[Dixielandjazz] JAZZ WIVES

[Stephen Barbone]

List mates:

Forgive this post from the NY Times because it mentions so many "modern"
jazzers. However please bear in mind that the article is about "JAZZ
WIVES" and they are also ever present in OKOM as the muses of OKOM
musicians everywhere.

If you are not prepared to have it interest you DELETE NOW. For
everybody else, I think you will find this article fascinating.
Especially if you are a JAZZ WIFE & MUSE.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


July 21, 2002  New York Times

The Jazz Wife: Muse and Manager

By ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

      On  July 2, family and friends of Mrs. Nellie Monk gathered at St.
Peter's Church in Manhattan to pay their last respects to the woman who
shared most of her life with the pianist and composer Thelonious Monk.

Monk and Nellie, as they were known to their friends, were one of the
grand couples in jazz. The eulogies reminded us just how critical she
was in sustaining her husband's career. She was his personal manager and
musical consultant, at times the family's chief wage earner, and mother
to their children, Thelonious Jr. and Barbara. After Monk's death in
1982, Nellie Monk helped establish the Thelonious Monk Institute, which
promotes jazz through educational programs and competitions, and more
recently she was a driving force behind the family record label,
Thelonious Records.

Mrs. Monk was not alone. Many spouses of jazz musicians have not only
maintained stable households but often run the "business" — handled
publishing, tours and booking and written proposals for grants. The
trumpeter and bandleader Dizzy Gillespie, who died in 1993, often
praised Lorraine, his wife of 53 years, for her financial skills.
"Lorraine knows how to handle money," he said. "Without her, I wouldn't
have a quarter."

Women like Nellie Monk and Lorraine Gillespie were not simply muses who
inspired their husbands' creative passions or housewives relegated to
the background of their spouses' public lives. Rather, they became a
significant social and economic force in the jazz world and thus were
ahead of their time.

Long-lasting partnerships like theirs call into question the pervasive
stereotype of the male jazz musician as a womanizing free spirit. Some
of the other great couples in jazz include Mona and Milt Hinton, Lucille
and Sonny Rollins, Dolly and Jackie McLean, June and Percy Heath, Mona
and Jimmy Heath, Dorthaan and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Sue and Charles
Mingus, Rosemary and Bobby Hutcherson, Sandy and Milt Jackson, Iola and
Dave Brubeck, Sandy and Clifford Jordan. But stories of such stable,
nurturing relationships rarely find a place in the countless movies and
books about jazz artists.

Mrs. Monk first met Thelonious in 1933, when she was an 11-year-old
named Nellie Smith. Her family had just moved to West 62nd Street in
Manhattan, and the Monks lived on the next street over. Her brother,
Sonny, quickly befriended Monk, who was a local hero because of his
prowess on the basketball court and at the piano. "A lot of young girls
used to go to his house to hear him play," Mrs. Monk recalled recently.
"Of course, a lot of girls had a crush on him." Eventually their
friendship grew into a romance, and they were married in 1947.

Mrs. Monk loved her husband's music, and he trusted her opinions. In the
late 1950's they acquired a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, which
she used to capture his playing. While he was at the piano, she
occasionally sang along in unison. She also welcomed — and fed — the
many musicians who dropped by their tiny apartment on West 63rd Street
to rehearse or just hang out. Although she had no formal music training,
musicians frequently solicited her opinions about their work.

"Monk would always ask Nellie what she thought about the music, not just
his music but the cats Thelonious dug, like Nat Cole, Teddy Wilson and
Erroll Garner," recalled Marcellus Green, a longtime family friend and
barber who counted many of the musicians as his patrons. "Nellie got to
be such a critic that everybody who was around of any note would ask
Nellie, `How's this sound?' "

Many women had been involved in jazz long before they met their
husbands. (Lorraine Willis was a chorus dancer with Edgar Hayes's
orchestra when she met Gillespie in 1937.) Anita Cooper grew up on
Staten Island listening to jazz on the radio, and while completing her
masters degree in social work at Fordham University, she moved to the
West Village in 1961, largely because of the music scene. There she met
Gil Evans, a struggling arranger and pianist, and two years later they
married. She said he asked her to become director of his orchestra "just
because Gil didn't have any interest in, or talent for, taking care of
that."

"Nor did I," she added. "But in order to avoid starvation, I took on the
phone calls and tried to make stuff happen."

Making stuff happen was not always easy. Mrs. Evans kept things together
by securing gigs, writing grant proposals and pinching pennies, and all
the while managed to raise their sons, Miles and Noah.

During the 1980's, Mr. Evans even asked her to play percussion in the
band. "Gil said to me, `I can't see you in the audience; I can't feel
your pulse anymore.' "

Gladys Hampton was the model of the wife and manager. She began managing
Lionel Hampton's band in the late 1930's and oversaw his publishing and
record companies. Her shrewdness was legendary — and so was her fierce
independence. Once, Mr. Hampton fired the singer Betty Carter, and Mrs.
Hampton rehired her. As Carter recalled years later, "That was the first
time I ever experienced dealing with a woman who was the boss."

In a period when jazz musicians often complained about the
ineffectiveness of their own union, it was women in many cases who
fought the club owners and record companies to improve the working
conditions of musicians. Maxine Gordon had been active in the music
industry years before she met her husband, the tenor saxophonist Dexter
Gordon. She started going to the Village Vanguard in 1957 when she was
only 15. Over the years, she became well-acquainted with the hazards of
a life in jazz: the late hours, the erratic work schedule, the lack of
steady income and health insurance. In the 60's and 70's she gained a
reputation for her
outspoken insistence that musicians learn the business and work together
to protect their own interests.

In 1972 she teamed up with other women to found Ms. Management, which
booked gigs, arranged tours, negotiated contracts and helped musicians
get their work published. She met Mr. Gordon in 1974, and they married
several years later. For much of the last two decades of his life — he
died in 1990 — she managed his career. "I got a lot of heat for putting
off promoters, club owners, record companies and other musicians when
Dexter didn't want to do certain things," Mrs. Gordon recalled.

She also remembered being called pushy, domineering or worse, but
dismissed such criticism as part of the job. She believes women were
better suited to the task because their egos were not at stake. "The way
we as women are socialized enables us to work, although we don't get any
credit," she said. "You wouldn't last a day if you did this work to get
public recognition."

Beyond an unyielding love of the music, what marked these relationships
was a commitment to home and family. As the saxophonist Johnny Griffin
once said: "If Monk isn't working, he isn't on the scene. Monk stays
home." Thelonious Jr. remembered his father as "a guy who had a fabulous
love affair with his wife, who partied with his children, who wrote
tunes named after family members." One of his favorites, his son said,
was the lovely ballad "Crepuscule With Nellie."