by Linda Dahl
Financially, she was in as bad a way as she had ever been and she didn’t hesitate to accept the first recording offer to come along, a deal orchestrated by Joe Glaser. It would be hard to think of a label less suitable for Mary than King Records, which had started as a purveyor of hillbilly music, and went on to build a reputation as a rhythm-and-blues label. But it had been three years since she’d made a record as a leader, and her work for Benny Goodman had evaporated.
THOUGH SHE WAS eager to record right away, “it took them over two months to record me,” she wrote of King Records, “and because I recorded modern music they were disappointed. They’d expected me to do the older things.” In fact, Mary recorded four of her most original bop-oriented pieces, arranged for octet: “Tisherome,” “Knowledge,” “Shorty Boo,” and “In the Land of Oo-bla-dee” (with Gillespie’s vocalist Kenny “Pancho” Hagood on the vocals written by Milt Orent).
If King hated the sides, jazz critics immediately hailed them. “Knowledge,” a variation on “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” showcased Mary’s trademark use of deft and witty interpolations. “Tisherome” (a partial anagram for “more shit”) is a variant of “Knowledge,” sharing its melodic line but exemplifying Mary’s interest in harmonies and rhythm more vividly, with Monk-like stylings. “Shorty Boo,” a languid, bluesy ballad, had been rearranged to good effect, but was saddled with mediocre lyrics. “In the Land of Oo-bla-dee” fared better, with its slightly loopy, mildly marijuana-scented words, and it became an underground hit. Downbeat, which awarded it four stars, declared “Oo-bla-dee” a “neat little tale of a bop princess wooed by a young man, the attempt to shuffle off a substitute bride, and the happy outcome.… With the use of flute [it] has managed to make the usual bop unisons sound almost colorful.” But this and other rave reviews fell on deaf ears at King, which dismissed the four compositions as “bop platters” that had virtually no market. Desperate to get her records out to the stores, Mary called and telegraphed the irascible president, Sydney Nathan, repeatedly, complaining that she got no promotion. In response, Nathan shot back a cparody. But it was for real:
A lot of you boys seem to think that the sound of your melodious voices will influence me to do things you think you could not accomplish by means of wire or letter, but you are wrong. Forget about a response, ’cause you aren’t getting one.
Stunned and furious, Mary began to promote “Oo-bla-dee” herself, the first of several intense efforts at self-promotion she would make in the coming decades. She roped in Lindsay and Milt Orent and anybody else she could find to help. “Milt and I sent letters and records out to hundreds of d.j.’s around the country, even to friends in radio in Canada and Paris, Italy, Johannesburg, Germany.”
And she got results. “In five months, I secured three major recordings—Dizzy Gillespie on Victor; Benny Goodman on Capitol; and Les Brown, with a 60-voiced choral group for Decca. Sarah Vaughan wanted to do it, but her company, Columbia, wouldn’t.” Her efforts, however, were largely wasted. Gillespie’s and Brown’s recordings were not released, and the Goodman version, which the leader had cleansed of the more interesting bop harmonies, was not particularly successful, coming as it did just before he was about to break up his bop band. At least part of the problem was a backlash against bop, which many in that era of growing conservatism and fear of Communist subversion associated with unsavory, subversive elements; even a bop fairy tale was suspect.
Mary calculated that she spent about $1,000 to promote her records—serious money for her a half-century ago—and borrowed more. Not only would King not advance her more money toward promotion, but at the end of the year he informed her that her royalties for the entire year of 1949 amounted to only $49.25. Bound to King like a sharecropper, Mary stood by in frustration as the company insisted on extending her contract for one more year to try to recoup the “debt” of her $1,000 advance.
Glaser took Syd Nathan’s side against Mary in her fight with King, writing to him:
I realize she has been sort of a problem child to you and regret the fact you have been caused any trouble; however I am sure you realize I greatly appreciate your having recorded her at my request and if ever an opportunity presents itself where I can reciprocate you by working out deals with you for any of our attractions, it will be a pleasure.
While continuing to promote her two King 78s, Mary had a date at Café Society, with Buck Clayton on trumpet, before the club closed for good in the spring of ’49. She finally had a lucky break when the Village Vanguard decided to feature jazz and offered her the debut position, opposite drummer J. C. Heard and group, in late August.
The Vanguard engagement, with Bill Clarke on drums, and Billy Moore, Jr., on bass, reestablished Mary’s importance as an accomplished presence on the New York jazz scene. She was reviewed in all the important papers, and her initial two-week date was extended through the fall and into the winter. One critic noted of Mary’s performance of her bop arrangement of Grieg’s “Anitra’s Dance”: “When she comes on a particularly novel progression she nods swiftly and minutely (her neck nudges forward like a Hindoo dancer’s) as if approving the hands that thought that one up.… Never once does the music become noisy. Just very very steady with an insistence that prickles one’s spine and sends one just where it wants one to go.… Miss Williams … seems always ahead of her playing, thinking into the next phrase.… Bach would like what she is doing—all this building and scattering, clustering and dispersing, by-path pointing while keeping to the direction … creation going on under the audience’s very noses.”
“I always had bop ideas,” she told another reviewer. “So I was glad when it got popular and I could use them more often. Right now I’ve got chords way ahead of bop.”
Not all the reviewers were as enraptured. Many disliked bop; several felt it robbed her playing of vitality. And Mary had personnel problems. Heard, she wrote in her diary, was jealous and treated her insolently, surrounding himself with friends who were “ignorant types: loud-talking and loud-dressed.” Bill Clarke also, she added somewhat cryptically, “became jealous and the friendship ended.”
She had plenty of offers for work now, but distrusted agents and turned everything over to Glaser, her next best thing to a personal manager (a dream that perpetually eluded her). “Since leaving Kirk,” she lamented in her writing, “I haven’t ever been lucky enough to get an agent to do anything. After signing, they sit and you bring your own work to them. After working hard to keep going, they’ll offer you a job you have to take at half the price you could have gotten yourself.”
The Vanguard was a springboard, however, to other important jobs. She appeared in Boston at John Hancock Hall for a week in October of ’49, opposite pianist Lennie Tristano and his group, performing bop arrangements of her material, including pieces from Zodiac. Her admiration for Tristano cooled a little after the date; she felt on further listening that there was too little contrast in his music.
That she felt desperate for someone to straighten out her career (or life) is something she revealed only to her diaries. “Harlem,” she wrote, “had taken me to the cleaners.” In the early winter of 1950, while appearing in Chicago’s Music Bar, she reached out to John Williams, who had moved to Chicago after leaving the music business in the early forties. She still admired his intelligence and his ability “to maneuver” and “exploit”—two of her most positive verbs.
But Williams turned her down. “Mary was in town with a group,” recalled Williams. “She asked me to come by, so I visited her at her hotel. She said, ‘Come back and handle this band for me.’ Mary was having problems with the group, controlling them, and she was really asking for help, you see. I was like a big brother to her. She said, why didn’t we get back together. I said no, ‘It is over.’ I was in love. I had a girlfriend, Kathleen Duncan, who would become my wife in 1951.”
Mary said nothing about this meeting to anyone, as was her custom. But she returned to a life lived constantly on the edge. To pay b
ills, she turned out arrangements: Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, Woody Herman, and Nat Cole all gave her work. As for recording, it had been ten months since she made a record for King. King wanted her to record some organ music, presumably more in the R&B vein, while Mary wanted to make a solo piano jazz record. Insisting on control of the next recording session, they sent a black producer to take her in hand, and in January of 1950 she went into the studio again. Mary detested this producer (in her fashion, she does not identify him in her diary, though in all probability it was Henry Glover, an important presence at King). The only input allowed her was the choice of a rhythm section: she went with the excellent players George Duvivier on bass, Denzil Best on drums, and Mundell Lowe on guitar. Of this session she notes merely: “I sat down and played a distorted organ and piano and then I got out of the place.”
The results were predictable. “Willow Weep for Me” was “pleasant, with Garnerish overtones,” as one reviewer said, but it was paired with an unremarkable “I’m in the Mood for Love.” Worse was the odd, rather disjointed sound of organ with piano overdubbed on “Bye Bye Blues” and its flip side, “Moonglow.” The January sides sank with barely a ripple of interest. Now Mary was on the warpath. She had performed as King wanted. Now she pressed the company hard to let her record a solo recording, as specified in her contract, before she began a club date in March 1950. But King kept stalling her. Doubtless there had been words at the disastrous organ-piano session. “She was not pliable and couldn’t be used by other people. No matter what anybody did, she could not be deterred. And that could be enraging,” notes Peter O’Brien, who managed her career later.
It was guerrilla warfare. The producer claimed he arrived at her apartment to pick her up for the recording date but that she was “passed out, drunk.” As the consummate professional, Mary was incensed by such an assertion. She tried to break her contract, pleaded with them to let her go. The company stood firm. Ironically, now, after years of neglect, her Village Vanguard date had brought expressions of interest in recordings from important labels. One record producer suggested she do an album of her modern work; another wanted an album of piano rags. Mary went so far as to prepare material and a budget for a recording session of all new originals—but with another artist, Bobby Tucker, on piano. (Fragments of pieces probably intended for that session, including lyrics without music to “Bebop Blues” and “Lessons in Bopology,” survive, in Mary’s hand, among her papers.)
King still would not let her go, but neither would they record her. Finally, in September 1950, Mary took the drastic step of filing a claim with the American Federation of Musicians for breach of contract. James Petrillo, head of the AFM, seethed when he learned the facts from her. “The idea of tying up this artist for two or three years without doing anything with her!” he fumed at King, and he got her a release at the end of the year. It was something of a Pyrrhic victory. It was “detrimental to an artist to secure a release this way,” Mary wrote, fearing that she would be viewed as a troublemaker by other record companies, and ostracized. She was right. On top of that, she was suspended from Union Local 802 in New York for nonpayment of dues, which meant she could not work where she lived until she paid up. It had not been a good year.
Mary tried once more, now desperate—there is no other word to describe the fever pitch of urgency in her correspondence—to get a record contract. She borrowed money again and made test pressings of new ideas—a bop piano trio version of “The Sheik of Araby,” and vocal experiments on “Cloudy” and “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” hiring professional singers to tackle the difficult harmonies. “For years I had been experimenting with voices the way I heard them. I wanted to have them sing like instruments. I had used several groups for tests.” She took her test pressings all around New York, but over and over, “I was turned down.” Nor did other plans pan out, including an offer by David Stone Martin’s brother to record her for a label he hoped to start. He didn’t have enough money to get it off the ground.
Mary’s urgency may have been driven by a sense of being preempted. She explained, “I had to get my experiments recorded along with a piano thing with bongo, because already a few people were trying to pick up on this sound. I had decided to start a bop era,” she added, referring to the general dearth of recording of the new crop of beboppers—a claim teetering between hubris, on the one hand, and artistic self-confidence on the other, with a rich lode of fantasy in the middle. “By 1951 no one cared to record me until a friend of mine, Nicole Barclay, came in from Europe. Nicole took me to Jimmy Ryan’s Dixieland Club to meet kind Rudi Blesh, whom I shall always be very grateful to. I asked him for a record date and he immediately said yes.”
Rudi Blesh owned and operated Circle Records. He was a great fan of ragtime and “trad” jazz, caring nothing for bop, but to his credit, he indulged Mary out of his high regard for her—that and the fact that she probably managed to convince him that there was a significant market niche to be tapped for her kind of jazz. She brought him her test records. In Mary’s honor, Blesh inaugurated a line of modern trends in jazz on Circle, but as it turned out, hers was to be the first and last in this category.
Nicole Barclay, who had brought Mary and Blesh together and would reappear a few years later in Mary’s story, was a chic, wealthy Frenchwoman, a jazz lover married to Eddie Barclay, with whom she started the record companies Blue Star and Barclay. The labels produced mostly expatriate American musicians and also reissued American-made jazz. Nicole Barclay had come to New York to promote a proposed jazz festival in Paris. She hoped to get Art Tatum to headline the event, but Tatum pulled out, so she tried to persuade Mary to take his place. But Mary balked, claiming the salary was too low—and fearful of being stranded in Europe, as had happened to a number of her friends. (But Barclay’s offer had planted the seed, and in two years Mary did leave for Europe, where she recorded for Barclay in Paris, including the lovely modern blues ballad “Nicole.”)
Blesh gave Mary studio time in June 1951. But before Mary’s Circle date, in March 1951, she recorded an LP for Atlantic Records. Here she showed herself to be under the sway of Erroll Garner, especially with respect to his use of time lags and voicings, but there was rather a tentative feeling to her playing, perhaps reflecting the strain she was under. The record got a good critical reception, but Mary was far more interested in her projects for Circle and hardly mentioned the Atlantic date, though it does contain several new originals and works by Herbie Nichols. By June of 1951, Mary had her arrangements ready and went into the studio on June 10th. That first session was one of her most creative and productive. With Billy Taylor on bass, Al Walker on drums and bongos, she recorded three of her modern originals—”Bobo,” “Kool,” and “Tisherome”—plus modern arrangements of “The Sheik of Araby” and “St. Louis Blues/Handy Eyes.”
“Kool” had a lighter feel than in the Asch version, and “Tisherome” in particular was beautifully played and more effective than in its earlier King version. Opening to a rumba beat, it moved into straight 4/4 jazz time with strong, atmospheric chords. “Handy Eyes” (Mary’s reworking of “St. Louis Blues”) had of course been evolving for years, “typical of her application of modern harmonies to the folk blues,” as Allan Morison wrote in the liner notes. Similarly, her highly rhythmic “Sheik of Araby” showed how far she had come.
“Bobo,” adapted from “Bobo and Doodles,” is the most musically advanced of the eight tunes on the album Piano Contempo: Modern Piano Jazz. It is one of her strangest pieces, mixing Afro-Cuban rhythms and chants (invocations by Willie Bobo that Mary may or may not have known were chants to santería deities), with Schoenbergian dissonances and bop harmonies, ending with a quote from Bud Powell’s “Tempus Fugit.” Sadly, though much of the material on the Circle record was brilliant, it went out of print almost immediately.
On June 15, five days later, Mary was back in the studio. “I thought up an idea of voices singing like instruments, also piano solos with bongo, bass and drums,”
she wrote, describing an idea she had already tried out in works like Elijah and her test record the year before. Now she used a singer friend, then-struggling Dave Lambert (later well known as part of Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross), who brought with him a group of eight musician-singers to work on four arrangements.
The results were dismal. As the rehearsal tapes Mary kept document, the group was simply not up to the job of Mary’s close harmonies and difficult rhythms. Mary’s piano weaves precisely through take after mushy take. At times she lets loose a slammed chord that cracks like a slap, signaling her loss of patience.
It must have been instantly apparent to her on that June day that her ideas, so carefully burnished, were not to be implemented. There were other, curious lapses. “Da Function” is a repetitive West Indian ditty, sung by a mediocre calypso singer, that simply had no place with Mary’s compositions. Perhaps she chose it because calypso was then enjoying a vogue; perhaps, too, to help out the composer, pianist Herbie Nichols, a new friend introduced by Monk. (Besides the wretched “Da Function,” she recorded his lackluster ballad “I Won’t Let It Bother Me,” as well as several of his tunes on her Atlantic record.) A sensitive, literate man, Nichols wrote Mary a letter that hinted at romantic feelings on his part: “I suppose the reason I left so many tunes with you were selfish ones—I derived pleasure from watching you smile at the different morsels.”
Neither did Mary’s ambitious vocal arrangements work. On two old warhorses, “Cloudy” and “Froggy Bottom,” the group never comes close to the kind of ethereal, sighing vocal effects she aimed for. After what Mary called a “discussion,” she then reluctantly agreed to the singers’ demands that she speed up the tempos (they were funereal) and change the key signature: that, she complained, “immediately gave it a different sound and we struggled through rehearsal.” To loosen things up, she added, she “let the musicians use stimulants but still nothing. I gave up. I never saw such a crazy session in all my life.”