a brief visit with Monk.

With no piano in the prison, Monk mimed the chords and melodies to
songs on his knees, on the tables, on the walls of his cell. He hummed
new tunes with Nellie in mind. He kept the variations running and
re-running through his mind, making mental charts of the way the music
was changing.

Meanwhile, Bud Powell had transferred sent from Bellevue to the
notorious Pilgrim State Hospital, the world’s largest asylum, where
shrinks with scalpels were butchering brains in the name of
psychiatry. Powell, the most gifted pianist of his time, was pumped
full of the latest drugs from Eli Lilly’s labs, strapped to a gurney
and his body convulsed with crippling jolts of electricity, again and
again, week after week.

Everybody agreed: Bud Powell had poetic hands. Nobody hit the keys the
way he did. The sound of his playing was rich and chromatic, swinging
with an almost ecstatic intensity. He was also fast, maybe as fast as
Art Tatum. Powell played with blazing speed but his runs were also
clear and coherent. He was the first pianist to record Monk’s
“Round Midnight,” in 1944 when he was playing with trumpeter
Cootie Williams. Monk returned the favor by writing “In Walked
Bud.”  Where Bud Powell’s playing was fluid and flashy, Monk’s
was angular, oblique and as fractured as a Cubist painting. Powell
dazzled nearly everyone who heard him, but to many Monk was an
acquired, if not peculiar, taste.

As a composer Powell was nearly as inventive as Monk. In songs like
“Dance of the Infidels,” “Tempus Fugit”, “Oblivion” and
“Hallucinations,” Powell seemed to be developing a new vocabulary
for music. Literary critic Harold Bloom cited Powell’s “Un Poco
Loco” as one of the greatest works of twentieth century American
art. He made the piano sing.

But the police beatings, the psychotropic drugs and the electro-shock
sessions took their toll. Powell was never the same following his
release from Pilgrim in 1953. He was assigned to the guardianship of
Oscar Goldstein, the owner of the Birdland jazz club. Goldstein kept
Powell in a state of prison-like confinement. His system was saturated
with heavy doses of the anti-psychotic drug Thorazine, which severely
degraded his ability to play. Powell later wrote a song about those
lonely months titled “Glass Enclosure.”

By 1956, Powell was a shattered man. The pianist had endured more the
100 electroshock sessions in his brief life. His friend Jackie Mclean,
the stellar sax player, speculated that Powell’s doctors had
subjected the musician to treatments that resemble torture more than
therapy. “He was so messed up, I think they were experimenting on
him,” Mclean said. It’s worth noting that at the time Powell was
being put through the wringer, the CIA was secretly financing
experiments in electroshock, mind-altering drugs and psycho-surgery at
hospitals in the US and Canada. While there’s no evidence that
Powell was a CIA research subject, some of that agency money found its
way to doctors working at the two psychiatric hospitals—Pilgrim and
Creedmore—where Powell underwent long-term confinement. (More than a
decade later, when Monk was battling his own mental demons, doctors in
New York recommended electroshock therapy. But his family intervened,
recalling vividly how the shock treatments had debilitated Powell.)

Powell spent the next five years in Paris, playing small clubs,
working off-and-on with Dexter Gordon, panhandling for bottles of
cheap wine. He played mainly standards, because he found it hard to
learn new material. Even then, he often cut his sets short. Sometimes
he would stop in the middle of a song, stare blankly at the keyboard,
then erupt in an inchoate rage. Powell, now stricken with TB, returned
to New York in 1964 for an engagement at Birdland, but he just
didn’t have the goods anymore. He seemed to get lost in his own
songs. The run was cut short. In the next four years he only performed
twice in public, and both gigs were disasters. And then Powell was
living on the streets, coughing up blood from the TB and a bad liver.
He died on July 1, 1966 of malnutrition. To put it another way, Bud
Powell, the man Bill Evans called the most talented jazz musician of
his time, starved to death on the streets of Manhattan.  He was only
41.

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Monk’s case finally came to trial in October. The judge in the case
seemed appalled that Monk had been held for so long on such flimsy
evidence and released him. The world had changed in those sixty days.
For starters, his producer Alfred Lion had paid his back union dues.
Lion had also put together eight of Monk’s old 78 recordings on a
long-playing album for Blue Note titled _The Genius of Modern Music
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were new on the jazz scene and these records would allow Monk a new
kind of freedom to extend his improvisations beyond the strict
three-minute limits of the 78 records.

But there was a serious problem. Following Monk’s arrest, the New
York authorities had revoked his cabaret card, which he needed in
order to perform in clubs that served alcohol. It was going to be hard
to promote the new album if he couldn’t play in public.

So for those first few months, Monk spent most of his time at home:
cooking, cleaning, tending to his mother and young son. He made a
little money giving piano lessons at his house, arranging songs for
other bands, teaching young musicians the chord changes and harmonics
of the new music that he and Bird and Powell had invented up at
Minton’s Playhouse in the 1940s.

Monk took long walks in the night after Nellie came home, composing
new songs in his head, re-structuring old standards into startling new
forms, listening to the jazz and blues pouring out of the Harlem
clubs. Sometimes he would go over to Brooklyn and play in black-owned
bars, places that openly defied the New York Liquor Authority’s ban
on cardless musicians, places that never saw the likes of Leonard
Feather. Other evenings he walked to Art Blakey’s house, where the
two jazz titans played chess into the wee hours.

All in all, Monk’s station in life hadn’t improved much. The Blue
Note records didn’t sell very well and neither did the excellent
Prestige albums with Sonny Rollins and Max Roach that followed them.
He still wasn’t getting many paying gigs and he was being screwed
out of the royalties for “Round Midnight,” one of the most
frequently performed songs of the 1950s.

Critics largely remained confounded by Monk’s style. He wasn’t as
flashy or fast as Art Tatum and he wasn’t as transcendent as Powell,
the great virtuoso. Monk’s idiom was for crooked passages and tricky
time signatures, punctuated by strange silences and negative spaces,
as if he had stripped the songs down to only essential elements.
Essential for Monk, that is.

Nellie called those lean days the “un-years,” mired in a kind of
internal exile, when, banned from playing clubs, Monk retreated into
his own head, drifting along to his own tempo. “There was no
money,” Nellie said. “No place to go. A complete blank.” Monk
described it as like “laying dead.”

Then Monk got a call from Charles Delauney inviting him to France to
play at the Third Paris Jazz Festival. Monk was ecstatic at the
chance. He’d long been a Francophile, hence the beret he wore
through most of the 1940s and the “Free France” button he often
pinned to his lapel. Monk had one important gig to play before
boarding the Air France jet to Orly: a benefit for Paul Robeson, whose
passport had been revoked by the Truman Administration in retaliation
for his vocal opposition to war with the Soviet Union. It was a risky
event to play at, but by then Monk, who had long admired Robeson (as
much for his athleticism as his acting and activism), figured he had
nothing more to lose.

Monk was ready for Paris, but the Parisians, who had embraced so many
black jazz musicians, didn’t know what to make of Monk, when he
swaggered across the stage at the Salle Pleyel in a bright blue suit
and launched into a curvy version of “Off Minor.” By most
accounts, Monk was drunk, having spent the day smoking pot and
drinking potent French cognac for the first time. He was also playing
with two French musicians who didn’t understand or even know his
music. They’d only rehearsed the songs once. But it was Monk’s
music and playing style that really seemed to befuddle, if not appall,
the French. This was not Count Basie or Duke Ellington. Monk writhed
and grunted as he played, stomping the pedals with his large feet,
crushing the keys with his elbow. He was sweated and moaned as he
pounded out those weird block chords to splintered modulations and
laid down fractured riffs spliced together like jump cuts in a Godard
film. When it was all over, many of the French, accustomed to
Dixieland and swing, booed Monk’s performance, while others just
shook their heads wondering what had just transpired. By and large,
Europeans didn’t seem to get Monk’s music. The poet Philip Larkin
famously smeared Monk as “the elephant at the keyboard.” How to
explain this hostility? Is it because Monk’s playing, unlike that of
Ellington, Powell, or Bill Evans, owed nothing to the classical
tradition?

Backstage, Monk ran into long-time friend Mary Lou Williams, the
remarkable jazz pianist and composer who had worked with Duke
Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Goodman. Williams had moved to
Paris two years earlier. With Williams was a slender woman dripping
with jewels named Nica, who would alter Monk’s career and life. Nica
was the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswater, an heiress of the
Rothschild banking family. Nica shook Monk’s hand and told him to
ignore the jeers from the audience. “I’ve been listening to your
music for years,” she said, telling Monk that she had cried the
first time she heard him play “Round Midnight.”

Nica was known as the Baroness of Bebop. She told Monk that she had
moved to Manhattan after splitting with her husband, Jules, an
Austrian baron and mining magnate. Nica was living in a suite on Fifth
Avenue at the Stanhope Hotel, where Charlie Parker would die in her
care. She told Monk to look her up when he got back to Manhattan.

After Monk returned to New York, his career began to pick up. He
signed a deal with Riverside Records and quickly recorded two of his
best albums: the startling _Thelonious Monk Plays the Music of Duke
Ellington
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Corners
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Sonny Rollins blowing a fire-breathing sax. Both records sold
relatively well and earned Monk some of his best reviews.

In 1957, he was offered a long-running slot at the Five Spot Café on
Cooper Square in the Bowery, which was a hang out for Beat writers
like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and abstract expressionist
painters like Franz Klein and Willem de Kooning. Monk’s band at the
Five Spot featured John Coltrane on sax and Wilbur Ware on bass. The
place was packed every night.

When the Five Spot engagement ended, Coltrane left Monk’s quartet to
rejoin Miles Davis. Monk took a few months before assembling a new
band to play a weeklong residency at the Comedy Club in Baltimore. The
new quartet featured Charlie Rouse on tenor, Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass
and Roy Haynes on drums.

The day before Monk was set to leave for the Baltimore engagement,
Nellie got sick and told Monk she didn’t feel like coming. So he
called up Nica and she offered to drive Monk and Rouse down to
Baltimore in her white Bentley. Monk might have contracted Nellie’s
cold, because he felt ill and a little grouchy. When they crossed into
Delaware, Monk asked Nica to stop somewhere so he could get a drink.
“A cold drink,” Monk said as they cruised down Route 40. “A
beer, a glass of water, anything?”

Nica pulled off at a place called the Park Plaza Motel, just outside
the town of New Castle. Nica waited in the car as Monk got out and
went inside. Rouse was laying down in the backseat, snoring. What Nica
likely didn’t know was the Delaware remained one of the most racist
states in the east. Some blacks referred to it as Northern
Mississippi. Geographically a northern state, Delaware still rigidly
adhered to Jim Crow laws and attitudes. It was the only northern state
to have school segregation inscribed into its constitution. Even into
the 1960s, Delaware featured whites only clubs, restrooms and motels.
And Thelonious Monk had just walked right into one of them.

Monk entered the motel, saw no one at the front desk and walked back
toward the kitchen, where he asked a woman for a glass of water. The
woman was a Mrs. Tonge, the wife of the owner. She stared at Monk
hostilely and demanded that he leave the hotel.

“All I want is a glass of water,” Monk replied. “I don’t want
a room. Just a drink.”

“We don’t have any water for you, just leave,” the woman
snapped.

Monk didn’t move.

Back at the front desk, Mr. Tonge was on the phone to state police,
who arrived at the hotel within minutes. Monk was still standing in
the lobby when the cops showed up, with a frantic Nica behind them.
They began to badger Monk, but Monk refused to speak to them. Nica
told the cops that Monk was ill. The cops grabbed Monk by the arms and
dragged him out of the hotel. Monk continued walking to car, opened
the door, got in and locked it. Nica followed him.

But as the Bentley drove out of the parking lot, the state troopers,
apparently getting suspicious about two black men and a woman in a
fancy car, tailed them, sirens wailing. The troopers pounded on
Monk’s window, demanding that he get of the car. Monk refused.

“Why the hell should I?” Monk yelled at the cops.

By now two other police cars had pulled up. The troopers surrounded
the Bentley, nightsticks drawn. Monk didn’t budge. The troopers had
no warrant and no probable cause to stop or search the car.

“Get out of the fucking car nigger,” the trooper screamed, pulling
at the door. Monk held on, fiercely. That’s when the cops started
bashing his hands with their nightsticks, beating him viciously over
and over again, with Nica crying out, “Stop hitting his hands!
He’s a pianist.” But the troopers kept pounding Monk. Nica’s
pleas only seemed to fuel their rage. They savagely beat his hands,
his arms, his head. They ripped off his red silk tie and threw Monk on
the ground.

“Monk didn’t back down,” Charlie Rouse said. “If he thinks
he’s right he sticks by what he thinks. If they told him to sit
down, he stood up. If they told him to say something, he said
nothing.”

With two troopers holding his arms, Monk walked toward the patrol car
with a defiant swagger, his bleeding hands cuffed behind his back. He
was humming.

_This is excerpted from Jeffrey St. Clair’s forthcoming book, Sound
Grammar: Blues and the Subversive Truth._

_JEFFREY ST. CLAIR is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is
An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents
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Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: [email protected] or on
Twitter @JeffreyStClair3 [[link removed]]. _

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* Jazz
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* police brutality
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* Racism
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* Bud Powell
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