Mary Lou Williams

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Mary Lou Williams (born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs) was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer born May 8, 1910.

She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements, as well as recordings of more than a hundred recordings (in 78, 45, and LP versions).

Williams arranged and hosted Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was both a mentor and tutor to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.

Early years

Williams, the second of eleven children, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,'s East Liberty neighborhood. She learned to play the piano at the age of three. Mary Lou Williams played piano out of necessity at a young age; before Williams began playing the piano in their homes, she and her white neighbors were throwing bricks into her house. She aided her ten half-brothers and sisters by attending dances at six years old. "The Little Piano Girl" was her first public appearance at the age of seven when she became known in Pittsburgh as "The Little Piano Girl." Lovie Austin was her first influence as a professional musician at the age of 15, citing Lovie Austin as her greatest influence. In November 1926, she married jazz saxophonist John Williams.

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Career

She began her Orpheum Circuit of theaters in 1922, aged 12 years old. During the following year, she performed with Duke Ellington and his early small band, the Washingtonians. She was playing with McKinney's Cotton Pickers at Harlem's Rhythm Club one morning at three o'clock. Louis Armstrong stepped into the room and stopped to listen. "Louis picked me up and kissed me," Williams explained clumsily.

Williams married saxophonist John Overton Williams in 1927. She first met him in Cleveland, where he was leading his team, the Syncopators, was leading his group and moved with him to Memphis, Tennessee. Williams on piano performed in Memphis, and he assembled a band. When her husband accepted an invitation to join Andy Kirk's band in Oklahoma City in 1929, 19-year-old Williams assumed the leadership of the Memphis band. Williams married her husband in Oklahoma City, but she did not perform with the band. The Twelve Clouds of Joy, Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds of Joy, moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Williams, when she wasn't working as a musician, was employed transporting bodies for an undertaker. Williams married Williams, who played with the band as well as being the band's arranger and composer, as the Clouds of Joy took up a long-standing presence in Kansas City, Missouri. "Froggy Bottom," "Walkin' and Swingin," "Little Joe from Chicago," "Roll 'Em," and "Mary's Idea" were among Kirk's "Misconduct" and "Mary's Thought" are among the many songs included in "Froggy Bottom."

Williams, a pianist and arranger for recordings in Kansas City (1929-30), 1930), and New York City (1930). She performed "Drag 'Em" and "Night Life" as piano solos on a trip to Chicago. At the suggestion of Jack Kapp at Brunswick Records, she suggested the term "Mary Lou." The albums were selling briskly, bringing Williams to national prominence. She performed solo gigs and as a freelance arranger for Earl Hines, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey right after the recording session. In 1937, she wrote In the Groove (Brunswick), a Dick Wilson/British collaboration, and Benny Goodman asked her to write a blues song for his band. The result was "Roll 'Em," a boogie-woogie piece based on the blues, which came after Goodman's radio show sponsor, Camel cigarettes. Goodman attempted to bring Williams under control to write exclusively, but she declined, preferring to freelance instead.

Williams, a widow who had divorced her husband, was among the Twelve Clouds of Joy in 1942, returning to Pittsburgh. Art Blakey was joined on drums by bandmate Harold "Shorty" Baker, with whom she formed a six-piece ensemble on drums. Baker left Cleveland to join Duke Ellington's orchestra after a brief engagement in Cleveland. Williams joined the band in New York City and later moved to Baltimore, where she and Baker were married. She travelled with Ellington and arranged several songs for him, including "Trumpet No End" (1946), her interpretation of Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies." Ellington sold Ellington on "Walkin' and Swingin"" also. Baker and the company had been relocated to New York within a year.

Williams accepted a job at the Café Society Downtown, launched Mary Lou Williams' Piano Workshop on WNEW, began mentoring and collaborating with younger bebop artists such as Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. She produced the bebop hit "In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee" for Gillespie in 1945. "During this period, Monk and the kids would gather around four or pick me up at the Café every morning," Williams recalls in Melody Maker.

She created the classical-influenced Zodiac Suite in 1945, in which each of the twelve sections corresponded to a sign of the zodiac, and was therefore dedicated to several of her musical colleagues, including Billie Holiday and Art Tatum. She performed it at Town Hall in New York City with an orchestra and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, and she shared it with Jack Parker and Al Lucas.

Williams accepted an England job in 1952 and spent two years in Europe. Music had taken over her life by this time, and not in a positive way; Williams was physically and mentally exhausted;

During a 1954 appearance in Paris, a three-year absence from performing began when she abruptly stepped away from the piano. Lorraine Gillespie, Dizzy Gillespie's wife Lorraine, converted to Catholicism in 1954. In addition to spending many hours at Mass, her energies were then devoted to the Bel Canto Foundation, an effort by her mother and her boyfriend to convert her Hamilton Heights apartment into a halfway house for the poor as well as musicians struggling with heroin use; she also donated money to a Harlem thrift store for a longer period of time.

The death of her long-time companion and student Charlie Parker in 1955, who also struggled with heroin for the bulk of his life, may have triggered her hiatus. Father John Crowley and Father Anthony assisted in persuading Williams to return to playing music. They told her that she could continue to serve God and the Catholic Church by channeling her natural gift of making music. In addition, Dizzy begged her to return to playing, as she did at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival with Dizzy's band.

In the 1960s, Father Peter O'Brien, a Catholic priest, became her close friend and boss. Dizzy introduced her to Pittsburgh's Bishop John Wright. At a time when no more than two clubs in Manhattan offered jazz full time, O'Brien helped her locate new venues for jazz performance. She performed in addition to club appearances, launched her own record label and publishing companies, founded the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival (with the bishop's help), and performed television appearances.

Following her hiatus, her first piece, Anima Christ of the Andes, was written and performed by Black Christ of the Andes, based on a hymn dedicated to Peruvian saint Martin de Porres. Two other short works, Anima Christi and Praise the Lord, were published. It was the first time a show at St. Francis Xavier Church in Manhattan in November 1962. She captured it in October of next year.

Her composition mainly concentrated on sacred music, hymns, and Masses throughout the 1960s. Music for Peace, one of the Masses. In 1971, Alvin Ailey choreographed Mary Lou's Mass, which was performed by the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater as Mary Lou's Mass. "If there can be a Bernstein Mass, a Mozart Mass, a Bach Mass, why can't there be Mary Lou's Mass?" Ailey wondered. Williams' Revision of Mary Lou's Mass, her most celebrated work on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, was a performance by Williams.

Williams put a lot of effort into performing her pieces, including "Mary Lou's Mass" at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City in April 1975, attracting over 3,000 people. It was the first time a jazz musician appeared at the cathedral. She founded a charitable group and opened thrift stores in Harlem, directing the proceeds, as well as ten percent of her own funds, to musicians in need. "Mary Lou says of herself as a'soul' player,' a way of implying that she never strays far from melody and the blues, but that she only works sparingly in gospel harmony and rhythm," a 1964 Time columnist said. When I play, I am praying through my fingers,' she says. "I get the right "soul sound" and I try to touch people's spirits," the singer says. She appeared with a jazz festival band at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1965.

Her career flourished during the 1970s, including as a solo pianist and commentator on the recording The History of Jazz. In 1971, she returned to the Monterey Jazz Festival for the second time. Barney Josephson, her old boss from her Café Society days, could also be seen nocturnally at The Cookery in Greenwich Village, a new club operated by her old manager from her Cafe Society days. That engagement was also recorded.

On April 17, 1977, she gave a two-piano performance with avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor at Carnegie Hall. Despite onstage tensions between Williams and Taylor, their performance was broadcast on an Embraced album.

Williams taught jazz to students in kindergarten. She later accepted a Duke University artist-in-residence position (from 1977 to 1981), focusing on Jazz with Father O'Brien and directing the Duke Jazz Ensemble. She did numerous concert and festival appearances, conducted clinics for youth, and appeared at the White House for President Jimmy Carter and his guests in 1978. In 1978, she appeared in Benny Goodman's 40th anniversary Carnegie Hall concert.

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Awards and honors

• Guggenheim Fellowships, 1972 and 1977.
• Nominee 1971 Grammy Awards, Best Jazz Performance – Group, for the album Giants, Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby Hackett, Mary Lou Williams
• Honorary degree from Fordham University in New York in 1973
• Honorary degree from Rockhurst College in Kansas City in 1980.
• Received the 1981 Duke University's Trinity Award for service to the university, an award voted on by Duke University students.