Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  Recent critical attention generally follows Bowles’s line, while ascribing more credit to Mary’s musicianship. “As pure instrumental music, it does not hold together,” thinks one reviewer. “Positively speaking, however, Williams is a master of harmony and this piece demonstrates a rich chromatic language.” Another writer agrees: With the exception of “Capricorn” and “Cancer”—the best examples of “a real jazz/classical integration”—Mary is “a very talented composer using disparate elements, unable to achieve formal clarity, development or a dialectic between different musical worlds, which emphasize respectively improvisation and premeditated, notated composition. This,” he adds, “has always been one of the severest challenges for the jazz musician, to extend composition beyond the realm of cyclic forms without losing that essential spirit which makes jazz what it is.”

  Apart from the testimony of those fans and critics who were actually in the audience on December 30, 1945, there was no way of assessing Zodiac Suite until half a century after the concert, when Mary was no longer alive, because no recording was released until the 1990s, even though the concert was taped for a planned record issue. The reason for this has all the elements of a tragicomedy. Most likely Moe Asch had agreed to issue a record of the Town Hall Zodiac, and was responsible for providing a recording machine at the hall—a portable but cumbersome machine that cut acetates of live music from which record masters were then made. Immediately after the concert, Mary had fled the hall, distraught and exhausted. When she returned the next day to retrieve the acetates of Zodiac, they had vanished. “For the first time in the history of the hall, the records [sic] had been stolen,” she wrote. “So I never heard how my music sounded.” Years later, she learned what had happened, writing in a letter to a lawyer she had hired to help her retrieve copyrights, “My Town Hall recording was stolen by Timme Rosenkrantz and released on a record in Denmark on the Baronet label.”

  Baron Timme Rosenkrantz was one of those fabulous characters who inhabit the fringes of jazz. Affectionately called the Jazz Baron by some, not so affectionately known as the Robber Baron by others, he was very much the genuine aristocrat; indeed, it was his family name that Shakespeare gave to one of the minor characters in Hamlet. By the time he was born, in the early 1900s, the Rosenkrantzes retained only a remnant (but a comfortable one) of their once-great fortune. Jazz critic Dan Morgenstern, a fellow Dane, recalls as a young man seeing Rosenkrantz’s father, a venerable writer of Danish historical fiction, strolling the Tivoli gardens in a long white beard.

  Timme, the classic black sheep, was a great disappointment to his family. (His waywardness was matched, if not topped, by a younger, wealthier aristocrat called the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, who was born a Rothschild. Both the Jazz Baron and the baroness were friends of Mary’s.) Jazz and cocktails played the largest part in the baron’s life; by the 1930s, he had moved to New York to be at the center of things. There he fell in love with, or under the spell of, another larger-than-life character: the clever, sexually ambiguous Inez Cavanaugh, an elegant, attractive black woman who tried her hand at several occupations and maintained an open relationship with Timme. As a journalist she wrote good descriptive pieces for Metronome, worked as a publicist for Duke Ellington, and wrote the liner notes to Black, Brown and Beige, as well as admiring notes about Mary’s playing. Sometimes Cavanaugh worked as a singer. She had presence, not much voice, but was intelligent about lyrics. And she and Baron Timme started a number of business ventures: a record shop in Harlem, a radio program, a music magazine (which lasted for only one issue), a club.

  Their forte, however, was entertaining. They kept a constant party going in their New York apartment. The baron’s many friends found him lovable, generous, and easy to forgive—his chief fault, apparently, was the fecklessness that stemmed from his drinking. It was an era of much greater tolerance for excessive drinking, however, and the baron’s charm, his genuine enthusiasm and love for jazz and jazz people balanced the sloppiness, broken promises, and so on. “Timme was never sober when I knew him, but he was a congenial drunk,” recalls Gray Weingarten.

  It was through Rosenkrantz and Cavanaugh that Gray Weingarten met great artists like Billie Holiday and subsequently befriended Mary. Chafing under the rules of her strict, well-to-do Christian Scientist family, she rebelled, falling in love with a young man named Hugh Shannon, a cabaret pianist, during the war. When Shannon was drafted into the army, Gray sent him jazz records at his request and developed her own interest in the music. “When Hugh was on leave, he took me to Café Uptown to see a very glamorous, marvelous pianist called Mary Lou Williams—Hugh was a pianist so he was a connoisseur. And Mary was part of the older scene, the Café Society set, along with players like Teddy Wilson, Eddie Heywood, Billie Holiday. She had a white, sparkling dress and she looked very beautiful. She didn’t say anything, she just came out, sort of bowed and just played up a storm. It was wonderful! That was my first introduction to her. And Hugh was very friendly with Billie Holiday, so I got to know her and then the Rosenkrantzes. They had an apartment, a really far-out apartment around 32nd Street not far from Fifth Avenue. There were two lions in front of it and it was owned by an eccentric guy who collected bathtubs. A lot of very famous people came there: Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington at one point. I guess anybody who was anybody came up there, it was like a perpetual open house, just a one-room apartment with a kitchen and a bathroom. And a big piano. Quite an atmosphere. When I’d come home from college on weekends, I’d hang out there.

  “I learned a lot about life at Timme’s. Billie Holiday was there one night, and to my horror I walked in the kitchen just as she had a tourniquet on her arm and she was shooting up. That was my first introduction to drugs.”

  Rosenkrantz’s unflattering nickname, the Robber Baron, resulted from his production of pirate records on labels like Baronet and New York Jazz, for sale abroad during the recording ban in the forties. “Danish guy? The thief, yeah,” says Johnnie Garry. “He would hide microphones and record people at his apartment. During the war, he was doing the black market records.” “I don’t know what the quality of the tape was, but good for the times, probably,” adds Gray Weingarten. “The equipment was right out there, on a table behind the piano. And Timme used to tape musicians at these parties at his place. He had this recorder which cut wax with a needle. I remember him taping Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith, for example. I’m not sure the artists were really aware that he was going to sell the stuff, or whether he told them that he would use it to get them jobs in Europe. There could have been all kinds of angles. I know he made money on the tapes, the musicians didn’t.”

  But others who knew Rosenkrantz had a more charitable view of the man. Dan Morgenstern remembers the baron’s love of jazz, his larger-than-life personality. Says jazz writer Chris Albertson, “After World War II, we were roommates in New York for a bit, but he was always disorganized and poor. He was a baron, but he never had any money and people ripped him off. I remember after the war, in Copenhagen, he had this Model T Ford without a heater. His brother would drive it and Timme would emerge from this pile of blankets in the back of the car, with piles of records to sell at the stores.”

  Besides acting as a record “producer,” Rosenkrantz also played the impresario. “I helped him put together guys for this orchestra he wanted to take over to Europe after the war,” recalls Weingarten. “All the musicians on the Street used to go to this bar on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 52nd Street for their break between sets. And there Timme would try to sign them up for his European excursion. He was drunk almost all the time I knew him. But that’s where he got his orchestra together. He was promising them they’d have a great time in Europe, see all the sights and so on. Billy Taylor was the pianist hired, along with Peanuts Holland, Tyree Glenn, and Don Redman as conductor. But when they got over, their luggage was in hock because he hadn’t paid certain fees. I was stuck with this band equipment he’d left me with—and the bill for sending it was a
bout $850, a lot of money then. My mother paid for it. Also, my boyfriend Hugh had left me for a male lover around then. I was just crushed. But then I really hooked up with Inez Cavanaugh and that whole crowd in New York. It was fascinating. And one day, Inez, who knew everybody, was going up to see Mary Lou and I went along because I had a car. Inez said I needed a friend. Well, Mary Lou turned out to be a great friend to me, a confidante. After I’d gotten stuck with Timme’s huge bill, I went up to see Mary Lou and told her what I had done. She told me not to expect any money back from Rosenkrantz and Inez. That was their style and they were pretty slick. She said Inez was a very clever and conniving kind of woman.

  “Most everybody thinks that after The Zodiac Suite was played at Town Hall, that Timme definitely was the one that went backstage and simply asked for the tapes. As if he was an official and entitled to them and supposed to have them,” Weingarten continues. “But nobody saw him do it.” Confirms Chris Albertson, “Timme did put out something of Mary Lou’s, one of her Zodiac pieces [retitled as the “Stars,” “Moon,” “Sunset” and “Sunrise,” on Selmer Records] and he never paid her.”

  Yet the Timme Rosenkrantz–Zodiac connection gets curiouser and curiouser. In a plot line that no self-respecting writer would attempt, he repeated his theft six months later.

  In the winter of 1946, Norman Granz was then at the beginning of a highly successful career as impresario of large-scale concerts called Jazz at the Philharmonic, popularly known as JATP. He approached Mary about performing in an upcoming concert. She was not interested in being one of many in a concert lineup, but she made a counteroffer. “I said, ‘I’ll do a concert if you get me a job playing with the New York Philharmonic symphony orchestra.’ I didn’t realize he was going to do it. I was just talking, you know, because we used to argue a lot when we met.” Granz waffled at first: jazz with the New York Philharmonic, or any symphony orchestra? It had never been done; and it would be expensive to produce, obviously. Finally, he agreed, and worked out a deal with the Carnegie Pops Orchestra, many of whose members also played for the New York Philharmonic. However, Granz told Mary, the concert was hers on condition that she work for minimum scale and pay for copying arrangements for the seventy-piece orchestra herself; also, he insisted, she must include some Café Society material along with the Zodiac. Mary accepted. “Being determined,” as she wrote, “I tried it once again.” There was barely enough time to pull it together. “You talk about being scared!” she wrote. “I was shaking in my boots. I had only eight or nine days to work, and 70 pieces to score for, so I got my old friend, Milton Orent, to help out.”

  Orent collaborated on the orchestrations to two of the three pieces selected, “Sagittarius” and “Aquarius,” but then had to leave town on a job, so Mary was left to complete the scoring for “Scorpio.” “I said, ‘Oh my goodness, I’ll finish them myself.’ He was so surprised. I had never written for a symphony in my life.” For “Scorpio,” she adapted the score she’d arranged for Ellington’s orchestra. Then, only a day or two before the sole rehearsal in June, Mary had “this brilliant idea, this piece of craziness. This was an idea that came on at the last minute. I called Milt. ‘What do you think about having the “paper men” ‘—her term for symphonic players—‘do a jazz thing?’ ‘Don’t do it, Pussycat,’ Milt Orent warned me.” Later that day, when David Stone Martin stopped by to visit, he found Mary seated on the floor with music manuscript spread out all around her, writing furiously. “I’m going to have the New York Philharmonic play a jazz boogie-woogie,” she told him proudly. Martin burst out laughing. “No one knows what you’ll do next.”

  Her decision to program a “boogie woogie” for symphony orchestra was especially dicey; she was intent on getting the classical musical world to take her seriously—as more than a “boogie woogie” pianist. “A lot of blacks felt that it was a derogatory kind of music to them,” comments Gray Weingarten. “Once in 1947, Mary and I went to hear Art Tatum play up in Buffalo at a very fancy club and somebody requested a boogie-woogie. Instead, Art Tatum played a marvelous classical thing, maybe Bach, with an occasional boogie-woogie bass, just a hint of it.” Mary intended to do the same. Anticipating the mixing of strings with jazz by other bop musicians, especially Charlie Parker (who in fact took great interest in what Mary was doing at Carnegie Hall), she scored for unison strings a long bebop line inspired by a Parker solo she’d heard on a record, and instructed them to play it swingingly.

  “It was 6:30 P.M. when I began this piece of craziness,” she wrote in her diary. “I had to write and copy for 100 pieces! I worked all night and went in at one the next afternoon.” David Stone Martin stayed up with her all night, a kind of one-man cheerleading section. Copying music by the hour is grueling work and one can only imagine the shape her hands and finger muscles were in afterwards.

  At the rehearsal the next day, June 21, Mary learned to her dismay that she had been assigned a green young conductor, Ann Kullmer, who “knew nothing about jazz and was frightened by 100 men sitting in front of her. At first, I was afraid to pass out the parts I had written for the Boogie Woogie. But then the manager, Mr. Ripp, was called away to the phone and I said to the musicians, ‘Do this for me.’ ” The result was chaotic. She and Kullmer looked at each other, near panic. “We both at one point were shaking like a dog,” wrote Mary. Mary decided that she would conduct the boogie-woogie herself after simplifying the arrangement: “I quickly changed the intro to a chord, asking Kullmer to start them and count eight beats, then cut out.” Mary led the orchestra from the piano. “After the intro, I played four choruses of a fast boogie and had the four bass men moving on chords and a fifth one doubling on the tonic. After the piano chorus, I had the oboe take a solo I had written. Then, 30-some violins stood and played two choruses, the piano came in once again, then the ensemble, the works, and a piano ending.” With Mary at the helm, laying down those strong, rock-steady rhythms, the musicians relaxed.

  The next day, June 22, she whirled into Carnegie Hall for her performance at the “Spring Finale” of the Carnegie Pops concerts series—sandwiched between soprano Gertrude Ribla and an offering of orchestral excerpts by Gounod, Brahms, and Mendelssohn, under the baton of Herman Neuman. She opened with “Sagittarius,” taking it at a considerably faster pace than at Town Hall and featuring piano rather than flutes and woodwinds. It was a curious choice: at ninety seconds, it was not much more than a fragment, and one of the least developed of the signs. Moreover, the string section sounded confused: clearly, there had not been adequate rehearsal time. But Mary’s next selection (misspelled “Boogie Voogie” in the program) went over better. The strings played the looping bebop line in unison—even with a hint of swing. Mary’s adrenaline was sky high. She’d played a flying piano solo introduction on the boogie-woogie; on “Scorpio,” her next and best selection (save for the horror-movie background effects scored for orchestra), she began her piano introduction with a key-splintering chord, followed by more jazz-paced unison lines for the orchestra. But then “Aquarius” was taken at a near-funereal tempo that only underscored both the static quality of the piece and a hopelessly lost string section. Again Mary rallied, closing her program with a sparkling solo encore of “The Man I Love,” folding bebop phrasing into advanced swing-era technique.

  Mary was sailing high after the concert, writing in her diary that the musicians especially had loved playing the boogie-woogie. “And later I was asked to do more things like this. I collected my music and went home much elated.” But her strong playing could not counterbalance the poor showing of the string section in particular. Like the overly ambitious fisherman’s wife of the Grimms’ fairy tale, who moves from hut to ever-grander abodes until she reaches too far, Zodiac Suite had gone from the simple to the grandiose, only to collapse under the weight of a full orchestra. With enough money, and especially with more rehearsal time, the challenges she’d set herself with Zodiac might well have been met. But it was a case of too little too late. The ad hoc app
roach she had mastered with swing bands wasn’t appropriate for a symphony orchestra.

  Mary had again arranged to have the Carnegie concert taped for an intended recording. Not yet aware that Rosenkrantz had purloined her Town Hall material, she wrote in her journal with unintended irony, “This time I did not forget the sides. I asked Inez Cavanaugh and her husband, the Danish Baron Timme Rosenkrantz, to guard them for me.” And lo! again the acetates mysteriously disappeared. They resurfaced later, if briefly. “Timme Rosenkrantz owed me a lot of money,” says Weingarten, “and gave me a whole bunch of records, his way of paying me back. Mary Lou’s Zodiac at Carnegie Hall, a twelve-inch vinyl record with a radio station’s name printed on it, was among them. And I think I may have the only copy of that record.” Mary discovered that theft at the same time she learned of the previous year’s. “My Carnegie Hall recording was also stolen by Timme Rosenkrantz,” she wrote more than a decade later.

  Mary seldom if ever spoke of that concert again. Uncharacteristically, there were no reviews of the Carnegie effort in her voluminous scrapbooks, only a program. Decades later, Mary’s Zodiac concert at Carnegie had acquired something of a mythic quality, and some even wondered if it had really taken place! But the program and a tape recording made by Weingarten of the twelve-inch vinyl exist to attest to Mary’s daring, if not completely successful, experiment with a symphony orchestra.