Morning Glory

by Linda Dahl

  “On one level, she was trying like mad to protect me—like Woods had done. She wanted me right there but I paid no attention to that. And in many ways, she was absolutely right. It was a rough world.”

  AS EVER, WORK provided the best release for Mary in a difficult time. Nineteen seventy-one was an extremely busy and important year professionally. With minimal financial investment, she managed to produce piecemeal for Mary Records one of her most brilliant projects of original music, the album she titled Zoning. In four separate sessions—two in January and one each in February and March—Mary recorded with different combinations new compositions such as the playful “Rosa Mae” (lyric added later by Gracie Glassman). This number, she recalled, was “written for the kids (with bassist Larry Gales). It had a little bass figure of rock so I could win the kids over and show them the little dances to the rhythms of jazz because I’m still playing the blues and jazz on top of it.” As for “Medi II,” a.k.a. “Busy, Busy, Busy,” Erica Kaplan notes: “Because of the simplicity and proportion of the harmonic phrasing, it gives the effect of a blues. [But] the composition’s slow half step harmonic oscillation creates a modal type effect and she demonstrates her absorption of the developments of saxophonist John Coltrane. The net result gives ‘Busy Busy Busy’ the feeling of a cross between a blues and a modal piece.”

  An interesting experiment was Mary’s addition of a second piano (along with Bob Cranshaw on Fender bass, and Mickey Roker on drums) on “Intermission,” and especially “Zoning Fungus II.” “Zita Carno could play a fly dot,” Mary said of this versatile pianist. (Carno played for the New Jersey Symphony, for Bugs Bunny cartoons and wrote transcriptions of John Coltrane’s music as well.) Mary wrote Carno’s part and much of her own in the somewhat atonal and scalar “Zoning Fungus II,” which resolves into a blues infused with longing, a far different kind of “free” playing from the two-piano performance that Mary would give a few years later with Cecil Taylor. Pianist Hilton Ruiz says of “Fungus II”: “Everything that she does here relates to something that’s going to happen over there. Everything.” Even at its most atonal, there is a certain strange beauty, the beauty of an ice goddess—shades of the “frozen chords” of Kansas City jam sessions of the 1930s. Critical response to Zoning was positive (twenty years later, a remastered compact disc with additional material has been issued). One reviewer extolled the “joyful, lifting pulse that she uses most effectively with the trio in which Cranshaw is on the bass and Roker on drums.” “She had a lot of fun putting this Zoning thing together,” confirms O’Brien. “She was dead serious. But I can see her coming around the bend in her apartment, in a housecoat. She’s got one hand held up high, this long trail of music paper coming down, a pencil in the other hand, and she’s smiling.”

  But there was also the usual emotional letdown after a sustained creative push. “She was hurt and furious about the liner notes I wrote for Zoning,” says O’Brien of his thoughtful and highly respectful writing for the LP, “and I never knew why. However, I think she was looking for spectacular treatment, as in the olden days—great stuff to happen. And she wasn’t getting that. The big record companies were absolutely distant, and for the eleven years I tried, I was never successful in getting a major company per se interested in Mary Lou. Norman Granz did finally record her in 1977 and 1978, but his label, Pablo, only paid about $2,000 each time, that’s all. Maybe that’s why Mary let me have it.”

  Part of her “fury” may also have been in response to the collapse of Peter O’Brien in late winter due to a serious bout of hepatitis for which he had to be hospitalized. This capped a disappointing engagement at the Cafe Carlyle in January and February, when she substituted for vacationing entertainer Bobby Short at the posh East Side club. “I thought, here’s a steady job for her—it would mean return engagements,” says Elaine Lorillard. “Then I don’t know what happened. I remember she had to have a certain piano.” “Oh, yes, Mary Lou Williams,” says Bobby Short. “She used to hate to come on after me,” he adds, laughing. “I pounded that piano, you know, broke strings and so on.” Worse, the audience was the kind Mary disliked playing for, nostalgically calling for boogie-woogies and Café Society repertoire; “cornball” was her term for them. “That was a red flag,” says O’Brien. “She would become uptight and uncooperative—evil is the term black people use and it’s the right one.” Critics as well felt she was miscast. “Seeing her in such genteel surroundings is like being served steak at a garden party,” commented Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker.

  When Marian McPartland, whom Mary viewed not so much as a rival as an interloper, was asked to sub the following year at the Carlyle, Mary took it as a snub. Though McPartland was a keen admirer of Mary’s brilliance, Mary was envious of the successful career the well-spoken, socially adept Englishwoman had built in America, writing frankly to Joyce Breach from Rome a few years before: “She wants to be the Queen of the ivories. Me, I don’t care—I pray for her. Anything I do she tries to ape me, ha! I never liked being in her company ’cause I always felt a breeze but this is not reason for me not to pray for her. Her idea is to top me—imitating etc., to reach the top. Now, Barbara Carroll (white) plays better jazz than Marian—it’s more soulful.

  “We [African-Americans] are the only people nobody wants, and now you can see why many become bitter. They never have a chance to receive credit for all they create through their suffering.”

  At times, Mary would balk when McPartland came into the Cookery to hear her, complaining that she would steal her arrangements and style. When McPartland began what is now a long-established successful radio program called “Piano Jazz” in the fall of 1978, she invited Mary to be her first guest, and the taped encounter shows Mary’s prickliness as she fairly bulldozes over her smooth hostess—but it is also a fair sampling of Mary’s later brilliance, with a furiously fast “Morning Glory,” a lightly seasoned “Rosa Mae” (with rare vocals by Mary), and a brilliant “I Can’t Get Started.” The two most famous female jazz musicians did make peace after 1978, when Mary’s cancer became public knowledge. McPartland recalls that Mary softened a good deal toward her; and Mary was especially appreciative of a lovely medal of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, that McPartland sent her as a gift.

  O’BRIEN RECOVERED FROM hepatitis, and Mary’s career rolled on. In May, invited by Ruth Ellington, she performed a homage to Duke Ellington at his grand funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Unlike other performers, she didn’t select a composition by the maestro but played the beautiful ballad “Holy Ghost.” “She got into trouble for that,” says O’Brien, “but she replied, ‘I counted it as a prayer for Duke. I put Duke Ellington chords in there.’ ”

  In 1975, Mary returned to the Cookery. She also performed a luminous version of Mary Lou’s Mass at a Composers’ Showcase at the Whitney Museum (a series that was taped though not issued on recordings). It was one of her most accomplished Masses, with Milton Suggs on bass, Jerry Griffin on drums, Tony Waters on congas, and a vocal choir that included Carline Ray.

  It was in 1975, too, that Monsignor James Rigney, rector of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, gave approval for Mary Lou’s Mass to be performed there. Rigney wanted to involve schoolchildren in services at the cathedral, and the work Mary described as a “Mass for the Young—or the Young Thinking” was deemed just the thing. “It’s going to swing,” she told the press firmly before the performance. Regarding the choir of forty students drawn from area Catholic boys’ and girls’ schools, she noted: “They don’t have to swing. All they have to do is sing their lines. The bass and drums and me—we’ll swing them.” With Mary was Buster Williams on bass and Jerry Griffin on drums.

  On a cold Tuesday afternoon on February 11, more than 3,000 people came to witness the Mass. The audience overflowed into the aisles, a respectful audience, quiet until the end, when they burst into applause after “Praise the Lord,” the concluding hymn. “Miss Williams,” reported the Times, “threw kisses.”

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nbsp; But the aftermath of the mass was anything but upbeat. O’Brien had attended to the thousand and one details that surround such an event, working feverishly on publicity, not to mention writing and delivering the homily. But after the service, when he unvested and sought Mary, what should have been a celebratory moment collapsed. “I wanted to go out and wind down. I was exhausted—I’d been at the church for hours beforehand, preparing. And all of a sudden, there’s Mary, with her neighbor Edith and Robbie, who’s glowering. And she said, ‘Let’s go around the corner and get some Chinese food.’ And I erupted: ‘No, Mary, no!’ I thought, what a way to end the day! And Mary turned away. Then I finished up at the church and I left.”

  Mary was also disappointed by the lack of response on the part of the music industry after the performance at St. Patrick’s, just as her recent, highly accomplished and self-produced creative work, Zoning, had not accorded her widespread recognition. “She got furious at me later,” says O’Brien. “I should have that mass going on all around the world, she told me. She had thought that George Wein and all those powerful people were going to immediately take her to the top after she was at St. Patrick’s.”

  With no recording contract, despite her achievement at St. Patrick’s, Mary had to take what was offered, and she readily agreed to do a trio album for the Danish Steeplechase label. The money was low but the company gave her free rein, and the result (recorded on July 8, 1975) was Free Spirits, a contemplative, somewhat subdued set of tunes saturated in the blues, prominently featuring Buster Williams. It is a benchmark album: Mary was at the zenith of her mature powers, absolutely confident, every note honed and placed with precision (despite the fact that she was suffering muscle strain in her left arm, wrapped in a thick Ace bandage during the recording). As usual, Mary mined her own material, recent and ancient, including “Gloria,” which on Free Spirits features a more rock-oriented beat, a more subservient bass, and a more sinuous piano than the “Gloria” of a year before on Zoning, which had been gutsier and more intense.

  Six months later, Mary recorded again for Chiaroscuro. The self-descriptive Live at the Cookery was made, with a young and green Brian Torff on bass being covered like a blanket by Mary’s piano. (Like others, Torff went on to a fine career after being launched by Mary.) “I could not believe,” writes Torff, “that one could record an album in such a noisy club. Right behind where I stood (at Mary’s left hand) was a bin where the waiters would throw dirty dishes while we played.” Perhaps that is why Mary, who plays louder than on Free Spirits, also seems to swing more vigorously; that and the fact that she was breaking in a new bass player: when she was not playing with a favorite, like Buster Williams, her playing tended to sacrifice delicacy for strength.

  Torff had once auditioned for Mary and been turned down, but when Milton Suggs left, she hired him to work at the Cookery in September. Torff worked with Mary throughout the winter of 1976. Rehearsals, held at Mary’s apartment, he remembers, were casual but memorable. Mary was going through a rough period with Robbie at the time, of which Torff was unaware. “I would show up in the afternoon and usually she greeted me at the door in a housecoat and slippers,” recalls Torff. “She’d sit down at that great old piano all scarred with cigarette burns, she’d pull something out, and just start playing. She was not a master of tact and she always seemed tired; there were circles under her eyes. But I saw her help many people—including me.”

  In fact, Mary had continued to help many up-and-coming pianists; since the sixties, Cedar Walton, Horace Parlan, and Andrew Hill, among others, had benefited from her advice. Teenaged Hilton Ruiz became a favorite protégé: “She offered to teach me for free, and I went to her house in Harlem every day.” Lessons, he remembers, would sometimes go on for hours, with Mary cooking dinner while shouting instructions from the kitchen. “I was in awe of her; I was scared. She was serious, but she also had a great sense of humor.” Torff, too, was in awe. “I would be scared stiff on the job,” he recalls. “She’d tell me to play the changes—but she’d play different changes on the second chorus. She was tough on me, soul on ice, and she admonished me for all my mistakes. I realized with her that I was not prepared—I didn’t know the older repertoire and the bop standards, and she told me to go out and buy bop records—which she pronounced ‘rekeds.’ But I learned and I think looking back that she had taken me on out of her generosity—teaching and guiding me. We played colleges, schools, nightclubs—the Copley Plaza Hotel for three weeks in Boston, where Mary also performed her Mass at a church and did workshops for children at a school in Roxbury. That was a poor, tough neighborhood—I can remember seeing dirt in the piano keys that Mary Lou played; but she suddenly improvised a piano solo so compelling and beautiful that the hair stood up on the back of my neck.

  “Her power of concentration was incredible. I can even remember her falling asleep once in the middle of a song. We were playing and I heard this soft, snoring sound. I looked over and there was Mary Lou, head down, fingers moving, but playing the piano in her sleep. When I hit the wrong note on my bass, Mary woke up!” Mary called her dozing on the job “being hypnotized.”

  While working steadily in the 1970s and commanding a higher salary than before, Mary nevertheless continued to live simply and frugally. When she finished working at the Cookery, for example, she’d usually drive home alone, in her Cadillac supplied by Roland Mayfield (still a friend), and according to Torff, “she’d often sleep on the front seat until six or seven A.M., when she could legally park it. Then she’d go upstairs to her apartment.” When she wasn’t driving, Mary would often take the subway downtown to the Cookery, wearing a cloth coat in cold weather and carrying her luxurious, full-length fur in a shopping bag. When she got off the train in the Village, she’d dress in the fur and put the cloth coat in the bag. On her days off, rather than going out to fancy parties or restaurants, she preferred to relax by playing cards with friends or visiting relatives. Grace had stabilized and Mary often went to Prospect Park in the Bronx to picnic with the Mickleses on food she prepared herself—fried chicken, chitlins, black-eyed peas, greens, and sweet potato pie. She was similarly low-key when she visited family in Pittsburgh. Recalls a favorite grandniece, Karen Rollins, “After she’d unpacked and settled in, she’d take me with her to Highland Park. We’d walk around, then go to Isley’s ice cream shop and get pineapple sherbet. She never wore her talent as a badge. It was never discussed. And no one in the family really respected her talent. Now, finally, the younger ones are beginning to realize who she was.”

  MANY PEOPLE WONDERED why Mary chose to perform in a a dual-piano concert at Carnegie Hall with Cecil Taylor, perhaps the ultimate avant-garde pianist. She had repeatedly made her negative feelings clear about the avant-garde in jazz, with its rejection of established harmonic and tonal patterns. In an essay that became part of her liner notes for Embraced, the album resulting from her concert with Taylor, she described the avant-garde as being filled with “hate, bitterness, hysteria, black magic, confusion, discontent, empty studies, musical exercises by various European composers, sounds of the earth, no ears, not even relative pitch and Afro galore” (although she hastened to add, “I’m crazy about African styles in dress”).

  Yet something in Taylor’s music appealed to her, as did John Coltrane’s late playing; or, rather, she accepted both musicians’ work because they could still, if they wanted to, play “within the tradition.” And although tradition—the heritage of suffering embodied in spirituals and the blues—was sacred to her, Mary had always pushed herself to experiment and master new styles. And by the mid-seventies, she was eager to reposition herself on the cutting edge. She was not, she wrote in her diary, “corny” (her word for passé and hidebound); she had “changed with the times.” Still, by then she had felt at least a twinge at being passed over. So much had happened since her reemergence in the sixties—rock, soul, long hair, Afros.

  Hair had always been a potent symbol in the black community: “good” hair meant stra
ight hair, “bad” hair meant frizzy, African hair. Mary, of course, belonged to the generation for whom straightening, or pressing, hair was as important to good grooming as brushing teeth. “In 1971, when Mary was at the London House in Chicago, Earl Hines was at another club. And he had these lacquered, glossy toupees, funny colors sometimes too,” recalls O’Brien. “Everybody’s hair from her era was pressed; Erroll Garner had conked hair. Duke. Louis Armstrong wore a stocking in his dressing room. And of course Mary.”

  In her little yellow kitchen, she spent hours transforming her hair into a smooth, glossy bouffant. “Once I came into Mary Lou’s apartment and I almost fell apart,” recalls O’Brien. “She’d washed her hair and it was up like a bush around her head: huge, frizzy hair, straight up and out. And I started laughing, and she said, ‘What’s the matter with you? Ain’t you never seen anybody’s hair?’ And I had not; I had no notion that that was the way it was.” But the sixties was also the period of “naturals,” dashikis, Black Power, all of which Mary viewed with suspicion. “Mary’s at the London House and the young bass player said something derogatory about Earl Hines’s hair—his wig—and Mary went ape-shit,” recalls O’Brien. “The anger was fierce and she wouldn’t speak: nothing. Not even on the stand. Three days like that. It was violent. God knows what that remark unleashed in Mary. No, she didn’t have an Afro.” On the other hand, in one of her playful moods she could go out and buy the biggest Afro wig she could find and come in with it on one night at the Cookery. She and O’Brien fell about laughing.

  She didn’t find too much to laugh about in the radical movements then in fashion on the fringe, sensing the possibility of violence behind the Black Muslims and Black Panthers. She also felt, especially after her dealings with Joe Wells soured, that she could not trust her “own people” in business. As she wrote in a letter in 1969: “I’m a little afraid of my own race. The black Americans at one time were the sweetest. Now they are killing off one another. It’s dangerous to be black! I never allow them to get too close.” It’s not surprising, then, that she wouldn’t join in the movement among many black intellectuals to celebrate the African heritage in African-American life. Some critics saw this as a result of deep shame about her origins. And Mary stuck her finger right into the wound, so to speak, when she declared in an essay: