by Linda Dahl
YET FAR FROM discouraging her, the failure of the Carnegie Hall concert only seemed to energize Mary. Her list of projects lengthened: she wanted to make regular visits to the sick at hospitals; hand-sew and donate scapulars (the badges worn by Catholic religious orders); and solicit donations of musical instruments from music stores for the young people she was beginning to teach at storefront community centers. But above all, there was the thrift shop. She scouted Manhattan for a storefront, finding one she liked around the corner from Bellevue Hospital, at 308 East Twenty-ninth Street. Signing a year’s lease in 1959, she set to soliciting “subscribers” and contributions of clothes and other items to sell.
The shop, friends remember, was never well-organized. There were racks of clothes, jumbled-up boxes of things, many of them from Mary’s famous friends—Lucille Armstrong, Louis’s wife, donated dozens of pairs of size 4½ shoes, Duke Ellington gave a mink bow tie, Elaine Lorillard gave brooches and beaded bags, Esmé Hammond gave couture dresses, and so on. Mary was proud, in a childlike way, of these trophies.
Having at last settled Grace in her own place, Mary’s time was now mostly her own; a woman helped out part-time in the shop. She let everyone know she was looking for merchandise, and leaned on buyer friends from Saks and Gimbel’s for donations. Mary’s favorite way of selling the clothes was to throw a party in the shop as a fund-raiser for a musician in trouble and invite people to make their purchases while she played. Delilah Jackson, today a historian of black entertainment, wandered into the shop one day in 1960, a young single black woman pushing a baby carriage. “Seemed like she knew that I needed things,” she recalled. “She introduced herself, but didn’t say she was a musician, an entertainer, and she asked if I needed anything. I said I didn’t have any money and she said, ‘I didn’t say anything about money, it’s for the kid.’ She gave me a big bag of clothes for the baby. She was still beautiful then and she was so excited about this shop, it seemed like she had found a new love. She’d put like $5 or $10 in my hand; she felt sorry for me. She was trying to do everything she could for me, this went on for six or seven months.”
Curious as to why Mary had picked a white working-class neighborhood for her shop, Delilah remembers asking, “ ‘Those Irish people, they like you? They’re crackers.’ But she said, ‘They love me, they can’t do enough for me. God’s been good to me.’ ”
If Mary had become “like a nun,” as several friends put it, she was still attractive to men. “There was a man who came by her shop who liked her,” says Jackson. “I think he drove a taxi, and she’d run out and talk to him, like she was in love. She had these long, slit skirts, with voluptuous legs—sexy.” “But,” emphasizes Lorraine Gillespie, “I didn’t know her to have any boyfriends in the time I knew her. Just the church,” she says, adding after a pause, “and all these priests.”
And monks, she might have added. In the spring of ’58, during a chance stop at Graymoor, a monastery and retreat center run by the Franciscan Brothers and Sisters of the Atonement in the Hudson Valley, Mary met and immediately befriended a young black Franciscan, Brother Mario (born Grady Hancock). Attracted by the beauty and aura of the place, Mary—who was traveling back from an engagement in upstate New York with, of all people, Joe Glaser—spent a good deal of the morning there. “She probably had never seen a black Franciscan, and so she was very determined to meet me,” recalls Brother Mario. “I was in the gift shop when they walked in. She was thin then and very pretty, in a dark coat with her hair flowing as usual, and I knew immediately she was an exceptional person, not an ordinary person that makes a pilgrimage. She carried herself like a lady. And I thought that Glaser was her husband, but she introduced him as her manager. Joe Glaser seemed in a rush but she was saying, ‘Wait, wait.’ She was just bubbling over, overjoyed to see a black religious and she gave me her address and sent Glaser back to the car to get some of her records—some 45s. Then Glaser tried to get across to me how important she was. ‘She’s a very famous jazz pianist.’
“Glaser was a very respectful man; he seemed dedicated to her. He would never interrupt her, although he did want to get on his way. But they must have stayed about another hour. I took them to the guest cafeteria for a cup of coffee. She was in complete control, oblivious. She talked in a sweet, soft voice at a solemn tempo. By then, Glaser was really nervous, looking at his watch and shifting around.
“I didn’t know who she was. We didn’t know those things, they were considered worldly. We never even read newspapers, and I’d been away from the world about three years. I had gone to Graymoor in 1955 and I was very young, about 21.
“About five months later in the autumn of 1958, she made a retreat, staying at our Sisters’ for three days. She was my guest, so we’d have a meal together, talk, and we’d walk around the grounds. And that’s when we really got to know one another. We weren’t allowed to get too involved with lay people, but she wrote letters that I have. In later years, from ’58 to ’64, when I was there, working at the gift shop, she’d jump in the car and just show up at any moment. When the Brothers went to New York twice a year, I’d visit her there. And she brought Lorraine Gillespie and Lucille Armstrong, all three together, up to Graymore in about 1959 or 1960. Lorraine and Lucille, I remember, bought expensive rosaries.”
Mary, however, had no money for expensive rosaries. Her shop limped along for several years until, by the end of 1963, it was operating at such a loss that Mary had to close it. Undeterred, she sought fresh financial support to open another storefront, but this time on home ground, between 142nd and 143rd streets in Harlem, just minutes from her apartment. Ever hopeful, she took out an ad in the Amsterdam News, announcing:
New and Old Clothing for the Entire Family donated by such well known artists as Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Clark Terry, Hazel Scott, Janet Burwash, Carmen McRae, Randy Weston, and others …
Chapter Sixteen
Black Christ of the Andes
1962–1968
THROUGHOUT THE 1960s Mary remained a “jack-in-the-box,” in Peter O’Brien’s phrase, in terms of performing. She continued to loathe nightclubs: not only were they full of bad vibes and selfishness, but worse, the noise and distraction “broke the telepathy between players.” When out of necessity she did take club dates, though, Mary felt that her playing had improved. “Before, I was almost wasted,” she wrote in her diary. “Now I can express myself better without ‘hoggin’ up’—making mistakes. My thinking is much better. I can really play from my mind through my heart to my fingertips, and that’s what jazz really is.” The best evidence of the strength and clarity of her playing from this period comes from self-produced recording sessions (for Mary Records) in ’62 and ’63. The version of “It Ain’t Necessarily So” released as a record is a buoyant, spare etching of the blues. (An abundance of other material from the same recording sessions, never previously released, may be planned for a CD release.)
Mary’s motto now became “Jazz is healing to the soul,” a belief she elaborated upon in her diary, in essays, and even in broadsheets that decried the polluting effects of commercialism on jazz music and called for a return to the strongly spiritual roots of the music. But her convictions, genuine and deeply felt though they were, had the ring of fanaticism for many people, serving only to isolate her from the very community she had long taken as her “family.”
She was particularly upset by the movement called avant-garde, or “free.” “It mirrors destructiveness,” she wrote in one of her most controversial essays. “I am very sad for what I hear, it seems that a heritage is being thrown away.” The kids—the next generation for jazz—couldn’t relate to it, she added, because the avant-gardists got “so far out they forgot about the basic thing—rhythm. So the kids made up their own kind of music with their own kind of rhythm for their own particular kind of dances, while these musicians got so anxious to impress each other with their dazzling techniques and complicated chords they failed to notice that they
were losing them.”
She distrusted the 1960s craze she called “Afro.” “Afro has nothing to do with jazz,” she continued. “Jazz grew up on its own here in America. It grew out of the work songs and the psalms of the black people here. Black Americans don’t have to go back to Africa to get their dignity. They’ve got it here. The innovators have introduced sounds that are not compatible to love and jazz is disturbed. These sounds are … turned in from love and away from God.” She added bluntly, “But these musicians using their talent to become a big star knew I was completely different. This talent I have is to help people, period. Yet I have faith that jazz is strong, the roots are deep. We must rid ourselves of evil by becoming charitable. SING OUR SOULS.
“It’s the suffering that gives jazz its spiritual dimension,” she added later, repeating her fervently felt view of jazz as a healing force. “That’s what our jazzmen today have forgotten. Only out of suffering is a true thing born.”
Regardless of the lastest fashions in music and painting, Mary now accepted that if she was to have an income it meant performing. After months of back-and-forthing, Joe Glaser finally convinced her that exposure in California could be invaluable to her career. He signed her to an important engagement in San Francisco at the Tudor Room of the Sheraton Palace Hotel in January 1962. Knowing her well, however, he took no chances once she’d accepted and asked Louis Armstrong, then based in California, to stop by to offer moral support. Armstrong did, and squired her to a Chinese restaurant—they both loved Chinese food—where they ate a six-course meal.
Mary got glowing notices at the Tudor Room and settled in for an extended engagement, striking up a friendship with actor Lloyd Bridges, who was then starring in Guys and Dolls at the hotel’s adjacent dinner theater.
To all outward appearances in California, Mary was successful and moderately prosperous; few could imagine the true state of her finances. Glaser had had to buy her gowns and help defray expenses because she was broke and up to her ears in debt. She still hoped—or fantasized—that she could recoup decades of lost royalties for old tunes, and to this end, she occupied her free time in California with typing letters to music publishing companies, adding to the thick pile of correspondence she’d carried on with them since the forties.
Wanting badly again to get a record out, Mary also wrote to Frank Sinatra at his new label, Reprise. “She told him she’d like to make a record for him, but she never heard back,” recalls Joyce Breach. Then from New York, Glaser wrote that he was trying to put together a record deal to rebuild her presence—first through reissues of old material and then new material. But this plan fell through, too, partly because he learned that Mary was trying on her own to set up a deal (in vain) with a public relations woman she’d become friendly with at the hotel. Glaser shot her one of his furious letters: he and Mary had an exclusive contract, how could she think of trying this?
In the spring Mary returned to New York, where she found new energy and began an impressive series of initiatives. She founded her own music publishing company, Cecilia Music, and a record company, Mary Records, and began actively educating children at storefronts. And finally, too, she began to write the music that most deeply engaged her: spiritual jazz.
IN THE YEARS 1962 to 1965, as part of a movement to update and liberalize the Roman Catholic Church, Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council. Religious institutions in America in general were struggling for relevance: for many African-Americans, the lack of inclusion of non-white aesthetics and customs in the Catholic Church was a deep concern. Among Church fathers, a debate raged over whether or not jazz was appropriate for a church service. Father Norman O’Connor, known then as the “jazz priest,” lobbied for including jazz in new liturgical music written for the Church, suggesting that jazz as music was neither sacred nor profane—rather, it was the purpose and the place it was played that made it one or the other. Mary had been thinking of writing spiritual jazz for some time. (Perhaps longer than anyone realized; after her death there was found among her papers a copyrighted “Lord Have Mercy”—from 1945.)
Conchita Nakatani, a friend and houseguest in 1958 and ’59, recalled that Mary began writing sacred music then, possibly an extended work based on parts of the Book of Psalms. And with the encouragement of Fathers Crowley and Woods, Mary planned to write a mass. “If anyone is capable of composing a great work in this field it will be she,” said Father Woods. “I see her as an apostle in the musical world. Jazz and Catholicism are in harmony with her. Jazz is an expression of the American Negro culture, and it has something beautiful to offer the Church in the way of music.”
Her first published work of lasting importance as spiritual jazz was the six-and-a-half-minute modern hymn composed for mixed-voice choir in dense harmony called, alternatively, St. Martin de Porres, or Black Christ of the Andes. This was music expressing Mary’s mystical nature in a formal exploration of jazz elements.
On May 6, 1962, Martin de Porres became the first black (actually a mulatto, or person of color) to be canonized in the Catholic Church. Conferring sainthood on de Porres, a Dominican lay brother born in Peru in the seventeenth century who became revered for his miraculous cures of the poor, was if nothing else politically overdue: many black Catholics were becoming increasingly alienated.
De Porres became the patron saint of justice and harmony among the races. Called “black Christ” by liberal Catholics, he appealed deeply to Mary, at least in part for the same reason Brother Mario had immediately attracted her. Both were rare symbols—and validation—of African-American heritage in a mostly white Church. “She said,” relates Brother Mario, “that I walked in her Harlem apartment and I said, ‘This is going to make you play,’ pointing at a statue of Saint Martin de Porres on top of her piano. And she said that’s when she started writing her hymn to Saint Martin.” (The monk himself does not recall this incident.) Mary also confided in Father John Dear, who was a student at Duke University when she knew him, that after Saint Martin’s canonization, she woke up one night to see a man standing at the foot of her bed. “I remember she told me she said to him, ‘You’re Martin de Porres,’ and he said ‘yes.’ And they started talking about life and Jesus and her believing in God.”
“Whenever she talked about how the visions or saints spoke to her—especially in her dreams,” Brother Mario adds, “I tried to change the subject because I always felt a little uncomfortable that she would speak about visions. She always said she could see things. Later, I accepted it as Mary’s way of trying to express herself. That was her way of expressing spirituality.”
BY THE EARLY 1960s, as the issues of racism and segregation were front and center in the news, and the pain and frustration of the ongoing, often brutal struggle for civil rights for blacks built, Mary’s conflicted emotions displayed themselves in seeming contradictions. On the one hand, she was an integrationist, choosing friends and lovers by character, not color. Yet she could also write in her diary: “Ofays [whites] made me nervous, I could not stay around them nor work with them.”
But if it was hard for her to deal with the covert and mostly insidious racism of the North, as well as the shocking reports of southern brutality toward blacks, Mary’s greatest difficulties with “race” concerned her own people. She noted sorrowfully, “There is no race on earth that is gifted with genius from the go like the Negro, yet he does the worst things in the way of sin.” Among the worst of these things, in Mary’s eyes, was self-destruction through heroin use. Appalled to see the growing violence and addiction in her neighborhood, she could not reconcile herself to the physical and spiritual degradation she witnessed.
Mary’s hymn to Saint Martin de Porres was her pioneering attempt, at once audacious and courageous, to marry jazz with spiritual content, as a means of healing troubled souls, especially the souls of her people. (The original title for the LP that would include St. Martin, later dropped, was Music for Disturbed Souls.) She premiered the piece on the saint’s first feast day,
on November 3, 1962, at a concert after a noon mass at St. Francis Xavier Church. It was a carefully arranged work for trio and choir and, as had been the case since Elijah, the harmonies for voice were dense, with beautifully unexpected resolutions.
A recording of St. Martin, made a month earlier for Mary Records, gave the piece a certain fame. Despite the expense involved, she had insisted on using professionals for the vocals, booking the Ray Charles Singers (no relation to the famous singer), which backed many top acts. “They were the only ones who could do it,” Mary explained. Nevertheless, “The chords were so complicated that I had to simplify them and turn to one of the most brilliant voice coaches, conductor and musician Howard Roberts.” Milt Hinton was discreetly in the background on mostly bowed bass.
For St. Martin Mary drew on a a range of musical influences, from traditional church hymns to spirituals, Latin-American rhythm, and jazz, leaving very little room for improvisation. Conceived as a ballad with a simple melody line, St. Martin is in three parts, and is set in a minor key so as to impart a blues flavor. The work is divided into pairs of male and female voices, observes musicologist Gayle Murcheson. “The tenors and basses open the piece with the first minor text singing the phrase ‘St. Martin de Porres’ as a refrain. However, instead of completing the phrase, they’re answered by the female voices and first tenors.” As Mary envisioned it, the composition was to swing by virtue of its approach to time in its phrasing, a goal not completely achieved by the somewhat stiff-sounding choir, despite Howard Roberts’s direction. “The Devil,” an example of African-American humor, was another new choral work with a typically Mary-esque sinuous melody line. Mary described it as being “about the material world and its many snares, with the Devil like an adversary, seeking whom he may devour.”