 |
Mary Lou Williams: 6 Decades of Jazz Innovation By LOREN SCHONBERG
Mary Lou Williams (1910-81) was, in the words of Duke Ellington, "perpetually contemporary." As an African-American woman, she overcame incredible odds and became one of the leading jazz lights of her generation.
 |
| Mary Lou Williams at work in New York, c. 1940. (Photo courtesy of the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University) |
|
Scratch beneath the surface of jazz history and you find that women have always played a hand in the evolution of the music. Singers such as Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Ethel Waters, Mamie Smith, and Bessie Smith were immensely popular artists in the early 1920s and they hired the best musicians to play for them, creating the opportunity to learn about phrasing and rhythm from each other. There were also women who played in first-rate jazz bands, such as Marge Creath in St. Louis, and in Chicago, Lil Hardin, who married and honed the talents of Louis Armstrong. Hardin not only played on his legendary Hot Five recordings but also became a bandleader and composer in her own right.There was another woman in the Windy City in the 1920s who remains obscure to this day, but who, in fact, was a tremendous inspiration to Mary Lou Williams, and her name was Lovie Austin. Near the end of her life, Williams recalled: "When I was between 8 or 10 years of age [1918 or 1920], my stepfather and my brother-in-law, Hugh Floyd, often took me to dances and theaters to listen to musicians. Well, there was a T.O.B.A. [a black theater chain] in Pittsburgh where all black entertainers came. I remember seeing this great woman sitting in the pit and conducting a group of five or six men, her legs crossed, a cigarette in her mouth, playing the show with her left hand and writing music with her right. ... My entire concept was based on the few times I was around Lovie Austin. She was a fabulous woman and a fabulous musician too. I don't believe there's a woman around now who could compete with her. She was a greater talent than many of the men of this period."
 |
| Williams in a publicity photo from the early 1970s. (Photo courtesy of the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University) |
|
Though Austin lived into her 80s, she never received her due. But her music did resonate through her influence on Williams, who began to attract international attention while she was still in her 20s. Williams became the musical director of one of the best ensembles to come out of Kansas City in the 1930s, Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy, and they recorded many of her pieces. One quote of hers is as good a representative anecdote as any: "No one expected a woman to be sitting on a stand with 12 or 18 men. When I was with the Andy Kirk band, no one said anything against it, though, because they went wild when I began to play. At the time I had started playing with a strong left hand, like Fats Waller, and that was considered amazing for a woman to do. In St. Louis once, I was sitting on the stand waiting for the band to come in, and I heard someone say, 'Get that little girl off the stage so the band can start up.' But I just stayed there, and when the band came in and I started playing, the house went into an uproar, cheering and laughing."She also wrote for other bands, including Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, which catapulted her into the pantheon of jazz composers. After leaving Kirk in 1941, Williams led her own small bands, made a series of experimental and fascinating recordings, and became a mentor to the next generation of jazz innovators. Her Harlem apartment became a salon for Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, and Tadd Dameron, and she taught them all how to better express their own individuality. You can see photos taken at some of those soirees if you look under Williams' name at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wghtml/wghome.html.
|
Juilliard Jazz Orchestra
"What's Your Story?": The Music of Mary Lou Williams
Juilliard Theater
Wednesday, April 28, 8 p.m.
Free tickets available after April 18 in the Juilliard Box Office.
|
|
|
Although she worked mainly as a solo pianist or with a trio, Williams continued to arrange for larger groups when given the opportunity and even had her own concert at Town Hall, where she premiered her Zodiac Suite, played by an orchestra that included strings and tenor sax great Ben Webster as a featured soloist. It was during the 1950s that Williams retreated from the jazz world as she became attracted to the Roman Catholic Church, to which she dedicated the last decades of her life. Father Peter O'Brien, a young Jesuit, read a Time magazine article about Williams and became, over time, her spiritual advisor, business manager, and close friend. He has also been advising the Julliard Institute for Jazz Studies on the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra's upcoming concert this month in the Juilliard Theater titled "What's Your Story?": The Music of Mary Lou Williams.Obsessed with education, Williams sought out children from Harlem and used music as a way to teach them positive life lessons. She did all this for no fee, and put whatever money she had behind her efforts to spread peace through the arts. Williams began composing a series of liturgical works in the 1960s (before Ellington's more famous sacred concerts), which led to a commission from the Vatican. Her Music for Peace, also known as Mary Lou's Mass, was later choreographed by Alvin Ailey and is performed frequently around the world. A series of recordings and appearances (the most notable of which paired her with the avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor) brought Williams back to the concert stage in the 1970s, and this heightened presence led to a teaching position at Duke University, now the home of the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture.Given her rare talent for integrating the best of jazz's new sounds into her own idiom over the course of a six-decade career, it is only natural that the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra salute Williams's music, and the prospect of what that music entails—from Lovie Austin on—is a thrilling one.Loren Schoenberg, who teaches jazz history, has been on the faculty since 2001.
|
