(Listen to this album in its entirety for a limited time at NPR’s First Listen page. Go to the “Listen to Albums” page at the top of my site here for an evolving list of websites where you can hear albums streaming on the web.)
courtesy of Decca Records
2012 is off to a glorious start, musically speaking, if this album is any indication. Due out January 10, Come Sunday by bassist Charlie Haden and pianist Hank Jones is a beautiful, beautiful recording that features truly uplifting tunes. (On a related note, Charlie Haden will be honored with a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award on Tuesday evening, January 10, 2012.) From the opening notes of “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” you begin to be transported and no matter what religion you hold dear, or none at all, this music is deeply moving.
This is a perfect example of what I call “Sunday morning music” (and in this case it is quite literally Sunday morning music) - on the quiet side, lyrical, meditative, melodious. The album is a distillation of mostly familiar spirituals and hymns from the American Christian tradition, including a couple of Christmas tunes, sometimes played with a sprightly verve and sometimes with a more prayerful quietude.
“Before music there was silence, and the duet format allows you to build from the silence in a very special way.” – Charlie Haden, from his website.
Photo by Cheung Ching Ming, courtesy of Decca Records
A follow-up to their 1995 Grammy-nominated album Steal Away: Spirituals, Hymns and Folk Songs, Come Sunday is an album by two of the jazz world’s masters playing at their best. And it may serve as one of the lasting reminders of Jones’ gentle genius: he passed away at the age of 91 in May of 2010, just three months after this recording was made.
Both of these men grew up playing music and had strong connections with these kinds of tunes. Charlie Haden, whose career in jazz has spanned from the avant grade to the standards, grew up in Iowa playing country music in the Haden Family Band throughout the midwest. (And did you know that actor/musician Jack Black is Haden’s son-in-law? I didn’t until I was researching this story.) Hank Jones started playing music at an early age and is the eldest of the three Jones brothers who became part of the jazz elite: trumpeter Thad Jones and drummer Elvin Jones were both giants in their own right.
The soul soothing rendition of classical composer Antonin Dvorak’s “Going Home” may be the highlight for me on an album full of highlights. It’s such a beautiful tune and so lovingly played here. In the early twentieth century, the melody for “Going Home” was borrowed from the “Largo” movement of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” and adapted into a hymn. Dvorak’s symphony itself was partially influenced by folk songs and African-American spirituals. And knowing (as we do now) that Hank Jones passed away just three months after recording the album, it makes hearing this song especially poignant.
Photo by Cheung Ching Ming, courtesy of Decca Records
The session ends fittingly with the title track, a classic from the Duke Ellington songbook, “Come Sunday,” taken from Ellington’s expansive jazz symphony Black, Brown and Beige. In a soulful reading of this tune that bridges the worlds of spiritual and popular music, Jones and Haden swing us sweetly home.
Photo by Cheung Ching Ming, courtesy of Decca Records
At 43 minutes long this album comes in a bit short of most church services, but it has that same power of lifting up your spirit and carrying you through the days ahead. Amen to brother Hank and brother Charlie for Come Sunday.
Poster for the HBO showing of the documentary film The Jazz Baroness
By Denis McGilvray
(See the end of this post for an update about the release of this film on DVD…)
The music of visionary be-bop pianist and composer Thelonious Monk has long been some of my favorite in the jazz realm, and really some of my favorite music of any genre. My wife, Sarah, said that he is her favorite musician; I asked her if she meant her favorite jazz musician, and she said no, her favorite musician of any kind. It’s easy to see why: Monk’s tunes are surprising and inventive, sometimes heart-breaking in their beauty but often joyously ebullient. They are full of incredibly memorable melodies. I often find myself humming or whistling one of his tunes while doing work around the house. Monk has been hailed as a musical genius, and rightly so, but his music was certainly not appreciated by critics and jazz aficionados early on because it was so different from anything else being played; even though he was among the early bop revolutionaries, his music was perhaps the furthest out of all of them. His playing was always a bit off-kilter and angular; it remains refreshingly modern sounding even though he was composing in the mid 20th-century. Monk had his roots in tradition and greatly respected and learned from the players of the previous generation, but he took that tradition and made from it something strikingly new — not always the easiest road to take in any artistic endeavor, and even less so when you’re a black jazz musician in the America of the 1940s and 50s.
Having been a longtime fan of Monk’s music, I had always been intrigued by the connection between him and the woman who was a patron and friend to him and many other jazz musicians – the woman known as Nica: Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild. Yes, she was one of the Rothschilds – part of the English branch of the German Jewish financial dynasty that has been among the wealthiest families in the world for several hundred years. I knew only the sketchy outlines of their story when I saw a documentary film called The Jazz Baroness on HBO recently. The film was truly a revelation. If you’re interested in jazz music or music history, I highly recommend that you see The Jazz Baroness, which tells the story of the long-lasting friendship between Pannonica and Thelonious Monk. Their personal stories are fascinating and beautifully told by the film’s writer, producer, and director, Hannah Rothschild, who made the film for the BBC. Ms. Rothschild is Nica’s great-niece and made the film in part to explore a part of her own family history, which was something of a mystery to her. Amidst all the riveting family and musical drama in the film, there is one event, however, that just kept playing in my head after watching The Jazz Baroness: how listening to one record changed Nica’s life, and ultimately the whole jazz world.
You may wonder, how can a record change a life? Hannah Rothschild wondered about that too. She ponders the mesmerizing effect that one recording had on her great-aunt and how it could have changed her life so dramatically. While the whole story of Nica and Monk’s unlikely friendship – an English heiress to the Rothschild fortune befriending an African-American musician born in rural North Carolina – is astonishing in itself, what I found most compelling was the tale of how this friendship came to be. In the film, the tale is told in Nica’s own words from an interview with Bruce Ricker, producer of the excellent documentary film about Thelonious Monk entitled Straight, No Chaser.
The story goes: it’s the early 1950s, Nica is in New York City, on her way back to Mexico where she was living with her husband and family. On the way to the airport she stops to visit her friend, jazz pianist Teddy Wilson. During the visit, he asks if she’s heard the tune “’Round Midnight” and she replies, no, she’s never even heard of Thelonious Monk. Wilson tells her she can’t leave without hearing it and pulls out the record. He plays “’Round Midnight” and Nica recounts, “I couldn’t believe my ears. I’d never heard anything remotely like it. I made him play it 20 times in a row. I missed my plane, and never went back to Mexico.”
Wow! That is one powerful tune. Presumably, the recording of “’Round Midnight” that she heard was the version from the Blue Note album Genius of Modern Music: Volume 1, which Monk recorded in 1947 but was not released until 1951; this was Monk’s first recording of the song that would become one of the most beloved, and most recorded, jazz pieces of all time. (Hear a full version of the 1947 “‘Round Midnight”.) Nica was so taken with Monk’s playing that she essentially devoted the rest of her life to the cause of modern jazz music and its beleaguered creators, in stark contrast to her upbringing and social position. How could this be?
However bewildering that Nica’s transformative experience seems, it does not surprise me: hearing one jazz tune had a transformative effect on my own life (although certainly not as world-changing as it was in her case.) For me the tune was “My Favorite Things” as played by John Coltrane; like Nica, I had never heard anything remotely like it, and the way Coltrane took this familiar, beloved song and blew it apart so beautifully was a consciousness-altering experience for me.* Knowing “’Round Midnight” well, I can understand her being moved so deeply by Monk’s recording that it changed her life. It is a ballad full of melancholy and shadow, and so heartbreakingly beautiful and personal – it really is one of the most emotionally moving tunes I’ve ever heard. (The version recorded by the Miles Davis Quintet on the 1957 album Round About Midnight is especially haunting, and also features Coltrane. You can hear it by going to the official Miles Davis website and clicking on the “Miles Davis Music Player” icon, then selecting it from the track listings.) Filmmaker Hannah Rothschild speculates that it is perhaps the song’s “mournful, haunting chords which triggered feelings of loneliness and not belonging” in Pannonica and had such an effect on her. And hearing this for the first time in the very early 50s, when there was not much else, if anything, like it even among the be-boppers, seems to have been nothing less than an epiphany to her.
What I get from the film is that Pannonica was not just some well-to-do lady on a mission of mercy; she was a genuine friend to these guys and cared deeply for these artists whose music she truly loved and felt passionate about, often when society as a whole did not. Hers was certainly not an uncomplicated life: she divorced her husband in part because of her love of jazz, faced defamatory and blatantly misleading stories about her life in the New York press (especially after Charlie Parker died while being cared for in her apartment,) and did everything she could to protect and nurture the sometimes fragile Monk and his family, even risking a prison sentence for him at one time. Nica took Monk into her home at the end of his life when Monk’s wife Nellie could no longer care for him alone. Nellie would visit every day and spend her time with him and her dear friend Nica. All of this because of one record! I don’t know of another tale quite like it in the annals of music history. Sure, many classical musicians had their patrons, but I’m not familiar enough with that history to know if there was ever a musical relationship as unlikely and as enduring as the one between Nica and Monk.
Nica’s story reminds me of the powerful impact which music can have upon us. If you’re reading this, then there’s a pretty good chance you have some inkling about the power of music also. That’s one of the reasons I created this blogazine: to share the importance of music in our lives. Please feel free to share your own stories of how a song or album has affected your life by joining in the commentary section at the end of this piece.
There’s another reason I wanted to include something in Monk’s honor here near the launch of Jukebox Delirium on Mardi Gras day, February 16, 2010. Thelonious Monk died on February 17, 1982. I’m sure it won’t be the last time I write about him. His musical legacy is growing all the time. It seems like I hear Monk’s tunes being played by more musicians than any other jazz composer I know of (even perhaps surpassing Duke Ellington.) Rest in peace, Monk…and thanks for the wondrous music.
To underscore what an influence Monk’s music had on her, Pannonica made one special request before she died in 1988, revealing how, nearly 40 years later, that one record was still so powerful. She simply said: “I would like my ashes to be scattered on the Hudson River, in the evening, around midnight. I think you all know why.”
*Note: The story of my hearing Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” for the first time will soon be the subject of another post on Jukebox Delirium, and is one of the main inspirations for my love of music in general…
Since several people have asked about the DVD release of this film, I’ve tried to gather some new information about that. The main website for the film, which had been active even a few months ago, no longer exists. There is going to be a DVD release of the Jazz Baroness in the U.K. as confirmed by its listing on the Amazon.co.uk website. The release date is listed as April 30, 2012. This will be a Region 2/PAL format DVD sold in Europe. (See the Amazon page for info about DVD formats/region codes.) The Amazon U.S. site has no listing for the film, but there is this new book that was released in the summer of 2011:
To be published May, 2012. (Image courtesy of HannahRothschild.com)
And after doing a bit more research, I found out that Hannah Rothschild has her own biography of Pannonica coming out in May, 2012: The Baroness: the Search for Nica the Rebellious Rothschild. (Virago Press, May 2012.) I have sent a message through her “Contact” page inquiring about a U.S. release of the DVD.
Whenever I come across new information, I’ll post it here. You can subscribe to receive updates. Thanks for reading…
Thelonious Monk playing “‘Round Midnight” live; date and location unknown – probably mid 1960s on a European TV program:
