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Friday 5 September 2008

Uncomfortable truths

The Trial and Death of Socrates (BBC Radio 3); The Jazz Baroness (BBC Radio 4)

A flick of the button on Tuesday lunchtime and as if by magic we were in 1950s New York listening to Charlie Parker on sax. No technicolour here, but stark injustice in black and white, and the story of an extraordinary woman. In The Jazz Baroness (Radio Four), Hannah Rothschild sought to uncover the truth about her great-aunt Pannonica (she was named after a rare butterfly discovered by her father), who befriended and encouraged many of the musicians who created bebop such as Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, looking after them when they were ill and dying.

Born in 1913 into the fabulously rich Rothschild family, Nica (as she was known) at first lived a conventional life, marrying a diplomat and settling in France. But she was Jewish and with the coming of the Nazis had to flee, on the last train out of France, first to West Africa and then to New York, where most unconventionally she discovered a love of jazz and hanging out through the midnight hour in the smoky clubs of the Lower East Side. This was at the height of segregation in America and, although bebop was hugely popular, many of its players were ostracised for being black. They could not fraternise, at least not legally, with their largely white audiences. Nica simply ignored the rules, defying the dreadful headlines about her in the tabloid press, and secretly entertaining her friends among the jazz greats in her suite in the Stanhope Hotel and later, after she was asked to leave, at the (‘Ba-lue’) Bolivar.

Hannah did not meet her never-talked-about aunt until 1984 when she cold-called her from a phone box in Manhattan. Nica responded with characteristically improvised enthusiasm, ‘Wild! Meet me in a club in Alphabet City at 1 a.m.’ Now that’s some aunt. Her long life was told in a brief but evocative half-hour (produced by David Perry).

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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