Category Archives: musicians

Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams

Editorial Review

Review

“Soul on Soul offers valuable insights about how gender shaped the opportunities and reputations of the first generation of jazz women… a balanced reading of this legendary jazz pianist… Kernodle’s study… establishes a rightful place for Williams as a jazz pioneer.” –Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

Product Description

Pianist, composer, and arranger, Mary Lou Williams (1910–1981), was one of the most significant and influential artists in the history of jazz. A versatile musical genius who experimented with and mastered most of the emerging styles in jazz’s evolution, Williams wrote and arranged for such greats as Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was friend, mentor, and teacher to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Yet throughout her prolific career of nearly six decades, she battled as an African American woman to achieve recognition, equality, and acceptance in the male-dominated world of jazz.

Now Williams’s artistic brilliance and lasting legacy are affirmed in this definitive volume, which masterfully interweaves biographical details with incisive commentary on her music, performances, and recordings. Setting Williams’s intriguing story against the racial, social, cultural, and musical currents of her times, Tammy L. Kernodle draws on extensive interviews and meticulous research to chronicle the tragedies and triumphs of Williams’s stormy private and professional life. Included are her struggles with racism, sexism, and age discrimination, and such personal misfortunes as recurrent bouts of poverty, turbulent marriages and love affairs, extreme loneliness, and a string of bad business decisions.

Born to an impoverished, unmarried mother in Georgia, and raised in Pittsburgh, the self-taught Williams started performing publicly when she was six-years-old. By the age of twelve, the “little piano girl” was touring on the black vaudeville circuit. Kernodle follows Williams’s harsh life on the road, her rise to fame in the 1930s as an arranger and performer for Andy Kirk’s Kansas City swing band Twelve Clouds of Joy, her role as matriarch of the bebop movement, her solo career, her blossoming spirituality, and conversion to Roman Catholicism. In her later years, Williams wrote sacred jazz pieces that brought emotional healing to listeners, and worked tirelessly to help and rehabilitate addicted, down-and-out musicians. She was also strongly committed to advancing jazz composition and to educating others about the cultural roots of jazz.

This striking portrait untangles the paradoxes of an exceptionally gifted pianist who defied the odds and endured hardships to create innovative music that inspired musicians and fans alike. It celebrates her persistent yet loving spirit, extraordinary talent, and enduring body of work.

Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams

Editorial Review

From Publishers Weekly

In a time when the music of Harlem was beginning to stake a claim on the racially mixed Greenwich Village clientele, Williams, a young black pianist, trained her sights on a more classical venue. In 1947 she reached it, leading Carnegie Hall’s New York Philharmonic in a boogie-woogie symphony of her own composition. Williams began her jazz career as a teenager accompanying orchestras “by ear.” She soon taught herself to read and write music and gained a reputation as a masterful arranger. Her influence on the evolution of jazz spanned four decades from ragtime to bop, and can be heard in the works of jazz giants from Duke Ellington to Charlie Parker. Many musicians attribute her with genius, but lasting popular recognition has eluded her. Dahl’s (Stormy Weather) narrative, while well researched, lacks the vibrancy needed to launch Williams to the fame she nearly obtained and so clearly deserves. Using a plethora of quotations, Dahl reconstructs Williams’s evolution as a prodigy, a mystic, a bohemian and a religious convert, but she offers little insight into Williams’s character: Dahl tells us that Williams was shy, but follows with stories of a very sassy nature; she announces that Williams’s telepathic gift haunted her throughout her life, but offers scarce anecdotal evidence. Nonetheless, Dahl’s comprehensive appendixes of discography, compositions and arrangements are a boon to jazz scholars, and despite its defects, this biography remains an important step toward recognizing the achievements of a remarkable woman. (Feb.)

From Library Journal

Dahl, a frequent contributor to jazz publications and the author of Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazz Women, presents here an overdue and definitive portrait of one of the 20th century’s most important and overlooked jazz figures, the troubled pianist, composer, and arranger Mary Lou Williams. Relating Williams’s story without sentimentality or sensationalism, Dahl portrays her as a woman who transcended economic and gender obstacles to create an enduring legacy in the notoriously male-dominated world of jazz. Although the book does not require familiarity with music theory, it manages to interweave the details of Williams’s life with the development of her music and her contributions to a variety of styles. Dahl details Williams’s influence on and collaboration with some of the premier names in jazz–Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, and Bud Powell–and her late-life religious conversion that resulted in a number of ambitious sacred music projects. This highly readable title is essential for jazz studies collections, suitable for women’s history collections, and recommended for all collections.

Mary Lou Williams Biography

Mary Lou Williams was born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs, on May 8, 1910, in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a very young child she taught herself to play the piano and her first public performance was at the age of six. She became a professional musician in her teens and became a jazz pianist, composer, and arranger.

Her professional debut with big bands came at age 12 substituting for a pianist in a vaudeville show and for the next few years she toured and played with such artists as Jelly Roll Morton, Willie “the lion” Smith, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington.

A child prodigy with perfect pitch and a highly developed musical memory, she began playing by age four. By age ten she was known as “The Little Piano Girl,” playing at private parties around Pittsburgh where the family moved when she was 6 years old. “Around Pittsburgh, I played for many wealthy families, the Mellons, in particular. I was just a kid. They were wonderful! They’d send a chauffeur out for me and I’d play for their private parties. Once they gave me $100. My mother almost fainted. She wanted to know if the lady drank. She even called the people to see if they had made a mistake.”

In the early forties Williams began a long happy engagement at Café Society Downtown in New York City. She was playing on and off, more on than off for approximately five years beginning in 1943.

The years between 1941 and 1948 were an intense period of creativity in Jazz and New York was the place to be. Williams arrived on the scene just in time to capitalize on the history making events of that era. It was during this period that Williams came in contact with musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, Oscar Pettiford, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, J.J. Johnson, Kenny Dorham, Charlie Parker, Art Blakey, Bud Powell, and Thelonious Monk, who was in her company daily. Many of these musicians would hold court in Williams’ apartment after hours creating and playing new sounds that would push forth the Bop Era.

Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk would bring their compositions to her to listen to and the musical sessions extended through the night and into the next day and might involve Erroll Garner or Mel Torme or Sarah Vaughan, etc.

In 1964 she founded the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival and served as director for three years. Williams even published her own music through her Cecilia Publishing Company and recorded her own Mary Records label. She was also founder and served as president of the Bel Canto Foundation for needy musicians as well as the general poor and young children and she started the New Reform Foundation for gifted children between the ages of 6 and 12.

Williams died on May 28, 1981.

Mary Lou Williams was the “Mother of Bebop.” She was the mentor to Dizzy, Bird, Monk, Bud Powell and Tad Dameron, who gave them the secrets of the flatted 5th and started the bebop revolution. Monk stole a tune from her. “Rhythmning ” was a Mary Lou Williams’ riff in one of her arrangements for Andy Kirk and Thelonious Monk made a song out of it without even changing it at all. – Nelson Harrison

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong

Product Details
Hardcover: 496 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (December 2, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0151010897
ISBN-13: 978-0151010899
Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds

Crafted with a musician’s ear and an historian’s eye, Pops is a vibrant biography of the iconic Louis Armstrong that resonates with the same warmth as ol’ Satchmo’s distinctive voice. Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout draws from a wealth of previously unavailable material – including over 650 reels of Armstrong’s own personal tape recordings – to create an engaging profile that slips behind the jazz legend’s megawatt smile. Teachout reveals that the beaming visage of “Reverend Satchelmouth” was not a mark of racial subservience, but a clear symbol of Louis’s refusal to let anything cloud the joy he derived from blowing his horn. “Faced with the terrible realities of the time and place into which he had been born,” explains Teachout, “he didn’t repine, but returned love for hatred and sought salvation in work.” Armstrong was hardly impervious to the injustices of his era, but in his mind, nothing was more sacred than the music. –Dave Callanan

Product Description

Louis Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century and a giant of modern American culture. He knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts, wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies–without a collaborator–and created collages that have been compared to the art of Romare Bearden. The ranks of his admirers included Johnny Cash, Jackson Pollock and Orson Welles. Offstage he was witty, introspective and unexpectedly complex, a beloved colleague with an explosive temper whose larger-than-life personality was tougher and more sharp-edged than his worshipping fans ever knew.

Wall Street Journal arts columnist Terry Teachout has drawn on a cache of important new sources unavailable to previous Armstrong biographers, including hundreds of private recordings of backstage and after-hours conversations that Armstrong made throughout the second half of his life, to craft a sweeping new narrative biography of this towering figure that shares full, accurate versions of such storied events as Armstrong’s decision to break up his big band and his quarrel with President Eisenhower for the first time. Certain to be the definitive word on Armstrong for our generation, Pops paints a gripping portrait of the man, his world and his music that will stand alongside Gary Giddins’ Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams and Peter Guralnick’s Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley as a classic biography of a major American musician.

Millionaire High School Dropouts

For some, diplomas are (barely) worth the paper they’re printed on. These star entrepreneurs jumped right in.

While the rest of us were negotiating curfews and cramming for the SATs, some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs ditched high school to start building their fortunes.

Many did it out of necessity; others had a mentor (or at least a backer looking to piggyback on their success). All, however, had a demon drive to build something of their own. Even at a young age, that commitment and passion can win over investors.

“Investors really look at the person and the quality of his or her idea more than their experience,” says Brad Burke, managing director of Rice University’s Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, which incubates new companies.

For all the new entrepreneurship programs popping up at business schools, there will always be a slew of born entrepreneurs who prove that high school diplomas, let alone fancy graduate degrees, might well be (barely) worth the paper they’re printed on. Here are just a handful of examples.

Jay-Z (Shawn Carter)

This high-school dropout grew up in one of Brooklyn’s roughest housing projects, dealing drugs before finding salvation in hip hop. In 1995 Carter took his first single to Def Jam Records, the company he ended up running from 2004 until 2007. In 2008 he signed a 10-year, $150 million deal with Live Nation that gave him control over his records, tours and endorsement deals with companies like Dell and Budweiser.

George Foreman

This ubiquitous pitchman grew up poor in Marshall, Texas. Found a mentor, through Lyndon Johnson’s Job Corps program, who encouraged the 15-year-old thug to box. Foreman would eventually win a gold medal at the 1968 Olympics. His big pay day came in 1999, when he bagged $138 million for selling naming rights to grill manufacturer Salton.

He has since pitched brands like Doritos, KFC and Meineke, and has launched a line of environmentally safe cleaning products, a line of personal care products, a health shake, a prescription shoe for diabetics and a restaurant franchise.

Simon Cowell

Caustic judge earned $75 million last year, thanks to his involvement with American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent, musical talent show The X Factor and SyCo records, his production company. The 50-year-old impresario dropped out of school at age 16 and landed a job in the mailroom at EMI. At 23 he left to start his own record label, Fanfare. Post-Idol, Cowell will shift his focus to a U.S. version of the The X Factor, where he’ll serve both as a judge and executive producer.

Giselle Bundchen

When Bundchen was 14 years old a modeling scout discovered her in a Brazilian shopping mall. In 1996 she debuted at Fashion Week in New York City. She earned $25 million last year, thanks to contracts with Versace, Dior and other companies. She also has a line of sandals called Ipanema by Gisele.