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Pannonica and Monk, originally uploaded by 160507.
The scene is a dark, smoky club in Greenwich Village, New York in 1958. Onstage a quartet is performing a complicated piece of music. Everyone is smoking and drinking; it’s the Fifties and cigarettes and alcohol are socially-acceptable substances. It’s the music that is not quite acceptable—that Jazz and the men who play it. They are African-American musicians in the time before the civil rights movement. Many of them are known drug users.

A murmur goes through the crowd, and the musicians acknowledge the new arrival. “Hi, Nica,” they call out, “Hey, Baroness.” The woman they’re addressing is wearing a leopard-skin coat and a patrician air. She carries the formidable name of Baroness Pannonica Rothschild de Koenigswarter. She’s aristocratic and white, and she is the Jazz musicians’ patron and fierce protector.

My article on Pannonica in The National, Abu Dhabi.