A Drink at Least.

Things were terrible until 1951, when they got worse. Monk was
arrested along with Bud Powell when a packet of heroin was found in their
possession. Monk had always been "clean" but he refused to let Powell take
the rap alone. "Every day I would plead with him." Nellie says,
'"Thelonious, get yourself out of this trouble. You didn't do anything"
But he'd just say "Nellie, I have to walk the streets when I get out. I
can't talk,"' Monk held his silence and was given 60 days in jail.

As soon as he was released, the police cancelled his "cabaret card," a
document required of all entertainers who appear in New York nightclubs.
Losing the card cost Monk his slender livelihood, but he had a reputation
as an oddball and the police were adamant. For six years Monk could not
play in New York; though he made a few records and went out on the road
now and then, he was all but silenced. "everybody was saying Thelonious
was weird or locked up." Nellie recalls, "But they just talked that way
because they'd never see him. He hated to be asked why he wasn't working,
and he didn't want to see anybody unless he could buy them a drink at
least. Besides, it hurts less to be passed over for jobs if you aren't
around to hear the other's names called. It was a bad time. He even had to
pay to get into Birdland."

Monk was the man who was not with it, and jazz was passing him by.
Miles Davis had come on with his "impressionist" jazz style - a rubato
blowing in spurts and swoons, free of any vibrato, cooler than ice. The
Modern Jazz Quartet was playing a kind of introverted 17th century jazz
behind inscrutable faces, and Dave Brubeck (TIME cover November 8, 1954)
introduced polished sound that came with the complete approval of Darius
Milhaud. Suddenly jazz - one of the loveliest and loneliest of sounds, the
creation of sad and sensitive men - was awash with rondos and fugues. The
hipsters began dressing like graduate students.

© TIME magazine - 1964
(Photo of Nellie and Thelonious by
David Gahr - TIME magazine.)