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| http://www.amazon.com/Nicas-Dream-Life-Legend-Baroness/dp/0393069400 |
'Nica's Dream:' the wild life of jazz patron Pannonica Rothschild
In "Nica's Dream: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness,"
David Kastin tells the story of Pannonica Rothschild, an adventuress, baron's wife and fabulously wealthy member of the Rothschild clan who became a great patron of jazz music in 1950s and 1960s New York.
By Curt Schleier
"Nica's Dream: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness"
by David Kastin
W.W. Norton, 272 pp., $26.95
Pannonica Rothschild — called Nica — tried very hard to be an upstanding member of the famous banking family. She went to the right schools, married the right man (a French baron, no less) and had five children. Ultimately, though, she couldn't do it. Seduced by jazz, she fled to New York and became patron
to dozens of musicians, most famously Thelonious Monk. Her fascinating life is the subject of "Nica's Dream," the second recent effort to tell this story; two
years ago, Nica's grandniece, Hannah Rothschild, produced a documentary, "The Jazz Baroness," which covered much of the same ground.
Both the film and David Kastin's book ascribe Rothschild's willingness to give up a life of privilege to the difficulty growing up a female Rothschild, of whom nothing more was expected than being a wife and mother. The filmmaker does a better job describing what it was like growing up a Rothschild. Growing up
on an English estate, young Nica (1913-1988) was not only offered a choice of breakfast milk — but from which breed of cow it came. Dinner guests were offered fruit directly from miniature trees carried in by servants. Author Kastin, however, does a superior job in placing her in the context of the milieu. This was a
time when no proper white woman, let alone a wealthy baroness, would so openly associate with black people and when jazz "was perceived as a serious threat not only to the prevailing social order, but to the integrity of Western culture, itself," he writes. Nica was also a proto-feminist. She learned to fly when just 21 and was a medal-winning war hero (as was her husband, BaronJules de Koenigswater), driving an ambulance during WW II.
After the war she accompanied her husband, who joined the diplomatic service of the new French government and was posted to Oslo, Norway, and Mexico. But after the excitement of wartime service, it was impossible to settle down. She made frequent trips to New York. On one such trip, pianist Teddy Wilson (she'd met him years earlier through her brother) insisted she listen to a recording of " 'Round Midnight," by a newcomer — Thelonious Monk.
"I had never heard anything remotely like it," she's quoted as saying. I made him play it 20 times in a row. [It] affected me like nothing else I ever heard."
She extended her stay indefinitely and eventually moved there permanently, becoming a benefactor to many. Pianist Hampton Hawes noted: "She'd give money to anyone who was broke, bring a bag of groceries to their families [and] help them get their cabaret cards."
Her home became a way station for musicians who came to jam and for a free meal. Charlie (Bird) Parker died in her suite at the Stanhope Hotel, and Monk lived in her home in Weehawken, N.J.
But with one possible exception — the drummer Art Blakey — her relationships were platonic fed by a passion, but a passion for music.
Where Kastin excels is in re-creating the world of jazz of the '50s and '60s, as modernists moved from swing to bebop to improvisational music.
In a fitting coda to her life, Nica asked her children to spread her ashes on the Hudson River "around midnight."
