Jazz
In New York, Koenigswarter became a friend and patron of many prominent jazz musicians, hosting jam sessions in her hotel suite, and lending them her chauffeur and Rolls Royce when they needed a lift to performances. She is sometimes referred to as the "bebop baroness" or "jazz baroness" because of her patronage of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker among others. Following Parker's death in her Stanhope rooms in 1955, Koenigswarter was asked to leave by the hotel management; she re-located to the Bolivar Hotel at 230 Central Park West, a building commemorated in Thelonious Monk's 1956 tune "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are".
She was introduced to Thelonious Monk by jazz pianist/composer Mary Lou Williams in Paris while attending the "Salon du Jazz 1954", and championed his work in the USA, writing the liner notes for his 1962 Columbia album Criss-Cross, and even took criminal responsibility when she and Monk were charged with marijuana possession by the police. After Monk ended his public performances in the mid-1970s he retired to Koenigswarter's house in Weehawken, New Jersey, where he died in 1982.
Read more about this topic: Pannonica De Koenigswarter
Famous quotes containing the word jazz:
“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed.”
—André Previn (b. 1929)
“He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co- ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, “Give me the co-ordinates.”... The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog!”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“There’s more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that’s because the audience doesn’t really know what’s happening.”
—Pat Metheny (b. 1954)