An unheralded African American jazz revolutionary from East Liberty whose progressive passages helped pave the way to the genre\u2019s future had a stretch of street in her old neighborhood renamed Mary Lou Williams Way on Friday.<\/p>\n
Dubbed \u201cThe First Lady of Jazz\u201d \u2014 but known first by the moniker \u201cThe Little Piano Girl of East Liberty\u201d \u2014 Williams was recognized as a self-taught child prodigy by the time she moved from Atlanta to East Liberty at age 4. By age 6, she began playing for nearby white families who had thrown bricks into her family home in a successful move to quell the <\/a>chaos<\/a>.<\/p>\n She\u2019d blossom into an iconic jazz pianist who cut more than 100 records and a prolific arranger and composer who put her pen to more than 350 tunes for herself<\/a> as well as for the likes of Duke <\/a>Ellington<\/a>, Benny <\/a>Goodman<\/a> and Dizzy Gillespie<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe call jazz American classical music, and so Mary Lou is the Beethoven of American classical music,\u201d said Sam Black, director of the African American Program at the Senator John Heinz History Center.<\/p>\n With 70 or so in attendance at the afternoon ceremony at the intersection of Larimer Avenue and East Liberty at Rain Garden \u2014 a crowd that included members of the late Williams\u2019 family, jazz aficionados and historians, local politicians and community members \u2014 there was ample testimony that Black\u2019s words were no exaggeration.<\/p>\n Over her 60-year career, Williams soulfully graced Ellington, Goodman, Louis Armstrong and other luminaries with her presence on stage, helped develop the blues-rich Kansas City Swing<\/a> sound, used her funds to aid the poor and the addicted despite her own economic instability and mentored fellow genre legends in Gillespie, Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk.<\/p>\n Bob Studebaker, host of \u201cJazzWorks\u201d on 90.5 WESA, spoke of her years mentoring young musicians at Cafe Society, a hub of progressive music and politics in New York in the 1930s and 1940s. As he explained, she was \u201cessential.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMary went home and they followed her like the Pied Piper,\u201d said Studebaker of the group of young jazz legends. \u201cThey talked about music. They traded ideas. Mary literally gave the giants of the next generation of jazz the foundational music lessons that made it possible for them to invent bebop.\u201d<\/p>\n Her innovation was as layered as a jazz chord.<\/p>\n \u201cShe premiered some of the very first long-form jazz compositions ever created,\u201d Studebaker said. \u201cIn the days when three minutes was the max that you could squeeze into a 78-rpm record, there wasn\u2019t much call to perform or to write and create long-form jazz. Mary did that and broke it into different pieces. It\u2019s just one of the many ways that she was always pushing music forward. She took music as she found it, and then said, \u2018What can I do with it?\u2019 And it was always something marvelous. Duke Ellington called her \u2018perpetually contemporary.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Musician, composer, jazz historian and lifelong East Ender Nelson Harrison expanded on her impact.<\/p>\n \u201cAnybody who was around her had to get mentored,\u201d he said of her penchant for teaching. \u201cMary introduced the flattened fifth (chord). If you don\u2019t believe it, she wrote a tune called \u2018The Land of Oo-Bla-Dee.\u2019<\/a> There\u2019s nothing but flatted fifth chords in there. That\u2019s a chord that they didn\u2019t use in Europe at all. They called it the Devil\u2019s Chord.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Harrison, she helped spread its use through contemporary music.<\/p>\n \u201cShe introduced Monk to the flat five. Ahmad Jamal told me that Tommy Turrentine (a peer and collaborator of Monk\u2019s) introduced him to the flat five at the Musicians Club on Wylie Avenue, the 471 Club,\u201d said Harrison. \u201cThat chord was a revolution. Well, \u2018The Land of Oo-Bla-Dee\u2019 is telling you what that chord means. And that\u2019s Mary\u2019s composition.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1964, she and jazz musician George Wein created Pittsburgh\u2019s first jazz festival at Civic Arena. And in 1996, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., began hosting the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival. After converting to Catholicism in 1954 and taking a three-year hiatus, she returned to music with a deeply spiritual focus and eventually taught at Duke University, where she continued influencing the next generation.<\/p>\n \u201cThe best jazz musician is simply a matter of opinion, but influence, that means more,\u201d said jazz musician Adam Lee Morgan. \u201cMary Lou not only did her thing, but also gave others the tools to do more, and that is the very essence of influence.\u201d<\/p>\n Featured Local Businesses<\/p>\n Now, all who travel the stretch of street on East Liberty Boulevard \u2014 like Gillespie, Davis and Monk \u2014 will have the chance to follow the Mary Lou Williams way, too.<\/p>\n \u201cHopefully, this addition of her name to a community where her family has remained serves as an inspiration to all who pass by and to future generations,\u201d said her niece Bobbie Ferguson, founder of the Mary Lou Williams <\/a>Institute<\/a>. \u201cThat, no matter what the challenges are or that one may face, with hard work, faith, the desire to achieve and the support of those who care, you can reach your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.\u201d<\/p>\n Williams died from bladder cancer at 71 in 1981.<\/p>\n \u201cWith sheer brilliance, extraordinary piano skill and unparalleled spiritual insight, she broke through barriers in a predominantly white, male-dominated industry,\u201d City Councilman Khari Mosley said of her legacy. \u201cPittsburgh has historically been a reservoir of cultural richness, and Mary Lou Williams exemplifies the height of Pittsburgh\u2019s momentous Black creative heritage. This renaming will serve as a constant source of inspiration for our young people, a daily reminder that genius flourished here and can continue to flourish here and that Black artistic excellence is synonymous with our city\u2019s cultural legacy and heritage.<\/p>\n \u201cItisquiteapropos thatthelittlepianogirl fromEastLiberty, whoonceplayedforiconicPittsburghindustrialistsliketheMellonsandtheOlivers,isnowimmortalizedasagiantthatwalksamongPittsburgh\u2019sgreatestsonsanddaughters,reflectingthebestof whoweareandwhatwecanaspiretobe.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An unheralded African American jazz revolutionary from East Liberty whose progressive passages helped pave the way to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284385,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":["post-284384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}