Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  There can be little doubt that Mary’s ambition to mount a symphonic work orchestrated for instruments not usually associated with jazz was fired by Ellington’s potent example. Like Ellington, Mary refused to take a backseat as a composer because she wrote from the jazz tradition—in other words, black music. The Zodiac Suite, she wrote, was “the beginning of a real fulfillment of one of my ambitions. As a composer and musician, I have worked all my life to write and develop serious music that is both original and creative.” Acutely aware of much of the musical establishment’s general disdain for jazz, she wrote with satisfaction about the reception by jazz musicians of her Town Hall concert of the suite in a letter to Joe Glaser: “From Zodiac, I received the name of musicians’ musician instead of the Boogie Woogie Queen.”

  IN EXPANDING THE twelve pieces of Zodiac from solo and trio works to instrumentations for chamber-jazz, Mary indulged a passion for the darker, rich colors of the orchestral palate, what Gunther Schuller described as “a grand love affair with the bass clarinet.” It was a love affair that endured; she afterwards wrote many arrangements for woodwinds. And although Mary employed modern jazz techniques, as Billy Taylor has observed of her then-innovative use of the rhythm section, she had also recently immersed herself in the work of twentieth-century symphonic composers—Bartok, the French impressionists, the German modernists. Zodiac represents a synthesis of everything she had absorbed to that point, while it is at the same time forward-looking—for instance, as a critic notes, her use of the “many pedal-point ostinatos developing into a blue-boogie played in thirds reminiscent of Miles Davis’ 1959 ‘Kind of Blue.’ ”

  Having written three signs by 1945, Mary simply improvised many of the other nine during her WNEW live radio show. “I thought perhaps I’d have all of them finished by the time they were aired but unfortunately I had ceased to think. On WNEW, I’d just compose them while I was playing during the broadcasts and Al [Lucas, bass] and Jack [Parker, drums] followed without missing. I’d nod my head when I wished for them to stop.” The radio audience responded enthusiastically, and in June of 1945, Mary recorded the signs for Moe Asch, as solos or with Lucas and Parker.

  “Aries” was intended to reflect the qualities of Ben Webster and Billie Holiday. They were “moody pioneers; people who create sounds and things you’ve never heard before.” Taurus was Mary’s and Duke Ellington’s sign, also Ellis Larkins’s. Taurans, Mary wrote, are “creative, lovers of the arts. They procrastinate, but they also know in what direction they’re going. That’s real jazz. I have tried to portray the stubborn quality. My music for the Sign of the Bull begins and ends with the same theme to indicate the personality that only changes when it is forced to do so.” The music is soft, understated, with an underlying deep wistfulness, and the gorgeous chords of the 6-bar theme framing “Taurus” pay obvious homage to Ellington (though for some reason she also included a quote from “Penthouse Serenade,” not an Ellington composition). “Gemini” was meant to be a sketch of Harold Baker. “He is described ‘playfully’ with a bit too much to drink,” Mary wrote. “He’d get real barrelhouse and then gentle and playful again. These people are at home doing ‘two things at one time’ and so in my music I have used two themes, in discord—the bass moving in one direction and the piano in the other—but equally balanced to set the pattern of those born under the Sign of the Twin.”

  “Cancer,” dedicated to alto saxophonist Lem Davis, then working with pianist Eddie Heywood at Café Society, was supposed to reflect “the order, peace and tranquility in the Sign of the Crab.” The chamber version at Town Hall featured a beautiful solo by Ben Webster. “Leo,” a bit of pomp and fanfare, was written for one of her favorite trombonists, Vic Dickenson. Leos are “proud and very strong,” Mary wrote, “born to rule. Leos really know what they’re doing.” The opening chords of the piano solo version were given “a trumpet-like effect to set the stage” and expanded to a fanfare for the chamber group. “Virgo” was the “jazziest” of the signs; its “flowing rhythms and running chords suggest those people who seem to have more intellectual than emotional personalities.” “Libra” represented no less than six heavyweights: Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and, later, John Coltrane. “Framed by a 12-bar prelude and ending that structurally display the balance for which that constellation is known,” Mary said in the liner notes, it was “written in a harmonious and melodic mood.” “Libra,” “the sign for those who love beauty and art,” was beautifully orchestrated for reeds (flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon), and brass (French horn, trumpet, and trombone), as well as strings (cello and double bass), piano, and drums. “Scorpio,” one of the first pieces Mary wrote, was “the sign of those who are creative, intense and passionate,” such as Ethel Waters, Katherine Dunham, Al Lucas. She set the music to this sign “in a strong and forceful pattern to indicate some of the moods which they follow,” stressing “tonal intensity.” This was one of Mary’s most successful “signs”; she wrote and recorded several arrangements: for trio; a fifteen-piece ensemble version; and a seventy-piece orchestral version—all three in ’45 and ’46—as well as a score intended for Ellington’s orchestra. An octet version recorded by bassist Oscar Pettiford for the Bethlehem label in the fifties is outstanding.

  Mary sketched “Sagittarius” for pianist Eddie Heywood, and while it is among the most interesting musical experiments of the twelve, it is at the same time one of the least satisfactorily developed. “I set this piece in a triumphant and varied mood for those headed for ‘success and glory.’ And I made the bars of the music as full and resounding as possible to achieve the kind of effect I wanted,” wrote Mary. But the piece, never achieving resolution, falls flat. “Capricorn,” for dancer Pearl Primus and trumpeter Frankie Newton, was one of Mary’s favorites, “the most ominous of all the movements because Capricorns are very good people, very deep people, very sad people. When they become discouraged, they go down, down, down. This has a mood to it and I knew the people.” Built on “Yesterdays,” a favorite tune of hers, “Capricorn,” as Mary described it, “is written with a dirge-like, half hammer beat, and it builds slowly to suggest a deliberate and headstrong personality.” But like “Sagittarius,” its ending is inconclusive.

  “Aquarius,” dedicated to Josh White and Eartha Kitt, was written as “a light, happy and jovial composition written for outgoing people,” the opposite of the brooding and heavy “Capricorn” (but both reminiscent of Gershwin’s piano “Preludes”). “Aquarius,” too, lacks a developed structure. “Pisces,” on the other hand, written for bassist Al Hall (and for Barney Josephson), was deliberately free-form, an airy waltz reminiscent of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos’s “Bachianas,” the sole “sign” to include a vocal, sung by operatic soprano Hope Foye. “It’s a tricky sign,” Mary wrote. “I composed this while broadcasting one Sunday afternoon on the radio show. There is no set theme pattern written for this composition, because I think of Pisces people as freedom-loving and imaginative. Of course, those influenced by this sign are thought to be arrogant too—and as the music unfolds I have injected those notes which I thought best captured the spirit of these people.”

  IF THE CHIEF drawback of some of the pieces was their fragmentary nature, the piano solo and trio version of Zodiac that Mary recorded builds a whole demonstrably greater than its parts, a lovely, lingering meditation. Jazz reviewers generally responded favorably: the attractively packaged album of 78s, with a portrait by David Stone Martin, was chosen as the “Record of the Month Club Selection” by The Record Review, which described Zodiac Suite as a “series of vividly evocative tone-poems in the jazz idiom,” adding that “fortunately she has not confined herself to jazz but uses modern symphonic composition.”

  By the time Mary began work on her new arrangements of Zodiac, with her vision of a concert-hall setting, she and DSM were no longer lovers, though he remained a close friend. The new man in her life was Milton Orent, a bass player with formal trainin
g in the classics who assisted her in scoring Zodiac both for chamber ensemble and then for symphony orchestra.

  Mary had met Orent right before she quit the Clouds of Joy, when he prepared a couple of arrangements for the band, and she ran into him again after she and Martin had parted. Orent had become a staff arranger for NBC radio, a job he hated. “If he had to do a score for Kate Smith or someone like that, he’d have the wildest things imaginable on it,” Mary recalled. “I’d say, ‘Milt, you can’t do that, she can’t sing on top of that!’ And he’d shout, ‘I’m sick of this!’ and start throwing paper. Milt was so far out they finally fired him.”

  Orent served as a kind of inspiration for Mary. While other friends, like Gray Weingarten, recall listening to symphonic music (as well as jazz) with Mary, with Orent she could talk about the music technically. “I studied with Milt,” Mary wrote. “In the latter part of 1945 we used to visit the library on East 58th Street and listen to music with earphones, reading scores—Hindemith, Schoenberg, Berg and all of the German composers. Milt made a present of a few scores and records. The reason I was so ahead in modern harmony was that I absorbed from Milt. He knew so much about chords and things. He knew a great deal about Schoenberg, Hindemith, and others before it became the thing. After being around him awhile I decided to dig intellectual music.” Orent had another useful talent: he was a lyricist. “It was always difficult to get him to finish anything he’d started,” Mary complained, “but he was the only lyricist who actually wrote the kind of story I wanted for my music.”

  It was at this point too that Mary decided to take some lessons from a Russian emigré called Ray Lev who, Mary hoped, could advise her on tone production and legato technique. The experience was disastrous: like all largely self-taught musicians, Mary had acquired “wrong” approaches. She had never, for example, learned “proper” pedal technique; instead, she had absorbed the jazz equivalent—controlling the keyboard with the hands—from masters like Art Tatum. Lev, she wrote, “sneered” at her playing technique. Mary swept out in a rage. A less secure artist might have crumpled under such withering criticism, but Mary eventually became clearer about where her artistic temperament and taste lay and felt that twentieth-century Western classical music did not voice the feeling that was all-important to jazz. Except for learning strengthening exercises of the hands and fingers in the seventies, when her hands were giving her trouble because of age and illness, Mary never again sought the approval of Western classicists. With the clarity of hindsight, she added, “The more I studied, the sillier and colder I got. When I played the classical composers for musicians at my apartment, they’d say the music made them feel as if they were crazy.” As for Milt Orent, attracted to jazz but trained outside it, “He was a great musician technically speaking, yet he was not too original. I lost my beat for a while after playing with him.”

  Their affair, though, seemed almost purely musical, and their surviving letters seem businesslike, without a whiff of the romance or passion that had suffused other relationships. Mary’s friends didn’t care much for Orent. “Milt was what we used to call a drag, like depressed and always trying to be hip or something,” remarks Gray Weingarten. “He just, you know, smoked a lot of pot. I didn’t like to be around him too much and he didn’t have much to say to me.” Adds Johnnie Garry, “Milt Orent was just a bass player. Mary Lou did all of the Zodiac—but he was her boyfriend and she gave him credit. Mary would say, ‘Milt’s a great arranger.’ And why? Because she’s got to give him something to do. But I’m saying Milt was just a bass player, and anyway, there were only two bass players she liked to play with her—Al Lucas and Al Hall.” Still, Mary had always preferred to mix music and romance, and Milt Orent was useful to her and loyal—very important qualities to Mary. “Mary was very controlling,” observes Gray Weingarten. “Her friends were all her friends. She could have her boyfriends in and out of the house, but when I got engaged, that was different: she acted as if she were losing a friend. She was very insecure.” Which may be why she liked Milt Orent; he remained steadfast. Long after their affair had blown over and he had gotten married and moved away, they still worked together periodically.

  Milt Orent’s actual contribution to Zodiac’s chamber-jazz version (presented at Town Hall) may never be completely clarified. The ideas were Mary’s; Orent helped with elaboration and development. Certainly, what Barry Ulanov terms the “strikingly unorthodox instrumentation of woodwinds, French horns, trumpet, trombone, strings and rhythm” was Mary’s plan, exactly the kind of blend she sought in the next few years, in compositions such as “Waltz Boogie,” “Elijah and the Juniper Tree,” “Tisherome,” “Knowledge,” and “In the Land of Oo-bla-dee.” And it was Mary’s idea as well to write jazz-inspired lines for instruments seldom associated with jazz. Indeed, she poured a wealth of ideas into the mix with Orent’s help. “Stylistically the suite is wide-ranging,” wrote scholar Richard Thompson, “including 20th century European piano preludes, blues boogie-woogie, vamps, ABA sectional forms, which often contrast jazz and classical writing, free piano cadenzas, standard song progressions and forms. Throughout the suite her invention is high; each piece has an individual spirit and feeling.”

  To present Zodiac, Mary persuaded Barney Josephson to rent Town Hall at the end of 1945. Other expenses—for orchestrating and copying the music and for rehearsing the musicians—she had to beg, borrow, or pay for out of pocket (she complained she had to pay $500 alone for copyists). She had a startling amount of work to accomplish and took a leave from the Café to do so nonstop. Friends who dropped by her apartment that autumn were accustomed to finding Zodiac music manuscript everywhere. “She’d leave that music around on her bed,” remembers Johnnie Garry, “and piled up on the floor.” For the Christmas holidays, Mary’s niece Helen came up from Pittsburgh. “She’d sit in a chair with her legs crossed, or else she’d stay in bed, writing music, just oblivious to everything,” Helen says. “Then sometimes she’d go to a park and just sit there for hours. Hours. Just looking around.”

  If Mary put her best face on in public, recalling it as a “wonderful concert,” privately she endured the anguish known to every artist who confronts the abyss between the vision and the finished work. “Everything went wrong,” she wrote in a diary passage filled with anguish. When Mary was not required on stage during the performance, Helen Floyd, who was backstage, says, “I remember she ran down in the basement and hid when they were doing it.” Nor was the concert hall filled. Mary blamed “the publicity man who was working on a concert the day before for drummer Specs Powell, which split the audience”; then, too, 5:30 P.M. the day before New Year’s Eve was not the best time for a concert. As Mary put it, the audience consisted of “a pack of musicians, newspapermen, disc jockeys and theatre people.”

  Mary’s favorite drummer, Jack Parker, couldn’t make the date, so she substituted J. C. Heard, then also working at the Café. While Ben Webster was a brilliant choice on tenor, her friend and Hamilton Terrace neighbor “Mouse” Randolph fluffed a lot of notes. The remaining musicians were mostly symphony players—flute, clarinet, bassoon, trombone, French horn, strings. And the meeting of jazz and the classics on Mary’s “Gjon Mili Jam Session” was the weakest: Mary’s idea to have a jam session needed more than one rehearsal to prepare both camps for the treacherous waters of improvisation. The result was chamber players who sounded stiff with fear. Nor were they helped by the fact that Milt Orent, who conducted the concert, lost a page of music. Mary reminisced, “The long, drawn-out strings threw some of the other musicians. So the musicians began to play on the wrong page and got lost. Everyone seemed to be playing a different page and I’ll never forget Ben Webster’s big eyes fixed on me. I remember yelling, ‘Count eight and play letter J.’ I thought I would blow a blood vessel any second. Somehow we got out of it.” Mary’s characteristic wit and vitality at the keyboard were overtaken, perhaps, by her anxiety and her playing was somewhat static. After the event, she wrote, “I was sick for ab
out a week and could not work.”

  Critical reaction broke fairly predictably along the classical-jazz fault line, with jazz reviewers responding more sympathetically than the sterner classical critics. Barry Ulanov was one of her most eloquent supporters, seeing Zodiac as further proof of the coming-of-age of the jazz composer. Though he conceded weaknesses—the concert had been underrehearsed, with sloppy ensemble work, and some weak spots in the construction—overall he regarded the concert a success. “This is the way music must go from here. Jazz cannot exist on jive and kicks and nostalgia alone; classical music will stop short unless it is infused with the warmth and drive and spontaneity of jazz. Mary Lou Williams, even if she was not altogether successful, made the case for this position almost unassailable.” “Fortunately,” agreed another writer, “she has not confined herself solely to the harmonic and rhythmic sequences of jazz alone, but has drawn freely from the scales and chords used so effectively in modern symphonic composition.”

  Classical critics tended to review Mary much less favorably. It was acceptable to use black “folk” themes in symphonic works, as composers like Gershwin and Copland did. But it was another thing entirely for a jazz composer to propose meeting the canon of Western classical music on equal ground.

  Paul Bowles, the avant-garde writer who later moved to Morocco, where he wrote the The Sheltering Sky and other books, was also a conservatory-trained composer, and in the 1940s he wrote reviews of adventurous music. In reviewing Zodiac Suite for the now-defunct Herald Tribune, he resharpened the red pencil he had used on Ellington after Black, Brown and Beige, ticking off the ailments he found in Zodiac with a world-weary efficiency. Mary’s “ambitious and sometimes amusing project was neither fish nor fowl,” Bowles complained, “often purely improvisational in character, although it had all been painstakingly orchestrated.” Indeed the only parts Bowles liked about Zodiac were the spots where Mary simply played jazz in her usual way. It was, he wrote with hardly veiled exasperation, “another attempt to bring about a wedding between French Impressionism and American jazz, a perfectly valid concept but it necessitates much more knowledge of the achievements of latter-day serious composers than is generally evident.” Other reviewers concurred. For Colin McPhee, writing in Modern Music, “when she turns to composing in a ‘modern, experimental’ way, the results are naive and unfortunate.”