Mary Lou Williams project [EN]

Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981)

Mary Lou Williams was born 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 after their marriage, 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 -- including Ghost of Love, Walkin’ and Swingin’, and What’s Your Story, Morning Glory -- and her terrific piano-solo work.

Mary Lou gave Kirk her notice in 1942, in part because of copyright disagreements and in part because she was frustrated. The “girl singers,” she complained, 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 made 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. 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.

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, living a life of personal sacrifice and prayer instead. 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 (Black Christ of the Andes, and Mary Lou’s Mass) and devoted much of her time to teaching. From 1977 until her death in 1981 she taught at Duke University, where the student center was named in her honor.

Mary Lou Williams left an important and 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.  The Dutch Jazz Orchestra committed a number of Mary Lou Williams’s hitherto unrecorded orchestral works to CD.

Mary Lou Williams - Dutch Jazz Orchestra CDs

Special thanks to

Fr. Peter O’Brien,

The Mary Lou Williams Foundation and

the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies

Books

PictboekDahl