A life way beyond colorful

The Life and Legend
of the Jazz Baroness

David Kastin

W.W. Norton. 273 pp. $26.95

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Reviewed by Steven Rea

She was a Rothschild, raised in sheltered splendor on an English estate, sent to a posh Paris finishing school. She was a decorated war hero, driving ambulances across the North African deserts for the Free French Forces.

She was the woman in whose Fifth Avenue apartment Charlie Parker, the great jazz saxophonist, died.

And she was the dramatic, black-haired diva of the New York nighclub scene who was busted in New Castle, Del., on drug charges while the passenger in her silver Bentley, the pioneer modern jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, was being beaten by the cops and hauled off to jail.

To say that the story of Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild de Koenigswarter - born in 1913, died in 1988 - is a colorful one is not even to begin to approach the extravagant adventures, the remarkable relationships, the scandals and creative collaborations that marked her life.

Thankfully, music historian David Kastin has spent the last few years immersed in the world of "Nica" - as those who knew her well (or those who would like to think they did) referred to the baroness. His biography is beautifully written, endlessly fascinating.

It is Nica's connections to the jazz world - to sax legend Parker, to the fabled keyboardist and composer Monk, to Art Blakey, to Bud Powell, to a veritable Who's Who of bebop and modern jazz players - that drew Kastin to his subject.

At the moment she first heard a recording of Monk's "'Round Midnight" - on a 1951 visit to New York from Mexico City, where her husband, Baron Jules de Koenigswater, served as France's ambassador - Nica's life changed. "I couldn't believe my ears," she said almost 35 years later, recounting how she asked her friend, pianist Teddy Wilson, to play the record over and over and over again. "'Round Midnight' affected me like nothing else I ever heard."

So, cut to the chase: Nica left her husband in Mexico and moved to New York with the oldest of their five children, a teenage daughter, Janka. They took lavish digs at the Stanhope Hotel. Nica began frequenting the jazz clubs, became friends with the promoters, the owners, the musicians. Before long, the "Jazz Baroness" - chic and sophisticated, free-thinking and free-drinking - was hosting jam sessions in her suites, sneaking the always hungry, often broke, occasionally stoned, predominantly African American artists up the hotel's service elevator.

And on March 12, 1955, after several days of convalescence chez the baroness (with periodic visits from the hotel physician), Parker collapsed and died. "Bird" was 34. The tabloids went wild: "Bop King Dies in Heiress' Flat!" Columnist Walter Winchell intimated that Parker and Nica were having an affair. (Kastin doesn't think so, nor do the many people he's interviewed.)

Soon after Parker's death, Nica was asked to leave. She found a similarly luxe living situation in a hotel on the opposite side of Central Park. (Full disclosure: my father was the manager of the Stanhope at the time, and Kastin contacted me while researching his book.)

But while the events surrounding Parker's death in Nica's apartment have long been the stuff of jazz lore, it was her decades-long friendship with Monk - and her unflagging financial and emotional support of the musician (plagued by psychological disorders and addiction) and of his wife and family - that is vastly more illuminating. She was there, lending her support and largesse, at the most difficult times of Monk's career. He composed some of his signature work on the baby grand in her hotels (and then in her eccentric modernist abode, built for film director Josef von Sternberg, in Weehawken, N.J.).

The baroness' "moveable feast" of a jazz salon resulted in more than 400 hours of annotated and archived recordings: Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, Lionel Hampton, Donald Byrd, Horace Silver (whose song, "Nica's Dream," Kastin took for his book's title) - they all played for Nica. It's an epic and extraordinary aural document. The "Pannonica Collection" remains in the hands of her heirs, and has, until now, been unavailable.

While tracing the pivot points in Nica's life and the evolution in the music that functioned as her living, breathing soundtrack, Kastin's biography stops to assess the kindred modernist movements in art, film, and literature (Jackson Pollock, John Cassavetes, Jack Kerouac). Similar aesthetic forces were at play - and the art forms, and artists, intersected. Oftentimes literally: at the Five Spot, the Bowery boite that was a jazz hub in the '50s and early '60s.

Nica's Dream would make for a great movie - although there's so much here that a mini-series might be more accommodating. But it certainly makes for a great book. Kastin has served his subject well, offering a rich and tumbling portrait of a force to be reckoned with - no dilettante or groupie or interloper, but a woman who was inspired by, and in turn inspired, many of the reigning figures of the jazz universe.