JazzTimes – October 2019

16 JAZZTIMES SEPTEMBER 2019

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obody embodied the jazz

tradition quite like Mary Lou

Williams. She was born in 1910

and helped define stride piano, big-band,

and boogie-woogie when those genres

were at their peak. When modernism

came in, she befriended Thelonious Monk

and Herbie Nichols. As early as the 1950s,

she programmed concerts and recordings

that sought to celebrate different historical

styles from ragtime to bebop; in the ’60s

she was quick to accept funk beats as well

as the harmonic innovations of Ahmad

Jamal, Bill Evans, and Herbie Hancock.

On her 1976 album Free Spirits,

Williams plays with a Hancock rhythm

section. Buster Williams had been in the

epochal Mwandishi sextet and Mickey

Roker had powered Hancock’s famous

Speak Like a Child. Both the bassist and

Mary Lou Williams:

Spirits of ’

A late-period masterpiece from a revolutionary pianist

BY ETHAN IVERSON

peers being quite so hip, especially with

this rhythm section.

The CD reissue does the music a bit

of a disservice, with alternate takes and

FURTHER LISTENING

> The Chronological

Classics, 1927-

(Classics, 1992) —

Includes early virtuoso

solos like “Night Life”

and “Lit tle Joe from

Chicago”

> Zodiac Suite

(Smithsonian

Folkways, 1995)—

Avant-garde

composition from 1945

> A Keyboard History

(Jazztone, 1955) —

Superb ’50s trio with

Wendell Marshall

and Osie Johnson,

one of the earliest

historically-minded

concept records

CHRONOLOGY

the drummer had been working fre-

quently with Williams in New York piano

rooms. Roker told me he played with

Williams at the Hickory House for seven

months straight, and Buster Williams

says he joined the trio there after Bob

Cranshaw had gotten too busy taping the

music to Sesame Street.

Free Spirits is a good title, for there is

something notably casual and “free” about

Williams’ pianism in this context. She

never forces an agenda with the bass and

drums, and her improvisations meander

in the best way. The left hand is restrained

yet rhythmic and the right-hand melodies

peck around in a classic call-and-re-

sponse. Perhaps nothing is obviously

avant-garde (except the dissonant “bells”

she lays down behind the bass solos), but

it is difficult to imagine any of her pre-bop

Mary Lou Williams at

home in New York, 1975

x Feature: Mary Lou Williams’ April 1977 concert with Cecil Taylor