Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  Singer Ada Moore, a sometime collaborator, contributed a witty but rather unwieldy lyric for “The Devil”; Mary fared much better on St. Martin’s lyric, pressing a reluctant Father Woods into service with his pen. Mary tapped and hummed the melody and Woods came up with this:

  St. Martin de Porres,

  His shepherd staff a dusty broom.

  St. Martin de Porres,

  The poor man made a shrine of his tomb.

  St. Martin de Porres,

  He gentled creatures tame and wild.

  St. Martin de Porres,

  He sheltered each unwanted child.

  O Black Christ of the Andes

  Come feed and cure us

  While we pray.

  A WEEK AFTER the church concert debut on November 11, 1962, Mary presented St. Martin, “The Devil,” and several other new compositions at New York’s Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center as part of a program she called “New Concepts in Jazz.” On the bill with Mary was Dizzy Gillespie and his twenty-five-piece orchestra, also the Argentine jazz-influenced composer and pianist Lalo Schifrin.

  Reaction to St. Martin in performance was mixed, and although Mary had appealed to her lists of friends and patrons to attend the concert, with proceeds to be shared between the Bel Canto Foundation and St. Francis Xavier’s arts programs, the concert failed to turn a profit. Although a few critics praised St. Martin, and Mary herself as a perennial pioneer in her writing, others were not so kind. One declared that “St. Martin was neither fish nor fowl,” not “good liturgical music nor good jazz and certainly not a possible fusion of the two,” just a “hokey prayer.” A French critic, Jean Delmond, very much the French philosopher, agreed, saying that St. Martin, although “imbued with the spirit of the blues” was a denatured composition, a “blues stripped of its accent.” Even the New York Times critic, John S. Wilson, soon to become a great and stalwart admirer of Mary’s music, was lukewarm about St. Martin and “The Devil” in concert. Mary’s pieces, he thought, were “neatly turned little cameos, each pleasant in itself but even in sum they did not achieve compelling interest.”

  Mary responded defensively, remarking that “one must listen attentively.” She had big plans for both the music and the saint, telling the press that singing star Johnny Mathis was planning to make a movie about Saint Martin de Porres, with her music supplying the soundtrack, another project that did not get off the ground. But after 1964, she dropped the piece from her repertoire. Peter O’Brien, who met her in that year and heard her play countless times, cannot remember a single performance of St. Martin, recalling that she told him in the late sixties that “Martin de Porres likes to stay hidden; he don’t like too much publicity.” Mary would have been well pleased, though, about the little side chapel dedicated to Saint Martin at St. Francis Xavier after her death. The chapel contains a dark-hued wood statue of the black saint.

  THROUGH WOODS AND other friends at the St. Thomas More Society, Mary met some of the most interesting radical Catholics of her day. One, well-to-do, somewhat reclusive Janet Burwash, helped to finance Mary’s next important concert, in 1967, and helped support her as she concentrated on both writing and performing a jazz mass. Burwash belonged to the influential peace movement, first known in America as Pax Christi, which worked for civil rights of African-Americans and an end to the war in Vietnam. Through Pax, organized in part by the radical Catholic Eileen Egan, Mary met Dorothy Day, the cofounder and voice of the Catholic Worker movement—and at this writing reportedly under consideration for canonization as a saint. Like Woods, Crowley, and other priests and Catholic activists Mary befriended, Day supported Mary in her desire to compose a jazz mass, and Mary performed several times at Tivoli, the farm worked by the Catholic Worker cooperative in the Hudson Valley, near Bard College.

  AROUND 1961, AFTER Mary had finished composing St. Martin de Porres, she began what was to become a long on-again, off-again engagement at Wells Supper Club in Harlem. The club was named for its owner, entrepreneur Joe Wells, a great admirer of Mary’s talent. But he was struggling financially in the early sixties. He had just opened his restaurant, and business was so poor in ’61 that he thought he might have to close it. Mary, needing money to fund Bel Canto’s latest endeavors, offered Wells a deal: she and a rhythm section would play for expenses only. The clear benefit to Wells was that her presence would lend class to the room and bring in the spenders. In turn, he would bankroll her recordings.

  Gérard Pochonet, by then married and living in New York, played drums for several stints at Wells’s club. “The music was excellent, great—half her tunes, half standards. Her style was still her style to me,” Pochonet recalls. “But Wells was a cheap guy.” According to Mary’s agreement with Wells, in addition to performing for expenses only she promised to give him 15 percent of the sales generated from her new records; later amendments of the agreement gave Wells 50 percent of the royalties.

  What did Mary actually get from this deal? Between ’62 and ’63, she put together enough material in the studio for both an EP (extended play) of eight tunes and a complete LP, Mary Lou Williams Presents St. Martin de Porres, a venture probably funded in total by Wells. Cover art for the LP was donated by David Stone Martin, who produced a supremely apt illustration of hands at once praying and flexed, as if for playing the piano—the whole in pink, Mary’s favorite color. For the EP, Mary turned to Alisa Mandel, a Greenwich Village artist and fellow St. Thomas More Society member. Born in Czechoslovakia, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, Mandel provided a line portrait drawing of Mary. For inexpensive manufacturing of the vinyl itself, she turned to Moe Asch. “He was pressing the records so badly that they wore out after three or four plays,” says Pochonet. “But she didn’t pay any attention to it. I told her, but that was the way she was.”

  The LP featured Mary playing in three different combinations: with bassist Percy Heath; with saxophonist Budd Johnson; and with gospel singer Jimmy Mitchell. Besides St. Martin, there was Mary’s modern gospel piece “Anima Christi” and “Praise the Lord,” set to Psalm 150 (both arranged and conducted by Melba Liston), as well as Mary’s tribute to recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy, the beautiful “Dirge Blues”; and “A Fungus Amungus,” a critique of the jazz avant-garde whose tartly humorous title derived from a story Lorraine Gillespie told about a frustrated preacher who was heckled until he shouted, ‘Everybody stand up! There’s a fungus among us!”

  Despite the mixed reception of the original concert version of St. Martin de Porres, reviews of the album (Mary Lou Williams Presents …) were good. One critic said the record marked “the triumphant return of a major talent to jazz,” and when it was later distributed in Europe, Mary was awarded both the Prix Mondial du Disque de Jazz from the Hot Club of France and the Grand Prix Académie du Disque Français in 1968.

  Despite her avowal in the liner notes that “10 percent of the proceeds from this album will be used for the rehabilitation of sick musicians,” sales were disappointing and there were no profits. Indeed, this first of her several self-produced albums turned out to be another of what Peter O’Brien calls her “more grandiose dreams,” and Mary was once again in financial straits. At Father Woods’s urging, Mary finally agreed to an engagement at the Hickory House beginning in January 1964. It was a well-paying job with plenty of exposure. Booked to play a month, with indefinite two-week extensions, Mary ended up playing at the club for well over a year.

  Again, the club date was billed as Mary’s latest “comeback,” leading to TV spots on both the “Today” and “Tonight” shows and a planned weekly half-hour radio show on WABC. Time magazine, which in 1957 had run a story about Mary’s “comeback,” ran another in 1964 in which Mary said prophetically, “I haven’t had that feeling of wanting to give up—I think this time that I’m out here to stay.” Whitney Balliett’s in-depth interview for The New Yorker that year also helped reestablish her presence.

  Back in 1957, Mary would stew in silence or vent her frustration in
her diary when a sideman displeased her. At the Hickory House in 1964, she was far less reserved and showed a sterner side, establishing a reputation among bass players as a strict leader. “It was terrible being on a job with her if the bass player wasn’t right—nothing would satisfy her,” says Peter O’Brien, who counted eighteen bass players come and go during the lengthy Hickory House engagement. Explains bassist-vocalist Carline Ray, “She would get angry at the kind of bass players who liked to play up near the top of the fingerboard, who wouldn’t let her have her space. She liked a bass player who would play down in the lower reaches of the instrument and lay down a nice musical swinging cushion and let her do her thing—in other words, stay out of her way.” Famously, Mary not only fired bassist Richard Davis at the Hickory House, but told Balliett, “I’d like to nail his foot to the floor; play them changes, man.” Says Marian McPartland, who knew her well, “On the bandstand Mary was demanding and intolerant, but also like a mother, praising the good.” If the rhythm section was not “together,” Mary told Marian, she would stop playing and let them play by themselves, rejoining them when they were “tight” again. And if they couldn’t get it together, she said she’d “play chimes,” because, she explained, “you’ve got to bring a section together to let them hear themselves. But if after this they still don’t make it, then I’ll start cussing!” As pianist Billy Taylor sums up Mary’s professionalism, “She was looking for perfection in playing mates.” From the sixties on, she worked mostly with bassists Larry Gales, Bob Cranshaw, Milton Suggs, Brian Torff, and Ronnie Boykins. Probably her most satisfying collaboration was with Buster Williams.

  “Bass is important to me,” she explained to Billy Taylor. “I don’t play any of the bass notes at all when I’m playing.… Today, if I don’t get a giant, well, he doesn’t hear it, ’cause the kids can’t hear the bottom of the chord. Often with the bassist I get hung up and have to get out of it.”

  “We’ve got to think together,” she insisted elsewhere. “You can’t think separately when you’re in jazz, even when one goes out free. There’s got to be a hitch-up of the minds, like mental telepathy. They say I’m difficult to play with. I don’t know.”

  Although at the Hickory House Mary had found a steady income at last, she was more interested in raising money for Bel Canto Foundation projects. After the first thrift shop failed, she considered running a tea shop in a bookshop that Joyce Breach had opened in 1965 in prosperous Bronxville. She would play piano for the “old Mary Lou fan club,” she mused, who would presumably make the trek from Manhattan to hear her during tea, and buy books. Nothing came of that, nor did halfhearted plans to earn money from trimming hats with fur or making beaded bags.

  However much in debt she remained (and she was also still half-supporting relatives), Mary’s image in the black community remained lustrous. When she proposed taking Breach nightclubbing around Harlem, her Greenwich-born friend objected: “But I’m so white white.” To which Mary replied, “Yeah, but you’re with Mary Lou Williams.” On one such evening, Breach recalls, Mary took her to hear Sarah Vaughan. “A long line waited to enter the nightclub but Mary just swept in, saying, ‘Mary Lou Williams waits for no one.’ And once we were inside, they found a table and very happily squeezed us in.”

  The honorable and reasonable way to raise money, Mary decided, was to seek work through the Catholic Church. Although her letters suggesting concert dates at Catholic college campuses had not yet borne fruit, Mary prevailed on Father Woods to introduce her to Bishop (later Cardinal) John J. Wright of Pittsburgh, an influential clergyman. She hoped he would fund jazz education in the schools.

  Their meeting was productive. Bishop Wright steered her toward the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), which sponsored programs in music and art for young people in poor neighborhoods, but he hesitated at Mary’s request to fund her mission to write jazz music for the Church. Jazz, he responded, had an unsavory reputation: it was associated with drugs and dropouts. Her reply was vintage Mary. “I said, ‘No, that’s not so. It is this commercial rock that has caused havoc in that area.’ I ran it down for him!”

  She was persuasive enough to win Wright’s backing to organize a jazz festival in Pittsburgh for 1964. Mary loved “firsts,” and this was a triple play: the first time that an African-American woman produced a jazz festival, the first time that sacred music was commissioned for a jazz festival, and the first time that the Catholic Church was involved in running a jazz festival. The Pittsburgh Jazz Festival was to be a charitable event, with any profits (over and above the initial outlay of “$25,000 or $50,000,” as Mary vaguely remembered) going to fund CYO projects.

  Putting together a program proved more difficult than expected. Soon veteran George Wein, who had been producing the Newport Jazz Festival since the later 1950s, was brought in. (Mary never said anything negative about Wein for publication, but privately she told a story that revealed her resentment. “She said Ben Webster went after George Wein with a saxophone at a rehearsal at the Pittsburgh Festival,” remembers Peter O’Brien, “when Wein said Dave Brubeck had done more for jazz than anybody. Ben Webster had to be restrained. Wein, he liked to keep them humble.”)

  FOR THE FIRST Pittsburgh Jazz Festival, held June 19–20, 1964, at the Civic Arena, Mary and Wein gathered top jazz talent. For m.c.’s there were Willis Conover, the famous disc jockey for Radio Free Europe; Duke Ellington’s son, Mercer; and Father Norman J. O’Connor. Among the musicians she hired were Harold Baker, Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers, Bud Freeman, Thelonious Monk, Jimmy Smith, Ben Webster, Melba Liston, Sarah Vaughan, Dave Brubeck, and Joe Williams.

  Much of Mary’s work was featured during the two-day event, in a trio setting and by a twenty-five-piece band playing Liston’s arrangements of Mary’s recent compositions, including St. Martin de Porres and “Praise the Lord.” Mary had approached choreographer Alvin Ailey about setting St. Martin to dance, but when Ailey was not available, the Bernice Johnson Dancers—the choreographer was saxophonist Budd Johnson’s wife—performed it along with “Praise the Lord.” (A decade later, however, Mary did work with Ailey.)

  With good reviews and an enthusiastic crowd, the concert appeared in every sense to have been a success. Mary happily told a local newspaperman, “It’s like Father Woods said. I do seem to be helping people. They kind of hear what I’m telling them through my music. The sounds reach out and touch you.” But when the dust settled, there was only a paltry $1,000 profit.

  Mary was undeterred, ignoring certain rumblings about overreaching herself, and produced a festival the following year with an even more ambitious lineup—Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Carmen McRae, Earl Hines, John Coltrane, Billy Taylor, and Woody Herman. Reviewers were even more enthusiastic about Mary’s solos and trio work in the 1965 festival. “Miss Williams has a pair of brilliant solos that ride along exultantly on her strong, driving attack,” one noted. With Larry Gales on bass and Ben Riley on drums that year, she played one of her favorites, the Denzil Best composition “45 Degree Angle,” as well as her own “Joycie” (for Breach).

  But the 1965 Pittsburgh Jazz Festival was also a financial disappointment. The CYO director, a Father Michael Williams, whom Mary referred to in one letter as “that priest that was mean to me,” eased her out entirely, made George Wein sole producer, and decided to include popular and folk music—heresy!—in subsequent festivals. (The festival limped along for a few more years before expiring, to be resurrected some years later as a popular summer feature in Pittsburgh.)

  THREADING THROUGH MARY’S life in the sixties was her continued relationship with her troubled family, a constant shadow and worry. “She had these nephews she part-raised,” says her old friend Bernice Daniels. “One was her sister’s boy, Robbie, another was her niece’s, Clifford, up in the Bronx.” Grace was attempting to stay sober, after bouncing in and out of dry-out centers. So also was Virginia Burley, who had cancer. Wrote a penniless Grace in her ap
plication for aid to dependent children in July of 1963, “Mom gave up wine and hooch since they found these things in her.” Getting on welfare regularized Grace’s life to some extent, but her privations were great. Mary gave what she could, but after 1963 she felt she also had to give to others in need, particularly musicians (such as her ailing husband, Harold Baker, and a now-flat Hazel Scott in Paris, to whom she wired money), as well as giving a huge amount (when measured against her income) to various Catholic charities. At times, Mary simply had nothing left to give. Where Grace and her family were concerned, she tried to shift the responsibility—if not to Grace herself, then to the New York City Department of Welfare. After school started that fall, for example, Mary went to battle with the Welfare Department on behalf of little Robbie, and won. Her eight-year-old nephew, she wrote, had no coat, no boots, not even a proper pair of shoes; they must buy him some. She also persuaded Ellington’s personal physician, Dr. Arthur Logan, to write the Welfare Department, citing the medical necessity of having a telephone at Grace’s apartment. When Robbie had his “sick attacks,” Mary explained unmedically, he had to be rushed to the emergency room.

  Although Robbie Mickles was the closest thing to a son she’d ever known, she could not care for him full-time; that should have been Grace’s job. “Anyway, [Mary] would have been incapable of raising him or adopting him in a conventional way, say in Westchester or Long Island,” explains O’Brien. “She was not capable of giving up who she was, of giving up the piano, to take care of him. So she raised him about a third of the time.” But Grace was not to be depended upon. She continued to relapse. To a friend Mary wrote:

  Got her out of Bellevue today and she’s still drinking (sh …) Everything is a mess—thanks to God—Just hope I don’t lose my mind (smile). Am receiving my salary in dribbles. They had to pay the Ray Charles singers $11,000—whew! Give me a ring—I may split the scene. smile. May God bless you.