Les Musiciens de jazz et leurs trois vœux

Born in London in 1913 into the English branch of the Rothschild family, Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter – nicknamed Nica – developed a boundless passion for jazz from an early age. She was a friend and confidante to the greatest jazzmen, and gave them unstinting support. We know that Charlie Parker, ill and refusing to be hospitalized, died at her home, and Telonious Monk spent the last nine years of his life there. Nica was a great lover of music, a tireless and enthusiastic supporter of bebop jazz, and an essential benefactress and patron of the great jazzmen of the 1950s and 1960s.

Between 1961 and 1966, she asked 300 of them an ingenuous question: “If you were granted three wishes that would come true immediately, what would you wish for?

Here’s the result, richly illustrated with Polaroid portraits of Dizzie Gillespie, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Bud Powell, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Sonny Rollins and others, taken by Nica herself, mostly at home.

In its first edition in 2006, the book was awarded the Prix du Livre de Jazz by the Académie du Jazz.