![]() The sheer breadth of her work is tough to track down since many of her arrangements were never recorded, and many have been lost. Whenever musicians listened to the band they would ask who made a certain arrangement. As we were making perhaps 500 miles per night, I used to write in the car by flashlight between engagements. "One week I was called on for twelve arrangements, including a couple for Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines, and I was beginning to get telegrams from Gus Arnheim, Glen Gray, Tommy Dorsey and many more like them. "By now I was writing for some half-dozen bands each week," Williams told Melody Maker. He repeatedly asked her to be his full-time arranger and his pianist - and she declined just as often, filling the gossip pages. It also served Goodman's more nefarious intention to - as the black papers of the time noted - import some of the sound of black bands into his mostly-white ensemble ( Billboard regrettably called it a "real jive version"). Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz Mary Lou Williams On Piano Jazzġ937's " Roll 'Em" was Williams' biggest song for Benny Goodman, a jazz-hands-ready swinger that helped solidify her status as a heavyweight away from Kirk with its balance between a propulsive, chugging rhythm section and bawdy horns. Despite the fact that her preferred style was anything but pop, the understated saxophone interlude that Williams penned is smooth and seductive, and the filigree she adds on piano is romantic without being overbearing. The Depression still loomed large, and getting a hit was a matter of survival as much as it was a boon for her career as a soloist. ![]() The record shows the band at its most glossy and saccharine - which Williams hated, but she could play the part. Neither Williams nor any members of the Clouds of Joy (including Kirk himself) would see royalties from the eventual American Songbook classic. Williams fleshed it out with an arrangement, but it was a crew of Tin Pan Alley writers that included Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin who got the credit after writing new lyrics. The song, recorded by the Clouds of Joy to meet the label's demand for something sweet, was based on a long-neglected melody (called "The Slave Song") by a Kansas City colleague named Lawrence E. If " Froggy Bottom" (first recorded in 1929, but not widely released until a rerecording in 1936) was her first really memorable composition and arrangement ("real jazz-'dirty,'" according to Variety), it paled in comparison to how " Until The Real Thing Comes Along" would change her entire trajectory. "I always liked lying flat on my back on the grass in Paseo Park in Kansas City, looking up at the stars, composing, late at night," she explained, via Linda Dahl's Williams biography Morning Glory. A falling out with John over money meant that Williams no longer wanted to share a bed with him instead, she stayed up all night writing. ![]() Through the early years of the Depression, while the band had few opportunities to travel and fewer still to record, Williams spent almost all her time refining her new craft, learning more theory from Kirk and going to jam sessions with Lester Young and Ben Webster while doing "five or six arrangements a week" by her own estimation, as she put it a 1954 interview with Melody Maker. ![]() Not yet confident enough in her own understanding of arranging to write them down, she dictated her ideas to Kirk (one early cut is called just that: " Mary's Idea"). A missing pianist left a spot open for Mary Lou during an early session, and she seized the opportunity to prove her worth by sharing a slew of new compositions. Williams' arranging career began in 1929 when her husband, John Williams, joined Kirk's band. But too often women's contributions to music, particularly jazz, are diminished by the assumption that they're intuitive and thus unintentional - an assumption that's clearly incorrect, but perhaps nowhere more baldly than in the fact that a woman was doing the intellectual work of writing arrangements for some of the swing era's most beloved bands. The comparatively unglamorous work of arranging - essentially, designing each band member's parts so they fit together, and coming up with new spins on familiar pieces - might not seem like one of Williams' most noteworthy endeavors, given her unmatched history as a player and composer. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |