Nica's Story: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness

While a coterie of bebop loyalists keep alive a caricature of Pannonica de Koenigswarter that has been woven into some of the music's most durable myths, she has, for the most part, been relegated to the dustbin of history. A closer look at Nica's 40‐year reign as New York's “Jazz Baroness,” however, reveals an iconic figure whose extraordinary life was played out at the nexus of gender, race, and class during a particularly transformative period in American popular culture.