Jazz Articles about Mary Lou Williams

Mary Lou's Salon

by AAJ Staff
May 4, 2006

"The all-time greatest woman jazz musician." That typically was the kind of language used in describing Mary Lou Williams. Mary Lou was a fabulous pianist, as well as a noted arranger, and composer. But she also had another role of distinction: she was a sort of mother spirit for innovative musicians. Her spacious Harlem apartment was a salon where, especially in the 1940's, many of the best jazz people hung out. I was a ...

Mary Lou Williams: Jazz Healing

by Teri Harllee King
May 4, 2006

"Jazz has healing in it, and a lot of love."--Mary Lou Williams The prospect of writing a column on Mary Lou Williams is just a little bit daunting--reflecting on her considerable body of work and enormous talent, but to write about women jazz artists and not cover her would be as close to a jazz sin as I can think of. So, here goes... As I was reviewing Williams' prolific career, I logged on to see ...

Mary Lou Williams: Mary Lou Williams Presents Black Christ of the Andes

by Bob Jacobson
September 12, 2004

Calling this album mainstream is a bit misleading, since it includes four pieces of choral/sacred music and one avant-garde cut. In a way, it's the perfect mirror of where Mary Lou Williams was in the early 1960's, coming out of a nearly ten year absence from performance. At the beginning of that period she had devoted herself solely to religion and charitable work. Jazz-loving priests within the Catholic church convinced her to convey her religious feelings through what she did ...

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 ...

Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams

by AAJ Staff
March 8, 2004

Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams Linda Dahl Berkeley: University of California Press ISBN: 0375408991 Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981): was she an important minor and perhaps neglected figure in jazz history, or was she a powerful and original stylist somehow left out of the jazz historical cannon? Should she, in fact, be ranked with the great jazz pianists like Fats Waller, Erroll Garner, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell-all of ...

Mary Lou Williams: Mary Lou Williams Trio at Rick's Cafe Americain

by Bob Jacobson
February 1, 2000

This CD is one of a handful by Mary Lou Williams finally appearing in “record" bins. Here's Mary Lou at age 69 and at the height of her powers (despite, as we're told by biographer Linda Dahl, physical ailments and a recent diagnosis of cancer). Also on board were Milton Suggs, bass, and Drashear Khalid, drums (brushes on all but one cut).

Billy Taylor has often said of Mary Lou Williams that “she has the most consistent way of swinging" ...

Mary Lou Williams: Mary Lou Williams, 1945-1947

by Bob Jacobson
January 1, 2000

At long last the “record" bins have more than two or three CD's of Mary Lou Williams, the brilliant pianist-composer-arranger whose career spanned half the century. This album from her mid-career includes 25 cuts (total time = 66 minutes, 51 seconds), with Mary in a variety of formats: solo, trio, quartet, quintet ("Mary Lou Williams Girl Stars") and directing a ten-piece orchestra.

In the 1970's Mary Lou Williams described herself as the only musician who had lived through AND played ...