Harlem Nocturne
Page 14
Martin also visited Williams in her Harlem apartment. There is no indication that they experienced similar harassment on the streets of Harlem. Ultimately, it seems, the inconveniences of Martin’s marital status may have worn on the couple. Or perhaps Williams was able to maintain a relationship because he was married—and thus unable to really interfere with her artistic ambitions and her independent lifestyle. In any event, by 1945, the romantic relationship, if there was one, appears to have been over. Williams and Martin remained dear friends for life, but by the mid-forties, Williams was involved with another musician, Milton Orent.
Significantly, both Martin and Orent were white men. Williams had been married to only black men, and all of her romantic attachments before Martin had been to black men—all of whom were musicians. The love of her life was the great Ben Webster, a highly regarded jazz saxophonist, with whom she became involved in the thirties. Prior to moving to New York, her world had been primarily black. Although New York was segregated, her social life in the city was not. There, she found herself in the company of young, hip, progressive men and women of both races. This was her community. It centered on the music.
Williams began performing at Café Society Uptown in 1945. Located on East 58th Street, the larger club lacked the warmth and intimacy of the downtown venue. Williams preferred the downtown venue, noting that, “for all its looks, the Uptown Café was nothing like Downtown—though it catered for the same kind of Eastside crowd: movie stars, millionaires and the elite. Downtown was groovy, more relaxed than uptown.”25 Josephson felt Williams could be as big a star as Hazel Scott, however, and he believed the move uptown would expose her to a broader audience.
Following the move uptown, Josephson helped secure a weekly radio show for Williams on WNEW. Called The Mary Lou Williams Piano Workshop, the show gave her an extraordinary opportunity to reach listeners who did not come to Café Society. It also gave her the chance to try out new works before premiering them.
Some nights between shows, Williams went to 52nd Street, “the Street,” to hear Billie Holiday at the 3 Deuces, or over to the Hurricane to see Duke Ellington’s band. One night she sat in with the band when Duke was late. Fifty-second Street, between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, housed a number of clubs where on any given night you could hear stars from all eras of the short history of jazz: 3 Deuces, Kelly’s Stable, the Hickory House, Leon & Eddies, Club Carousel, the Famous Door, the Onyx, Club Downbeat. Musicians, fans, and college students found their way to the Street, and so did the hustlers and the drug peddlers. Billie Holiday famously said, “I spent the rest of the war years on 52nd Street and a few other streets. I had the white gowns and the white shoes. And every night they’d bring me the white gardenias and the white junk.” Williams never used heroin—nor did she drink; her substance of choice was marijuana. But she never passed judgment on those who became addicted. In fact, she later tried to set up a one-woman rehab in her apartment. She claimed, “It doesn’t matter what a person does as long as I like him or he is blowing.”26 This was Mary’s major criterion: first and foremost, she liked talented musicians who were disciplined and serious about the music.
Mary Lou Williams with fans in the studios of WNEW, the radio station that hosted The Mary Lou Williams Piano Workshop, 1945. Courtesy The Mary Lou Williams Collection, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University.
On 52nd Street, Williams noticed the drug use, but she was there for the music. When she did comment about narcotics, it wasn’t to spread tales about individual musicians, but to share observations about the ways unscrupulous people would plant drugs on unsuspecting musicians. At one of the clubs on 52nd Street, Williams was standing at the bar when a detective walked in. Another man, afraid of getting caught with whatever drugs he was carrying, hid them in a musician’s coat that was lying on the bar. “A girl I happened to know took it out of his pocket without the musician, who was a nice guy and a nondrinker, [noticing what she’d done],” Williams later wrote. “She said to me, ‘Did you see what that rotten so and so did? I guess he thought he’d be searched and rather than get in trouble he’d rather frame an innocent man.’ After this I was told to keep my hands in my pockets if I had pockets whenever I was on the street.”27
When Williams finally headed home, or in the afternoon before heading downtown, she might stop off to see Thelonious Monk and “the kids,” as she called the young bebop musicians. Bebop was a harmonically complex, fast-paced style of music requiring near virtuosic skill. While swing bands allowed individual soloists to break away and improvise before returning to the arrangement, in bebop most of the tune was taken up by long, improvised solos over difficult chord changes. The music developed in small clubs; in after-hours jam sessions; in some of the most innovative big bands, such as Billy Eckstine’s; and in the salonlike atmosphere of Williams’s Hamilton Terrace apartment.
After Williams finished her work at Café Society, the young musicians would pick her up and head uptown to her apartment around 4 A.M. Miles Davis, Monk, Mel Tormé, Sarah Vaughan, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie all found their way to 63 Hamilton Terrace: “Usually when Monk composed a song he’d play both night and day if you didn’t stop him,” Williams later wrote. “Bud, Monk or Tad would run to the house . . . playing their new things for my approval or showing them to me.”28 She became especially close to the young, gifted Bud Powell, encouraging Barney Josephson to hire him and then mentoring him both professionally and musically.
But their creative relationship was mutual. Williams insisted, “The things Bud wrote for me improved what little originality I had and inspired me to experiment with my own things.” Williams is being unduly modest here. As early as 1940, especially on the album Six Men and a Girl, one can hear her using harmonies that would be associated with bop. She had referred to them as “weird harmonies” and “screwy chords.” Williams was much more than a mentor, midwife, or maternal figure for the new music and the younger musicians; indeed, she was an active participant in and contributor to the technical development of the music. In many ways she was both a pioneer, laying the groundwork and pointing out future directions, and a student of bebop. She was always open to learning, changing, and growing, and thus she was constantly evolving as an artist.29
Like a number of other musicians, Powell fell in love with Williams. “Once or twice,” she wrote, “I had to hide away because I think he felt he was in love with me—he wouldn’t allow me even to sit with one of my little nephews. He wanted nobody around me. If I walked down the street with anybody he’d push them away from me. He began to depend on me emotionally.” Eventually she had to distance herself from him because of his insane jealousy, further exacerbated by his mental illness and substance abuse. “I wouldn’t let Bud Powell in my house when he’d come in high,” Williams later said.30
For many of the men, Williams was more of a maternal figure than a paramour, and they treated her with tenderness and respect. What she thought of them and their music mattered to them. Later on, the brilliant and innovative Herbie Nichols wrote her pages and pages apologizing for not living up to her standards; he expressed remorse for his own drug use and for letting her down. The tone of the letter suggests that he may have been more devastated than she was over his failings because he so badly wanted to earn her approval.
Williams spent many predawn hours at Minton’s on 118th Street to hear and support the “boppists.” She wrote, “The cats fell into Minton’s from everywhere, the customer had no place to sit for the instrument cases. I used to hear Mr. Minton grumble in a kidding way about all musicians packing the place and there wasn’t much space left for the customers.”31 A throng of musicians, hipsters, students, and others who appreciated the music filled Minton’s. Young white musicians came hoping to learn this exciting and innovative form that was being perfected among young black musicians. The beboppers created a counterculture as well as a music. Of course, many musicians of Williams’s generation had no time or ear for the m
usic that would become known as bebop, but Williams heard their originality and brilliance and continued to support, encourage, and teach them. She also recognized that many of those who dismissed the new music, both black and white, were not beyond stealing and incorporating their ideas without crediting the boppers.
By now, Williams found herself growing tired of all the benefit performances required of her as a Café Society musician. She told British jazz critic Max Jones, “The only drag in New York was the many benefit shows we were expected to do—late shows which prevented me from running up on 52nd Street to see my favorite modernists.”32
In 1943, Williams began conceptualizing what would become one of her most significant and ambitious compositions, The Zodiac Suite. Ever since Duke Ellington had presented Black Brown & Beige at Carnegie Hall in January 1943, Williams had aspired to write an extended work of her own. She had recently begun to see Milton Orent, a classically trained bassist and arranger, and she and Orent worked together to prepare for the composition. They listened to live music. They went to the New York Public Library’s branch on East 58th Street to listen to classical recordings, and they read the scores of Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and other German modernists and French Impressionists. Williams’s friend Gray Weingarten also brought music to her, and the two would listen to and discuss them in Williams’s apartment. According to Weingarten, she introduced Williams to her favorites, the Russian modernists, and in exchange Williams introduced Weingarten to bebop. Still, Williams continued to think “bop [was] the only real modern jazz, despite the contentions of the copyists of Stravinsky, Hindemith and Schoenberg.” During the period of composition, Williams attributed much of her growth and development to her growing relationship with Orent. Her friends disagreed. Weingarten feels that Williams gave Orent credit because he was her boyfriend. Whatever the case, the two spent a lot of time together, and he worked closely with her on the extended composition and would eventually conduct it.33
At any rate, Williams was intent on diligently preparing herself for the production of her first extended work. She then began working on the suite at Café Society Uptown, composing the first three movements and improvising them nightly. She also introduced one Zodiac composition a week on her radio show. Ultimately, Williams dedicated all twelve signs to her artist friends and others involved in the music business. The dedications are a virtual who’s who of the New York jazz scene at the time, with Ben Webster, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, and others on the list. Each piece evokes that individual’s traits as well as the dominant traits of the sign of the zodiac he or she was chosen to represent.
Williams had a long-standing interest in the zodiac. At this stage in her life she hungered for spiritual meaning and guidance, but she did not have a sense of religiosity. For her, music was a spiritual medium, a conduit to something outside of herself as well as a vehicle for expressing a sense of the spiritual, if not the divine. She operated in a secular world, that of jazz and show business, yet the jazz world itself was nonetheless characterized by its own expressions of the spirit. Surprisingly, Williams found community in the context of New York nightlife, a world in which sex, drugs, and money were in great supply. But the scene also provided fellowship, warmth, love, and transcendence. She would later write: “Jazz is a spiritual music. It’s the suffering that gives jazz its spiritual dimension.”34 For Williams, black music offered transcendence by directly confronting and acknowledging human suffering. This was the source of its spiritual power, for suffering and our longing for transcendence from it are what join us as humans. She believed black music to be a gift to all humankind because it provided a way through pain and suffering to beauty and joy.
Listening to the Zodiac Suite today, in these post–Kinda Blue times, one may be reminded of Miles Davis’s seminal work. “Cancer,” especially, sounds like the introduction to “So What.” “Cancer” is deeply interior and moody, introspective and dark, but in a soothing, comforting way. It is impressionistic—but classical and modern at the same time. It leaps ahead a decade, previewing the sounds that would dominate the late fifties.
Pianist and educator Billy Taylor praised the suite’s “innovative use of the rhythm section.” Later, Andrew Homzy, writing a set of liner notes for the Vintage Jazz Classics edition of Zodiac Suite, called it “a series of vividly evocative tone poems in the jazz idiom.” The piece is indeed poetic, at times haunting, at other times meditative. Here it is dancelike, there humorous. As with the twelve signs of the zodiac, each movement evokes a different mood and persona. Williams herself was a Taurus. That piece starts off as a quiet and introspective piano solo moved by a series of chords and two-note motifs before the drums join in, seeming to push the melody further over a series of repeated chords. Midway through, the left hand brings in a blues tone before the song returns to the meditative feel of the opening. “Taurus” melds directly into “Gemini,” whose opening choruses echo the sound and energy of Broadway, or perhaps a Stuart Davis painting.
The larger work provided Williams the space to explore classical music and to attempt to bring together classical and jazz idioms. Williams wrote that Zodiac was “the beginning of a real fulfillment of one of my ambitions. As a composer and a musician I have worked all my life to write and develop music that was both original and creative.” Although she found classical musicians—the paper guys—too studied and lacking in the creativity that characterized jazz musicians, she envisioned a group that would bring together black and white, male and female, European classical music and jazz—a truly democratic ensemble.
Williams debuted The Zodiac Suite with Edmond Hall’s chamber orchestra at Town Hall at 123 West 43rd Street on a Sunday afternoon, New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1945. The orchestra included a string section, a flute, a clarinet, a bassoon, and a number of brass instruments. Bassist Al Hall, drummer I. C. Heard, and an unknown opera singer joined the orchestra. Williams’s friend and former lover Ben Webster was featured as well, as were Edmond Hall (clarinet), Henderson Chambers (trombone), and Eddie Barefield (tenor and clarinet). Milt Orent directed the orchestra. At the same concert, Williams also performed some of her most popular jazz and boogie-woogie tunes. The reviewer for the New York Times found the work “rather ambitious” and noted, “The composition was scarcely a jazz piece at all, making its appeal as a more serious work. How successfully, time will tell.” Clearly, Williams had used the opportunity to expand her own vision beyond the parameters of what was conventionally called jazz, though it is highly unlikely she would have made the kinds of distinctions suggested by the reviewer.35
Jazz was still rare in the city’s concert halls. Benny Goodman had performed the first concert by a jazz orchestra in Carnegie Hall in 1938, and Williams performed The Zodiac Suite there in 1946. Though founded by the League for Political Education as a meeting place to provide public education on important political issues, Town Hall quickly emerged as a preferred site for musical performances because of its incredible acoustics. Built by the architect firm McKim, Mead & White in 1919, Town Hall opened on January 12, 1921. It welcomed contralto Marian Anderson in 1935, and it was home to an extraordinary jazz concert on June 22, 1945, featuring Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Don Byas, Al Haig, Curley Russell, and Max Roach. It was one of the venues that was most welcoming to jazz performers.
Through Williams’s music, places of architectural and acoustic wonder, the concert halls, were transformed into spaces where traditions met, conversed, and sometimes collided; they were spaces where paper men met improvisational genius. Places like Café Society and Williams’s Sugar Hill apartment brought together integrated groups of musicians and integrated audiences that challenged convention and tradition. This urge to challenge traditional sounds, spaces, and communities was reflected in the broader desires of progressive artists and activists, especially in Harlem. They remade the city in their own image, and they imagined and sought to bring into being their own version of a beloved community.
Moses “Moe” Asch recorded and released the studio version of Zodiac in 1945. Shortly after arriving in New York, Williams began to record for Asch, and she continued to do so during her most productive periods. Williams always admired and respected Asch. She noted, “The poor guy never quite made it financially because he was too nice to musicians.” Williams was grateful to Asch for a number of reasons: “He submitted my music to all the New York libraries, he paid me for recording musicians I had heard in Pittsburgh,” she explained. “Sessions for Asch brought me more royalties than I’ve had from any other record company, and gave me the freedom to create.”37
Even after recording it, Williams continued to recompose and revise The Zodiac Suite. In addition, other artists performed portions of it. Williams’s fellow Café Society performer and friend Pearl Primus choreographed and performed parts of it, and would continue to do so throughout the decade. Talley Beatty and Katherine Dunham also choreographed dances to portions of Zodiac. Williams dedicated “Scorpio” to Dunham, Imogene Coca, and Ethel Waters, whom she called “my friends the sexpots.” Gray Weingarten arranged for Williams to perform parts of the suite in Syracuse at a benefit for the NAACP. Dizzy Gillespie recorded three movements in 1957, arranging them for big band.