Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  Of course, Monk and Powell had a direct influence on Mary’s approach to music. But Mary was an influence on Monk as well as on Powell, too. “In the forties,” notes Whitney Balliett of Mary’s evolving style, “she advanced certain dissonant chords that became part of Thelonious Monk’s permanent furniture.” Direct evidence of her influence on Monk is apparent in several compositions: in his “52nd Street Theme,” particularly the bass line, which is straight out of Mary’s “Scorpio”; in Monk’s “Hackensack,” which refers to Mary’s 1944 arrangement of “Lady Be Good”; and in his “Rhythm-a-ning,” based on the second chorus of her “Walkin’ and Swingin’.”

  In the case of Bud Powell, Mary noted that he “took some licks of mine” for his “Un Poco Loco.” She was not apparently bothered by such borrowing because the musicians were her close friends; indeed, she saw it as a compliment, as when she herself retailored Monk’s “ ‘Round Midnight,” a composition she loved. Her version of Monk’s tune, recorded in 1955, was called “I Love Him,” a title intended to make clear that she was throwing a musical bouquet to Monk by reworking an admired tune.

  Many musical “borrowings” belong to the “imitation as flattery” school, or they are the innocent, unconscious applications of others’ ideas. Others are not imitations at all, but deliberate “lifts”—a polite word for theft. Such thievery occurred many times over with Mary’s compositions, and as Peter O’Brien notes, “She was angry—angry at not being given credit for what she actually did.” In the forties, as Mary often told friends like Marsha Vick, “Musicians used to come and sit beside me because they’d hear during a set maybe a couple of new things that they could use.” Explains Billy Taylor, “She was in a very fertile period then, writing a lot for all of them and people just took the music and somebody else’s name got on it.” Examples? Coleman Hawkins recorded Mary’s hip arrangement on the changes of “Lady Be Good,” a session she recorded for Asch with Hawkins, calling it “Rifftide”—which Monk later did as “Hackensack.” The same disguised “Lady Be Good” was recorded by trumpeter Fats Navarro as “Fats Blows.” Also, as noted above, the second chorus from Mary’s “Walkin’ and Swingin’ ” was adapted by Monk in his tune “Rhythm-a-ning.” Then pianist Al Haig used Monk’s version in his own “Opus Caprice”; and two years later it reappeared in Sonny Stitt’s nearly identical “Symphony Hall Swing.” There are undoubtedly other borrowings. The important thing, as the writer Ira Gitler emphasizes, is this: “Nowhere does Mary Lou receive credit of any kind.” Of course, many creative jazz musicians have been dealt similar bad hands. But it was the repetition of uncredited borrowings over the years, the piling up of incident upon incident in Mary’s case, that was a big factor in her eventual loss of heart over the whole business of jazz for a long time.

  ONCE, AND PERHAPS only once, Mary played with both Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk at a concert—but the occasion of three of the greatest jazz pianists playing together was just another shabby gig. “Someone booked the three of us at a concert in Philadelphia. Real pitiful—we played in the Elks clubhouse. Stan Getz and Red Rodney and group were booked in the adjoining room. It cost me money, for Monk as usual was without even train fare and I had to sponsor the trip. At the concert someone slipped Bud a few drinks and he really clowned after this. Poor Bud’s mother was with him, trying to keep him from going overboard. I felt sorry for her, she was a kind mother. But I never laughed so much. Even the audience laughed: Bud would sit and stare at everyone, then play 24 bars of the Minute Waltz, stop and sit.”

  It was Monk, Mary wrote, who asked her in 1944 to participate in a project for all three pianists. “I had Monk write one that he later recorded as ‘Criss-cross’ with a small combo,” Mary said. Powell’s contribution was probably what Mary later termed “a solo on ‘Cherokee’ ” and Mary’s contribution was a new arrangement of “Scorpio” for three pianos. “I arranged Monk’s part so that it would be more or less in his style. And Bud Powell’s was quite different and my part was my style. It was really quite wonderful—the three of us were working on one piano, six hands. But our rehearsal turned out to be funny. Monk was reaching over Bud’s shoulder to play his chords and Bud turning around, giving Monk a mean look. This rehearsing every day on one piano in my apartment went on for some time until I got sick of it. And before I could get the idea done, I had to go away. Anyway, it was just an experiment.”

  Monk’s musical ideas and approach exerted a powerful influence on Mary, and they remained friendly until the last phase of his life, when, his personality damaged by his addictions and mental instability, he withdrew from society almost totally. Peter O’Brien recalls that in the early 1970s, as a new young priest (and Mary’s manager), he visited Monk’s dressing room with Mary. “Monk was in the dressing room and he went into the bathroom. He was nodding when he came out and Mary just sat there. She didn’t bat an eye. All I saw was a little flicker of sadness in her face, but she knew how to deal with that, she just stayed right there. That was early on in my exposure to these things.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Benny’s Bop

  1948

  IN THE SUMMER of 1948, Mary took a step that surprised many in the jazz world, joining Benny Goodman’s recently formed combo. She knew firsthand of Goodman’s reputation for being hard on musicians, and had turned down an offer, nine years earlier, to replace Teddy Wilson when Wilson left Goodman’s combo. But since then, Goodman had broken up his big band, forming a new group to feature modern jazz; and this development much intrigued Mary, who was eager to write more bop charts (and be paid the kind of fees she had received occasionally in the thirties for her work for the established big bands).

  The crusty Goodman had something of a soft spot for Mary—no surprise, since in the thirties she had given him a hit with “Roll ’Em.” Also, years before she had recommended a fantastic but unknown guitarist named Charlie Christian to Goodman’s then manager, John Hammond, who was stunned by Christian’s virtuosity and immediately wanted him for the Goodman ensemble. Then Mary, who was a friend, talked Christian into leaving his safe surroundings for the wide white world of fame in music. But Goodman was reluctant to hire a black guitarist. “John Hammond said, ‘Benny didn’t want to start no revolution,’ ” related Delilah Jackson, a historian of black entertainment who knew Hammond. “Benny told him, ‘It’s not me; it’s the guys. All this business of black and white guys upsets the band. And Roseland [the Manhattan ballroom] don’t want you to bring black guys in.’ Eventually, Mary told me, Hammond just sprung Christian on the band.”

  Once Goodman heard Christian play, it was a done deal. For the brief period of 1939 to 1941, when Christian was with Goodman’s sextet, the group was wildly popular, Christian’s creativity and lyrical playing adding invaluable luster. Christian spun out beautifully improvised patterns that grew titles like “Gone with What Wind,” “Air Mail Special,” “Flying Home,” “Seven Come Eleven.” “But after he had been with Benny Goodman a while,” Delilah Jackson relates, “he says to Mary, ‘You got to stop him! Benny Goodman’s stealing everything I do. One night I play a riff, and it’s my riff, and the next night he’s got it in his licks. This has been going on ever since I been there.’ Well, Mary said she spoke to Benny Goodman and told him that Charlie had been doing these musical things since he’s a kid in Oklahoma.”

  When Mary and Christian were not on the road with their respective bands in 1939–41, they would get together to jam in the basement of the Dewey Square Hotel, which had a piano. “Charlie and I used to play and write all night long. I still have the music—16 bars—of a song he started but never completed,” Mary said. Benny Goodman once stopped by and was charmed by a musical side of Christian he hadn’t known existed. “Charlie played the classics, lovely things such as ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ ” wrote Mary.

  But the young guitarist was ill. Mary had already lost several friends to tuberculosis, mostly recently the brilliant saxophonist Dick Wilson. Charlie Christian was to follo
w, collapsing during a tour at the end of 1941. Back in New York, he ended up in Seaview Hospital, a city-run sanatorium notorious among the poor for its indifferent care. There, Christian lingered until March of 1942, with Count Basie paying his doctor to visit him weekly, while Goodman, as John Hammond pointedly mentions in his autobiography, did not even find the time to visit Christian at his sickbed. Charlie Christian was just twenty-five when he died.

  IN 1946, BENNY GOODMAN recorded as air checks both “Lonely Moments” and Mary’s jaunty, riff-tiered “Whistle Blues” (also called “Whistling Blues”). Goodman had recently settled in Los Angeles, broken up his big band, and switched from Columbia to the more pop-oriented Capitol Records. “Lonely Moments” is the superior tune, building to a bravura finale, and Goodman’s recording of it, according to a Goodman discographer, was a signal “that Benny is building a new book for the band, that it will be oriented toward ‘bop.’ ”

  However, Benny Goodman had serious reservations about bop. He complained to George Simon that it “jarred his ear. Everybody is trying to see just how much he can put in it. It’s nervous more than exciting music. If some of them would just try to simplify their arrangements and solos, they’d come off much better.… And as for some of those chords they’re using, they’re just pretentious tripe.” Mary was among the few with whom Goodman felt secure venturing into the new musical territory. But it was not a smooth transition, even with her. On “Lonely Moments,” says biographer Ross Firestone, “Benny had scoffed ‘Oh, bebop!’ when Mary Lou first showed him the chart and insisted she simplify some of the more harmonically complex passages.” Adds another Goodman expert, James L. Collier, “Eventually Williams persuaded Goodman to use it by telling him to play the blues on his solo. Goodman, however, as he frequently did, tinkered with the arrangement, in particular removing the flatted fifths.” Still, the performance was deemed a critical success, fresher and more adventurous than anything Benny had tried in some time.

  AS GOODMAN WAS casting around for more modern-sounding material he liked, he happened to hear a superb young tenor saxophonist. Wardell Gray’s smooth blending of the styles of Lester Young and Charlie Parker appealed to Goodman, and he offered him a job. Then Goodman heard the young Swedish clarinetist Ake “Stan” Hasselgard, who also straddled swing and bop. Hasselgard had an easy charm and the ability to laugh off Goodman’s often grating eccentricities; more important, he served as a kind of bridge between earlier and current clarinet styles. Goodman took the unusual step of hiring Hasselgard as second clarinet in his new group, and brought Gray and Hasselgard back east in the spring of 1948. There, he assembled a rhythm section sympathetic to bop: Billy Bauer on guitar (later replaced by Mundell Lowe), Arnold Fishkind on bass (replaced by Clyde Lombardi), and Mel Zelnick on drums, as well as a very young Patti Page, the first of several vocalists to pass through that band. Other brief sojourners were the trumpeters Red Rodney, Fats Navarro, and Doug Mettome. A reluctant Teddy Wilson had been persuaded to rejoin Goodman on piano.

  Although lack of ticket sales forced a Carnegie Hall concert for the band to be canceled, Goodman remained optimistic about his bop group’s future. In May 1948, they were booked for much of the month at the big, popular Click Club Restaurant in Philadelphia. For the new band book, Goodman commissioned Mary to be one of his principal arrangers, also using material by Mel Powell, Eddie Sauter, Shorty Rogers, and others.

  Radio broadcasts, recorded off the air and later released as bootleg records, give invaluable evidence of the fresh new sound of a band that was almost entirely unrecorded. Although Mary was not yet in the band in May, many of her arrangements were played. Among them was a favorite of Goodman’s, “Mary’s Idea,” (a.k.a. “Just an Idea”), one of Mary’s first compositions, and one which she had continued to refashion to fit the ways jazz had evolved since 1930. By 1948, “Mary’s Idea” was clothed in long, sinuous lines, more complex riffs, and tightly voiced ensemble passages. She also contributed, among others, hip new versions of “Bye Bye Blues,” “Blue Views,” and an excellent “There’s a Small Hotel.” But despite their quality and Mary’s established standing as an arranger, Goodman paid her, she said, only $10 an arrangement, promising her more as the band became successful. Mary fumed in private. (Like most musicians, she had her stories about the bandleader’s tightfistedness. After calling rehearsals that would last into the wee hours of the morning, she said, Goodman expected his band members to pay for their own taxis home.)

  From the start, there were problems attracting an audience with the Goodman bop band. Younger people especially liked what they heard, but the legions of die-hard swing-era Benny Goodman fans—his bread and butter—wanted no part of bop, not even a bop as polished as it was in his repertoire. The Click Club tried to renegotiate its fee with Goodman in mid-May, but Goodman resisted. He was determined to hold on until he got back to New York, where he had big plans: he wanted to book the group for a whole summer of dance concerts, as soon as the ban was lifted, and make some records. Teddy Wilson, tired of road life and Benny Goodman, gave notice when the Click Club date ended, and Goodman immediately got in touch with Mary, offering her the job. After some hesitation, Mary consented, swayed when she heard Goodman’s plans to record her arrangements for Capitol in the fall. She still had no major recording contract and knew she’d get valuable exposure through Goodman.

  “The first two nights Benny used bass, drums, piano and clarinet,” Mary wrote about the new band’s initial performances in early June. “We had quite a ball and sounded very good. After this we played weekends with the Sextet.” For his part, Benny Goodman was, as he told George Simon, “of course, very enthusiastic about Mary Lou, about her writing and about her playing.”

  The weekend job was an innovative experiment for the times—not just musically but socially. Promoted and financially backed in part by Goodman himself, the combo played its first weekend concert on June 26th at the huge Westchester County Center in White Plains, and was broadcast over radio station WNEW as “The Benny Goodman Show.” The County Center could accommodate thousands and as BG himself said on the air, it was “just a block from the train station at White Plains—the cost only $1.25, and soft drinks only.” Goodman apparently envisioned the teenagers of New York and its suburbs flocking to the County Center all summer to hear a different band on Friday nights, and his own group on Saturday nights.

  The gamble didn’t pay off. Nor, it seems, was it the music alone that kept the fans away. The County Center backed a mixed race policy, which Goodman, to his credit, supported fully as the leader of his combo, but it was a highly controversial policy, as George Simon pointed out in Metronome later that summer. It was one thing for an integrated Café Society to cater to a sophisticated New York crowd of blacks and whites; but the White Plains venture catered to the white masses. It would, after all, be some twenty years before Martin Luther King, Jr., was to galvanize the civil rights movement in America, so after just three weekends, Goodman canceled the rest of the summer engagement at the Center.

  THOUGH BENNY GOODMAN continued to waffle about the merits of bop, the little he and his combo managed to record is extremely well rehearsed, well thought out, and listenable: two WNEW air checks from the Westchester County Center, two V-discs, and some material recorded during rehearsals in September 1948 for a Capitol album that was not released. That there is any music on record is serendipity: there was another recording ban at the time, extending from January 1948 until early in 1949. There were still, however, those government-issued V-discs, and radio broadcast transcriptions for the AFRS (Armed Forces Radio Service), which had begun during the war. Bootleg records also cropped up later.

  The County Center broadcasts featured Goodman, Mary, Stan Hasselgard, Wardell Gray, Red Rodney on trumpet, and the rhythm section of Billy Bauer on guitar, Clyde Lombardi on bass, and Mel Zelnick on drums, as well as several young male and female vocalists who mostly faded from sight afterwards. (Bop singer Babs Gonzales, a friend of Mary’s,
turned up for one set but wasn’t recorded.) In an attempt to please both his swing fans and the younger crowd he wanted to attract, Goodman’s repertoire ranged from swing-style arrangements like “Back Home in Indiana” to bop favorites like “Swedish Pastry.” The air checks of the band make clear that he was most at ease with the swing material, but to his (and Mary’s) credit, her arrangements of tunes like “Mary’s Idea” made Goodman sound as comfortable as one could imagine him sounding playing flatted fifths and ninths.

  He had little reason to feel optimistic about his bop plans after the failure of the County Center dates, but Goodman pressed on. While unsure about the music itself—as George Simon put it, Goodman “blows hot and cold”—he did want to make lots of records with the group, and he planned to expand it into a new big band that he would take out on a concert tour. For this, as he told jazz writers, he would need more arrangers to “supplement manuscripts by Mary Lou and Mel Powell.” (He did go on to build a basic bop band book, with new charts by Chico O’Farrill and others, and more by Mary as well.)

  In the summer of ’48, the bop combo found itself without a gig. However, they kept busy rehearsing and made two V-discs in New York in July, including an old Goodman standby, “Stealin’ Apples,” wittily updated by Mary. (This material is now available on compact discs.)

  The group (Benny Goodman, Wardell Gray, Clyde Lombardi, Mel Zelnick, and an unidentified pianist who was actually Mary) recorded Mary’s reworking of “Limehouse Blues,” calling it “Benny’s Bop.” With its complex and tricky unison lines, the writing reminded bop critics of Lennie Tristano, a pianist whom Mary much admired at the time (it was a short-lived musical infatuation). “Benny’s Bop” was exactly that: a challenging bop tune written for Goodman to take flight.