Mary Lou Williams

Mary Lou Williams, ca.1946. Photograph by William P. Gottlieb

Mary Lou Williams (born Mary Alfrieda Scruggs ; born May 8, 1910 in Atlanta , Georgia ; † May 28, 1981 in Durham , North Carolina ) was an American jazz musician ( pianist , composer and arranger ). She is considered to be one of the most important pioneers of gender equality in jazz and was “the only Stride pianist who, comparable to Ellington, constantly modernized her style and finally adapted herself to more modern onesHarmonics oriented ".

Career

Childhood and early adolescence

Mary Lou Williams grew up in East Liberty - a suburb of Pittsburgh - as one of eleven children. Her (initially single) mother worked as a cleaning lady, sang spirituals in her free time and played ragtime on the piano and organ. Mary Lou Williams taught herself to play the piano when she was three to four years old by re- enacting what her mother had just heard. She later trained using the roles of an electric piano owned by her uncle , on which she heard and re-enacted the interpretations of Jelly Roll Morton and James P. Johnson . As an eleven year old she attended concerts and got to know arrangements by Don Redman and the pianist Earl Hines . Unbeknownst to her family, she performed as a pianist in the neighborhood when she was six, soon accompanied silent films and a little later played as a “ child prodigy ” at parties with the upper class, such as the Mellons . In addition to playing ragtime, she also played classical works, popular melodies, and hymns .

From 1924 she attended Westinghouse High School , which she left at the age of fifteen because men from the neighborhood were chasing her and she feared sexual assault. She had her first engagement with a vaudeville group of the TOBA , where she showed the usual shows in this genre, for example by playing a piece on the piano with her fists or running around the piano while she was playing.

At the age of sixteen she married the saxophonist John "Bearcat" Williams , whom she had met on this show and with whose vaudeville orchestra Syncopaters she had been touring since the end of 1925. The band was hired in Kansas City by the then successful vaudeville duo Seymour and Jeanette . However, the question arose whether Williams was allowed to play as a woman at all; her husband advocated it, as it was a great attraction when a woman played the piano well. His view turned out to be correct. During this engagement, which led via Chicago to New York City , she also met Fats Waller . She amazed the pianist because she could interpret even the most difficult compositions after listening to them once. After Seymour's death she accompanied his partner Jeanette James and recorded several records with her in 1927; When performing in New York, musicians from Ellington's "Washingtonians" like Tricky Sam Nanton were part of the backing band, which opened up a new musical world for them.

Kansas City 1929 to 1942

In 1929 she played part-time in the Andy Kirk- led big band The Twelve Clouds of Joy . This band was formed from Terrence Holder's Dark Clouds of Joy , in which her husband had been involved since 1928. So that he could play there, Williams had left his wife in charge of his own Memphis band. For the first recordings of Kirk's band in 1929, she not only acted as the pianist for Marion Jackson, who was absent from the rehearsal in the recording studio, but also contributed to the first compositions and arrangements, although at that time she had little knowledge of notation and harmony . Marion Jackson remained the band's official pianist.

In 1930 she made her first solo recordings under her own name for Brunswick Records ("Drag 'em" and "Night Life"); the record company continued to insist that she be a pianist on the recordings of the Twelve Clouds of Joy . It was not until 1931, on the occasion of a guest performance with Blanche Calloway , that she became the regular pianist of the Twelve Clouds of Joy , after it was clarified that she was not appearing in a uniform suit, but in a dress. The orchestra worked as a Territory Band around Kansas City until 1936 . Their compositions "Walkin 'and Swingin'", "In the Groove" and "Mary's Idea" developed into hits and made the band known. During those years she also took part in countless jam sessions with Kansas City jazz musicians , such as Coleman Hawkins , Ben Webster (with whom she was in love), Lester Young and Herschel Evans . Since Williams built unusual harmonies into her improvisations , she was very much appreciated by the other musicians because of this " zombie music". From 1936 the tour plan and the repertoire of the band changed: Under the management of Joe Glaser, the Twelve Clouds of Joy played all over the United States and also in Canada; Ballads and dance music came to the fore in the repertoire. Mary Lou Williams was paid better, albeit as a "niche musician" for some jazzy numbers that stayed in the program.

Brunswick shellac record by the Mary Lou Williams Trio: "The Pearls" ( Morton ) - "The Rocks", with Booker Collins (b) and Ben Thigpen (dr) from September 1938

On the mediation of John Hammond , she arranged and wrote from 1936 new compositions such as “Roll 'Em” or “Camel Hop” for Benny Goodman's band , but also arrangements of her “Froggy Bottom” (as “Overhand”), her “Messa” Stomp ”or from“ Sweet Georgia Brown ”. Goodman's offer to arrange only for him and to be active as a pianist in his orchestra, however, refused them. She also recorded with Mildred Bailey in 1938 ; a planned admission, in which she was supposed to accompany Billie Holiday , did not materialize because of an illness.

Pittsburgh / New York City - 1942 to 1949

Williams stayed with the Twelve Clouds of Joy until 1942 . Then she returned first to Pittsburgh, where she put together her own band, which her later second husband "Shorty" Baker and the young Art Blakey belonged to. However, Baker moved back to the Duke Ellington Orchestra , for which Williams acted as a permanent band arranger next to Billy Strayhorn after his marriage to Baker in December 1942 . Her best-known title for Ellington was "Trumpets No End", which was based on Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" and has been recorded several times. After six months she left Ellington and played several longer engagements at the Café Society in Greenwich Village , where she also accompanied Josh White ; In 1944 she recorded “Mary Lou's Boogie” / “Roll Èm” for Moses Asch . In 1945 - Baker had separated from her during his military service - she had her own radio show (The Mary Lou Williams Piano Workshop) on WNEW, one of the leading broadcasters of good pop music at the time , through Barney Josephson, the owner of Café Society -Program

Mary Lou Williams in her apartment with (left to right) Dizzy Gillespie , Tadd Dameron and Jack Teagarden (1947). Photo: William P. Gottlieb (1947)

From 1946 she appeared in several women's bands, including with Mary Osborne (with whom she recorded a 78 for Continental , "She's (He's) Funny That Way" ) and at the Girls Stars with June Rothenberg and Bridget O'Flynn; they played a program of standards as well as Dvořák's “Humoresque” and “All God's Chillun Got Rhythm”.

Her apartment in Harlem became a meeting place for the pioneers of modern jazz , such as Thelonious Monk , Dizzy Gillespie and Tadd Dameron , with whom she exchanged ideas and compositions and became their mentor. She was therefore also called the "mother of bebop". Unlike many of her peers, Mary Lou Williams appreciated what the boppers did; From 1946 she also integrated the bebop into her own game. She also adopted the harmonious extensions of this new jazz style in her compositions, such as "In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee" (lyrics: Milt Orent ), which Dizzy Gillespie recorded in her arrangement with his big band. Benny Goodman played some of her pieces with his short-lived bop-oriented ensemble, of which she was a member in 1948 as an arranger and sometimes also as a pianist. In August 1949 she opened the tradition of jazz concerts in New York's Club Village Vanguard .

Looking for a new way

In the early 1950s she was forced to tour with Mildred Bailey due to financial difficulties . In 1952 she performed with Kenny Clarke and Oscar Pettiford at the Downbeat Club. In the same year she went on a short tour to England, which turned into a long period in Europe. She has performed several times at the Royal Albert Hall and the Royal Festival Hall ; In 1953 she went on guest tours to the Netherlands and Scandinavia, accompanied Sarah Vaughan and settled in Paris , where she a. recorded for Disques Vogue with Don Byas ( Don Carlos Meets Mary Lou and the solo album In Paris ). She also appeared in Switzerland and Germany - in November 1954 in Baden-Baden with the Kurt Edelhagen Orchestra .

In 1954 in Paris there were various encounters in the record studio with American, but also with European musicians. Two tracks with the British singer Beryl Bryden seem rather strange ; The solo (“I Made You Love Paris”) and trio recordings, among others. with Jean-Louis Viale and the year before with Don Byas .

After she was told at a party in London that she was not doing very well at the moment, when she had a guest read Psalm 91 , she received an invitation from Gérard Pochonet in France to spend six months at his grandfather's country estate and to rest there: "I stayed six months and I slept and ate, read the psalms and prayed."

Already in Paris and increasingly after her return to the United States in 1954, where she initially only had a few opportunities to perform, Williams turned to religion. She preached for the Abyssinian Baptists on the streets of Harlem in 1955, caring for poor relatives and musicians in need (such as Bud Powell ). In 1957, under the influence of a jazz-loving priest (John Crowley) introduced by Dizzy Gillespie, she converted to Catholicism along with a close friend of Gillespie's wife, Lorraine . The priest Anthony Wood became her spiritual mentor and convinced her to remain musically active: in 1957 she made a comeback at the Newport Jazz Festival with the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band , where she performed parts of the Zodiac Suite newly arranged by Melba Liston . Then she appeared again more and more in public.

In addition, she was a non-profit organization and founded the Bel Canto Foundation in 1958 , which was supposed to help musicians solve their drug problems, the crux of many musicians on the bebop scene of the 1940s. She donated ten percent of her musical income to the project, for which she also ran a second-hand shop in Harlem. Due to financial failure, however , she had to give up her Bel Canto Foundation in 1968.

After her conversion to Catholicism, she increasingly composed liturgical pieces such as the Black Christ of the Andes suite (dedicated to the recently canonized Martin de Porres ), which she performed at the Lincoln Center in 1962 with the Ray Charles Singers and Milton Hinton based on a text by Anthony Wood .

In 1964 she performed at the New York jazz club Hickory House for a full year ; in the same year she founded a jazz festival with the help of the Catholic Church in Pittsburgh. It was also around this time that the young Jesuit priest Peter O'Brien became her spiritual advisor; In 1971 he also became her manager (a role he held until her death).

In addition to her club appearances, Williams played in colleges, founded her own record label (Mary Records) and a music publisher, and appeared on television programs. In 1967, with a concert at Carnegie Hall, she advocated the integration of new musical approaches into Catholic church music. In the same year she wrote one of the very first Catholic masses to be entirely underlaid with jazz music. In 1968 she composed her second mass, Mass for the Lenten Season . The presentation of the second mass in the Vatican in 1969 did not result in the hoped-for papal promotion of jazz masses , despite an audience with the Pope, but at least the secretary received an order for the third, Music for Peace (later mostly called Mary Lou's Mass ) of the Justitia et Pax Curia Commission , Joseph Gremillion. In this work, she approached the partially Rock Jazz at -Idiom.

Back on the scene: 1970 to 1979

Since 1970 Williams played regularly in the New York Cookery ; There were also guest appearances in clubs (e.g. in London), school workshops and festivals. At the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1971 she was honored with Jay McShann as "Rediscovery of the Year" with a standing ovation . She has also appeared on radio and television (including on Sesame Street in 1973 and in Billy Taylor's Jazzmobile Workshop); in addition, she continued to perform her mass.

Unlike in previous years, her new recordings have now been regularly released on established jazz labels. The live album Giants (1971), on which she was heard with Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby Hackett , George Duvivier and Grady Tate , was nominated for a Grammy and recognized by critic Dan Morgenstern as "one of the truly greatest albums in jazz history".

Musically, she remained open despite her criticism of a free jazz that had lost contact with the jazz tradition and played a concert with Cecil Taylor in Carnegie Hall in 1977 , which was announced as Embraced , turned out to be "stormy contact with the new avant-garde" and was released as an album on Pablo Records . According to Reclam's jazz dictionary , the concert ended "musically in a fiasco ".

She also appeared before President Carter at the White House in 1978 . In the same year she made guest appearances at several festivals in Europe, for example at the North Sea Jazz Festival and with a solo recital (for the LP of the same name) at the Montreux Jazz Festival , as well as being the first guest on Marian McPartland's radio show Piano Jazz .

From 1977 until her death from cancer in 1981 she was artist in residence (from 1980 also with a teaching position) at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where, after her death, today's Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture was established. She received six honorary doctoral hats and was twice a Guggenheim fellow.

personality

Because of her shy nature, the introverted pianist was dependent on a proactive manager; initially her first husband took over this function, later Father O'Brien. In the judgment of her spiritual mentor, Anthony Woods, she was intuitive, primal and very direct. In his opinion, she needed a trustworthy counterpart to sort out ideas. Nevertheless, she repeatedly proved very independent judgments and, for example, refused to tour with musicians like Louis Armstrong in situations in which she was not doing well because she would have had to make too many compromises there.

Act

The pianist amazed with her powerful attack and persistent playing; Critics like Hugues Panassié noted that she played "like a man". Her masterly style, initially influenced by Fats Waller, Earl Hines and Art Tatum , also absorbed the innovations of the following epochs: "The bracket that held her stylistic diversity from ragtime to post-bop developments was an infectious swing ."

In total, Mary Lou Williams composed over 350 songs and longer compositions. Her pieces have been performed by jazz musicians such as Jimmy Lunceford ("What's Your Story, Morning Glory"), Louis Armstrong ("Cloudy", "Messa Stomp", "A Mellow Bit of Rhythm", "Walkin 'and Swingin'"), Cab Calloway , Bob Crosby ("Ghost of Love", "Toadie Toodle"), Tommy Dorsey ("Little Joe from Chicago"), Ella Fitzgerald ("What's Your Story, Morning Glory"), Dizzy Gillespie ("In the Land of Oobladee") ), Honi Gordon (“Why”, “Walkin 'Out the Door”), Earl Hines, Nat King Cole (“Little Joe from Chicago”, “Satchel Mouth Baby”), the Casa Loma Orchestra (“What's Your Story, Morning Glory ”,“ Walkin 'and Swingin' ”), Red Norvo (“ Messa Stomp ”,“ A Mellow Bit of Rhythm ”) and Sarah Vaughan (“ Black Coffee ”) played and recorded.

Motifs from some of her pieces form the basis for compositions by other well-known jazz musicians: In particular, the bass line from Monk's “52nd Street” comes from her composition “Scorpio”; the second chorus of their “Walkin 'and Swingin'” provides the basis for Monk's “Rhythm-a-ning”. Her arrangement of “Lady Be Good” is based on “Rifftide” by Coleman Hawkins, “Fats Tune” by Fats Navarro and “Hackensack” by Thelonious Monk.

At the same time as Fletcher Henderson , she created some of the first real swing arrangements. She not only arranged for the aforementioned musicians and bands, but also for Count Basie, Woody Herman and the International Sweethearts of Rhythm . The Zodiac Suite , composed by her , a combination of jazz and classical symphony music, in which a different musician born under this sign is the focus for each sign of the zodiac, was performed several times by her in 1945 and 1946. She presented excerpts from her Zodiac Suite in 1945 as Signs of the Zodiac in her radio show in solo and quartet line-up. The suite was performed in 1945 in a chamber jazz line-up in New York Town Hall and in parts in 1946 in Carnegie Hall in a symphonic version with the New York Pops Orchestra . The suite, which she orchestrated herself, was partly enthusiastically received by the critics, but partly judged very ambiguously as “neither fish nor meat”.

Musicologist and composer Andrew Homzy pointed out that the pieces in the suite are unconnected; he missed a musical development of the themes, but at the same time emphasized Williams' compositional skill and placed her in a row with Frank Zappa because of the variety of musical ideas and changes in the individual pieces . The recordings of both concerts were stolen and some of them (only in Europe) were available as robbery. The full recording of this Town Hall Concert was not released until 1991.

Williams recorded more than a hundred records ( singles and long-playing records ). Nevertheless, some periods of her work are not well documented, as she was difficult to market for the music industry due to her idiosyncratic personality and her cross-genre play and she tended to work with independent labels or founded her own label, which was not sufficiently advertised.

As early as 1955, Williams was the first to present an album on which she presented the entire history of the jazz piano at the time; The record A Keyboard History received excellent reviews, but was not available in official stores , but only through a record club .

Her album Black Christ of the Andes , recorded in 1963, among others. with Budd Johnson , Grant Green , Percy Heath , The George Gordon Singers and the Ray Charles Singers, finally received in 1968 the “Prix Mondial du Disque de Jazz” of the Hot Club de France and the “Grand Prix” of the Académie du Disque Français .

Mary Lou's Mass , which was partially performed at a funeral service for Tom Mboya as early as 1969 and premiered in 1970, was used by Alvin Ailey as the basis for a dance theater piece that was part of his ballet group's repertoire from 1971 to 1973.

Cook / Morton highlight their trio album with Buster Williams and Mickey Roker for Steeplechase , Free Spirits from July 1975, as their most captivating work on record in their later years .

Importance and appreciation

For several decades, Williams was considered "the greatest female jazz musician"; Colleagues like Billy Taylor or Marian McPartland admired their game. Martin Kunzler stated that “before Carla Bley and Toshiko Akiyoshi, no woman had such a central position in jazz as the pianist and even more so the composer and arranger Mary Lou Williams”.

Her contribution to jazz music was only recognized by the general public towards the end of her life - she had been a legend among musicians since her swing times in the 1930s and her opening to new currents such as bebop in the 1940s (something from parts of jazz criticism was shared quite early).

Duke Ellington put her meaning this way: "Mary Lou Williams is continually contemporary." She said of herself:

“Nobody can assign me to a certain style. I learned from a lot of people. I am constantly changing. I try so that I can keep up with what is happening, to hear what the others are doing. I even go ahead of them a bit and show like a mirror held up what will happen next. "

Count Basie was more competitive. Saxophonist Buddy Tate said in an interview for Joanne Burke's documentary, “She played all these men up against the wall. She didn't do this on purpose, but the men believed it was. "

Her life and work was documented in Joanne Burke's 1989 film "Music on My Mind". In 1994 she was recognized in the documentary "A Great Day in Harlem". The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC has named its annual Women's Jazz Festival after their Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival . The Mary Lou Williams Foundation , building on her fortune, supports young musicians aged six to twelve. Her archive is located at Rutgers University's Institute of Jazz Studies in Newark .

In August 2010, played in the New York jazz club Birdland , the Trio 3 , consisting of Oliver Lake , Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille with Geri Allen , five evenings compositions by Mary Lou Williams. Some of the tracks were released on the Swiss label Intakt Records under the title Celebrating Mary Lou Williams .

Discographic notes

Tadd Dameron , Mary Lou Williams and Dizzy Gillespie in Williams' apartment, circa June 1946.
Photograph by William P. Gottlieb .

(From left) Danny Settle, Slick Jones , Gene Sedric , Mary Lou Williams and Lincoln Mills , performing at The Place , New York, circa July 1946.
Photograph by William P. Gottlieb .

The work of Mary Lou Williams between 1927 and 1945 is documented in the issues of the Classics label .

• The Zodiac Suite (Vintage Jazz Classics, 1945)
• On Vogue (Vogue, 1953) with Don Byas
• Mary Lou Williams Presents Black Christ of the Andes (Folkways Recordings, 1964)
• Zoning (Folkways Recordings, 1974) solo
• Free Spirits ( SteepleChase Records , 1975)
• Live at the Cookery ( Chiaroscuro , 1975)
• At Rick's Cafe American (Storyville, 1979)
• A Grand Night for Swinging (1976, ed. 2008)

literature

• Linda Dahl: Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams . University of California Press, Berkeley 1999.
• Leonard Feather , Ira Gitler : The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz. Oxford University Press, New York 1999, ISBN 0-19-532000-X .
• Tammy L. Kernodle: Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams . 2004.
• Martin Kunzler: Jazz Lexicon. Volume 2 . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2002 (2nd edition), ISBN 3-499-16513-9 .
• Len Lyons: The great Jazz Pianists . Da Capo, 1983, p. 67 (1977 interview).

Web links

Commons : Mary Lou Williams  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Website at Rutgers University, with discography
• Piano transcriptions by Dave Ratcliffe
• Biography (English)
• More short biography (English)
• Bob Jacobson on Black Christ of the Andes on Allaboutjazz
• Interview Max Jones: Mary Lou Williams - a life story . In: Melody Maker , Vol. 30, April / June 1954
• Mary Lou Williams at Discogs

Notes and individual references

1. ↑ Helmut Weihsmann Women in Jazz , Radio Orange 94.0 (May 29, 2009)
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Wolf Kampmann (Ed.), With the assistance of Ekkehard Jost : Reclams Jazzlexikon . Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-010528-5 , p. 556.
3. ↑ Linda Dahl, Morning Glory . Pp. 26, 34.
4. ↑ In doing so, she earned more than a worker's daily wage. Cf. Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , p. 22 ff.
5. ↑ See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , p. 37 ff.
6. ↑ Cf. Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 44 ff.
7. ↑ Seymour and Jeanette initially suggested that she should appear in men's clothing to hide the fact that she was a woman. She could then appear in a woman's wardrobe. See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 49f.
8. ↑ Cf. Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 51 ff.
9. ↑ Gunther Schuller ( The Swing Area , New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 351f.) Expressly emphasizes the maturity and style of the seventeen-year-old pianist
10. ↑ See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , p. 56.
11. ↑ Partly the alto saxophonist Jimmy Lunceford played with the Syncopaters under the direction of Mary Lou Williams instead of John Williams . See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 60, 63ff.
12. ↑ See Frank Driggs, Chuck Haddix: Kansas City Jazz. From Ragtime to Bebop - A History. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005, pp. 87f., Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 72ff., 138-141, 154-156
13. ↑ See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 75 ff.
14. ↑ See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 81 ff.
15. ↑ See Driggs, Haddix, pp. 126, 138; 173, 200, and Richard Cook Jazz Encyclopedia London 2007, p. 669
16. ↑ See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , p. 88
17. ↑ See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 104ff.
18. ↑ Dahl, p. 110
19. ↑ Instead of Williams, the young pianist Margaret Johnson was hired. See Dahl, p. 111f.
20. ↑ Cf. Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 131 ff. As well as a sketch of the history of WNEW at New York Radio Guide
21. ↑ Cf. Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 177ff and Nelson Harrison on Williams
22. ↑ See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 179-210
23. ↑ Before that, mainly folk concerts took place there; their group shared the stage with JC Heard's band . See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , p. 211.
24. ↑ She received no royalties for most of her compositions ; she also lost money in legal disputes over the authorship of some pieces. See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 218f.
25. ^ "Something of an acquired taste," says Cook , Morton The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings . Penguin, London 2006 (8th edition), ISBN 0-14-102327-9
26. ^ Whitney Ballet: American Musicians II: Seventy-One Portraits in Jazz , Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2006, ISBN 1-57806-834-7 , GoogleBooks
27. ↑ See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 270-280.
28. ↑ See Dahl, pp. 270-280.
29. ↑ At that time there was still a percussion ban imposed by Pius X in Catholic sacred music . See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , p. 289
30. ↑ See Dahl, pp. 288-310. On the work of the commission see Dieter Marc Schneider Johannes Schauff (1902–1990). Migration and 'Stabilitas' in the age of totalitarianism Munich 2001, p. 168ff.
31. ↑ Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , p. 318
32. ↑ See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory, p. 316.
33. ^ Richard Cook, Brian Morton: The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings. Penguin, London 2006 (8th edition), ISBN 0-14-102327-9 , article Mary Lou Williams, cf. Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 330ff.
34. ^ See Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture. Retrieved August 20, 2019 . 
35. ↑ Williams put massive pressure on her when she shied away from jamming with more prominent musicians. Allegedly he hit her once because she wasn't playing well enough for him. See Dahl, p. 46f.
36. ↑ quoted in Marian McPartland in Dahl, p. 259
37. ↑ H. Panassié, Le Jazz Hot , quoted by Linda Dahl, Morning Glory p. 77, cf. also Dahl p. 44 and 88.
38. ↑ Kunzler, Jazzlexikon, p. 1291 f.
39. ^ According to Leonard Feather , this is a variant of their earlier title "What's Your Story, Morning Glory"; see Feather / Gitler p. 698.
40. ↑ Cf. Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , p. 191 f., And Feather / Gitler, p. 698
41. ^ Gunther Schuller, The Swing Area , New York: Oxford University Press, p. 353
42. ↑ See Dahl, pp. 297, 433.
43. ↑ contained in the Classics album Mary Lou Williams 1944-1945 .
44. ^ The Town Hall concert took place on December 30, 1945; Musicians included Edmond Hall , Mouse Randolph , Eddie Barefield , Al Hall and JC Heard, and a classical chamber orchestra. The star soloist Ben Webster played on the piece "Cancer" and can also be heard in the encore. See Cook / Morton, and Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , p. 410
45. ↑ so Paul Bowles , quoted in Dahl, p. 167; Barry Ulanov was consistently positive .
46. ↑ Andrew Homzy: Liner Notes for The Zodiac Suite: The Complete Town Hall Concert of December 31, 1945 (Vintage Jazz Classics)
47. ↑ Williams later suspected that Timme Rosenkrantz stole the recordings and had them in possession. See Dahl, p. 164, pp. 170–175, and Tammy Lynn Kernodle Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams , p. 124.
48. ↑ Tammy L. Kernodle: Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams . 2004
49. ↑ See Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , pp. 245 f.
50. ↑ Her liturgical compositions also had a great influence on the composer Eddie Bonnemere , who was her pupil; see Linda Dahl, Morning Glory , p. 291
51. ↑ See Dahl, p. 308 ff.
52. ↑ According to Cook / Morton, it is "just played out". In addition to standards and her own compositions "Ode to Saint Cecilie", "Gloria" and "Blues for Timme", the album contains two compositions by John Stubblefield . Her biographer Linda Dahl ( Morning Glory , p. 326) also emphasizes the “benchmark” quality of this recording.
53. ^ Marian McPartland: Mary Lou Williams: Into the Sun (1964) in ( Memento from January 20, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Down Beat
54. ↑ Martin Kunzler: Jazz Lexicon. Volume 2 . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2002 (2nd edition), p. 1291
55. ↑ cf. Down Beat April 10, 1955, cf. Dahl p. 246
56. ^ Quoted from Mary Lou Williams biography at All About Jazz ( Memento from January 10, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) In the original: "perpetually contemporary."
57. ^ "No one can put a style on me. I've learned from many people. I change all the time. I experiment to keep up with what is going on, to hear what everybody else is doing. I even keep a little ahead of them, like a mirror that shows what will happen next "according to the Mary Lou Williams biography on All About Jazz ( Memento from January 10, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
58. ↑ "Anytime she was in the neighborhood I used to find myself another little territory, because Mary Lou was tearin 'everybody up", quoted in the Mary Lou Williams biography in All About Jazz
59. ↑ "She was outplaying all those men. She didn't think so but they thought so. ”Quoted from All About Jazz
60. ^ Mary Lou Williams Foundation
61. ↑ Intakt Records
62. ↑ see discography and Dahl, p. 400ff.

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on May 25, 2010 .