[Dixielandjazz] Dorothy Donegan

[Steve Barbone]

  List Mates:

I originally sent this obit to Anton Crouch who asked about Dorothy 
Donegan. It was printed in the NY Times upon her passing in 1998. She 
was a MONSTER player. Better than most male jazz pianists, but because 
she was a woman, she never got a fair shake as a jazz performer. She 
could play any style you want, ragtime & boogie woogie included, (Like 
Dick Hyman) but had her own unique voice on the piano, and with her 
bawdy jokes and in your face style was something to behold in nightclub 
performances.

Those who were with her when she died said that with her last breath, 
she raised her hands as if playing a final encore, and then lowered them 
and passed away.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

Anton: Here is her obit: She had more technique than most jazz pianists 
and a very out front performing style. Some must have rubbed off on me. 
I used to see her at the Embers in NYC in the 1950s.

Incredible talent and she knew how to swing.

Cheers,
Steve


Dorothy Donegan, 76, Flamboyant Jazz Pianist

By BEN RATLIFF

Dorothy Donegan, a jazz pianist who brashly mixed swing, boogie-woogie, 
vaudeville, pop, ragtime and Bach -- sometimes within a span of 10 
minutes -- and who was known for an outrageous sense of humor, died on 
Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 76.

The cause was colon cancer, said The Associated Press.

Ms. Donegan was better known as a performer than as a recording artist, 
and her flamboyance helped her find work in a field that was largely 
hostile to women. To a certain extent, it was also her downfall; her 
concerts were often criticized for having an excess of personality. She 
would act out songs, mocking their words; do devastating parodies of 
pianists and singers, especially if they were in the audience, or get up 
and shake her hips while keeping up a left-handed riff.

She could push humor into brazenness and kept up a supply of off-color 
jokes. She told writers without hesitation that sexism caused her 
obscurity -- that, and her insistence on being paid at the same scale as 
her male colleagues.

Born in Chicago, Ms. Donegan was encouraged from an early age by her 
mother to become a professional musician. She was a church organist as a 
girl, and at 14 she was playing for a dollar a night at the city's South 
Side bars. She was one of many notable jazz musicians inestimably helped 
by the tutelage of Walter Dyett, a music teacher at DuSable High School, 
whose other students included Dinah Washington, Johnny Griffin, Gene 
Ammons and Von Freeman.

She played blues and boogie-woogie piano, even recording for the 
Bluebird label in 1942, but she aspired to be a classical concert 
pianist. She studied at the Chicago Conservatory and at the Chicago 
Musical College. In 1943, when she was 18, she gave a concert at 
Orchestra Hall in Chicago, the first black performer to do so. Time 
magazine covered the concert, and word about a pianist with a wide 
repertory and blizzard-fast fingers reached the jazz piano virtuoso Art 
Tatum, who came to her house to hear her play. Tatum showed her some of 
his technique and remained the strongest influence on her playing.

Hollywood soon came calling. Persuaded by her agent to turn down a 
five-year contract from MGM, she accepted a $3,000-a-week contract from 
United Artists for one picture, "Sensations of 1945." She appears in a 
duet scene with another pianist, Gene Rodgers, and the band behind them 
was Cab Calloway's. That was the end of her film career.

In the late 1950s she began a series of engagements at the Embers in 
Manhattan and the London House in Chicago. It was during this period 
that she developed her flamboyant performance style.

By the 1970s she was more comfortable, making a living playing in 
festivals in America and Europe and attracting a fierce coterie of fans 
in New York. A resident of Los Angeles since the 1950s, she would return 
occasionally to the East Coast for nightclub performances or a 
jazz-festival or concert-hall event. After a Town Hall performance in 
1971, John Wilson wrote in The New York Times that Ms. Donegan "showed a 
technical virtuosity that could be compared only to that of Art Tatum 
and a swinging drive that might be equaled by Mary Lou Williams."

Ms. Donegan was married three times, and is survived by two sons, John 
and Donovan. Her last performances were in Monterey, Calif., last 
September, before diabetes and cancer rendered her too ill to play.