In Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul, Deanna Witkowski brings a fresh perspective to the life and music of the legendary jazz pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams (1910-81). As a fellow jazz pianist-composer, adult convert to Catholicism, and liturgical composer, Witkowski offers unique insight gleaned from a twenty-year journey with Williams as her chosen musical and spiritual mentor. Viewing Williams’s musical and corporal acts of mercy as part of a singular effort to create community no matter the context, Witkowski examines how Williams created networks of support and friendship through her decades long letter correspondence with various women religious, her charitable work, and her tireless efforts to perform jazz in churches, community centers, concert halls, and schools. Throughout this fascinating story told with equal amounts of deep love and scholarly research, Witkowski illumines Williams’s passionate mantra that “jazz is healing to the soul.”
First time in paperback and e-book! The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working in—and stretching beyond—a dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazz's compositional language. Her generosity made her a valued friend and mentor to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Her late-in-life flowering of faith saw her embrace a spiritual jazz oriented toward advancing the civil rights struggle and helping wounded souls. Tammy L. Kernodle details Williams's life in music against the backdrop of controversies over women's place in jazz and bitter arguments over the music's evolution. Williams repeatedly asserted her artistic and personal independence to carve out a place despite widespread bafflement that a woman exhibited such genius. Embracing Williams's contradictions and complexities, Kernodle also explores a personal life troubled by lukewarm professional acceptance, loneliness, relentless poverty, bad business deals, and difficult marriages. In-depth and epic in scope, Soul on Soul restores a pioneering African American woman to her rightful place in jazz history.
"Imagine a pianist playing concerts with Benny Goodman and Cecil Taylor in successive years (1977-78). That pianist was Mary Lou Williams. In a career which spanned over fifty years, Mary was always on the cutting edge."--Bob Jacobsen, www.allaboutjazz
An illustrated account of the childhood of jazz pianist, composer, and arranger Mary Lou Williams in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in the early twentieth century.
Explores the role of jazz celebrities like Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams as representatives of African American religion in the twentieth century Beginning in the 1920s, the Jazz Age propelled Black swing artists into national celebrity. Many took on the role of race representatives, and were able to leverage their popularity toward achieving social progress for other African Americans. In Lift Every Voice and Swing, Vaughn A. Booker argues that with the emergence of these popular jazz figures, who came from a culture shaped by Black Protestantism, religious authority for African Americans found a place and spokespeople outside of traditional Afro-Protestant institutions and religious life. Popular Black jazz professionals—such as Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams—inherited religious authority though they were not official religious leaders. Some of these artists put forward a religious culture in the mid-twentieth century by releasing religious recordings and putting on religious concerts, and their work came to be seen as integral to the Black religious ethos. Booker documents this transformative era in religious expression, in which jazz musicians embodied religious beliefs and practices that echoed and diverged from the predominant African American religious culture. He draws on the heretofore unexamined private religious writings of Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, and showcases the careers of female jazz artists alongside those of men, expanding our understanding of African American religious expression and decentering the Black church as the sole concept for understanding Black Protestant religiosity. Featuring gorgeous prose and insightful research, Lift Every Voice and Swing will change the way we understand the connections between jazz music and faith.
Winner of the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Book Award in Pop Music 2022 Catholic Media Association honorable mention in biography 2022 Association of Catholic Publishers second place award for Biography Winner of the 2022 Jazz Journalists Association Award for Biography/Autobiography of the Year In Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul, Deanna Witkowski brings a fresh perspective to the life and music of the legendary jazz pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams (1910-81). As a fellow jazz pianist-composer, adult convert to Catholicism, and liturgical composer, Witkowski offers unique insight gleaned from a twenty-year journey with Williams as her chosen musical and spiritual mentor. Viewing Williams’s musical and corporal acts of mercy as part of a singular effort to create community no matter the context, Witkowski examines how Williams created networks of support and friendship through her decades long letter correspondence with various women religious, her charitable work, and her tireless efforts to perform jazz in churches, community centers, concert halls, and schools. Throughout this fascinating story told with equal amounts of deep love and scholarly research, Witkowski illumines Williams’s passionate mantra that “jazz is healing to the soul.”
Mary Lou Williams -- pianist, arranger, composer, and probably the most influential woman in the history of jazz -- receives the attention she has long deserved in the definitive biography by a leading scholar of women in jazz. The illegitimate child of an impoverished and indifferent mother, Williams began performing publicly at the age of seven when she became known admiringly in her native Pittsburgh as "the little piano girl of East Liberty," playing one day for the Mellons at bridge teas and the next in gambling dens where the hat was passed for change. She grew up with the jazz of the early part of the century, championed by the likes of Earl Hines and Fats Waller, yet unlike so many other musicians of her time, she was open to new forms in jazz -- she was an early champion of bop, and a mentor and colleague to its central figures, such as Thelonius Monk and Bud Powell -- and in broader musical styles as well (after her conversion to Catholicism, she wrote masses and other sacred music). Most of the other famous women in jazz -- Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald -- have been singers. Williams was instead a phenomenal pianist who performed solo, with small groups and big bands, in vaudeville and clubs, and on numerous records. But she is equally well known today as a composer and arranger of remarkable versatility and power, having worked with, among others, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. Her compositions have been recorded by artisits as varied as Marian McPartland, Dizzy Gillespie, Nat "King" Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and herself -- and, more recently, by cutting-edge players Geri Allen and Dave Douglas. But Williams was more than "just a musician"; her interests were catholic in both senses, and she struggled to combine her love of music with her love of God. She was a tireless humanitarian, and made ongoing attempts to help dozens of down-and-out musicians; in the 1950s, her apartment was, at times, virtually a rehab. Though she was often in emotional despair, she found comfort for her many disappointments and hurts not only in her music but in her spirituality. Linda Dahl, granted unprecedented access to the large Williams archive, has given us the whole of Williams's very full life, from her often harrowing days on the road to her tumultuous marriages and love affairs, from the ups and downs of her unique fifty-year career to the remarkable spirituality that came to inform both her daily life and her music. This is a striking protrait of one of our least understood and most important musicians.
A galvanizing history of how jazz and jazz musicians flourished despite rampant cultural exploitation The music we call “jazz” arose in late nineteenth century North America—most likely in New Orleans—based on the musical traditions of Africans, newly freed from slavery. Grounded in the music known as the “blues,” which expressed the pain, sufferings, and hopes of Black folk then pulverized by Jim Crow, this new music entered the world via the instruments that had been abandoned by departing military bands after the Civil War. Jazz and Justice examines the economic, social, and political forces that shaped this music into a phenomenal US—and Black American—contribution to global arts and culture. Horne assembles a galvanic story depicting what may have been the era’s most virulent economic—and racist—exploitation, as jazz musicians battled organized crime, the Ku Klux Klan, and other variously malignant forces dominating the nightclub scene where jazz became known. Horne pays particular attention to women artists, such as pianist Mary Lou Williams and trombonist Melba Liston, and limns the contributions of musicians with Native American roots. This is the story of a beautiful lotus, growing from the filth of the crassest form of human immiseration.
Handy resource for jazz listeners and hardcore fans. Spanning players from eighty years of history, this bold book steps forward and claims who are the greatest. Compiled from an extensive survey conducted with the best jazz minds in the education, publishing and entertainment worlds, noted jazz journalist Gene Rizzo summarized the chosen and presents a concise bio on the essence of these jazz giants. Choices were made on the basis of chops, originality, creativity, and degree of influence. This book will either confirm some readers' opinions or open debate with others, but ultimately the book provides an impressive summary of the greatest jazz piano players of all time. A photo accompanies each listing * Landmark recordings are listed * Extra lists include the next twenty to be selected, the top women players and an alphabetical list of all the other players considered
