By Kyle MacMillan
While Mary Lou Williams has not attained anywhere near the level of recognition as Duke Ellington—at least not yet—she deserves to be considered right alongside the famed composer and bandleader in the symphonic jazz realm.
That’s the belief of Tammy Kernodle, who wrote a 2004 biography of the jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams was republished in 2020 by the University of Illinois Press with a new introduction that highlights the jazz notable’s still-under-recognized legacy.
The composition that cemented Williams’s place in the symphonic jazz realm is Zodiac Suite, which she completed in 1945; the chamber-orchestra version, one among several she ultimately created, premiered at New York’s Town Hall in December of that year. The suite consists of 12 short works, what Kernodle describes as “symphonic poems,” each inspired by an astrological sign and performing artists born under it—such as saxophonist Ben Webster and vocalist Billie Holiday for Aries—each possessing its own style and character.
“I think it is one way in which people are moving beyond Ellington to consider what other aspects of classical jazz or symphonic jazz are out there. I think it will become a standard piece,” said Kernodle, a distinguished professor of music at Miami University in Ohio.
Aaron Diehl (bottom left) with The Knights
Ravinia audiences will have a chance to judge for themselves when the Aaron Diehl Trio and the New York–based chamber orchestra The Knights present excerpts from the Zodiac Suite as part of a June 29 program that also includes works by 19th-century French composer Louise Farrenc and Ludwig van Beethoven.
Williams’s extraordinary career began with her playing during her childhood around Pittsburgh, where the Georgia native grew up, and was capped with a recording at the Montreux Jazz Festival three years before her death in 1981 at age 71. In between, she worked with some of the field’s biggest names in multiple eras—arranging for Earl Hines, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey as well as playing with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, and Cecil Taylor.
Laying the foundation for all that would follow was her important time in Kansas City, MO, an important jazz center in the 1930s and ’40s. She served as an arranger, composer, and pianist for Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy, remaining with the group through 1942, and writing such songs as “Froggy Bottom,” “Walkin’ and Swingin’,” and “Roll ’Em.”
Kernodle calls Kansas City the “epicenter of Mary Lou’s blossoming”: “Without Kansas City, I don’t think we would have seen Mary Lou morph into a composer-arranger, and I would even venture to say, an activist and educator—those things come later, but they are being developed and built in her in Kansas City.”
The musicologist believes Kansas City has never been fully acknowledged as a music center that in some ways was more important than Chicago after the 1920s. She called it a Midwestern “cultural melting pot” in which intersecting styles, musical experimentation, jam sessions, and cutting contests were the norm. The versatility and risk-taking Williams learned there stayed with her for her entire career allowed her to jump confidently among varied styles and across jazz history, sometimes confounding critics and writers who didn’t always know where or how to categorize her.
Kernodle discovered Williams in graduate school around time the Rev. Peter O’Brien, a Jesuit priest who became the performer’s manager in the 1960s, donated her archives to the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. After beginning a doctorate program at Ohio State University, Kernodle decided to write her dissertation on Williams, first thinking she would focus on the Zodiac Suite.
But after she began going through the archives, she found movements of Williams’s Masses, and the budding musicologist chose to put those in order and write about what they meant in terms of the intersection of spirituality and jazz. The pianist and composer converted to Catholicism in 1954 and concentrated on writing hymns, Masses, and other sacred music in the 1960s, including her Mass for Peace, which later grew to be known as Mary Lou’s Mass.
Kernodle did not originally intend to write a book about Williams, but later decided she wanted to write more extensively about the musical artist. “My book was not just writing about Mary Lou Williams as this fantastic musician, composer, and creator,” she said, “but talking about Mary Lou Williams as a Black woman living in America who was dealing with all these avenues of systemic racism and how, in some ways, her talent allows her to escape certain things—but not all things.”
Although Williams was respected by other musicians within the jazz world, she suffered prejudice from critics, promoters, producers, and others because she was both female and Black. According to Kernodle, some people have even cast doubt on whether she really composed the Zodiac Suite.
Portrait of Mary Lou Williams in New York’s CBS Studios, ca.1947 (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)
The musicologist believes such doubts are absurd, considering she served as a mentor to such giants as Thelonious Monk, Charlie “Bird” Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie, showing them classical scores and discussing harmonic progression, sound color, and structural forms. “And we’re going to question if this woman had the intelligence to sit down and write 12 symphonic poems?” she said. “Why wouldn’t she have? Because she’s Black? She didn’t go to school? She didn’t have formal training?”
Later in life, Williams became a groundbreaking jazz pedagogue, exploring how the musical form could be taught in the academic realm. She served as artist-in-residence at Duke University in 1977 through 1981, teaching jazz history and directing the Duke Jazz Ensemble.
The melding of jazz (and the ragtime music that preceded it) with classical music came from both sides of the divide, the first wave of such cross-genre works coming in the early 20th century from both Black and white composers like Will Marion Cook, James Reese Europe, and George Gershwin.
The second wave took place in the 1930s and early 1940s as the Harlem Renaissance peaked in the music world, framed by the likes of Ellington, Williams, and pianist James P. Johnson. On the classical side, Black composers like William Dawson were introducing jazz and other African American elements into works like his 1934 Negro Folk Symphony.
Aaron Diehl grew up Catholic in Columbus, OH, and began studying piano at age 7 and later served as pianist for his church, a pursuit he continued when he moved to New York to study at The Juilliard School. He was playing at St. Joseph of the Holy Family in Harlem when he met the Rev. Peter O’Brien, who was serving as guest presider, and was introduced to Williams’s music. Together, they incorporated her music into the church’s liturgies.
Mary Lou Williams, Dizzy Gillespie, Jack Teagarden, and Milton Orent in Williams’s New York apartment, ca.1947
In recent years, Diehl returned to her music and discovered the Zodiac Suite, which originated as works for piano and a few other musicians, first heard on WNEW radio in New York. In 1945, with help from NBC arranger Milton Orent, she created a version that was performed by a chamber jazz ensemble led by clarinetist Edmond Hall at New York’s Town Hall. Because of under-rehearsal and other problems, the concert was a mixed success. A year later, a symphony orchestra version was presented at Carnegie Hall, but the score and accompanying parts have since been lost.
Diehl focused on the 1945 iteration, which he said has been “cloaked in mystery.” O’Brien ushered the work into publication more than 10 years ago, but it was rife with copying errors in the parts and other problems. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the pianist took on the 38-minute work as what he called a “passion project,” working to create a new edition that he hopes to have completed in the near future. “It’s been a gradual process of trying to get something that is as close as possible to what Mary Lou Williams intended,” Diehl said.
For help, he turned to The Knights, who he said are ideally suited for such an undertaking, and Eric Jacobsen, one of the group’s two artistic directors. “They are incredibly versatile,” Diehl said, “and they are very open-minded. Still in this day and age, when it comes to certain types of vernacular [music], many traditional ensembles don’t have the training or interest in taking on those musical approaches.”
In September 2023, Diehl and The Knights released the first-ever studio recording of the Zodiac Suite. The critically acclaimed album features Diehl’s trio along with four guest artists—saxophonist Nicole Glover, clarinetist Evan Christopher, trumpeter Brandon Lee, and soprano Mikaela Bennett.
Diehl and The Knights have also performed the work at the Blossom Music Festival, La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest, and other summer series, and the pianist is scheduled to present it at the BBC Proms in London later this summer with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
“I’ve been championing this for a few years, and it’s been wonderful,” Diehl said, “and I’m really having a great time working on this piece and working with different ensembles. But it’s got to have a life beyond me just doing it. There has to a real interest among other musicians and ensembles.”
Kernodle believes that interest is coming, and she expects musicians to begin looking harder at other works by Williams that meld jazz and classical music. These include Boogie, which was written for chamber orchestra and jazz trio, and History: A Wind Symphony, which received its world premiere in February during a Williams festival presented by the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, FL.
For his next Williams project, Diehl plans to revisit her sacred works, which offer another kind of stylistic and spiritual union, and focus especially on the Mass for the Lenten Season, which has never been recorded. “I think her sacred works interest me the most at this point,” he said. “They are really beautiful.”
Because of the work of Diehl and others and increased attention in recent years on diversity and inclusion, Williams’s profile is, at last, growing. “You have artists who have started to really go through her vast catalog and ask questions,” Kernodle said. “You have artists and concert curators and promoters who have been thinking about her more keenly as part of this conversation—not just what is jazz, but what is American music?” ■
Kyle MacMillan served as classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. He currently freelances in Chicago, writing for such publications as the Chicago Sun-Times, Early Music America, Opera News, and Classical Voice of North America.