The Baroness by Hannah Rothschild

Author:Hannah Rothschild
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307961990
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-03-19T04:00:00+00:00

Nica heard the melody but she also heard something intangible. Her friend, the photographer and writer Val Wilmer, explained: “For the fan the music becomes deeply personal, as if the player is talking to you alone. The musicians are reaching out and telling you their own life history, their experiences. They are testifying on their instruments.”

Jazz and Nica grew up together. It was the soundtrack to her life. Her father had played the great early recordings of Scott Joplin, George Gershwin and Louis Armstrong. As a young woman she had danced on a wave of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. Those who didn’t actually perform in London’s grandest ballrooms called to her over the wireless.

Even in deepest Africa, on daring Free French missions, the radio was Nica’s constant companion, the Circe beckoning her towards another world, another life. While she was enduring an unfulfilling marriage, living in a disoriented society that, after the war, was trying to rebuild itself, bebop burst across the airwaves. Its discordant, anarchic and explosive phrases seemed to match her mood exactly. Those musicians were throwing out the rule book, playing the notes out of sequence, ignoring structure with great speed and dexterity. Bebop was music you couldn’t dance or sing to. For many, it was as tuneful as a hundred cats scratching on a blackboard, as comprehensible as a buckling freight train. It was music that said, “I really don’t give a shit about convention or what anyone thinks, I am going to be uncompromisingly myself and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.” It was the exact antidote Nica had been looking for.

“It was the music that drew me first,” she said. “I didn’t know any musicians then. In time, I grew to feel that if the music is beautiful, the musicians must be beautiful too in some way. Now I know that it’s not possible to play with Bird [Charlie Parker], Monk, Sir Charles Thompson and Teddy Wilson and not be very much worth digging yourself. They’re all rather like their music.”

Nica’s friend, the musician and producer Quincy Jones, told me: “Jazz has a way of transforming darkness into light through comedy or taking the pain away from a bad love relationship or whatever and then make it either funny or express it in order to release it … That is why it was so strong and that is why it has permeated the planet and almost every country in the world.” For all the awards Jones has won, the multimillion-selling albums, he can still remember the thrill of arriving in New York in the late 1940s with nothing but his trumpet. “It was like walking into Wonderland.” Through his eyes, I could imagine the city.

At that time, Monk, Quincy Jones and other jazz musicians were just a bunch of unknowns: a collection of diverse individuals drawn to the same place. “She had no idea they would some day become famous. No one could have imagined it. They were virtually social pariahs,” her son Patrick observed in a newspaper interview.

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