Constellations I: The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams

As I promised in previous posts on the Songs of the Five Elements, and Songs of the Nine Planets, I am continuing the series with the music of the Zodiac -which will itself now become a series. There is no better place to start then Mary Lou Williams. 

Mary Lou William’s was born under the sign of Taurus. The sign of the bull is ruled by Venus, the planet of beauty, so it is no wonder she was able to hear the music of the constellations and transform them into her sensual and expressive modernist jazz composition, Zodiac Suite.

Born on May 8th, 1910 she was a child of Atlanta, Georgia but a product of the Midwest, growing up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Playing piano was something of a survival strategy for Williams. Her hostile white neighbors liked to throw bricks at her house, but this animosity was alleviated when she started playing piano for them. Music really does soothe the savage beast. Perhaps it can even soothe the racist beast. By the age of six she’d graduated to playing parties, and by seven was dubbed “The Little Piano Girl.” I suspect even the infant Jesus smiled down on her playing, just as he did on the “Little Drummer Boy” because she later converted to Catholicism, but not before passing through an exciting life as a traveling performer and arranger for some of the great names in jazz history.   

This phase started at age twelve when she was swinging through the Orpheum Circuit chain of vaudeville and movie theaters. The nineteen-twenties were roaring and she got to see it from the vantage point of a precocious adolescent performer. She must have been a musician in a former life to come back into this one with her fingers ready and poised to channel the music of the spheres onto the black and white of her cosmic keyboard. In this time she moonlighted in Duke Ellington’s band the Washingtonians. Then, a few years later, while in Cleveland, she met her first husband, the saxophonist John Overton Williams. She followed him and his band the Syncopators back to his town of Memphis before hitching a wagon with him out west to Oklahoma where he’d been invited to be a part of Andy Kirk’s group, Twelve Clouds of Joy.

Something about this band and the number twelve must have followed her around for her life. Some quality about the number twelve must have resonated in her soul. After all, the twelve signs of the zodiac are numbered twelve, as are the apostles of Christ, of whom she later dedicated herself to. In numerology twelve is connected to the starry heavens, as suggested by the constellations. It is also the combination three (ternary logic, triolectics and the trinity) and four (the number of the directions and their elements).

​It wasn’t all easy listening for her out there in Tulsa. It wasn’t a smooth jazz ride. Any working musician knows there are hours of toil and other jobs taken just to keep the bread and bacon the table. She found herself hauling corpses for a local undertaker for a spell while her husband got to play. The band moved to Missouri, Kansas and there she found herself sitting in with them at last. Here her own compositions started to flow into the mix of Kirk’s repertoire. The song’s “Mary’s Idea,” “Roll ‘Em” “Little Joe from Chicago, and “Froggy Bottom” all came from her creative mind. 

​Her recording career promptly followed beginning in 1929 with arrangements for the group, and the following year she cut her own solo piano to wax with “Drag ‘Em” and “Night Life.” She was getting hot and the records started selling, opening new doors for her in the music world as her star rose to prominence. She became Kirk’s permanent second pianist, had solo shows lined up, and found herself sought after as an arranger by the likes of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Earl Hines. 

With fellow Twelve Clouds of Joy bandmember Dick Wilson she produced “In the Groove” in 1937. The cigarette companies were even lining up to work with her and she wrote “Camel Hop” to the delight of Turkish tobacco enthusiasts and sellers across the land. (I wonder if they paid her in camel cash.)

Benny Goodman at this point wanted to keep her under his wing, but she liked being able to be the queen of her own world, and work with whoever the muse directed her to. Around the same time, the muse, or at least cupid, had bailed on her marriage, and she left John Williams in 1942.

This might have something to do with why she quit the Twelve Clouds of Joy. Harold “Shorty” Baker also quit with her. The two were in a new relationship together. They hooked up with drummer Art Blakely, at least musically, and formed a six-piece ensemble. Six is half of twelve, a number of the sun, but this group didn’t stay out in the daylight long, and the band dissolved. Soon she had a showcase for herself as a member of Duke Ellington’s group, but that didn’t last terribly long either.

Planting herself in New York City she got a taste of the radio bug, hosting her own show on WNEW, a Class A clear-channel radio station that had begun operation in 1922. The aim of her show was instructive, to pass the torch and inspire younger musicians. Mary Lou William’s Piano Workshop is the kind of thing I’d like to hear on radio today. This corresponded with her role as a mentor at the time to heavyweights Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. The jazz world was poised for bebop and she was right there when it happened. In an interview for Melody Maker the songstress recalls, “During this period Monk and the kids would come to my apartment every morning around four or pick me up at the Café after I'd finished my last show, and we'd play and swap ideas until noon or later.” As for the radio station, Boris Karloff would later ride the airwaves of WNEW in the following decade, with his 1950s children’s radio program. I bet there was nothing like cuddling up to Karloff’s voice as kid.

It was after this that Zodiac Suite poured out of her being. The zodiac is a common word for those of us interested in astrology and astronomy. But what is it exactly? The word comes from the ancient Greek, zōdiakòs kýklos (ζῳδιακός κύκλος), which means a “cycle or circle of little animals.” From there it went into Latin, zōdiacus, and then slipped into English. The zodiac can be considered as a belt around the Earth that extends about eight degrees north and south of the ecliptic, or the path of the movement of the sun around the celestial sphere. Because many of the constellations of the zodiac appear as animals or mythological figures, that’s how it got the name, circle of little animals. Not all of them are animals, but enough are to make it stick: Leo the Lion, Taurus the Bull, Pisces the Fish, Scorpio the Scorpion, Cancer the Crab are all examples.

In composing the Zodiac Suite she followed ancient tradition. Musicians have long sought to communicate the nature of celestial bodies through the medium of modulated sound waves. Her suite is one of the most successful and pleasing to the ears of our times. It rightly consists of twelve interconnected pieces, one for each sign. It starts with Aries and ends with Pisces, the same way the zodiacal year begins and ends with the Vernal Equinox, the point of its eternal return in spring.

The piece is as much modernist classical as it is modernist jazz. The year was 1945 and the whole midcentury thing was ready to burst. This music was a part of that, and the era can be heard when you listen to the original Asch recording. The music evokes those times so perfectly

The idea had first come to her in 1942 when she’d gotten hold of an astrology book and was inspired to write pieces for her musical friends. She had the first three written when she set about playing them on air at WNEW, and improvised the remaining nine. Al Lucas backed her on bass and Jack Parker on drums. Later she went into the studios of Asch Recording. Moe was always hungry for something new to press to record, and he championed Williams. She brought in Lucas and Parker to record the suite with her as a trio for Mr. Moe.

William’s work prefigured the later work of jazz and classical composers who sought to fuse the two together. The sound here is also distinctly American. Though it has twelve as a number, it has little in common with dodecaphonic music. There may be some influence, but it is slight, and while she liked the trio Asch recording, she wanted to do up Zodiac Suite with an orchestral backing and she started to re-sculpt the pieces into that for such a format.

 At the time she was in a relationship with Milton Orent. Now who is Milt Orent, you ask? Milt was a double bass player who’d received a classical musical education and had a deep knowledge of twentieth century composition. He worked as a studio musician and arranger for NBC radio. And while Williams was with Orent he played her the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, and probably some other cats who’d gone atonal. Orent gave Williams his input when she recast the suite for a large ensemble. For her own part, she put in more opportunities for the players to improvise, prefiguring the scores of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen where certain segments are left up to the players intuition. Still, Zodiac Suite doesn’t sound European at all, but clearly American, as each piece jaunts through the nature of each constellatory sign.

Her general blueprint did remain and most of the pieces are dedicated to people who were born under a particular constellation. She dedicated “Aries” to Billie Holiday and Ben Webster while “Taurus” was for Ellington. Her lover Shorty Baker got “Gemini” while Lem Davis was given “Cancer.” A surprising number of influential jazz musician are born under the sign of “Libra” and she dedicated it to Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. The rest of the signs follow suites with the luminaries of the age.

This version was first performed at the Town Hall in New York City on New Years Eve, 1945. A couple of obstacles threw themselves in the way and part of the show was bungled, leaving Williams sick for a week. This kind of thing can happen to a dedicated artist. Meanwhile the tapes for the recording went missing and it ended up being bootlegged around in Europe.

​A number of recordings now exist including the first trio version on Asch. Aaron Diehl and the Knights have meanwhile recorded a smashing version, just out in 2023, of the orchestral/big band version. This recording is more in line with the modernist vision she had when revising it for the concert hall, and the shades of modernity in classical music are foregrounded a bit more here, than on other recordings. 

The music life can be a hard life. Everyone knows about the rock and roll casualties lost to drugs. The jazz casualties are just as great, and heroin had long been a part of its subterranean underworld. We know about the marijuana use in jazz circles, can understand it, even celebrate it by lighting up a spliff, as one may now do with full legality in many states. Yet the heroin was there all along, getting into the bloodstream of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis among many others.

I don’t know if this was what was on her mind, but something snapped in Williams when she was on tour in Paris, France, 1954. She got up from the piano and that was it, for many years. She was done. Dizzy Gillespie’s wife Lorraine had turned to Catholicism, and Williams followed, converting and shifting the direction of her life, away from the musical service she had given her many fans, to service in the form of the Bel Canto Foundation she started to help the poor, to help poor musicians, and those suffering from the tragedy addiction so often brings its way. With the money shed earned in her career, and some gifts from friends, she opened a half-way house and thrift store in Harlem.

Charlie Parker died in 1955 and she stayed away from music after that for awhile, putting her energy into the new efforts she was making on behalf of those in need. Still, she became close to two priests who told her she could use her prodigious gifts in service to the creator, but it she wasn’t ready just yet to get back to the work destiny had in mind for her. Dizzy Gillepsie also encouraged to get back to composing at the piano. Nobody wanted her to quit playing.

Another priest named Father O’Brien ended up becoming very close with Williams and helped her as a manager in the 1960s. He even had a part in getting her to establish a new jazz club in Manhattan and she got swinging again. Gillespie had introduced her to Bishop John Wright, from Pittsburgh. With his clerical help she went back to the town where she’d first performed and started the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival.

Williams had long had the gift of teaching and Wright got her a gig as a teacher at Seton High School. Her mind had turned by this point to the sacred implications of music in worship. She was commissioned by the church to write the music for a mass and it became the first ever mass done in the style of jazz, the Pittsburgh Mass of 1964. It ended up being released by Folkways as Mary Lou Williams or The Black Christ of Andes. It had developed out of a piece she wrote in honor of St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint of mixed-race people, barbers, innkeepers, public health workers, all those seeking racial harmony, and animals, for his feast day in 1962

​The work is a visionary masterpiece of spiritual jazz incorporating the blues, avant-garde idioms, and spirituals. She had found her way back to music, and continued to teach, stressing the importance of jazz history and its place in American life.

​Her work is well worth acquainting yourself with as you take another trip around the sun.

​​.:.  /|\  .:.   .:.  /|\  .:.    .:.  /|\  .:.

(We'll get to Stockhausen and his Tierkreis cycle next. I've touched on it before briefly in the previous link and also briefly in this Brief History of Space Music as well as an early essay of mine for Brainwashed.com: Music from Sirius: The Dreams of Karlheinz Stockhausen, which I can't find on the site anymore, but it looks like someone put up on Scribd -and also has been referenced in some academic papers - who knew!?