[Dixielandjazz] Dorothy Donegan

[Fred Spencer]

Dear Steve et al.,
Dorothy Donegan's story is told in Mary Unterbrink's book "Jazz Women at the
Keyboard" (McFarland, 1983) where she is described as a "Flamboyant [and]
Outrageous...jazz legend [with] technical brilliance" Cheers.
Fredand
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Barbone" <barbonestreet at earthlink.net>
To: "Dixieland Jazz Mailing List" <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Sunday, August 22, 2004 9:41 AM
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Dorothy Donegan


>   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.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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