Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  We were sold into slavery by our African chiefs. I was born in the U.S.A. This new mixture of Afro and everything else does only one thing—it destroys two arts—you have neither Afro nor jazz. It seems that before changing to another country’s musical heritage, I should try to persevere and fight here at home through my music of love and peace and bring this heritage forward. Perhaps if all black Americans went to Africa, we would be treated worse. We would perhaps be rejected by the native Africans and (who knows) even put into concentration camps.

  When she played with African musicians at a jam session, Mary added, they could not play jazz rhythms—they simply did not understand them.

  This insistence in her writings and speech on the Americanness of jazz—that is, on the importance of the complexity of influences that gave rise to the African-American aesthetic called jazz—ran counter to the then politically correct rhetoric in hip black America. It was bound to inflame people, and it did. In the late 1970s, Mary became artist-in-residence at Duke University. “When I first got to Duke the black students all sat by themselves in the cafeteria, all studied together. I would tell them you are too young to know, you haven’t seen racism, but they wouldn’t listen to me for the first year.” Nor would they deign to take her Introduction to Jazz course to which white students were flocking. “And I would tell them, ‘Because they know what’s happening, you dumb son of a b——. Send your Al Capone [leader] to me.’ And I had to prove to them that they were the Toms.”

  To illustrate her philosophy, her vision of jazz as cultural alchemy, Mary asked David Stone Martin to draw her a “tree of jazz.” Central to that vision is the role of slavery, and the release from its torment the slaves sought in music. The roots of Mary’s great old “tree” are the spirituals, European forms married to the African-based blues, both of which are depicted climbing up the sturdy trunk, to branch out—into ragtime, swing, and bop—while the “leaves” of the tree are the individual players who contributed important sounds. With only three exceptions—Mary’s friends Zoot Sims, Benny Goodman, and Jack Teagarden—all of the leaves are named for black musicians. Importantly, the tree also contains dead branches, what Mary called the soulless exercises: commercial rock, black magic, avant-garde, cults, and, simply, “exercises.” The withered leaves on the dead branches represent the musicians who turned away from the spiritual heart, the soul, of the music (spirituals and the blues).

  “Community is the word she used all the time in relation to jazz,” explains O’Brien. “And the spiritual feeling in the blues that arises out of suffering. That was a big thing with her. Some people don’t like this. But to her, that’s where the depth came from.”

  One critic who took decided umbrage with Mary’s views, Chuck Berg, lambasted her for her arrogance in Downbeat (December 1978): “She claims that all of jazz is divided into her four parts [and that] there is ‘nothing new in jazz since bop,’ and that ‘jazz is America’s only art form.’ Such narrow, misguided and incomprehensible pronouncements can perhaps best be dealt with in socio-psychoanalytic terms. [They] do little to benefit their author [and] reveal a similar sense of confusion in the music.” This was not her only bad press: she received a particularly mean-spirited review from a critic in the New Statesman when she was appearing at Ronnie Scott’s club in London that same year. After ceding reluctant praise for her “tortuously inventive” “Mack the Knife,” he descended to unchivalrous comments about Mary’s appearance, describing her as “fairly mountainous in striped pink chiffon with heavily chipped nail varnish.”

  This kind of panning was most unusual. Brother Mario’s is a far more representative voice: “She communicated that hope that one day jazz would come back in full force—the music of love, that soulful feeling that blacks had forgotten.” Adds Barry Ulanov, “If you hear in her music what I hear in her music—almost a kind of prayer, even before it becomes overtly religious—you hear that she’s saying: ‘This is how it is with me.’ She knew what she wanted to do. She had an indomitable will about her.” After all, hope, rebirth, redemption, were at the core of Mary’s religion, and her religion was at the center of her life.

  It was, then, in the spirit of reconciliation between the two “camps” of jazz (avant-garde versus everything that came before) that Mary conceived the idea of doing a concert with that lion of “out” players, Cecil Taylor. He had won her over with his admiration for her playing. Actually, he’d been listening to and appreciating Mary’s music for a long time; he first caught her at the Savoy Club in Boston while a conservatory student in that city in 1951. “She was playing like Erroll Garner, but her music had a lot of range,” Taylor said in a rare interview. Almost two decades passed before Mary, in turn, listened to Taylor—during his engagement at Ronnie Scott’s in 1969. Then, in 1975, Taylor really began listening to Mary, dropping by the Cookery often. When Taylor told her, “No one’s playing anything but you,” Mary’s reaction was, at first, “Here’s somebody else putting me on.” And each time he came into the club, as Mary remembered it, he’d move closer to the piano, until, she said, “He sat down one night at the end of the gig and played, but a little too long,” clearing out the club. But he kept showing up to listen, and eventually Mary broached the idea of doing a concert together. (It was Taylor who came up with the title, Embraced. In response, Mary drew a picture of three concentric circles, symbolizing, as she saw it, her music, his, and the music of their interplay.)

  Organizing the April 17, 1977, event fell to Mary, who followed her usual game plan. Friends received photocopied requests: “Help save this precious music and keep me out of Bellevue! Smile! Send checks for your tickets or donations.” Despite such efforts, made at her own expense, and O’Brien’s publicity, the house at Carnegie Hall was no more than half-filled and the concert just broke even.

  But it would be a hall peopled with partisans of the two pianists, among whom speculation ran high about what sort of jazz would emerge from the meeting of two such strong musicians—for if Taylor was a lion at the piano, Mary was a lioness. To Village Voice jazz writer Gary Giddins the concert promised to be “doubly innovative for bringing together two great keyboard artists in a program of duets, and for dramatizing the enduring values in the jazz-piano tradition.” But hints of a possible musical fiasco were also in the air. Rehearsals revealed frayed nerves and disparate purposes. Cecil Taylor had never shown any desire to play predetermined music from a written score, although Mary claimed that for the first half of the concert he’d agreed to play the new dual-piano arrangements of spirituals she’d written, using her “history of jazz” approach. Then, after an intermission, they would use “rhythm patterns as a shell,” in Mary’s words. “When Cecil is doing his things, I’ll start moving in his direction. I’ll play free and then I’ll jump back to swinging.” But in the hours before the concert began Taylor fumed. Not only had she written a part for him—a “free” player of the first rank—but she had not consulted him about the rhythm section—her own—that was to accompany them for the first half. To Mary, of course, this seemed fair: she got the first half, and he got the second half of the concert. But as Taylor told a journalist, Mary “wanted him to play her music but [she] refused to perform his music the way he wanted it heard. We are not certain exactly how the concert will be structured,” Taylor warned.

  Clashed would be a more accurate title than Embraced for the music that ensued; the concert confirmed gloomy predictions. Reviewers tended to write about it more as a contest than a collaboration: “The result was at best a tug of war in which Mr. Taylor managed to remain dominant,” wrote the New York Times. On “Back to the Blues,” to take one example, Taylor plunges deep into his favorite nether musical regions. It takes Mary’s strongest playing, the signature crash and crush of her left hand at full throttle, to tug the piece back from outer space. When, as Gary Giddins described Taylor, “the predatory avant-gardist” overreached Mary’s “spare, bluesy minstrations,” she called in the rhythm section—as if she w
ere calling in the troops.

  Listeners—at least those in Mary’s camp—saw little of the “love” she had urged Taylor to play after the difficult first half. Backstage, fur flew. “I slammed the door on him hard,” says Peter O’Brien, “and saxophonist Paul Jeffrey, who was listening backstage, had to be physically restrained from punching him. Mary came off the stage and said to me, ‘Oh man, I played my ass off.’ And she did, but I made her go back out there.” Her adrenaline up, Mary played brilliant encores—“A Night in Tunisia,” “Bags’ Groove,” and “I Can’t Get Started,” the last a frequent source of inspiration for Mary.

  Perhaps the best review, though never published, came from Nica de Koenigswarter, in a letter she shot off to Mary after the concert, written in the Jazz Baroness’s beautiful hand and careful multicolored underlinings:

  Rather than an ‘embrace,’ it seemed to one like a confrontation between heaven and hell, with you (heaven) emerging gloriously triumphant!!! I know it wasn’t meant to be that way, but this is the way it seemed. I also know what a sweet cat C.T. is and what beautiful things he writes, in words, that is, but the funny part is that he looks just like the Devil when he plays as well as sounding like it, as far as I am concerned, sheets of nothingness, apparently seductive to some. Anyway I loved Mickey Roker and Bob Cranshaw for seeming like Guardian Angels, coming to your defense and it was worth it all to hear you bring it back to music.

  Love you, Nica

  Two years later, Mary could joke a little about the concert. “When I was coming along, it wasn’t enough just to play. You had to have some tricks—I used to play with a sheet over the piano keys. So when Cecil started playing like that and kept on going, I started to get up from the stool, turn around and hit the piano with my butt—chung, choonk! That woulda got them!” She revealed her hurt only to her fellow artist in a letter after the fiasco:

  Cecil! Please listen if you can. Why did you come to me so often when I was at the Cookery? Why did you consent to do a concert? You felt I was a sincere friend. In the battlefield, the enemy (Satan) does not want artists to create or be together as friends.

  Cecil, the spirituals were the most important factor of the concert (strength), to achieve success playing from the heart, inspiring new concepts for the second half. I wrote you concerning the first half. You will have a chance to listen to the original tapes and will agree that being angry you created monotony, corruption, and noise. Please forgive me for saying so. Why destroy your great talent clowning, etc? Applause is false. I do not believe in compliments or glory, my inspiration comes from sincere love. I was not seeking glory for myself when I asked you to do the concert. I am hoping you will reimburse me for 30 tickets—would you like to see the receipts?

  I still love you, Mary

  Within six months of the concert with Taylor, Mary was back at Carnegie Hall for another concert with another difficult musician, as a “special guest” in January of 1978 in a forty-year “reunion” concert at Carnegie Hall. Billed as “An Evening with Benny Goodman,” the concert attempted to re-create the spirit of the famous 1938 concert where Goodman had been dubbed “King of Swing.” But the 1978 event was a disappointment, underrehearsed, ragged, with Goodman off balance. Mary played gamely and took a sparkling solo on “Lady Be Good,” but the gig was just a gig to her, a way to pay bills. (When Goodman approached her afterwards about doing a record together of Fats Waller tunes, she declined).

  After going from playing with way-out Cecil Taylor to comping for Benny Goodman—a breathtaking musical leap few pianists would attempt—Mary could declare with satisfaction, “Now I can really say I played all of it.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Artist-in-Residence

  1977–1981

  IN THE 1970s, a number of black musicians began to obtain positions at universities around the country. Mary was approached in 1975 by Max Roach about teaching at the University of Massachusetts, where he was ensconced, but they couldn’t come to terms. The following year, Duke University, just a cut below the “Ivys” and set in the thriving Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill “Research Triangle” of North Carolina, began an active search for more black faculty under the presidency of the late Terry Sanford, a liberal presence in southern politics who had been governor of North Carolina and a U.S. senator. Frank Tirro, a saxophonist and jazz scholar then heading the music department at Duke, was especially eager to build up the jazz department, but at first Mary was not on his short list. “The possibility,” as Tirro puts it, “of securing such an artist as Mary Lou Williams seemed remote.” But her name kept coming up, and to Duke’s delight, she expressed interest when contacted. Tirro invited her down to tour the campus, and in May, Mary boarded a Trailways bus for Durham, O’Brien in tow.

  She found a small city, southern and bucolic but also sophisticated and prosperous, with an established black middle class—worlds apart from the Durham Mary had visited with the Clouds of Joy in the 1930s, when segregation, “the shame of America,” as Senator Sanford put it, was in full force. Back then Mary had stayed in Haiti (pronounced “Hay-tie”), the black section of town, near the railroad tracks. “Haiti was very famous,” noted Sanford. “There were black hotels and every kind of store. There was some kind of opera house. Durham was much more hospitable to blacks than Atlanta—they were voting here in the 1920s, certainly not the case in the rest of the South—because they were a much more dominant part of the community. The oldest black-owned insurance company in America is in Durham. But you still had a very segregated society in Haiti, where white people would only venture down to clubs and stuff.”

  Haiti is all gone now, just fields of weeds—a victim of urban renewal. “They ran a highway through there,” remembered Sanford. “Typical. The cheapest land. There were some very substantial black businesses there, and they were given an area and some shops across the highway, but it never has worked out.”

  Mary liked Durham’s gentle-mannered people, the manageable size of the city, the easy social interaction between the races, telling an interviewer later, “Nowadays, whites down here will say, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ ‘No, ma’am.’ And they come to my house and help me.” And she liked Duke University—the venerable-looking campus, the brick buildings graced by large trees and squared by big, comfortable-looking houses—with its well-equipped music building and excellent auditorium. As artist-in-residence, she would teach two courses: Introduction to Jazz, and Jazz Improvisation, as well as direct Duke’s jazz ensemble—and she would receive, for the first time ever in her career, an assured regular salary with full benefits.

  Within weeks, Mary made her decision to go, signing a contract for the 1977–78 academic year, then signing on for three more years in the second semester. She was delighted: “Ha ha ha—look at me! A high school dropout. Now I’m a college professor,” she wrote gleefully to John Williams. Sanford and Tirro were delighted too: “Tirro said to me, ‘This is a three-time winner: black, female, and jazz,’ ” recalls O’Brien. Sanford explained, “We just put her on the faculty roll as an indefinite appointment when it was clear she wanted to stay; the contract was technical.”

  Although Mary became extremely popular and beloved as a teacher, it took a little time for Duke to grasp what an asset she was. “When she came, she didn’t arrive with a great splash,” says Paul Vick, then head of the Alumni Office. “People began to realize who she was by seeing her, by this infectious enthusiasm for life and for the music. You couldn’t be around her and not be affected. She captivated people.”

  Mary immediately decided to buy a house, and by the end of the summer, with O’Brien’s help, she had found what she wanted at a good price—a largish, well-maintained raised ranch at 1205 Shepherd Street. It was not a fashionable address, but the neighborhood was integrated in race and class. Through her front windows she faced an elementary school; from the back, through her kitchen picture window, a sloping backyard with shade trees and rhododendrons blazing with color in the spring. Inside, a staircase led
to a large second floor with five bedrooms—large enough, she planned, to accommodate houseguests and to provide rooms for Robbie and O’Brien. For herself, she chose a corner bedroom—not the largest—where, following her old road-gypsy habits, she did most of her work from her bed—writing music and letters, eating, watching television.

  Downstairs there was a snug den where Mary gave private lessons on her battered old Baldwin, and across the hall was her rather formal living room, with a grand piano (loaned by Baldwin Piano’s Raleigh office), deep blue velvet couches, and antiques she bought from local stores. The heart of the house, though, was the large, informal kitchen.

  Mary didn’t care that she wasn’t in the stylish part of town. “Mary didn’t mingle much either with the fancy black middle class in Durham,” says O’Brien, “or with the neighbors. She didn’t want to meet them; she thought that was bad luck, they’d get all involved in her life.”

  On the surface, her life in Durham was simple and serene. When in town, she liked to shop daily for food. “She had her fish store, her meat store, her store for produce. She would make a vegetable pie and she carried a bag of vitamin pills from a nutritionist who prescribed for her. Despite her weight, Mary ate healthy food.” She relaxed by playing cards or telling jokes. Joyce Breach had a special card table made up for her and sent it down to Durham, and when one of her sisters or friends was there, they would set it up in the kitchen or den and play for hours.