• Jazz Musicians and their three wishes

Jazz Musicians and their three wishes

Born in London in 1913, in the English branch of the Rothschild family, Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter - nicknamed Nica - experienced a boundless passion for jazz from a very early age. She was the close friend and confidante of the greatest jazzmen and helped them without counting. We know that, sick, refusing to be hospitalized, Charlie Parker died at her home, and Thelonious Monk lived there the last nine years of his life. With her Polaroid, she photographed, most often at home, most of the musicians: Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Bud Powell, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Sonny Rollins and many others. Between 1961 and 1966, she asked them this naive question: "If you were granted three wishes that were to come true immediately, what would you wish for?" planning to collect their often spontaneous answers in a book. This book, which has remained unpublished to this day, is here, produced from the original model of Pannonica. Three hundred musicians answer the question. Duke Ellington: "My wishes are simple! I want the best!" And Miles Davis: "My wish? To be white!" On December 9, 1988, at the Memorial Service for Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter at St. Peter's Church, Clint Eastwood said: "I knew Nica only a short time, but I discovered a remarkable woman, and as a patron of jazz, the Baroness will be remembered as someone whose life was inextricably linked to this music and its greatest performers. She helped me in the preparation of the film Bird, and I will always be happy to have had the opportunity to know her. She was truly a great lady." Grateful, the musicians also dedicated about twenty themes to her, including: Pannonica by Thelonious Monk, Nica, My dream of Nica by Sonny Clark, Blues for Nica by Kenny Drew, Thelonica by Tommy Flannagan...

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