In Love With Voices

Mary Lou Williams: A burning piano In 1975, after a few failed auditions, I finally reached a musical level where I began working with Mary Lou Williams. As an African-American woman whose renown was based upon her musical abilities, she paved the way for many women in jazz by serving as an inspirational role model. For a one-year period I was fortunate to be her bassist, which was quite an experience. We performed in a duo setting and I have the scars to prove it. The legendary pianist, arranger, composer, humanitarian, and spiritual seeker, was the toughest bandleader for whom I have ever worked. This is a nice way of saying; she beat me up and really put me to the test, both mentally and musically. The truth is her standards were very high, and Mary Lou had very exact ideas about what she wanted in her music. I was taught about more than merely the notes on the page; she made me fully aware of the feeling and soul it takes to play jazz. I can never repay her for that, despite all the rather brutal criticism I endured. She took me through the old school of hard knocks with her gloves off, and I must admit that this was invaluable for a young guy who needed it. I don’t think young players have such an experience available to them anymore, for these legends of this bygone era have passed. It was a great honor to play with her, and after this war was over I was never the same. Mary Lou Williams lived at 141st street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem. Once or twice per week, I would take my bass on the IRT subway and head uptown to Harlem. As I hit the street, I immediately noticed I was one of the few white guys around in that neighborhood. The bass that I wheeled in front of me as I rolled down the sidewalk was apparently my shield of cool. It gave me a street validity that I probably didn’t deserve, and with it came plenty of looks from people that seemed to say, “White boy, if you got the guts to come up to Harlem with that bass fiddle, you must be all right.” I imagine that my intent was strong like my father’s, readily perceived by others as being sincere. Nothing was going to stop me from studying with a master like Mary Lou Williams. Her building was tired and grey, and walking up those gray steps into her apartment, it was if I had entered into another dark and mysterious galaxy. Mary lived in a small one bedroom at the top of the stairs where little if any daylight crept in, a fitting metaphor. The furniture was well-aged and worn, much of it covered in plastic. I later learned that this humble apartment was the holy ground where Monk, Miles, Dizzy, Bird, and so many others jazz legends had to come to Mary Lou’s salon, seeking her musical input and advice. The modern jazz movement of bop was in full bloom in the early 1940’s, and musicians would stop by regularly to exchange ideas with Mary Lou Williams, of whom they held in the utmost respect. Thelonius Monk would be working on a new tune at her piano, while Dizzy Gillespie was discussing a musical arrangement and its new harmonic ideas in her small kitchen. Miles Davis and other young musicians who were new in town would come to her apartment to soak up what they could. On the upright piano stood many small plastic religious figures alongside piles of music that were usually works in progress. Her music had been her recovery. Mary Lou Williams suffered a breakdown in the 1950’s and stopped playing for a few years, the result of the hard and volatile life that is being a jazz musician. Her extreme sensitivity combined with the harshness of the music business proved to be too much for her. After some time recovering, she converted to Catholicism and ran a thrift shop to help musicians in need, many of which had drug, alcohol, and other personal problems. A very perceptive priest, citing the fact that Mary was an extraordinary person, but a ‘confused thinker,’ gently approached her and suggested she might do more good for others by returning to music. From that point on, jazz would be far more than a vocation; it would be her cause in life. Like Mary Lou herself, her Harlem apartment had an unrest about it. You had the feeling that one rarely slept here; they wrote music, smoked cigarettes, drank coffee and fought the battles of life inside those walls. She usually appeared at the door in bedroom slippers and a housecoat, rarely making an appearance for the day until necessary. Mary went to bed very late, and usually looked as if she hadn’t slept but twenty minutes the night before. Her still beautiful face mirrored her many trials in life. By far the most dramatic place in the apartment was the upright piano, situated in the small parlor opposite the plastic-covered sofa. The first time I arrived at her dwelling, I took the cover off my bass and looked down in a silent, and carefully concealed horror at the sight I saw. In the bass range of the keyboard, just below the religious deities that gazed down upon the piano, were dark brown, circular cigarette burns. Like tarnished moons that burned themselves into the keys, they represented endless days and nights at her piano, in search of the melody and the right chord to go with it. I felt as if I was witnessing the branded arms of Negro slaves in the south before the Civil War, the soul and legacy of a people. “I wonder if she is going to do that to me,” was a thought that I must admit had crossed my mind. Mary Lou could be sweet and kind, or exhausted and exasperated, depending on how she felt that day. She would pull out one piece of music after another from the pile, and like two boxers sparing, we would go at it. When our rehearsal went well she was very pleased, and with a disarming little girl-like laugh, she would say, “You sound so good I don’t want to stop playing,” but when I displeased her, she cut me to the bone. “I know I’m tough on you,” she explained, “but the young musicians of today don’t play with any feeling, and besides this was the way I was brought up. In Kansas City, if I was playing a jam session and they didn’t like what I was doing, they’d knock me onto the floor and tell me to go home and practice.” Her eyes and voice cut through the dim, hazy light that barely seeped through her curtains in that dark room. Mary Lou’s mission was, in her words, “to save jazz” from the commercial world of mediocre pop and rock and roll that she found so distasteful. Bop for her was the last evolutionary era and like an evangelist; she saw her musical life as a mission to save the world, or at least the world of jazz. She would bring this up obsessively, and one got the feeling that she could not rest in a world she no longer understood.