[Dixielandjazz] FW: Mary Lou Williams

[Bill Haesler]

Friends,
This one is passed on via our sister group the Australian Dance Band list.
Another long one, but well worth reading for you folks in the USofA.
Kind regards,
Bill. 

Williams Jazz Fest Swings Back to Mary Lou

by Matt Schudel
Washington Post, May 15, 2005
 
This is the 10th year the Kennedy Center has presented the Mary Lou
Williams Women in Jazz Festival. More than 100 women have performed
in that time, but there remains one woman whose music has been
conspicuously absent from the festival: Mary Lou Williams.

Her name has long hovered on the misty periphery of jazz awareness,
but this year we can finally see why she is more than a figurehead
for the festival that honors her career. At long last, the Mary Lou
Williams Women in Jazz Festival, which runs Wednesday through
Saturday, will fully earn its name.

On Friday, vibraphonist and bandleader Cecilia Smith will present a
full evening of Williams's compositions entitled the Mary Lou
Williams Resurgence Project. The music, ranging from classic swing
tunes to ambitious sacred works, will be performed by small groups,
a big band and 50 massed voices of the magnificent Morgan State
University Choir.

Geri Allen, who portrayed Williams in the 1996 Robert Altman
film "Kansas City," will perform Williams's 12-part "Zodiac Suite"
on Saturday (on a triple bill with the Dixieland ensemble Jazzberry Jam
and singer Rene Marie). Allen is believed to be the first pianist to
perform the suite since Williams wrote and played it in 1945.

"For the first time," says Peter O'Brien, a Jesuit priest who
managed Williams's career for 11 years and knew her well in the final years
of her life, "the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival truly represents
Mary Lou Williams."

The idea of honoring Williams, and women in jazz generally, came
from Billy Taylor, the Kennedy Center artistic adviser and Johnny
Appleseed of jazz. It takes place each year in May, the month of
both Williams's birth 95 years ago and her death in 1981.

During her 71 years, she was a remarkable, one-of-a-kind artist. She
may have been the finest prodigy jazz has ever produced -- a full-
fledged professional at 12, who played with Duke Ellington's band
when she was in her early teens; a pianist whose abilities were said
to rival those of Art Tatum and Bud Powell; a composer of
irresistible melodies and forward-thinking harmonics; the hostess of
a jazz salon that spawned some of the most imaginative music of its
age. She continued to develop new ideas and modes of expression
until the end of her life.

She wasn't just "good for a woman" -- she was superior to almost
everyone.

Musicians still revere Williams, but to the wider public, and even
to the shrinking quarter that listens to jazz, she's Mary Who? The
music alone will have to show why a small but devoted coterie believes
Mary Lou -- to anyone in jazz she's just "Mary Lou" -- deserves a place
alongside the most honored names in jazz.

"Genius," says Smith, who has studied Williams's music for the past
four years. "Is there another word for her? I don't think so."

On her expedition of musical archaeology, Smith has made a number of
discoveries. One of the works she will present Friday is Williams's
1962 oratorio for orchestra and choir, "St. Martin de Porres" (also
called "Black Christ of the Andes," for the first black saint of the
Roman Catholic Church from the Americas).

"It's so magnificent," says Smith, "it makes you sit and reflect for
a minute."

Williams's 350 compositions have been carefully catalogued and now
reside at the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in
New Jersey. That's where Smith went four years ago to begin her journey
into the world of Mary Lou.

She found an unrecorded composition, an "Ode to St. Cecilia," the
patron saint of music. And as she looked at Williams's handwritten
scores, she felt drawn to them for another reason, as if they had
been beckoning her all along.

Williams called her publishing company Cecilia Music.

"That's a little spooky," says Cecilia Smith.

For the last 17 years of Williams's life, her closest associate was
O'Brien, the Jesuit priest who had read about her in Time magazine
and introduced himself while she was performing at a New York jazz
club in 1964.

"We were immediate, deep friends," he says.

Catholicism, to which she had converted in 1957, was an important
part of Williams's life and inspired her to write "St. Martin de
Porres" and three Masses. With O'Brien's guidance, she reentered the
public eye in the 1970s, after years as a near recluse.

O'Brien teaches English at St. Peter's College in Jersey City, N.J.,
and, as executive director of the Mary Lou Williams Foundation,
keeps a close watch on how her music and reputation are preserved. Even
today, 24 years after Williams's death, he describes their odd-
couple association as "the most significant relationship of my life."

She was born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in Atlanta on May 8, 1910. As
early as the age of 2, sitting on her mother's lap, she began to
pick out melodies on an old pump organ.

Around age 5, she moved to Pittsburgh, where a couple of stepfathers
came and went, bestowing new last names -- Winn and Burley -- on
her. Professional musicians sometimes came to the house, but Mary Lou's
mother refused to let her daughter take formal lessons, fearing
they'd dampen her originality. By the time she was 6, Mary Lou was
playing for neighbors, and at 10 she was billed in Pittsburgh
as "The Little Piano Girl."

She began to work in vaudeville troupes and traveling shows when she
was 12, and by the time she was 13 or 14, she was in New York and
sat in with Ellington's band for a week. Everything in her life happened
fast: She married a musician named John Williams at 16, moved to
Memphis, began to lead a band at 17 and by the time she was 19 was
working with one of the best groups in Kansas City, Andy Kirk and
His Twelve Clouds of Joy.

Within a year, she was the band's pianist, chief composer and
arranger -- and even sewed uniforms and drove one of the band's cars
to out-of-town jobs. She could play piano with her left hand while
writing out arrangements of the next tune with her right hand.

"There was a true artist in her," says O'Brien. "You can hear it in
her first solo when she was 19. She was already a master."

It's amazing how many paths in jazz intersect at Mary Lou Williams.
She knew Jelly Roll Morton, the fountainhead from which the first
jazz flowed in New Orleans. After hearing her play, Fats Waller
lifted her up and tossed her in the air. She met Thelonious Monk in
the 1930s, when he passed through Kansas City with a gospel show. By
the late '30s, she was writing arrangements for Louis Armstrong,
Benny Goodman, the Dorsey Brothers, Cab Calloway and others.

In Kirk's band, she met Ben Webster, the velvet-toned tenor
saxophonist. She knew Count Basie, Lester Young and everyone else in
music-mad Kansas City and figured in one of the greatest jazz
stories ever told.

Sometime in 1933 or 1934, Coleman Hawkins, who was considered the
premier tenor saxophonist of the day, came to town. After midnight,
a jam session began at a club called the Cherry Blossom. After
listening to Young, Webster, Herschel Evans and other K.C. sax
kings, Hawkins went to his hotel, came back with his own saxophone and
entered the battle. The night grew later and the music grew hotter
as the tenor men put forth one chorus after another, each more
exhilarating, more daring, more tension-packed than the last.

"Around 4 a.m.," Williams told an interviewer 20 years later, "I
awoke to hear someone pecking on my screen. Opened the window on Ben
Webster. He was saying, 'Get up, pussycat, we're jammin'!'"

Williams took over on piano, as the tenor players kept blowing.
Hawkins was sweating so hard, he took off his shirt, but the low-key
Young, with his endless store of soaring inventions, grew stronger
and seemed, to the ears of most, to be triumphant. As night turned
to day, the battle royal came to an end only when Hawkins had to pack
up his horn and drive to his next job. He was so late, the legend goes,
that he burned out the engine of a new Cadillac trying to make the
show.

After writing such classic tunes as "Cloudy," "Walkin' and
Swingin'," "Mary's Idea" and the soulful "What's Your Story, Morning
Glory" (the obvious source of the '50s torch song "Black Coffee"),
Williams left Kirk's band in 1942 and moved to New York. Long since
divorced by then, she formed a band with her new husband, Ellington
trumpeter Harold "Shorty" Baker, and then quickly became a star in
her own right.

She headlined at the Cafe Society nightclub (performing opposite
Billie Holiday), had her own radio show and was dubbed the "Queen of
Jazz."

In 1944, she campaigned across the country for the reelection of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the following year composed
her "Zodiac Suite," which was performed by the New York Pops
orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 1946.

During this time, Williams's home in Harlem became a gathering place
for musicians. She'd make a pot of food and would leave the door
open if she wasn't home. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell,
Monk and Miles Davis -- the vanguard of the bebop movement -- all came to
her house and swapped ideas.

In the early 1950s, Williams lived in Europe and was performing in
Paris when she decided she needed a break from the business and
walked off the stage. She stayed away from music for three years,
using the time to study Catholicism and join the church. She began
to 
perform again on a more modest scale and, in 1958, was one of only
three women included in the "Great Day in Harlem" photograph of jazz
musicians by Art Kane. (The two others were Marian McPartland and
Maxine Sullivan. In 1978, Williams was the first guest on
McPartland's "Piano Jazz" program on National Public Radio.)

In the 1960s, Williams absorbed the new modal styles of John
Coltrane, dabbled in the free jazz of Cecil Taylor in the 1970s and
borrowed from Stravinsky. She was, in Duke Ellington's
words, "perpetually contemporary."

Like Ellington himself, but few others, Williams kept growing
throughout her life, yet retained an essential musical sensibility
that was all her own.

"Real jazz has love," she once said, "and it has the spirit of God
coming out of the suffering of black people."

"Anything you are," she added, with characteristic pithy
simplicity, "shows up in your music."

After teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Williams moved to
Durham, N.C., in 1977 as artist-in-residence at Duke University. She
gave master classes, taught jazz history -- O'Brien was her co-
lecturer -- and continued to compose and perform. She was
comfortable on campus, even though she never got through the ninth grade or
had children of her own. Because of the demand, her courses were capped
at 90 students.

"The students adored her," says O'Brien. "She got them to feel the
music within their bodies."

As the first great female instrumentalist, the first great female
composer and the first great female arranger in jazz, Williams
always understood the quality of her work and was never naive about her
talent. If she crossed many lonely frontiers in her life, she knew
that others would one day follow.