[Dixielandjazz] New book about Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the mysterious Jazz Baroness

Sun Jul 17 11:34:02 PDT 2011

To:  Musicians & Jazzfans;  DJML

From:  Norman Vickers, Jazz Society of Pensacola

This from Kansas City Star.  The book by David Kastin is entitled Nica’s Dream:  The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, June 27, 2011.

I look forward to reading and reviewing it myself.

Sunday, Jul 17, 2011 

Posted on Sat, Jul. 16, 2011 

Biography soulfully explores the life of jazz patron Nica Rothschild

By DONNA SEAMAN
Special to The Star 

Named after a rare butterfly, or so it was believed, Pannonica, called Nica, was born to vast wealth and a weighty legacy. 

Determined to break out of her golden cocoon, she became a pilot in the open-cockpit era. She blazed down the streets of New York City like an avenging superhero in her signature Rolls-Royce. 

She sailed high on the oscillating wave of bebop. She became the unconventional and enigmatic Jazz Baroness and a tabloid scandal when Charlie Parker died in her Fifth Avenue hotel suite.

Music historian David Kastin is the first to tell Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild’s singular story, and he tells it with commanding expertise, panache and sensitivity. 

Nica was perhaps the wildest of the British branch of the international Rothschild banking dynasty. Her great-great-grandfather bankrolled Napoleon’s defeat. Her great-grandfather, after a protracted battle against an anti-Semitic law, became the first Jewish member of Parliament. Her grandfather was named a baron by Queen Victoria. 

Once the Rothschilds succeeded in becoming fully integrated into England’s echelon of power, the next generation turned its backs on all that “stifling grandeur.”

Walter, Nica’s uncle, was a notorious womanizer and a leading zoologist, who established an exotic private zoo at the Rothschilds’ immense country estate. 

Charles, Nica’s father, was an entomologist. He met Nica’s formidable mother while collecting butterflies in the Carpathian Mountains in the region of Hungary known in Latin as Pannonia. (Hence Pannonica’s evocative name.)

After a long illness, Charles committed suicide when Nica was 9. Hers was a privileged but grim childhood.

Nica met Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, a French widower 10 years her senior, on a runway in France, where they each landed their private planes. They married, sent their children to America at the start of World War II and served in the French Free Forces. 

Nica was a translator, decoder, radio broadcaster and battlefield jeep and ambulance driver, attaining the rank of lieutenant and receiving the Médaille de la France Libre.

Heroic Nica had five children and dutifully played her role as a diplomat’s wife when Jules was posted in Norway, Mexico and the U.S. 

But when the “vivacious baroness” found herself once again trapped in a “gilded cage” and embroiled in “escalating marital discord,” she took flight. New York City was calling, and its siren song was jazz.

Kastin sets Nica’s provocative tale within a capsule history of jazz, which “was perceived as a serious threat not only to the prevailing social order but to the integrity of Western culture itself.” 

Kastin draws on original research and revelatory interviews with musician David Amram and writer Nat Hentoff, among others. 

Kastin also incisively chronicles the world-altering synergy among New York City’s bebop musicians, abstract expressionist painters and Beat writers. They were all visionaries, breaking away from established forms to create truth-seeking art in the wake of a war of unprecedented horrors. 

Nica leaped into this crucible of creativity armed with her silver flask, cigarette holder, pearls, mink coat and Rolls. 

Inspired by Duke Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige,” Nica reported that she “really got some message … that I belonged where that music was, that there was something I was supposed to do.” Then, she heard a recording of Thelonious Monk’s “ ’Round Midnight,” and her fate was sealed.

Cosmically attuned to the music of liberation, she was determined to contribute to the jazz world, which desperately needed a champion as heroin addiction and police harassment stymied struggling musicians. 

In her quest for an authentic life, Kastin observes, “the baroness had joined a highly dysfunctional subculture,” and “she, like so many of the musicians she idealized, would pay a considerable price for her freedom.” 

The baroness became a regular in Manhattan’s hippest jazz clubs and routinely hosted open-door, after-hours jam sessions in her fancy hotel suite, outraging the management. 

Nica provided sanctuary, food, Chivas Regal and a sharp, appreciative ear for such jazz insurgents as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus. 

Of all her supportive friendships with cutting-edge musicians, the baroness’s bond with Monk was the most profound and involved. Kastin devotes many pages to the relationship between the psychologically vulnerable genius and his tireless guardian angel. 

The baroness was a “patron, cheerleader, and confidante to the jazz community,” as well as muse and earth mother. Jazz tributes to her generosity abound, most notably Monk’s “Pannonica” and Horace Silver’s “Nica’s Dream.” 

Conversely, Nica was erased from the official Rothschild family history. She was also confronted with vicious racial and sexual prejudices and innuendo. Kastin insightfully analyzes both Nica’s contentious reputation and valor in defying racism and covers in chilling detail her arrest, along with Monk and Charlie Rouse, in 1958. 

The baroness finally secured a place of her own, a modernist house overlooking the Hudson River. The outpost was a hangout and home not only for jazz cats, but also for a burgeoning population of four-legged felines. Everyone called it the Cathouse, with all due hilarity.

In spite of her notoriety, Nica was reserved, private, even shy. Since her death in 1988, much of her life, Kastin laments, remains “veiled in secrecy.” 

Nica’s children have declined to provide access to archival materials, including tapes of those historic jam sessions. They even barred the door to Nica’s grand-niece, Hannah Rothschild, who made the 2009 BBC documentary “The Jazz Baroness.”

Even so, Kastin, whose richly prismatic, cascading, and affecting prose is its own form of music, brings Nica soulfully to life. 

“Nica’s Dream” is a vital and resonant portrait of a generous nonconformist who believed fervently in freedom, equality and the redeeming power of art — a woman who boldly improvised a life devoted to the music that gave her wings.

Donna Seaman is a senior editor at Booklist and a book critic for Chicago Public Radio.