The story of “Crepuscule with Nellie” starts in August 1951, when police searched a parked car on West 63rd Street in New York, close to Thelonious Monk’s home. Monk was inside, along with his friend Bud Powell and others. The officers found heroin, widely believed to be Powell’s. Monk refused to say whose it was.
He spent 60 days in jail. Worse, he lost his cabaret card, the police licence that New York musicians needed to work in any club that sold alcohol. Monk was 33. He wouldn’t get it back until he was 39.
His wife Nellie had a name for that stretch. She called them the un-years. Near the end of them, Monk wrote her “Crepuscule with Nellie”.
The cabaret card
From the 1940s until 1967, anyone working in a New York nightclub had to carry a card issued by the police, and an arrest record could be enough to have it taken away. For a jazz musician, that meant being shut out of the city’s clubs, the places where reputations were made. Monk was not the only victim: Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker lost theirs too, as we explain in our article on the jazz police.
Monk could still record and play the occasional concert or out-of-town gig. But the steady club work that paid the rent was gone.
Nellie
Nellie Smith was born in St. Petersburg, Florida, but moved to New York as a girl and grew up in San Juan Hill, the neighbourhood in Manhattan’s West 60s where Monk had lived since childhood. They met as teenagers. They married in 1947 and lived in the apartment Monk shared with his mother. Their son, Thelonious Jr., known as T.S., was born in 1949, and their daughter Barbara in 1953.
Through the un-years, Nellie earned much of the family’s money. She worked as a seamstress and took other jobs, including as an elevator operator, according to Monk’s biographer Robin D.G. Kelley. She also ran Monk’s business, collecting fees and paying musicians, and made sure he was dressed and ready on the days he played.
Writing through it
Monk kept composing and recording. He made records for Prestige in the early 1950s, and in 1955 Riverside bought out his contract. In late 1956 he recorded Brilliant Corners, which on its release the following year finally won him wide critical attention, at a time when New York’s clubs still couldn’t hire him.
A piece for Nellie
In the spring of 1957, as the fight to restore his card was nearing its end, Monk wrote a piece for Nellie.
According to Kelley, Monk thought of calling it “Twilight with Nellie”. His friend and patron, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, suggested the French word for twilight instead: crépuscule.
The piece with no solos
Improvisation was the heart of Monk’s music. He wrote about 70 compositions, and on almost all of them the melody is a starting point for him and his band to solo on.
“Crepuscule with Nellie” is different. It’s a short, slow theme with Monk’s typically surprising harmonies, and he treated it as a finished composition. There are no improvised solos: the band plays it as written, and Monk often played it alone at the piano in the same way. Kelley describes it as through-composed.
Monk recorded it in late June 1957 for Monk’s Music, with a septet that included Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane. On the record Monk plays the theme first with just bass and drums, and then the horns come in and play it with him. He kept it in his repertoire for the rest of his career, through to a solo recording in London in 1971.
A new beginning
The card came back in 1957. That summer, Monk began a residency at the Five Spot in New York with a quartet that included John Coltrane, and he never looked back. A recording of that band at Carnegie Hall in November 1957, lost for decades, includes “Crepuscule with Nellie”.
Monk and Nellie stayed married until his death in 1982, and she died in 2002. For more of his music, start with our pick of 10 genius Thelonious Monk songs and the story behind “Round Midnight”.
