Artist: Mary Lou Williams
Genre(s):
Blues
Discography:
Collection (Boogie Woogie)
Year:
Tracks: 3
To say that Mary Lou Williams had a long and productive career is an understatement. Although for decades she was often called jazz's superlative distaff instrumentalist (and one has to admire what mustiness have been a around-the-clock struggle against sexism), she would have been considered a major creative person no matter what her sex activity.
Just the fact that Williams and Duke Ellington were about the entirely pace pianists to modernize their elan through the years would have been enough to guarantee her a place in idle words history books. Williams managed to invariably good modern during a half-century life history without forgetting her roots or how to play in the sr. styles.
Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs (although she soon took the appoint of her stepfather and was known as Mary Lou Burley), she taught herself the piano by ear and was playing in public at the age of six. Growing up in Pittsburgh, Williams' animation was always filled with music. When she was 13, she started working in vaudeville, and trio days later marital saxist John Williams. They moved to Memphis, and she made her debut on records with Synco Jazzers. John soon joined Andy Kirk's orchestra, which was based in Kansas City, in 1929. Williams wrote arrangements for the set, filled in for an absent pianist on Kirk's first gear recording session, and finally became a fellow member of the orchestra herself. Her arrangements were largely responsible for the band's typical sound and eventual success. Williams was soon recognised as Kirk's top soloist, a pace pianist wHO impressed everyone (even Jelly Roll Morton). In addition, she wrote such songs such as "Roll 'Em" (a killer strike for Benny Goodman) and "What's Your Story Morning Glory" and contributed arrangements to other vainglorious bands, including those of Goodman, Earl Hines, and Tommy Dorsey.
Madonna Lou Williams stayed with Kirk until 1942, by which time she had divorced John Williams and married trumpeter Harold "Shorty" Baker. She co-led a combo with Baker before he joined Duke Ellington. Williams did some writing for Duke (to the highest degree notably her rearrangement of "Racy Skies" into a horn struggle called "Sarracenia flava No End") and played briefly with Benny Goodman's bebop radical in 1948. She had step by step modernized her style and by the other to mid-'40s was actively supporting the lester Willis Young modernists wHO would lead the bop revolution, including Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron, and Dizzy Gillespie. Williams' "Zodiac Suite" showed turned some of her modern ideas, and her "In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee" was a bebop allegory recorded by Gillespie.
Hank Williams lived in Europe from 1952-1954 and so became very involved in the Catholic religious belief. She retired from music for a few years in front appearing as a guest with Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival. Williams returned to nothingness and by the early '70s sounded more than like a pres Young average player (intelligibly she was familiar with McCoy Tyner) than a subsister of the twenties. Although she did non tutelage for the vanguard, she once in a while played quite freely, although a 1977 duet concert with Cecil Taylor was a nail debacle. Williams wrote deuce-ace people and a cantana, was a star at Benny Goodman's 40th-anniversary Carnegie Hall concert in 1978, taught at Duke University, and ofttimes planned her later concerts as a history of jazz recital. By the time she passed away at the eld of 71, she had a name of accomplishments that could birth filled three lifetimes.
The Virgin Lou Williams recorded through the years as a leader for many labels including Brunswick (a geminate of pianoforte solos in 1930), Decca (1938), Columbia, Savoy, extensively for Asch and Folkways during 1944-1947, Victor, King (1949), Atlantic, Circle, Vogue, Prestige, Blue Star, Jazztone, her possess Mary label (1970-1974), Chiaroscuro, SteepleChase, and eventually Pablo (1977-1978).
Rosana
