Mary Lou Williams: The Unseen Force Behind Jazz Innovation
How Mary Lou Williams Bridged Eras, Mentored Innovators, and Re-shaped Jazz History
Mary Lou Williams was a figure whose impact is felt immensely in jazz history, yet too often overlooked, partly because of her gender, and partly because the nature of her work resists easy categorization. She was the connective tissue between the stride pianists of the 1920s and the bebop innovators of the 1940s, a musician whose evolving harmonic language helped reshape jazz from within. Standing at the crossroads of swing and modern jazz, Williams’s music bridges eras without belonging fully to either, making her difficult to mythologize within the neat narratives of jazz history.
I first became aware of her music through my early studies of stride piano when I was a child. At the time, I had just moved past my fixation with Scott Joplin—thanks to Marcus Roberts’ album The Joy of Joplin—and into a burgeoning obsession with James P. Johnson, once again courtesy of Marcus Roberts’ recording of “Keep Off the Grass.” I was astounded by the rhythmic sophistication and moving bass lines embedded within stride. Just as I had learned Joplin songs such as “The Entertainer” and “Maple Leaf Rag,” I was determined to learn “Keep Off the Grass.” Unlike Scott Joplin, though, James P. Johnson didn’t write down his music, but rather preserved it through shorthand and piano-roll recordings.
During my quest to find an accurate transcription of “Keep Off the Grass,” my dad came home with a curious piece of music he had picked up from the Jazz at Lincoln Center library. It was a song called “Nightlife,” with the name Mary Lou Williams written across the top. It was clearly a piece in the stride tradition, so I was immediately interested.
When I sat down to listen to the recording of Mary Lou Williams performing the piece, I was blown away. The tempo was around the same as “Keep Off the Grass,” but the left hand wasn’t just relegated to a back-and-forth stride bass. She moved fluidly from stride lines to walking tenths to full walking bass lines. The syncopation blurred the beats to the point of almost obscuring the meter. At times, it felt as if the right-hand lines were trying to derail the left hand with accented interruptions. Her harmonies contained an idiosyncratic mix of blues and whole tone rich harmonies.
In her playing was a mix of virtuosity and playfulness that made me wonder whether this piece was improvised or notated. Did the song have distinct melodies, or were they simply sections she improvised over freely? The more I listened, the more questions I had. The scarcity of information I could find about the piece only further mystified me. I needed to learn more about Mary Lou Williams.
Williams came from as much a classical background as a jazz one. A child prodigy from an early age, she absorbed a wealth of influences throughout her childhood. She learned piano sonatas because of her grandfather’s interest in classical music. She learned boogie-woogie because of her stepfather’s love of the style, developing her formidable left hand. Her uncle loved Irish folk songs, so she learned that repertoire as well. She could speak as fluently about Bartók, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky as she could about her jazz contemporaries.
Williams’s ambitions as a composer didn’t stop at piano playing. She became one of the great uncredited big-band arrangers of the 1930s. She first learned arranging while playing piano in Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy. She learned theory from Kirk on a nightly basis, played in jam sessions with Lester Young and Ben Webster, and spent the late hours writing arrangements. Her dedication led to her work being in heavy demand by Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. Her experience with top swing bands gave her a command of harmony and orchestration that set the stage for the next revolution in jazz: bebop.
Mary Lou Williams is often known more for whom she influenced than for who she was. Having mentored Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, and having shaped the emerging bebop style, many discussions about her unfortunately stop there. But if one listens closely, her influence is unmistakable. In “Aries,” the opening movement of the Zodiac Suite, one can hear a possible influence on Monk’s song “Epistrophy”.
One can also hear similarities between the movements of the Zodiac Suite and “Nightlife.” The rhythmic sophistication in her stride playing is further developed in the suite. In the movement “Gemini,” she deploys a boogie-woogie bass line with an additive rhythmic quality and the metric ambiguity of a composer such as Igor Stravinsky. Those little cluster interruptions from “Nightlife” became a stylistic feature of her compositional voice.
Her mix of blues and whole-tone harmonies had also developed into defining elements of her style. Rather than being personal quirks within stride, they became the harmonic anchors around which her language was built. She referred to this kind of harmony as “zombie music,” which she described as “mainly outré chords and ‘out’ harmonies based on ‘off’ sounds.” The features of Williams’s “zombie music,” such as accented clusters and whole-tone harmonies, were among the ideas Thelonious Monk would later develop in his own work.
In the Zodiac Suite, there is also a much greater ambition in scale. Here we find a composer with a distinct harmonic language, torn between the grandiosity of classical and symphonic music and the improvisatory nature of jazz. Williams spent years reworking the suite for piano and orchestra, eventually performing it at Carnegie Hall in 1947. Her move toward orchestral writing paralleled the ambitions of Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige—one of the principal inspirations for the Zodiac Suite—and James P. Johnson, who wrote orchestral works such as Yamekraw, A Negro Rhapsody.
Through her mastery of ragtime, stride, and the blues, along with her diverse array of influences, Williams pushed the boundaries of what jazz could be. Her unique sense of rhythm, swing, and harmony is easy to take for granted from a modern vantage point, knowing the trajectory of jazz history.