Jazz

When Hannah Rothschild first met her great-aunt Nica it was 1984. Hannah was 22, and Nica, then 70, had asked her to come sometime after midnight to a basement jazz club in an area of pre-Giuliani downtown Manhattan ‘known for its crack dens and muggings’. She was able to find the venue, as promised, by the pale blue Bentley parked erratically outside and inhabited by a couple of drunks. Inside, her aunt, ‘the Baroness’, was easily identifiable as the only white person: a wizened old doll in a fur coat with a a long black-filter cigarette, drinking whisky out of a teapot.

In the Rainbow Grill in New York one evening in 1971, according to Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Southern California, Duke Ellington  halted his band in mid-flow and announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the baddest left hand in the history of jazz just walked into the room, Mr Thelonious Monk.' In the Rainbow Grill in New York one evening in 1971, according to Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Southern California, Duke Ellington  halted his band in mid-flow and announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the baddest left hand in the history of jazz just walked into the room, Mr Thelonious Monk.’ In the code of jive talk, ‘baddest’ meant the best.