Jazz Articles

The Mary Lou Williams Collective: Zodiac Suite: Revisited

by Michael P. Gladstone
May 26, 2006

The Zodiac Suite was composed by pianist Mary Lou Williams in 1944-45 and recorded shortly thereafter. It was also performed on Williams' weekly radio program in 1944. The suite consists of twelve segments, each musically describing one sign of the Zodiac, and is regarded as Mary Lou Williams' most important work. Each of the compositions was dedicated by Williams to personalities as diverse as Ben Webster, Leonard Feather and then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It has been sixty years ...

The Mary Lou Williams Collective: Zodiac Suite: Revisited

by John Kelman
February 6, 2006

In a time when “female jazz performer is no longer an oxymoron, it's important to remember there was a time when jazz was essentially a men's club. All the more remarkable, then, that pianist Mary Lou Williams was not just an accomplished artist--in a time where women jazzers were typically relegated to vocalist roles--but a forward-thinking one with one foot in stride and the other in a rapidly evolving musical landscape. While Zodiac Suite: Revisited is not the first tribute ...

The Mary Lou Williams Collective: Zodiac Suite: Revisited

by Jim Santella
February 5, 2006

The Mary Lou Williams Collective, an arm of the Mary Lou Williams Foundation, Inc., is devoted to the recording and performance of the music of the pianist and composer. Williams dedicated her Zodiac Suite to figures she respected, including Billie Holiday, Ben Webster, Duke Ellington, Ellis Larkins, Vic Dickenson, Leonard Feather, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Eddie Heywood, Bob Cranshaw, Frankie Newton, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Pianist Geri Allen interprets each movement from the ...

The Mary Lou Williams Collective: Zodiac Suite: Revisited

by R. Emmet Sweeney
February 1, 2006

She was “the little girl who swings the band, an arranger for Andy Kirk, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and practically any other sublime big band name you could deign to think of. Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell hung out at her NYC apartment to soak up her knowledge during the bop era. Mary Lou Williams should be a household name, or at least a dorm room name. Something.One who carries her torch to enlighten bedraggled minds ...

Mary Lou Williams Collective: Zodiac Suite: Revisited

by AAJ Staff
May 14, 2004

In March, Geri Allen performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Stanley Kaplan Penthouse with Daryl Hall (bass) and Billy Hart (drums), a coincidental CD release for this very musical Mary Lou Williams' Collective release that features Allen with an alternating trio featuring Buster Williams (bass) and Hart as well as Andrew Cyrille (drums). As Williams disproved many a fallacy in her time--in particular that women could not be successful let alone influential in the jazz world--so too has ...