The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild
By Hannah Rothschild, Virago, £20

No one lucky enough to have seen Thelonious Monk on the bandstand will ever forget it. He wore sunglasses and strange headgear — skullcaps, bowlers, fur caps suited to the Russian steppes and straw hats meant to shade Chinese farmers from the sun. Over six feet tall, he dwarfed every piano he played and attacked the keyboard with splayed fingers and sometimes with his elbows, his right foot slamming the floor. He lumbered to his feet to dance from time to time too, spinning in place to urge his musicians on. Early listeners, confronted by his strange persona, his unconventional rhythms, unusual chords and unprecedented voicings pronounced him “weird”, “anarchic”. In fact, his music is supremely logical: Monk may lead you into uncharted territory but he always leads you right out again. Today, he is considered one of the three or four greatest geniuses in the history of the music, the most important jazz composer after Duke Ellington.

The Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter seems to have understood that from the moment she first heard Monk’s haunting masterpiece, ’Round Midnight. The sound and feeling of it changed her life, as her great-niece, the film-maker, Hannah Rothschild, recounts in The Baroness. It eventually persuaded her to walk away from the rarefied world of the great Jewish banking family to which both women belonged and begin life all over again as the friend and patron of Monk and a host of other, mostly black, musicians, struggling to survive in the underground world of New York City. “I belonged where that music was,” she once explained, “It was a real calling.”

That decision appalled her relatives. Hannah Rothschild was 11 years old before she was told of her great aunt’s existence and 22 before she met her in person in a cellar club in Manhattan. She found her fascinating, saw in her a Rothschild who had managed to reinvent herself, and spent some 25 years, off and on, trying to understand how and why she did it.

She is very good about the life the Baroness left behind. Pannonica was born in 1913 and raised in splendid, pampered isolation at Tring Park, one of six vast Rothschild country houses in England. It had a staff of 30, including one man whose sole task was to wind the clocks. Because she was a girl, she was barred by clan tradition from entering the family business and expected to marry well. She seemed to do just that. Baron Jules Koenigswarter was a wealthy Jewish widower, 10 years her senior, with a vast estate in France. They had five children. Both husband and wife were decorated for aiding the Free French during World War II. Then, their marriage began to fall apart: he was uninterested in music; she couldn’t get enough of it.

Sadly, for all her sleuthing the author seems to have found out very little about her aunt’s life in the jazz world that does not appear in two earlier books: Nica’s Dream: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness by David Kastin and Robin D.G. Kelley’s authoritative Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. And her pages are larded with too much half-digested history. It’s not true that jazz “evolved in the cotton fields”, for example; jazz is sophisticated big-city music. Black bebop musicians didn’t succumb to narcotics because slave-masters had fed their ancestors cocaine to keep them working (a dubious claim, to begin with); they got high for the same reasons white musicians got high — because it felt good.

Still, the Baroness is an irresistible subject. She was flamboyant — driving from club to club in a silver Bentley, smoking cigarettes in an extra-long holder, sipping whisky from a chipped teacup — and she was fearless, serving as a sort of racial chaperone and sometime-manager for otherwise powerless black artists in a still-segregated country. “By being with the Baroness,” the tenor saxophonist, Sonny Rollins, remembered, “we could go places and feel like real human beings… She really wanted to help jazz musicians. I think she was a heroic woman.” Again and again, she came to the aid of scuffling artists, including Rollins, the drummer, Art Blakey, and the alto master, Charlie Parker, who died in her hotel suite. That event, trumpeted in the tabloids, drove her husband finally to divorce her and to win custody of her three minor children.

She had many admiring friends in the music world, but Thelonious Monk was the love of her life. Whether that love was ever more than platonic is unknown and probably unknowable. But there is no question about the depth of her devotion to him. When a miniscule amount of marijuana was found in the car in which she and he were driving, she took the rap, risking prison and deportation, and was only kept out of jail by a legal technicality. Monk’s sometimes bizarre behaviour — a byproduct of the bipolar disorder from which he suffered all his life and the alcohol and drugs he insisted on downing each day — exhausted the patience of many of his admirers. But the Baroness never waivered and in the mid-1970s, when his customary reticence turned into total silence and he no longer seemed to want even to touch the piano, she allowed him to withdraw behind the walls of the Weehawken, New Jersey house she shared with scores of cats. She cared for him there until he suffered a fatal stroke in 1982.

The grieving Baroness outlived him by six years. Before her death, she asked that she be cremated so that her ashes could be immersed in the Hudson River that flows below her house. The timing of the ceremony was “very important,” her niece writes, “It had to be done ’round midnight.”