Mary lou williams in the New York Times
Yesterday morning I began receiving notes from friends who viewed this New York Times article. Entitled “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Mary Lou Williams,” the piece is part of a larger series that invites musicians, scholars, and critics to weigh in with their favorite track related to the subject at hand. In this case, writer Giovanni Russonello asked twelve musicians and writers to share their favorite Williams tracks along with short descriptions of why they made their particular choices.
The friends who alerted me to the article expressed their dismay that I was not one of the invited twelve. Clicking on the article link, I noticed that three people had already expressed their dismay at my exclusion in the comment section (as of this morning, April 6), there are fourteen such comments). If you feel similarly, I invite you to either add a new comment or “recommend” an existing one here.
I’ve also reached out to Mr. Russonello via Twitter offering to send him a copy of Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul (my ASCAP and JJA award-winning biography) and Force of Nature (my 2022 Williams tribute recording). I will post an update here if I receive a response.
Here are some thoughts on why I believe that my voice would have added something to the conversation (I’ll save my thoughts on what Williams track I might have chosen—two pieces that were not included in the article immediately jump to mind):
If the point of the “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love . . . “ NYT articles is to introduce jazz to wider audiences, then Mr. Russonello missed out on including one person—myself—who has brought both Mary Lou Williams and jazz to countless people who might never set foot in a jazz club. Williams believed that jazz should be shared everywhere, including in community centers, schools, and churches. Churches continue to be a large portion of where I share both Williams’s and my own original liturgical music. Truth be told, this aspect of my work, which is very much in line with what Williams did in her many generous performances of her sacred music at churches where she worked with non-musicians who sang her Masses, may be part of the reason why I was overlooked for this article. For more than two decades, but especially in the last three years, since the publication of my ASCAP and Jazz Journalists Association award-winning biography, Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul, I have been performing Williams’s liturgical music in houses of worship. In collaboration with the Stonewall Chorale in 2022, I performed the U.S. concert premiere of Williams’s Mass for the Lenten Season (while this concert was held in a church, it was not for a religious-or-otherwise-not-religious audience). In 2021 at the invitation of the Mary Lou Williams Foundation, I created the new performance edition of Music for Peace (Mary Lou’s Mass). Choirs now use this edition when they purchase performance licenses from the Foundation. I used the edition in a packed performance of Music for Peace in Williams’s hometown of Pittsburgh in 2021. My point-of-view as someone who has done the work involved in moving Williams’s liturgical music from archival boxes to concert stages and church sanctuaries would have significantly added to the conversation.
I can understand how Mr. Russonello might not know my name if I was only presenting Williams’s sacred music in houses of worship. But the fact is that my 2022 recording, Force of Nature (MCG Jazz), which features twelve of Williams’s instrumentals that I arranged for my jazz trio/quartet, reached number five on the JazzWeek national radio chart last year and remained in the top ten for ten weeks.
Even if my recording went unnoticed, I am certain that Mr. Russonello was aware that my book, Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul won the 2022 Jazz Journalists Association Award for Biography of the Year last spring. Several months later, it won a 2022 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Book Award for Excellence in Pop Writing. And just to show my wide-ranging audience base, the book also won second place in the biography category from the Association of Catholic Publishers and an honorable mention in biography from the Catholic Media Association.
I can also understand if Mr. Russonello missed those latter two Catholic publishing awards. But the ASCAP? The JJA? No.
In my 25-plus-year career as a jazz pianist, and in my more recent work as a doctoral candidate in jazz studies at the University of Pittsburgh, I have come to expect that many jazz writers (and by this I include critics and scholars) often discount or do not consider names that do not break through their small jazz circles. It takes a lot of work to find the names of those who are not at the table. But some of us who are not there are reaching very wide audiences and getting them to spend five minutes that make them begin to seek out more of Mary Lou Williams’s music.
And this is what saddens me about this article. As much as the article aims to reach new audiences with Williams’s wide-ranging oeuvre (and it will reach a wide audience because it is the New York Times)—there are many people who will never pick up a copy of the Times (or perhaps any newspaper) who musicians like myself are reaching.
It is because of Williams—a force of nature who I never met, but whose music and life I began to get to know more than twenty years ago, when I was invited to perform at the Mary Lou Williams Festival at the Kennedy Center—that I uprooted myself from my longtime home in New York City to her hometown of Pittsburgh two-and-a-half years ago. I will not stop performing Williams’s music or my own. But a little piece of me feels more quiet from not even being recognized as being “one of the twelve.” This blatant disregard is, unfortunately, something that I have experienced time and time again as a jazz musician and now as a Williams scholar. I am tired of people telling me to “not let it get you down.” This disregard, or ignorance (and neither is better), will probably continue to happen. But I am here pointing it out, and I ask you to do the same.