Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  There are, in fact, some intriguing parallels between the two composers in this musical arena. Mary did not think it mere coincidence that Ellington put on his first sacred concert in the fall of 1965, shortly after she’d given him her recording of St. Martin de Porres, or that he presented his second sacred concert in 1968, the same year Mary wrote her second mass. Both composers became absorbed in the Bible; both wrote three long sacred works, and they wrote them around the same times. (Ellington created three sacred concerts—in 1965, 1968, and 1973. And although he was commissioned to write liturgical music, in the end he chose not to do so, preferring to concertize.)

  MARY’S MISSION TO write a jazz mass really took shape in the spring of 1967, when Bishop Wright hired her to teach music at a Catholic high school for girls in Pittsburgh. Mary was euphoric at the opportunity to prepare a sacred jazz concert with the school’s choir. “The Bishop of Pittsburgh will have 1,000 kids to sing the Mass I finish in the Cathedral here, in July!!” she wrote O’Brien with high enthusiasm.

  As so often, though, Mary’s optimism hit a wall, and her spirits soon dipped when she began working at the school. Seton High’s principal expected her to teach music to 400 girls, and, many complained, was so prejudiced that Bishop Wright replaced her (with a black administrator), and directed that Mary’s music class be reduced to a manageable twenty-five. Then Mary tackled the curriculum. Although she noted with approval that the teenagers had a talented choir director in their Sister Gracia, they seemed bored and restless. “I was teaching them theory and the kids just sat there and glared at me,” Mary said later. “I couldn’t stand that, so finally I said, ‘Let’s do it how it is.’ I wrote a bop blues and the kids went wild.” Mary’s mood soared again. “After that, they couldn’t wait to get to class. I was teaching them to sing like Billie Holiday—teaching them the sounds the way she made them. They loved it. They were scatting like Ella!” She began adapting “religious” pieces like “Praise the Lord” and some secular but soulful tunes like “O.W.” for her planned mass with the choir. “I had lost my inspiration, but I was truly inspired by the girls. For the first time in a while I really felt like writing, so I began composing during the class. I’d tell the kids to take a break and I’d write eight bars of the Mass. They’d sing it right off.” To which she added, “I wrote that mass in a week.”

  Not exactly. She actually had to simplify a good deal of material—for example, there were three versions of “Praise the Lord” written for that mass, each progressively less complex harmonically, to suit the abilities of her amateur choir, as was the case with “O.W.,” which served as a processional. As she was to do in the next two masses she wrote, Mary was responding to the pragmatic needs of the choirs she worked with, and perhaps as well to her own limited experience in directing choirs.

  Although she was inspired with fresh ideas by working with the girls in class, much of the work of rewriting was done at her sister Mamie’s house in East Liberty where, as was always her habit, Mary stayed while she was in Pittsburgh. It was an atmosphere that she later described pungently in a letter to Peter O’Brien as the “most hell you can imagine—all that noise.”

  Can’t seem to write in New York, but listen to this. There’s eight of us where I live. In the house, kids are running up and down the stairs, TV on in the room to the left and to the right. Records are being played by the boys downstairs. Yet I stay up til 4 A.M. frequently, writing for the kids—something else, huh? I am teaching them to sing the arrangements I’m writing for them, including the “Gloria” (“Glory to God”), “Kyrie” (“Lord Have Mercy”), and “O.W.,” arranged for entrance music.

  At last, after one postponement when Bishop Wright was called to China on a mission, at the end of July 1967, Mary was able to hear her mass celebrated in Pittsburgh’s beautiful St. Paul’s Cathedral, with a choir of thirteen, some probably drawn from CYO summer-camp attendees. (It was recorded by Mary herself, on a home tape recorder.) She had tried, Mary said, to capture in the music “the way I feel when I’m praying.” This first quietly serene mass (simply titled Mass), composed for piano and voice, flowed lyrically out of the African-American experience, its jazz influence residing primarily in the naturalistic phrasing of the vocal lines and masterful piano accents that gently swing the piece. Mary’s liturgical work stirred attention of church authorities sufficiently to ask her to appear on a Catholic television program about the history of salvation, where she was part of a company that included Dr. Tom Dooley and U Thant.

  But Mary was far from satisfied with her first effort. “It was long, drawn out, like a symphony, like the kind of thing they have in churches,” she later said dismissively. Like so many of her earlier compositions, it would be revamped, overhauled and added to, and then would flow into her next mass, titled Mass for the Lenten Season.

  IN CONTRAST TO the serenity and rich sonority of her spiritual music, Mary’s private life continued in disarray. While working on Mass, she wrote O’Brien grimly from Pittsburgh, “You know I’m going through the worst period of my life. God knows what He’s doing, but I don’t. Wish I could leave His business alone, stop complaining, find a rocking chair and sit in it, ha!” But at least her teaching stint in Pittsburgh had given her a respite from the problems of her second Bel Canto Thrift Shop, which from the beginning was as impractical a business venture as the first—more a place to socialize than to do business. Into the storefront she moved an old piano and a drum set donated by Dizzy Gillespie, invited her friends to stop by and play cards and talk, and threw parties for friends on their uppers, like Eartha Kitt and Hazel Scott. (Scott had divorced Powell and married an Italian 15 years younger than herself. Father Woods performed the ceremony and Mary was maid of honor. But Scott’s second marriage was a failure as well, and soon her glamorous career in Europe foundered. Once back in New York, however, she promptly reestablished herself.) Mary, who could ill afford it, constantly gave merchandise away yet still expected the shop to allow her to fund her own needs, modest though they were, plus those of others. Typical of Mary’s attitude was a 1966 letter to the landlord, in which she pleads with him to reduce the shop’s rent from $125 to $75 a month: “I’m away making money to run the store. The store is closed when I have to go away until such time I can find someone capable of taking care of it. Last year I gave away close to $3,000.” Needless to say, this argument did not impress her landlord. And business continued to worsen. “She was not tough enough to run a business,” says Peter O’Brien.

  Meanwhile, Mary’s silent partner, Joe Wells, watched his investment being run into the ground, while Mary responded to his worried queries with wildly impractical suggestions. Why didn’t “they” buy up the whole block, she asked at one point, and set up stores serving the community? Mary may have been “Madame Queen” to Wells, but he was out of patience. He brought in his wife Ann to manage the store, dump the Salvation Army goods, and expand the section called “Votre Boutique” featuring African-American designers. Mary defended her castoffs, but Ann Wells held firm. Finally, in the winter of 1968, the store was closed for good, with the Wellses demanding that Mary pay her share of rent and electric bills.

  Mary felt betrayed. “It seemed as if God had deserted me and I wondered what I had done. I was off the beam for quite a while,” she confided in a letter to Joyce Breach. Ann Wells was a “witch,” and her husband worse: in Mary’s view, they had taken everything she had built up, while she had lost money and hope. “She had a lot of paranoia, she didn’t trust people,” thinks Elaine Lorillard. “On the other hand, if people gave her money or lent it to her, they didn’t or shouldn’t have expected to get it back. I didn’t.”

  With the shuttering of the shop, all hope of funding the Bel Canto Foundation ended. But for Mary the dream of having a foundation that could provide both outreach and a basic living for her, so that she would not have to depend on nightclub work, only went dormant. Within a few years she was mulling over plans to apply for foundation grants for
outreach projects.

  IN PRACTICAL TERMS, the closing of Bel Canto Thrift Shop confronted Mary with a pressing need to find an income. She decided to try her hand again at writing arrangements for the few big bands that still survived. In particular she wanted to arrange for Duke Ellington, regarding him as both the best composer and bandleader in jazz. In August of 1967 she stopped by to chat with him during an engagement at the Rainbow Room, and there, she said, “He asked me, again, if I would do some things.” Soon after, she wrote him the following letter:

  8/21/67

  Dearest Duke:

  Received a call from Inez Cavanaugh last night. Seems that many of your ardent fans would like me to write for your band. I have already started a few things and hope to get them to you before you leave New York.

  Was reluctant, due to the fact I am trying madly to do something about my compositions that I have in Cecilia Publishing company. I asked [Tempo Music—Ellington’s Music publishing company] for the return of “You Know Baby” because I have spent a great deal of loot trying to do something about it and at last it was used in a Frankie Sinatra film a few months ago. I called Ruth [Ellington] several times to help with the exploitation. You do realize that this is unfair for the artist to do all the work.

  First I had the Foundation to help musicians. I dropped all this to get back to music. Lost a great deal of money in a partnership store after deciding to return to music. In fact, my partner actually took the store from me (had invested over $15,000 of my salary to keep the foundation going). Have been teaching jazz in Pittsburgh at Seton High School. Wrote the Mass and Bishop Wright celebrated the Mass with teenagers singing it. Had wanted you to hear to do a big Mass here or Pittsburgh. Came to New York the first of August.

  Well to make a long story short, I have earned very little in the past year and to be able to arrange for a band without a goodsized advance of money would put me in really bad shape.

  I love writing for you because you are my favorite but, I will have to receive some kind of compensation. I have bills to pay. If I had money I’d write for you and not charge you anything.

  Am making up “You Know Baby” (two arrangements of it, due to the fact that you have a Rock and Roll singer). It’s a natural for a hit if you’re lucky to get it through all this “muck and mud (smile).” Unfortunately nothing happened with the record I recorded, mainly because one cannot understand the singer’s words, his diction was very bad. The kids in Pittsburgh and Fordham liked both the “Chief” and “You Know Baby.”

  If you can possibly do so, I’d like an advance of between $2500–3000 so that I can do as many things as possible for the band. This will enable me to pay up bills and devote the next three months to writing.

  As usual, I’d like to concentrate on “ol standards and originals.”

  May God Bless you … Love

  P.S. Please call immediately.

  In the mid-forties, when for a time he couldn’t play any works registered with ASCAP, Ellington had needed her. Now he didn’t, and was charming but noncommittal. Bassist Brian Torff recalls Mary’s stories about Ellington’s use of charm: “She would write arrangements for him, then go to him to get paid and he would say something like, ‘Well, Mary, what a lovely dress you have on!’ ” Mary was nothing if not determined and continued to pursue the idea of writing for Ellington for at least another year, even as she was writing arrangements for the Count Basie and Woody Herman orchestras.

  One of the pieces she arranged for Ellington, her “Scratchin’ in the Gravel,” now called “Truth,” was magnificent, taken at a dirge-like tempo before a majestic finale, with lead alto solos tailored for Johnny Hodges. “That’s her crusading thing again,” remarks O’Brien. “The idea was this is the truth about jazz—the blues.” There were as well the new rock-and-roll and ballad versions of “You Know, Baby,” and rock and jazz versions of “Chief Natoma from Tacoma,” the piece Mary had written and produced on a 45 for teenagers.

  Both versions of “Chief” wound up on Ellington suites: the “rock” version in the center section of the long suite The River, and the “jazz” version in the “Loco Madi” (short for “location Madison”) movement of the UWIS Suite. Though the tempo is changed in the latter, and there is an inimitable Ellington treatment at the end of the movement, Mary’s “Chief” melody can be clearly heard. Mary was never credited nor paid.

  It is more than likely that Mary’s “Chief”s were folded into the two suites unintentionally. After all, Ellington was a composer who, as his long-term West Coast secretary, Patricia Willard, remarks, said that he did not often go out to hear others play: he had become aware that he was too likely later to unwittingly “compose” something he’d heard. Mary knew nothing of how her material had been used, never heard the suites, though there was a close call: while team-teaching with her at Duke University in the late seventies, O’Brien recalls listening to The River for the first time with students right before Mary arrived in the classroom. “When I realized what I was hearing, I took the needle off the record before she entered. She would have been furious. There would have been some shit flying—she would gotten on a bus for New York and raised hell.”

  MARY’S SECOND MASS took shape when Father Robert Kelly approached her about writing one for the six weeks of Lent in 1968. Kelly, a priest at St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem, was in charge of a project to commission works by African-American composers in the New York Catholic Diocese. She agreed with alacrity. This second work she described as “a quiet piece,” and in large part it is: the music’s appeal lies in its delicate pensiveness and sensibility, dabbed with the blues, a properly contemplative but subtly swinging mass. The “jazz” aspect of the mass was contained in her arrangements for saxophone (Harold Ousley), flute (Roger Glenn), guitar (Ted Dunbar or Grant Green), bass (Major Holley and others)—but with the unfortunate addition of Robbie Mickles on drums, playing a loud, rock-oriented beat (which Mary may have hoped would “reach the kids”). Again Mary used singer Honi Gordon, whose golden tones, at once earthy and ethereal, lifted the amateurish mixed choir, for whom Mary’s long, sinuous boppish melody lines and jazz-inflected stops and pauses were unfamiliar territory. The younger, more pliable voices handled their parts better, but even they, many noted, were a struggle to train.

  Again Mary approached Moe Asch. Wouldn’t he record this mass, she pleaded? By sheer word of mouth, she told him, the Lenten jazz service had packed the church for four Sundays. But again Asch declined. There was no one else to go to, and to date Mary’s Mass for the Lenten Season has not been recorded, although it has been performed several times, including once at Dorothy Day’s Tivoli Farm that summer for a Pax Christi meeting, and in 1969 at a concert in Rome. Like its predecessor, it lives on in certain rearranged and revised sections of her third and most famous mass.

  On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. At the request of a priest from a nearby school in Harlem, Mary wrote two songs in tribute to the civil rights leader afterward. Composing them virtually on the spot, she drew their titles from his sermons. The stately “If You’re Around When I Meet My Day” and the exuberant “I Have a Dream” were performed by a children’s choir on Palm Sunday that year. Mary, who had taken care to write music that captured King’s voice and inflections, admitted that she was “shaking with fear” at the task, but she was pleased with the results, and as usual hoped that Moe Asch might produce an album, including the new songs. In vain.

  Then Mary, to use her phrase, “picked up her cross” and went on, her life kept in balance by prayer and music, which by then utterly interconnected for her. “I’m praying through my fingers when I play,” she said often. It was the kind of prayer that reached out and sought to heal. “I think the entire world is kind of upset and I don’t think people know very much what to do with themselves,” she observed. “I make it by sticking with my work and thinking that everything’s going to be okay—which I think it will be.”

  Chapter
Seventeen

  Zoning

  1968–1977

  WITH HER SECOND mass completed, Mary determined to begin another. Both her first and second had been “quiet,” so as not, she explained, “to detract from prayers when the beat becomes more important than union with God.” But her third was aimed at her favorite target—young people. And she intended it not only to swing, but to rock teenagers into the fold.

  She needed financial support to write the lengthy new work. Reasoning that the time was ripe for papal support of a jazz mass, she set her sights on the Vatican, enlisting Peter O’Brien’s help in contacting the Jesuit hierarchy in Rome, and plying Brother Mario with letters and plans. Once she had Vatican approval, she felt, a stipend to compose the work would surely follow.

  Meanwhile, she had to earn a living. In Copenhagen, Baron Timme Rosenkrantz was opening a new jazz club. From there, Mary reasoned, it would be easy enough to get to Rome and the papal officials she hoped would fund her third mass. So she agreed to debut at “Timme’s Club.” And she had the baron’s word as well that she would find plenty of work on the other side of the big pond.

  Traveling to Scandinavia on a German steamer (she still feared flying), Mary arrived in Copenhagen in the middle of August to find Timme’s Club far from ready to open, although she was booked for the following week. Rosenkrantz found her a room, but it was a distance from the city. Being isolated and broke in an expensive city took a toll on her; Mary’s spirits fell and her health worsened. In letters home she complained of a raft of disorders: an infected eye, back pain, a sluggish digestive system, and the possibility that she’d contracted mumps or chicken pox (she had not). Mary’s weight had been creeping up; she now tipped the scales at 200 pounds. She joked about her struggles with diets, but hated being obese. A physician-friend, music-lover Dr. Sam Atkinson, notes that Mary “was powerfully built and extremely durable, as great musicians are,” yet her health was never very good from that time on. Most ominous, as she mentioned in a letter to Joyce Breach, “I had a slight discharge from carrying luggage, etc,” and immediately began a new diet, a “grape cure” for cancer. “I used the grape juice and I healed it,” she added. It would be exactly ten years later that her bladder cancer, in an advanced state, became manifest.