By the time Mary left Kirk in May of 1942, she
had divorced John Williams and married trumpeter Harold "Shorty" Baker,
then also with Andy Kirk. It was when Baker was hired by Duke Ellington
that Mary decided to go with him. But after some dozen years, Williams
was ready for a change of musical scene. For a while, Ellington had
her travel with the band as a member of his arranging staff. But the
marriage didn't last, and Mary decided to settle in New York, where
she was hired by the astute Barney Josephson, owner of Café Society,
the Greenwich Village night club that featured outstanding jazz, blues
and comedy—unique for its day—catered to integrated audiences.
Mary thrived in an environment that included
Billie Holiday (whose rendition of "Strange Fruit" became a sort
of theme song in the club catering to a leftist crowd), Josh White,
trumpeter Frankie Newton, dancer Pearl Primus, all of whom became
special friends. When Josephson branched out and opened his Café
Society Uptown, Mary alternated between the two venues.
It was through Josephson's assistance in
1945 that she got her own weekly radio broadcast on WNEW, Mary Lou
Williams' Piano Workshop. Her program figured into Mary's composing
one of the more interesting compositions (and reflecting Duke Ellington's
movement toward creating extended works), The Zodiac Suite. Williams
introduced movements on a weekly basis in 1945.
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She composed three ahead of radio time, but
as she later told New York Times writer John S. Wilson, "I was just
without ideas . . . So what I did to finish (the suite) . . . I
composed while I was playing. I'm at my best composing that way."
In addition to its broadcast premier, The Zodiac Suite was originally
issued in 1945 on two 78 RPM records produced by Moe Asch, an enthusiastic
fan of Mary and producer of Folkways Records. The suite was presented
in Town Hall on December 31, 1945.The following June, she performed
three movements with the 70-piece New York Pops Orchestra during
the Carnegie Hall Pops Series.(The suite was not performed in its
entirety again for 55 years, until October 2000, as part of programs
associated with the exhibit, Mary Lou Williams: In Her Own Right.)
This period in Williams' life is fascinating
on another score: her interest in modern jazz and in collaborating
and mentoring of such bebop pioneers as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious
Monk, Bud Powell, and Tadd Dameron, among others. As photographer
William Gottlieb noted in an essay accompanying his gallery of photographs,
taken in 1947 in Mary's Hamilton Terrace apartment and posted on
this web site, she turned her abode into a veritable "salon" for
the advancement of modern jazz. She also credited her musical development
in the forties to Milton Orent, an NBC staff bassist and arranger
who wrote the lyrics for Mary's "(In the Land of) Oo-Bla-Dee" and
assisted with the orchestration of The Zodiac Suite. "He was about
30 years ahead in sound."
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Williams in her Hamilton
Terrace apartment in a 1944 photograph taken for an Asch Records and
featuring the pianist in an unusual trio with trumpeter Bill Coleman
and bassist Al Hall. Williams' apartment was a veritable music laboratory.
©William P. Gottlieb, From the Collection of the Library of Congress.
