Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)!

I’ve been listening to my recent haul of Chronological Classics albums, among other “new” (old) stuff and the usual favorites, and this woman’s music stood out right away. An immensely talented pianist, not especially fiery or in your face like some piano titans like Oscar Peterson or Art Tatum, but certainly in their territory, just playing more precisely, intellectually even. She was a master arranger too and had an uncanny ability to adapt as jazz rapidly evolved.

After a little research I now know that Williams was playing piano at age 2-3, at first as a way to get the local Pittsburgh white folk to stop throwing bricks into their house, but soon as a local sensation who was taking any available lessons and learning fast. Her career began with the earliest Duke Ellington bands in the early 20s, barely into her teens, at a time when jazz was still taking shape and sounded pretty archaic by today’s standards, or even the standards of 10-15 years later when the swing/big band boom started, eventually to morph into smaller bands and bebop. Mary Lou Williams kept up with and could play it all, and was in fact a mentor to future giants like Thelonius Monk, among others. Always embracing the new, letting go of the past easily.

She was close with the bebop cats in general and embraced the music earlier than most. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were among the many friends who would stop by her apartment regularly, a known hangout for forward thinking jazz artists. Plus Williams recorded a lot! Well over a hundred sides for various labels, mostly big ol’ RCA (who had a whole separate label for the blues stuff, Bluebird), with various aggregations including one labeled the “Girl Stars”.

That stuff has some very nice guitar, so I was curious who that might have been. At first I couldn’t think of a single female jazz guitarist from that era unless you want to count Les Paul’s wife and musical partner Mary Ford, a decent guitarist but not one I’d classify as jazz necessarily. Having done the least bit of research I now know that I should have been able to remember Mary Osborne, who I know as a guitarist for sure but may have mixed her up mentally with Mary Ford. Osborne made at least one album of her own, which I’ll track down soon. A whole other musical avenue to absorb!

I’m tellin’ ya, I think life is telling me to be more reverential of women. It’s like the majority of my favorite artists, the newer ones anyway, are female! It’s been happening for years and I never noticed until recently. Starting in the 2000s it was Feist and KT Tunstall and Lady Gaga, a bit later Shania Twain’s one tune “Up!”, and recently it’s all Lake Street Dive and a few Shawn Colvin albums, with Mary Lou among several contenders in the historical categories, Lil Hardin Armstrong and Lovie Austin among them. I’ve always been the sensitive wimpy type who cries at movies or even ads. A sad looking cat or dog can be brutal…

Williams in her apartment with Jack Teagarden, Tadd Dameron, Hank Jones and Dizzy Gillespie.

One tragic event almost ended Williams’ career in 1954, as she was living in Europe, avoiding racism and working. It was when Charlie Parker died. Williams took it very very hard, knowing him personally but also aware of what his impact had already been and would continue to be. She quit performing and became a devout catholic, with her friend Dizzy Gillespie’s wife. She did much more than that though. She put her own limited funds and more raised from others into a rehab type facility to help musicians and others with addiction problems.

This woman, at the height of her career, living in Europe to get away from racism at home, walked away from it all to move back to racism-land and do something selfless, something that might help the next Bird not succumb to heroin and death. This is the mid 50s! She was waaay ahead of the rest of the world. Her pastor eventually convinced her she could still play if she wanted to so she did, with a triumphant performance at the Newport Jazz festival playing with Dizzy’s band, helping out with arrangements too! She’s the great unsung arranger of both the swing and bop eras! Worked with everyone!

I’m just in awe of Mary Lou Williams! Why is this woman not a household name or at least as well known as other stars of the era like Dizzy and Duke and Basie and the rest? One can only imagine what her day to day must have been like as a black woman before the civil rights movement was even an idea, and from very early in life (the bricks!). Even the wiki mentions how totally exhausted mentally and physically she was at one point, before leaving for Europe I think.

I hope they gave her a postage stamp at least. I’m just amazed that I hadn’t really known anything at all about her, and I’m the target audience! That’s a fucking crime if you ask me. She has as much credibility and gravitas as any jazz artist of any era you care to name, but because she was a woman, without a flashy nickname like many of her pals, she falls between the cracks. She needed a publicist!

I just love learning about people like this! There were/are heroes everywhere all along/even now, we just hardly ever notice them as they go about being heroic in their little niches, far removed from our own. As jazz fans we owe it to Mary Lou Williams’ legacy to pump up that legacy and reputation twice as hard as others. It’s long overdue… Everyone should know!