Harlem Nocturne (20 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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 music 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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.