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Mary Lou Williams - Dutch Jazz Orchestra CDs
"When Mary Lou Williams was enduring her final illness, and was bedridden, in May of 1981, I was subconsciously fighting against time, and kept engaging her in conversation over many matters, large and small. One afternoon I approached her with one of the three then available LPs preserving the recordings of Andy Kirk. I wanted to know some detail about credit for the arrangement on one of the pieces which was not hers. She was tired and worn down. She turned her head toward me and testily said: “you know all about the music; now don’t bother me any more.”
I had met Mary Lou seventeen years earlier, in February of 1964, and the friendship between us was immediate and deep. As it grew, she educated me in the ways of the music business. I began to field some of her contracts and became her persistent advocate. In the autumn of 1970 she said she would “come out here again,” if I would go out with her, as her personal manager. Our mutual devotion grew so strong over the next dozen years that here I am, 24 years after her death, just as driven on behalf of her and her music as ever.
She formed The Mary Lou Williams Foundation in 1980 in order to expose children to jazz. She left her entire estate, including all her copyrights, to this foundation. In addition, I took those words (“you know all about the music”) as a sacred trust and I have made every effort to preserve her music, and to aid in its being heard as widely as possible. At times both purposes have been accomplished when children have heard her music--and sometimes even played and sung it.
A profound bow should go to The Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ., in the U.S., to its director Dan M. Morgenstern, a most trustworthy man, and most especially to Annie Kuebler, its archivist. The Institute accepted all of Mary Lou Williams’s papers which they now own and Ms. Kuebler has lovingly and carefully catalogued and safely preserved every scrap. The Mary Lou Williams Collection (and the Mary Lou Williams Foundation Collection) contain a rich source of knowledge about this great musician -- and also all her music. The music is now available to researchers, from grade school children to the most professional academics.
But music on paper is not only meant to be preserved, catalogued, and read. It is meant to be PLAYED. And it is meant to be HEARD. Music may be played locally in a concert hall and move the few thousand gathered there that night. But in order for music to be heard repeatedly, and in a widespread way, it must be RECORDED. Enter the brilliant Dutch Jazz Orchestra.
A note of personal gratitude, on my part, is due to Dr. Walter van de Leur who is as dogged and determined as I am. This recording project actually began with his coming over to the United States a number of years ago to research the music of Mary Lou Williams, especially her unknown compositions and arrangements, for performance by The Dutch Jazz Orchestra at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Netherlands. That proving successful, and fulfilling to the musicians, plans moved forward to “the real deal”: this sumptuous and long-desired recording.
And what a recording it is! All the care and ability earlier accorded by the Dutch Jazz Orchestra to the music of Billy Strayhorn, Mary Lou’s fellow Pittsburgher, has been extended to hers. Ten world premieres enhance the importance of this release. The three re-creations of works written in the 1930s show Mary Lou in an earlier prime. Walkin’ and Swingin’ is undoubtedly a classic, and the two ballads from that period are especially lovely.
To the gentlemen of the Dutch Jazz Orchestra: kudos and bouquets, of every kind, in profusion. You have served “The Lady Who Swings the Band” well. And a profound “Thank You.”
- Rev. Peter F. O’Brien, S.J., Executive Director of The Mary Lou Williams Foundation July 9, 2005 - Jersey City, NJ
The Lady Who Swings The Band
Rediscovered Music of Mary Lou Williams
The Dutch Jazz Orchestra
"In recent years, two biographies of Mary Lou Williams have appeared. These biographies of course illustrate the importance of her musical career, but they are also a sign of a relatively new development in jazz historiography. Entire bookcases can be filled with books about male jazz musicians, composers and band leaders, but women in jazz have thus far been largely overlooked. True, the achievements of famous female jazz singers have been acknowledged, be it often in stereotyped narratives, but very little has been written about female instrumentalists. The importance of Mary Lou Williams’s career therefore transcends her own life and extends to the future of jazz: her story proves that women can hold their own in a competitive professional world dominated by men.
Mary Lou Williams was born in 1910 in Atlanta, Georgia, as Mary Elfrieda Scruggs. She grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the home town of other jazz musicians such as Erroll Garner, Earl Hines, Billy Eckstine and Billy Strayhorn. A child prodigy, she learned to play the reed organ at a neighborhood church at a very early age. From the organ to the piano was a small step for young Mary, and before long, she was earning money by playing the piano at private homes. Nevertheless, her youth in besooted Pittsburgh was difficult, and Mary matured quickly.
After a first stint with Boise De Legg and His Hottentots, she joined Buzzin’ Harris and His Hits ‘n Bits, and left home for good to become a professional musician at the tender age of fifteen. In Buzzin’ Harris’s troupe she met alto and baritone saxophone player John Overton Williams, whom she married in 1926. The couple played in various bands, toured on the black Theater Owners Booking Agency circuit (TOBA) and met numerous illustrious jazz musicians.
Two years later, John Williams joined Terrence Holder’s Black Clouds of Joy, while Mary Lou worked mostly on her own. In 1929, trumpet player Andy Kirk took over Holder’s band, and within half a year, Mary Lou became the regular pianist. The fame of this band, known as Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy, owed much to her light-swinging arrangements, her smart compositions, and her terrific piano solo work. Three of her works for Kirk -- Ghost of Love, Walkin’ and Swingin’, and What’s Your Story, Morning Glory -- are included in the present CD.
Mary Lou gave Kirk her notice in 1942, in part because of copyright disagreements and in part because she was frustrated. The “girl singers,” for instance, often got better billing than she. Leaving Kirk’s band had lasting consequences for her career as a composer-arranger: although she wrote on an incidental basis for various other famous orchestras, from now on, she never again would have a regular orchestra to work with. When her second husband Harold “Shorty” Baker landed a job in Duke Ellington’s orchestra, she had an opportunity to write music for this renowned band.
It is certain that Mary Lou wrote at least seventeen arrangements for Ellington, but there may have been as many as fifty. They included a take on Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies (her most famous score, known as Trumpet-No-End) as well as arrangements of standards and pop tunes such as Star Dust, I Love Coffee, Ogeechee River Lullaby and Sweet Georgia Brown.
Around the same time she worked on her ambitious twelve-movement Zodiac Suite, which she recorded as a soloist in 1945, for the newly founded Asch Records. On New Year’s Eve 1945, the Zodiac Suite was premiered at Town Hall in New York City, with a chamber orchestra, and later, in 1946, she played a few movements from the suite at Carnegie Hall, with the Carnegie Pops Orchestra. She arranged Scorpio, one of the twelve movements, for big band (an arrangement she sent to Ellington), but it was never recorded. It should be noted that Aries Mood, another piece to remain unrecorded, is not from the suite but is a separate work written around 1966, for Ben Webster.
After more than twenty-five years in music, Mary Lou Williams radically, and dramatically, changed the direction of her life in 1953. In the middle of a performance at the Boeuf sur le Toit, in Paris, she stopped playing and walked out of the club. She converted to Catholicism and dedicated most of her time to religious and charitable work. For years she refused to play in public, instead living a life of personal sacrifice and prayer.
However, some of her friends, especially Dizzy and Lorraine Gillespie, continued to encourage her to return to music, and in 1957 she gave in to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival, with Dizzy’s big band. From then on, she remained active in music while continuing her charitable work (she ran a thrift store that, among other things, sold musician’s clothes). In addition, she composed sacred works for jazz orchestra and choir, and devoted much of her time to teaching, From 1977 until her death in 1981 she taught at Duke University.
Mary Lou Williams left an important, diverse body of jazz compositions and arrangements, written for a variety of ensembles. Since different occasions called for different music, she developed chameleonic musical qualities as a composer-arranger. “Nobody can put a style on me,” she often said. Her early work for Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds of Joy must have instilled in her a love for orchestral music, for she sought to work with jazz orchestras throughout her career. Many of those orchestral scores have never been recorded, because recording jazz orchestras has become too expensive for most record companies.
Here lies the contribution of the Dutch Jazz Orchestra and Challenge Records. The Dutch Jazz Orchestra receives a modest but important structural financial contribution from the government of the Netherlands, which it spends on musicological research and on concerts and recordings of the music yielded by that research.
The orchestra is always on the look-out for half-forgotten material that has never been recorded. With the help of Fr. Peter O’Brien, executive director of the Mary Lou Williams Foundation, and Ann K. Kuebler, head archivist of the Mary Lou Williams Collection at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, the orchestra located a number of hitherto never recorded works for big band by Mary Lou Williams. It was decided that some of Mary Lou’s famous pieces for the Clouds of Joy and Benny Goodman should be included as well, as proof of the longevity of these charts. The true treats on this CD are the nine pieces that have never been recorded before. They are proof of Mary Lou Williams’s tremendous talents.
In Ellington’s words, she was “soul on soul.” After spending many fulfilling hours with her music, the Dutch Jazz Orchestra would like to add that Mary Lou Williams was also “jazz on jazz.”
- Walter van de Leur
Chief (ca. 1966, this arrangement 1967) - world premiere
Music: Mary Lou Williams, words: Milton Orent & Mary Lou Williams Cecilia Music Publishing Co.
Solos: Rob van Bavel, piano; Ruud Breuls, trumpet.
In August 1967, Mary Lou visited Duke Ellington, to suggest that she write some music for him, as she had done during the 1940s. Since Billy Strayhorn, Ellington’s co-composer for twenty-seven years, had just succumbed to cancer, it was likely that Ellington could use some assistance. Apparently Ellington expressed interest, as shortly after their conversation she mailed him a music sketchbook with five of her pieces in new arrangements (some of them in multiple versions). The first piece in that folder was Chief, a work derived from a song that Mary Lou had composed to inspire an interest in jazz among teenagers (Chief Natoma from Tacoma) with somewhat old-fashioned lyrics about “Indians.” This arrangement, as well as the others for the Ellingtonians, shows how well Mary Lou understood Duke’s sound. Regretfully, none of the works she sent him ever made it to the bandstand.
Aries Mood (A Portrait of Ben Webster) (1968) - world premiere
Music: Mary Lou Williams
Cecilia Music Publishing Co.
Solos: Rob van Bavel, piano; Albert Beltman, alto; Ruud Breuls, trumpet; Simon Rigter, tenor.
Mary Lou Williams was romantically involved with a number of famous jazz musicians, including Don Byas, Harold Baker and Ben Webster. She met Webster when he joined the Clouds of Joy, in the summer of 1932. Decades later, she dedicated a new work to Ben Webster, for a program with the Danish Radio Big Band in 1968: Aries Mood. (This piece should not be confused with Aries, a movement from the earlier Zodiac Suite, which incidentally was also dedicated to Webster, and to Billie Holiday.) Aries Mood is one of many compositions in which Mary Lou Williams used tempo and meter changes. After a modern-sounding boppish introduction, the piece drops to a moody half-time feel, to return to the original tempo for an unexpectedly brief coda. Such sudden endings are another characteristic of her later work.
Medi II (1973, this arrangement 1978) - world premiere
Music: Mary Lou Williams
Cecilia Music Publishing Co.
Solos: Martijn van Iterson, guitar; Ruud Breuls, trumpet.
Mary Lou premiered the curiously titled Medi II (for meditation?) on her famous trio album Zoning, for Smithsonian Folkways. She arranged the work for the student orchestra of Duke University in 1978, with added lyrics (omitted here). In this arrangement, the frantic blues now stood as a metaphor for the busy life of New York City. Where her earlier trio version is thematically rather ad lib, the big band arrangement carries a more outspoken theme, stated here by guitarist Martijn van Iterson. The strong groove in the rhythm section is typical of many of Mary Lou’s works, possibly a legacy of her background in stride and boogie-woogie piano.
Scorpio (1945, this arrangement 1946) - world premiere
Music: Mary Lou Williams
Cecilia Music Publishing Co.
Solos: John Ruocco, clarinet; Hansjörg Fink, trombone; Rob van Bavel, piano; Mike Booth, trumpet.
Scorpio is the only known movement from the 1945 Zodiac Suite that Mary Lou arranged for big band. She revisited this work frequently throughout her career. For instance, she wrote a version for three pianos (never recorded) for Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and herself. Her arrangement for Ellington, premiered on this CD, was written in 1946. Like all the movements from the Zodiac Suite, Scorpio is dedicated to a number of Mary Lou’s show business colleagues: actress Imogene Coca, singer Ethel Waters, bassist Al Lucas and dancer Katherine Dunham. Similar to Aries Mood and Chief, Scorpio is built over a vamp (i.e., a repeated figure in the rhythm section) that evokes a sense of mystery.
O.W. (1954, this arrangement 1967) - world premiere
Music: Mary Lou Williams
Cecilia Music Publishing Co.
Solos: Simon Rigter, tenor; Erik Veldkamp, trumpet.
O.W. honors saxophonist Orlando Wright (later known as Musa Kaleem) with whom Mary Lou worked in the 1940s. She recorded this piece in 1954 for the Paris-based Vogue Records, with tenor-saxophonist Don Byas, and subsequently arranged it for vocals as the opener of Music for Peace, which later became Mary Lou’s Mass. The arrangement performed here by the Dutch Jazz Orchestra was written for Ellington in 1967, and like all of Mary Lou’s 1967 adaptations for Ellington, has never been recorded.
Scratchin’ in the Gravel (1940, this arrangement 1967) - world premiere
Music: Mary Lou Williams
Cecilia Music Publishing Co., Universal Music Publishing Co.
Solo: Albert Beltman, alto.
First recorded in 1940 by a group called Six Men and a Girl, Scratchin’ in the Gravel was included in the set of arrangements Mary Lou sent Ellington in 1967. “Dearest Duke,” she wrote, “I love writing for you because you are my favorite but, I will have to receive some kind of compensation. I have bills to pay.” Whether or not Ellington was interested in paying those bills, it is unfortunate that he did not use her arrangement of Scratchin’ in the Gravel, since it was tailor-made for his stellar lead-altoist, Johnny Hodges. Note the meter change towards the end, where Mary Lou moves the piece into a brief waltz segment.
Shafi (1977) - world premiere
Music: Shafi Hadi & Mary Lou Williams
Cecilia Music Publishing Co.; Shafi Hadi.
Solos: Albert Beltman, alto; Nils van Haften, baritone; Eric Ineke, drums.
Shafi is another work in which Mary Lou employs her characteristic tempo changes. There is a wealth of ideas in this work: angular lines, a brooding segment with plaintive alto lines over a step-wise movement in the rhythm section, rhythmically powerful tuttis and a virtuoso ending. Co-author Shafi Hadi was a saxophonist who played at one time with Charles Mingus. His relation to Mary Lou is unknown. Reportedly he had run into trouble when they met, and characteristically she tried to help him in any way she could. Hadi’s exact contribution to this work -- other than lending it his name -- remains unknown, too. However, the arrangement is by Mary Lou.
What’s Your Story, Morning Glory? (1938)
Music: Mary Lou Williams; Lyrics: Jack Lawrence & Paul Webster
Cecilia Music Publishing Co., Range Road Music Inc., Warner Bros. Inc.,
Solos: Rob van Bavel, piano; John Ruocco, clarinet.
What’s Your Story, Morning Glory? is one of the many works Mary Lou wrote for Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy. This very smart twelve-bar blues plays with the traditional blues format of two repeated stanzas and a conclusion. Mary Lou allows her lines to spill over the bars, giving What’s Your Story its modern quality. The song was successful, but not for Kirk. Jimmy Lunceford had a hit with it in 1940, and others noted the tune’s power too. Mary Lou felt that the famous song Black Coffee resembled her own composition so closely that it constituted plagiarism. Although What’s Your Story was originally recorded with a singer, the Dutch Jazz Orchestra decided not to use a vocalist and to choose a slower tempo, resulting in a track that is not a reproduction of the original, but rather a wistful echo.
New Musical Express (1953, this arrangement 1967) - world premiere
Music: Mary Lou Williams
Cecilia Music Publishing Co.
Solos: Rob van Bavel, piano; Mike Booth, trumpet.
As she often wrote for different orchestras, Mary Lou developed a remarkable ease in adopting the various musical idioms employed by the leaders of these bands. Her scores for Ellington, for example, are fitted to the sound of his orchestra, but she always manages to avoid flat imitation of either his or Strayhorn’s style. New Musical Express is an example of an entirely different orchestral sound, something she might have done for Dizzy Gillespie, for whom she indeed wrote a few arrangements.
You Know Baby (1944, this arrangement 1967) - world premiere
Music: Mary Lou Williams, lyrics Frank Lewis
Cecilia Music Publishing Co.
Solos: Albert Beltman, alto; Mike Booth, trumpet; Hansjörg Fink, trombone.
Written in 1944, You Know Baby is a sensuous ballad, which Mary Lou herself was known to sing on occasion. Her 1967 arrangement for Ellington is full of challenging harmonic turns (listen for the trumpet answers to the melody) and is at times radically dissonant. Never one to shun experimentation, she made a rock ‘n roll version of the song as well, in hopes of reaching a younger audience. As she explained to Ellington in her letter, she wrote “two arrangements of [You Know Baby], due to the fact that you have a Rock and Roll singer. It is a natural for a hit if you’re lucky to get it through all this ‘muck and mud’ (smile).” The singer referred to is in all likelihood Tony Watkins, who had some kind of rock ‘n roll finale with the Ellington orchestra. Today, this version seems dated, but her jazz arrangement of You Know Baby has certainly stood the test of time.
Lonely Moments (1943, this arrangement 1947
Music: Mary Lou Williams
Cecilia Music Publishing Co.
Solos: Martijn van Iterson, guitar; Eric Ineke, drums; John Ruocco, clarinet.
Lonely Moments, written in 1943, shows that Mary Lou had an early affinity with bebop. In this period, she also did a lot of work for Benny Goodman, who had his reservations about bebop. The two worlds seem to meet in this arrangement, bound together by the ever-present strong Williams groove. A Sing, Sing, Sing-like drum-and-clarinet segment, inserted in the middle of the composition, is followed by a passage in which the theme is cleverly layered.
Ghost of Love (1938)
Music: Mary Lou Williams, lyrics Jack Lawrence
Cecilia Music Publishing Co., Range Road Music Inc.
Solos: Simon Rigter, tenor; Albert Beltman, clarinet; Erik Veldkamp, trumpet.
Ghost of Love, another work written for Andy Kirk, shows that Mary Lou was a gifted melody composer, an aspect of her talent that all the swinging blues on this CD should not be allowed to obscure. Kirk originally recorded the delightful Ghost of Love with romantic vocalist Pha Terrell, who had earlier made a hit for Kirk with Until the Real Thing Comes Along. Much to Kirk’s chagrin, neither Ghost of Love nor any of the other Mary Lou Williams compositions would be a hit record for his orchestra.
Walkin’ and Swingin’(1936)
Music: Mary Lou Williams
Cecilia Music Publishing Co.
Solos: Rob van Bavel, piano; Hansjörg Fink, trombone.
Mary Lou composed this famous piece for Andy Kirk, reportedly with the help of tenor-saxophonist Ben Webster. The second chorus is a beautiful example of cross-section writing, with a trumpet that leads the saxophone ensemble. Towards the end of this chorus, Thelonious Monk’s later composition Rhythm-a-Ning emerges, another example of the frequent borrowing that went on in jazz writing. Mary Lou is not free of such vices either: her final chorus cites the Cuban traditional The Peanut Vendor.
Line-up
Trumpet: Jan Oosthof, Ruud Breuls, Erik Veldkamp, Peter van Soest, Mike Booth.
Trombone: Hansjörg Fink, Andy Bruce, Dave Rothschild, Martin van den Berg.
Reeds: John Ruocco, Albert Beltman, Hans Meijdam, Ab Schaap, Simon Rigter, Nils van Haften.
Piano: Rob van Bavel.
Guitar: Martijn van Iterson.
Bass: Jan Voogd.
Drums: Eric Ineke.
Musical director: John Ruocco.
Artistic directors: Albert Beltman, Walter van de Leur.
Research: Walter van de Leur.
Recorded March 11 and 12, 2005, Wisseloord Studios, Hilversum, the Netherlands
Produced by the Dutch Jazz Orchestra
Edited at Galaxy Studios, Mol, Belgium
Engineers: Rolf Breemer and Robert Jansen
Design: Marcel van den Broek
Research, performance editions and liner notes: Walter van de Leur
Special thanks to
The Mary Lou Williams Foundation: Fr. Peter O’Brien;
The Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University: Ann Kuebler, archivist, Tad Hershorn, photo archivist;
Cecilia Music Publishing Co.;
Challenge Records: Anne de Jong;
The Dutch Jazz Orchestra: Jan Oosthof and Albert Beltman; Christian de Pee; Ted Buehrer. For more information please contact
Copyright © 2009, Dutch Jazz Orchestra. All rights reserved.
