The Jazz Baroness
Hannah Rothschild is searching for the real story behind her great aunt Panonnica’s sudden disappearance. In 1951 the beautiful married mother of five left home and went to New York in search of Thelonious Monk, the man who wrote "‘Round Midnight;" forming a unique bond that was meshed by his intoxicating music. It is an obsession that took her from Harlem to Hell and back again. Narrated by Helen Mirren.
3/12 8:30 (H-D) & 3/17 8:30 (Latchis)
The Jazz Baroness 2009
Hannah Rothschild
82 min UK Doc
Post Production Script PDF (Click here)
Longer Synopsis PDF (Click here)
Clandestine Films presents
The Jazz Baroness
A documentary feature directed, written and produced by Hannah Rothschild.
New York, 1956. Thelonious Monk sits at the piano in a secret smoke filled basement club, premiering a new tune. He starts, and then stops. Everyone waits. He clears his throat and starts again. To everyone’s astonishment, Monk, a man of few words, turns to the audience. “This one’s for the Baroness… Pannonica, a very dear friend of mine, a very special lady.”
Pannonica, sitting at her usual corner table, smiles enigmatically as the new tune floats across the keys. But who was the Baroness? And why, seventeen years after her death, is she still a legend in the Jazz World?
London 2008. In this film her great neice Hannah Rothschild tries to find out why her own family want this woman’s past kept quiet and what if anything they are hiding.
Pannonica Rothschild was born in 1913. Her grandfather was the first Jewish MP. The Balfour declaration, leading to the creation of the state of Israel, was written to her uncle. On her family estate in Tring exotic creatures including emus and giant tortoises populated the park. Her uncle Walter drove a trap pulled by four zebras. But Nica’s childhood was not quite the idyll it might sound. There was a propensity for depression in the family and the lives of Nica and her three siblings were blighted when their father committed suicide.
As a young woman Nica attended a finishing school in Paris and studied art and aviation; she met her husband, Baron de Koenigswarter, through their mutual love of flying. The couple had five children. Her life should have been set, but the war broke out. News reached the family that their relations were being interned in camps. Nica and her husband joined the Free French in Africa determined to fight for the Resistance. There, she flew Lancaster bombers and drove ambulances. It was there she heard her first Charlie Parker record. Normal life would never be resumed. After the war, Nica left her family for New York in search of a new life.
When Charlie Parker died in Nica's hotel suite in March 1955, it caused such a scandal that she was vilified in the tabloid press and stoned in the streets by racists. She had become an embarrassment to her estranged husband who won custody of their children.
Nica took on jazz musicians in place of family. She used her inheritance as well as her dedication and energy to support them. Inherent in this passionate loyalty was a powerful indignation about the racism these black musicians encountered on a daily basis. And her response to this perhaps owed something to her own experiences of anti-Semitism, to the loss of family members during the Holocaust and to her involvement in the War.
Nica was the inspiration for some of the most critically acclaimed bebop tunes – Art Blakey’s and Horace Silver’s Nica’s Dream, Nica’s Tempo by the Jazz Messengers, and Monk’s Bolivar Blues to name but a few – and up until her death in 1988, Nica would be sitting at the best table in any number of clubs, pouring whisky out of a flask disguised as a Bible. She died alone in a hospital room in 1988. All that remains are the songs and rare footage.
Nica’s life spanned much of the twentieth century, her experiences of passion, motherhood, freedom and loss directly reflecting the great issues of the times: anti-Semitism; the Holocaust; desegregation in America; the women's movement. Nica's story takes place in the context of the biggest artistic movement of the century: Modernism; the settings range from the English countryside to old Europe to Africa to New York.
This eighty-five minute documentary explores the life of a great patron of jazz and one of its most colorful characters told in her own words read by oscar winning actress Helen Mirren.
Nica’s friends including the elusive musicians such as Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, Chico Hamilton and Roy Haynes illuminate the story as do her relations, Dame Miriam Rothschild, Lord Rothschild and friends like The Duchess of Devonshire. Rare and unseen archive footage of the Baroness and her background are shown and the soundtrack features twenty-seven recordings of songs written and recorded for Nica and her world.
Copyright Hannah Rothschild All rights reserved
