Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  DANCERS ESPECIALLY WERE intrigued by the Zodiac Suite in the forties: Katherine Dunham, along with the brilliant choreographer and dancer Talley Beatty, adapted “Scorpio” for a ballet for her company. And Pearl Primus, then a young dancer at Café Society who became a friend of Mary’s, adapted some of the signs for a dance series.

  Nor did Mary forget her suite. “Mary expressed a desire to have the Zodiac played in symphonic form again,” remembers Weingarten, then a student at Syracuse University. “She had all the music and I thought that it would be great to do at Syracuse. So I played my tape for a violinist who put on experimental concerts. He thought it was wonderful. I called Mary Lou and told her he’d love to do it. But she wanted too much money—$2,000, way out of the ballpark for Syracuse at the time.”

  Instead, Mary played portions of the suite at Syracuse with her trio as a benefit for the NAACP. “We had only a few days to put out some pamphlets and publicize it, but it went very well. She played pieces from Zodiac, standards, and her own boogies.” Then, in 1957, after several years of near-complete absence from public performance, Mary played with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band at the Newport Jazz Festival, presenting “Aries,” “Libra,” and “Virgo” in arrangements by trombonist Melba Liston. Later, in 1969, while she was in Rome, Mary played new arrangements of Zodiac pieces over Vatican Radio. And when she returned to the States a few months later, she had still another idea: to rearrange the suite for Thelonious Monk. Nothing, though, came of this intriguing plan.

  THE ZODIAC SUITE had brought her a flurry of critical attention, and within the black community there was intense pride in her accomplishment. Mary’s Carnegie performance, wrote journalist Lorna McDaniel, “completely eroded the whites-only barrier to the Carnegie Hall stage.” But the commissions she’d thought would come her way did not materialize. “One of my greatest ambitions will be realized,” she told an interviewer the next year, “when I am called to present some of my work at a concert with the New York Philharmonic or the Boston Symphony Orchestra.” She soon learned differently. “Even if you had studied for symphonic music, there was no opening for blacks at the time in that field,” she told student musicians later. Although Mary’s life would be crowned by many achievements and honors, she was never invited to appear with the New York Philharmonic or the Boston Symphony.

  After the Carnegie Hall venture, Mary told Barney Josephson she needed some time off from Café Society. She had been working hard for more than twenty years; she now retreated from performing. “After I left the Café, I turned down work that would have paid $400 a week, and was told I should be in a straitjacket,” she noted drily. “Now,” she added privately in her diary, “for a while, I’d take it easy and ball.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Kool

  1944–1947

  “I WAS VERY curious. I asked, ‘What the hell is bebop, Lou?’ ” recalls Johnnie Garry of the style of jazz that was introduced to the perplexity of most listeners of the forties. “She made it easy for you to understand. She was brilliant,” continues Garry. “She said bebop’s really from a German composer named Hindemith. What it is, she said, is every fifth note, you flatten it. And you got a bebop.”

  Controversy between bebop and the established styles of jazz had hardened by the time Mary wrote an essay in 1947 trying to bridge the gap between musicians: “If we are to make progress in modern music or, if you prefer, jazz, we must be willing and able to open our minds to new ideas and developments.… I see no reason there should be a battle in music.… Bop has become a permanent and powerfully important influence on our native music and the originators are gifted, just as the musicians of my era and before.… Musicians are supposed to love each other in order to produce.”

  She was clearly in the minority. In comparison to older styles of jazz, bop was viewed by many as unattractive, with jagged and complex rhythms, far-out chord changes and inversions, utilizing harmonies out of favor in composition for, quite literally, centuries—namely, the interval of the tritone, a.k.a. the flatted fifth.

  Some of the old guard, such as Roy Eldridge and Coleman Hawkins, were receptive to the new sounds, but Mary was among the few established jazz musicians who seized upon bop’s creative potential. She had always favored long melody lines and unexpected punctuation in her big-band writing. Now, at a time when she needed artistic challenge, the new complexities of bop appealed to her greatly. “I was dissatisfied completely with the older music,” she wrote. “I was working at the Café Downtown and I was late so many times that Barney fired me when I went Uptown. I was so happy when he fired me. I said I’d rather be out. I was up there playing real commercial music and skipping notes on classical—the worse you played it the better you’d go over. And I was hanging out on 52nd Street where Billie Holiday was. I heard this music [bop] and it was terrific.”

  Before Mary left regular employment at Café Society altogether, she had done her best to elevate boogie-woogie, all the rage then. “Once you get known as a boogie player, you’ve got to play boogie, boogie all the time,” she complained. “Roll ’Em” and “Little Joe from Chicago” had become classics, but Mary was bored to tears with the style. Still, trying to please the public and herself, she “freshened” the form, with some charming results—notably her “Mary’s Boogie,” “Hesitation Boogie,” and “Boogie Misterioso.” And her “Waltz Boogie” stands as one of her loveliest compositions.

  Experimenting with boogies was fine, but when it came to the radical innovations of bop, Mary knew that she had to tread softly at Café Society Uptown. “Bop was musicians’ music,” she explained. Asked years later if she played it much at Café Society, she laughed, adding, “They’d all go home if I did.” Her dissatisfaction with the Café Society job just grew. “She was looking for places to be musical—not just a piano player,” says Peter O’Brien. By late ’46, she was “balling” as much as performing, but while she was making the rounds, she was absorbing and incorporating the new sounds. “Barney did hire me back,” Mary wrote of late 1946. “He wanted me back and I stayed a short time, but the music was so beautiful it just gave you a sight of a new picture happening in jazz. It had such a beautiful feeling. It didn’t take me very long to get on to it or create in my own way.” By 1947, she was off the Café scene except for occasional stints. Mary had taken a distinctly new direction, and a rebellious one in the eyes of the jazz “establishment.” As writer Eric Lott points out, “We forget how disruptive bebop actually was.” Bop, he reminds us, was far more than technical innovations in music: it was a lightning rod for real and symbolic issues in society. All of the ongoing conflicts in America—racial, class, sexual—impacted on post–World War II America. Bop strongly signified a passionate and relentless velocity, complexity, even superiority—a breathtaking command of the idiom in the hands of the best players, who were African-Americans. The musicians themselves who were experimenting with bop intrigued Mary as well, and she made a point of getting to know them. Though she had an established reputation, especially among musicians, while they were unknowns, Mary was only seven years older than Thelonious Monk, and fourteen years older than Bud Powell.

  ALTHOUGH MARY DIDN’T record full-fledged bop until 1947, there was plenty of evidence earlier of her interest in expanding her musical boundaries. Besides certain forward-looking harmonies she wrote while with the Clouds of Joy, she was using modern harmonies in recordings as early in 1944, and specifically in certain chord changes in The Zodiac Suite, in her arrangements of “Caravan” and “Stardust,” and in her composition “Bobo and Doodles,” which had elements of blues, boogie, and bop, including thirteenths, which were quite modern voicings for that era.

  By 1946, she was clearly immersed in the possibilities of modern jazz harmonies, as shown in her recording of “These Foolish Things,” and the bop-oriented charts she arranged for the house band at Café Society Uptown. “Lonely Moments,” a riff-built swing tune Mary wrote in ’43, was one of her favorites, and she arranged it
with modern harmonies for various combinations and a piano solo. By ’47, she’d written a flat-out bop version for big band (not performed in full until 1994, about fifty years later, at Carnegie Hall, although a “small” big-band version was recorded in ’47) that anticipated in its judicious use of flatted fifths her best-known bop tune, “In the Land of Oo-bla-dee,” written a year later. And there was her excellent “Kool,” based, like so many other bop tunes of the era, on the changes of “I Got Rhythm.” “Kool,” writes scholar Erica Kaplan, contains “an enormous variety of rhythmic figures.… The florid and angular melody line is highly ornamental, utilizing frequent embellishing notes and figures as well as diatonic and whole-tone scale passages. Sharp 11ths, augmented 5ths, 13ths, and raised and lowered 9ths are prominently featured.”

  But for all the influence of Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington’s “ultra modern phrasing” remained Mary’s most important influence. “Even though the Ellington band hasn’t the bop phrasing,” she wrote, “what composer in the jazz field can get a jazz sound out of an oboe or flute? None but Duke.” That she had a strong sense of the historical importance of the forms of black music preceding modern jazz is clear. In November of 1946, she performed with Ethel Waters in an innovative “Concert in Blue” at Cornell University, the music linked to a text prepared by a young Marshall Stearns, who would become the eminent jazz historian. Later, when Mary performed her important “history of jazz” concerts, she drew on Stearns’s writing that traced jazz from slave-era spirituals.

  Mary’s need to communicate her rich musical heritage led her, in the mid-1940s, in another direction: teaching. She attracted many pupils, among them young Eddie Bonnemere, who had won a radio contest with his version of Mary’s “Lonely Moments.” She also turned many away. A flock of Juilliard students approached her in 1946, but of them she wrote, “I kept two out of this group. I felt the others should continue with the classics as they did not have much imagination.”

  MARY HAD recorded certain important new compositions like “Kool” for Moe Asch, who continued to give her complete artistic freedom in her recordings. But she was eager both to record with a major label and to be paid reasonably well for her work, while Moe Asch continued to operate on a shoestring. Yet a lucrative record contract was still only a dim prospect, which may be why she accepted an offer from producer Leonard Feather to record some of her new originals, despite her reluctance. Feather’s plan called for an “all-girl” band, which Mary viewed as a gimmick.

  It was not that she didn’t esteem women musicians. She had many friends and role models among women in jazz—from Lovie Austin to Lil Hardin Armstrong in the twenties; singers like Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday, and the new singer on the block, Sarah Vaughan; piano players such as Bobbie Jones, Julia Lee, Margaret Johnson, Barbara Carroll, and Beryl Booker; trumpet player Dolly Jones; and guitarist Mary Osborne, whom Feather had booked for her date as a leader. But long accustomed as she was to picking top sidemen, Mary chafed under Feather’s insistence that she use June Rotenberg and Bridget O’Flynn on bass and drums, respectively. (She would also play with bassist Bonnie Wetzel and drummer Elaine Leighton.) She did not disparage their musicianship publicly; Mary fought all her musical battles privately, almost never knocking another player to the press. But she was frankly wary about the wisdom of choosing sidemen on the basis of gender. Ironically, when June Rotenberg could not make the first recording session (for Continental Records), Feather didn’t hesitate to substitute a male bassist (Billy Taylor, masquerading as “Bea” Taylor).

  Later in 1946, after the Continental date, Mary made more records with Feather as producer for RCA Victor; though she was booked to play Carnegie Hall also as leader of an all-woman group, opposite Mildred Bailey and her orchestra, there is no record of such a concert.

  Feather thought the combo successful enough to plan further dates (including the Atlanta concert nixed by the Georgia governor because it was a mixed-race group). But Mary bowed out of further commitments with Feather, distressed by what she termed “nasty vibrations” from certain of the musicians. The first recording session had lived up to her fears. “It was the cattiest session I’d ever encountered; the girls talked more music than they played.”

  When Feather managed to persuade her to record with the women again for RCA, “I said to myself, ‘This time I’m going to see if they can think like a male.’ ” But there were “words” between the musicians, scenes in the studio. “This kind of thing upset my entire system and I kept putting future dates off.” Another problem was Mary’s artistic relationship with the producer, who several times imposed “his” tunes on the dates, which incensed Mary. Indeed, many years later she wrote Feather a letter in which she lambasted him for what she called his manipulativeness, coldness, and meanness.

  Two of the most brilliant tunes that Mary recorded with women, either in late ’47 or early ’48, never made it out of the studio until discovered in Mercury’s vaults nearly fifty years later. One was “Just You, Just Me,” in which she reveals a firm command of Monk’s techniques; the other was a modern version of “Mary’s Idea.” They may have been the result of a budding record deal with Mercury, an important label. As Mary later recalled, producer Mitch Miller also wanted to record her around that time, as did John Hammond.

  But no deal materialized with either producer, and Mary continued to be spottily recorded, mostly by minor labels. Still, musicians and critics prized her few offerings during the rest of the decade. To pianist Billy Taylor, who met her in 1945, “Mary Lou Williams was, as usual, far-thinking.” For Gary Giddins, writing in the seventies, “her bop recordings are notable for the absolute avoidance of clichés.”

  FROM THE TIME Mary settled in New York, in the early forties, she liked to drop by Minton’s Playhouse on 118th Street. Minton’s, a new club on the renovated ground floor of Cecil’s Hotel, played a big part in the beginnings of bop, as did Clark Monroe’s Uptown House, where younger musicians who had not yet made their mark formed the core of regulars. Thelonious Monk was the house pianist at Minton’s, and Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Kenny Clarke were constantly in attendance, working out complex harmonies. “We all used to hang out at Minton’s,” Mary told Phil Schaap. “I’d go there practically every night and hang out. I only sat in once, very short, I was there listening to sounds, it was something new to me, I was absorbing it. It was the new way of playing—never heard before.”

  Minton’s Playhouse was not too large a place—“intimate,” she described it. “The bar was at the front and the cabaret in the back, and the bandstand was in the rear of the back room, with a strange painting that covered the entire wall at the back, with weird characters sitting on a brass bed, some jamming, some talking to chicks and one chick lying across the bed. I always thought the painting was out of place. During the day characters played the jukebox and danced. I used to visit frequently during the day and got a lot of laughs. One big family on 118th Street, that’s how we were. The club was run by Teddy Hill, who was the manager, a bandleader at one time.

  “All the bop musicians were jamming or playing there because there was no work for them on 52nd Street,” continued Mary. “Nobody understood what they were playing. I lost the friendship of a lot of older musicians by hanging out with the young musicians. When bop came along they felt that it was so strange that it wasn’t right, it wasn’t good. You know, you always have that dissension. They didn’t understand: it was so far out.”

  But soon the creative explosion drew other musicians, some of them inspired innovators, others talented consolidators, white as well as black. As in every art, there were also poseurs of hip, imitators who were happy to coopt the ideas of others and make money off them.” ‘Leeches’ would scribble music on their cuffs at Minton’s, stealing it, and even our own guys, I’m afraid, did not give Monk the credit he had coming,” Mary wrote.

  The “big family” at Minton’s, however, did not provide the same camar
aderie for Mary as the Kansas City scene had. Her success, her age, and, to a certain extent, her gender—all were barriers, despite her assertions to the contrary. Her male colleagues respected her as an equal professionally, but trumpeter Howard McGhee, then just coming along, may have been speaking for many when he said: “When a woman is on the scene, it’s different. Even with the grandmother of all the lady musicians, jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, you really have to be extra respectful. She expects it. So if you hire women, it’s just going to mean hassles.”

  The most profound division, however, between Mary and many of the bop musicians was not age or gender or style of playing, but their use of heroin. “It must have really hurt her, when heroin came in and she saw so many people destroyed,” remarks Peter O’Brien. “She never said anything but it must have taken a toll.” Marijuana was different; she, like Louis Armstrong (who smoked it every day, which Mary did not), found it calming, useful for reflecting and relaxing at times. Ironically, given the epidemic of hard drugs at the time, Barney Josephson actually fired her for smoking pot one night at Café Uptown. (He had forbidden the use of drugs of any kind in the clubs). “I was set up,” she wrote, “by a jealous ‘big name’ musician. I protested to Barney and he relented.” But little did Josephson know, as he shuttled between his Downtown and Uptown clubs, that in Doc Cheatham’s words, “Everybody in that group smoked pot. They had a little room off the bandstand and some, including Mary Lou and Billie, would smoke pot in there. They would put me outside the door in a chair smoking a pipe that would cover the fumes of the pot.” Mary and Doc Cheatham often shared a cab home after the gig to the apartment building they both lived in. Cheatham said, “We would come home together. She would light up. One time she said, ‘Take one.’ I said, ‘Man, I don’t want to smoke.’ She said, ‘Take one.’ So I took a little and blew all the smoke out. She said, ‘Don’t you waste that!’ ” He added elsewhere, ruefully, “She never did invite me to those after-hours they had, like with Billie Holiday.”