MARY LOU WILLIAMS - MISSIONARY OF JAZZ
THE MISSIONARY OF JAZZ
Mary Lou Williams: A Catholic Who Used Music to Touch Spirits
Mary Lou Williams was one of the most innovative, creative, groundbreaking musicians in the history of jazz - any likely the one you have never heard of.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, her family moved to Pittsburg as a child. Her teachers recognized her musical genius and helped foster it. A self-taught pianist, she discovered her gift of perfect pitch at age 4, and was performing with professionals in Pittsburgh by age 6. She helped develop the Kansas City swing sound, wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was friend, mentor, and teacher to jazz greats Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and her best friend for over 40 years, Dizzy Gillespie.
She was ahead of her time in more ways that one and was one of the first women to establish her own record label (and named it after herself), Mary Records.
After years of recording and performing she was mentally and physically drained. She had a dramatic spiritual awakening that happened very suddenly in 1954 when, at the age of 44, she walked off a Parisian stage in the middle of a performance, and disappeared from showbusiness for three years. “I got a sign that everybody should pray every day,” the New York Times reported her saying years later. “I had never felt a conscious desire to get close to God. But it seemed that night that it all came to a head. I couldn’t take it any longer. So I just left — the piano — the money — all of it.”
During those three years, which were almost an extended religious retreat, she devoted most of her energies to her foundation, Bel Canto, an effort she initiated to help addicted musicians return to performing. In addition she used her savings, as well as help from friends, to turn her apartment in Hamilton Heights into a halfway house for the poor as well as musicians who were grappling with addiction. Raised a Baptist, she converted to Catholicism during that time; was baptized, along with her friend, Lorraine Gillespie, Dizzy Gillespie’s wife; and became a daily mass goer.
Her friends encouraged her to return to music and she did. She came to the realization that jazz was a purely spiritual music rooted in African-American struggle. Inspired by the canonization of St. Martin de Porres, a Peruvian saint of African descent, she wrote the groundbreaking jazz hymn, Black Christ of the Andes. Her twin passions of the Lord and music also came together to great effect on Mary Lou’s Mass, a long out-of-print, papally commissioned suite. You can listen to a few snippets of this first mass set to jazz here.
Mary Lou was dubbed the “Missionary of Jazz” by NPR and, the name really reflects her life and mission. She is an almost unknown giant of jazz who used her gift to reach the souls of others. There is a new documentary about her life called: Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band.
“I am praying through my fingers when I play. I get that good “soul sound”, and I try to touch people’s spirits.”