Marian McPartland, 1918-2013

Marian McPartland and Monk Rowe
Photo by Val DeVisser

Today I am reflecting on the life and career of Marian McPartland, who passed away on August 20, at the age of 95. The accolades and tributes are pouring in, and almost all of them include the qualifier that Marian was one of the most accomplished of all women jazz musicians. In fact, if we want to pay proper tribute to her, it would be more appropriate to say that Marian McPartland was a wonderful jazz pianist, educator, radio personality, and a classy individual. While it is difficult to not feel melancholy at the passing of another legend, I keep reminding myself that Marian defied her parents’ wishes for her to lead a proper British life; she waded onto the beach at Normandy, forged a career as a major jazz artist, created the longest running NPR series, and touched the lives of countless fans and fellow musicians. This is a cause for celebration.

Marian emigrated from the U.K. to the U.S. in 1946, a time when a woman jazz instrumentalist was a rarity, and an Englishwoman jazz musician even more so. I think she enjoyed exceeding peoples’ expectations, and the fact that she was accorded a different response in the press and in the jazz community in general was less bothersome to her than most people think. She touched upon this in our interview, which was conducted in April of 1997 before a concert in Utica, NY.

MM:    I don’t think it was ever an uphill struggle for me, because I sort of had my indoctrination in working with Jimmy, and boy Jimmy was so supportive and proud of me. And so when I started at The Embers as a trio — Ed and Don, they couldn’t be nicer. I mean very seldom did I have a bad experience. The only problem would be like I remember the first review I had from Leonard Feather: “she has three strikes against her: she’s English, white and a woman.” And it didn’t bother me that much. I don’t remember being too upset about that. And if there were things it’d probably be from the audience like “oh you play good for a girl,” or “you sound just like a man.” I mean you don’t hear those things anymore. And I mean there were a lot of women on the scene: Mary Lou Williams, Barbara Carroll, people I’d heard before I got there — Hazel Scott, Lil Harden. I never felt that the women were in such bad shape I guess. They went ahead and they had consciousness raising and I remember talking to Barbara about this, and she said “well I didn’t know it was a thing, we’ve just been playing and doing our thing right along.” And I never had to feel that things were tough. I never did.

MR:    I think it’s often the case when the people that are doing it, aren’t aware that there’s a real problem. It’s the people that are observing from outside, you know, think there’s a problem that needs to be dealt with.

MM:    Well and there were some women who were trying to get gigs. Like somebody I recently had on “Piano Jazz” was a bass player named Coline Ray, was really wonderful, and she said years ago she would get a call for a gig and as soon as the person knew it was a girl, he’d hang up. But I don’t think it was all that prevalent, truthfully. There’s probably still an air of male chauvinism there. But I don’t care. I still like things like having the door opened for me and I don’t have trouble with political correctness. If the bass player wants to put his arm around me, that’s okay.

The Jimmy she refers to is of course cornetist Jimmy McPartland. In a story that seems like a fairy tale, Marian and Jimmy met and connected in a turbulent time. She spoke about her involvement in WW II and the direction her life took afterwards:

MR:    Can I take you back to when you met Jimmy and, it must have been quite an experience to be a young lady in World War II, you started with the British version of USO, is that right?

MM:    Yes.

MR:    Did you have a contract with them? Was it a volunteer thing, or was it a real job?

MM:    Oh I think we had a contract, it was a real job. In fact at that time I had the choice of either being dropped into the woman’s Army, or going into some kind of entertainment, so naturally I decided I would do that immediately, I didn’t have to think about it at all. So the pay was pretty decent, and we played all over the country. Accommodations and travel were not always the best because there was a war on. And there would be bombs dropping once in a while. But then I switched and went with regular Merchant USO. Somebody said “oh you ought to join USO, the pay is better and you’ll meet all these wonderful American guys” stuff like that, and I though oooh. So that’s what I did. And then we worked, it would be a regular show, like with a comedian or a singer or dancer, they had a guitar player and then I did the piano player thing for the whole show. So then it got to be when they were going to have the invasion and after the invasion, they were sounding people who wanted to go over to France and of course I wanted to go and did go with the first group which was about a month after the invasion. And we went over in a boat and we had helmets and combat boots and everything the GI’s had except the guns. You know I felt like MacArthur wading ashore onto Omaha Beach and straggling up the beach and we knew how to put up pup tents. But we never had to because somebody always did that for us. I should have kept a diary. And we went through all of these miserably bombed and strafed areas that were just a mass of rubble, and we finally arrived in Belgium in a rest area, and it was called Eupen, and they had a big band and they had all kinds of stuff going on and the area shows would come there to rest, and they had an Officer’s Club, and that’s where I met Jimmy. One of the people, Willy Shaw, was a comedian from Chicago, knew Jimmy, and said “we can’t have this man out there being in combat, we’ve got to get him into Special Service,” so that’s what they did. So that’s how I met Jimmy, because he then became a member of this little band. But first they had a big party for him, all the band members and people are saying “Jimmy McPartland’s coming, Jimmy McPartland’s coming,” and I’m going “who?” I’d heard of Bud Freeman and Sidney Bechet, but I hadn’t heard of Jimmy yet. And they had a party in this tent and they were going to have a jam session, and Jimmy always told me afterwards, “oh I saw you across the tent and I knew you wanted to play and I said to myself ‘oh a woman musician, she wants to play and I know she’s going to be terrible,’ and you were,” he says. But I really wasn’t terrible I think I just didn’t know how to play with a big band at that point.

MR:    So you guys hit it off pretty quickly?

MM:    Yes we did. And I guess going out every day early, out to the carrier to entertain the troops and going — maybe had to perform on a flatbed truck or they’d build a stage out of boards or it would be raining and they’d put a top over the piano and stuff like that. It wasn’t exactly the greatest. But they just loved it, and then they would wine and dine us and oh, it was something. So you know there we were, so I think it was a case of propinquity — that’s a good word — like we were there and so it just followed on that we would get together. And of course I admired Jimmy’s playing and he started to tell me that he liked my harmony so one thing led to another.

MR:    From a logistical standpoint it must have been interesting seeing what kind of instrument you were going to deal with every day — what kind of piano were they going to find for me?

MM:    Well it’s funny because I thought it was going to be terrible, in fact one of the prerequisites of the job was that you would learn to play accordion in case there were no pianos. Oh, boy, I’ll never live this down. But I never had to actually play the accordion because they had these wonderful little like a G.I. piano which was not quite a full keyboard, like a small upright, painted gray, Army style. And I always got to play on one of those. I never had a problem. And then when we were in Eupen, Jimmy went out to somebody’s house, some people that had been branded as traitors, and removed the piano and put it on a truck and brought it over to the theater for me, and this was like “oh, you went out and got a piano for me, oh.”

MR:    What a nice gesture.

MM:    So that sort of fixed the deal right there. So we got married over there in Aachen, Germany.

Her music, life and career prospered in the United States, first with the assistance of her husband Jimmy and his musical connections, and soon after as a leader of her own trio.

My association with Marian dates back to 1975. For a few years I taught music in Verona, NY, a rural school district outside Utica. I was flabbergasted one day to find a note in my mailbox, distributed to all the teachers, about an upcoming assembly for the students featuring pianist Marian McPartland. I specifically remember saying to the nearest teacher, “Marian McPartland is coming to VVS!?” Her response was “who is Marian McPartland?” As it turned out, our principal was significantly hipper than we had realized. He was a jazz fan and when he saw Marian’s name on the list of performing artists sponsored by our local BOCES, he jumped at the opportunity. I will never forget Marian performing before an auditorium full of middle and high school students. She handled it well, and in recognition of the then-current pop music, included Stevie Wonder’s “You are the Sunshine of my Life” in her performance. In what was a first for me, I approached her afterwards and wondered if she might return during the school year to perform as a guest with my newly-formed high school jazz ensemble. She did, and the concert was a great success. Marian exuded class and was attuned to the level and needs of the students on stage. In reflecting on her visit I am reminded that the life of a musician, no matter where they are in the hierarchy of the jazz community, is never an easy one. Marian would have been 54 at the time of this visit, at the height of her career, yet she was playing a rural high school assembly in Central New York, and gladly doing so. Her only complaint was that the Verona Motel had no phones in the rooms.

Our paths crossed a number of times after that, most significantly in 1997. By that time I had been at Hamilton for three years and was in the midst of our jazz oral history project. She brought her trio to a nearby Utica venue for a concert, and soon after received an honorary degree from the college, one of 13 jazz musicians so honored to date. The last time I saw Marian perform was in Toronto at the 2003 IAJE conference. Marian would have been 85 at the time, and was slowed by age and arthritis. When I saw her hands before the concert I could not imagine that she was about to go on stage with a piano trio. But like many veteran musicians, Marian learned how to compensate and her stage presence, dry wit, knack for creating perfect set lists, and her always-keen harmonic sense enabled her to enthrall a standing-room-only audience.

Most jazz fans are familiar with the photo called “A Great Day in Harlem” by Art Kane, taken in 1958. Marian was one of three women among the 57 jazz artists pictured that day. She stood next to Mary Lou Williams, one of her musical heroes, and when a restaging of the picture was conducted in 1997, Marian was one of the nine remaining musicians. The updated 1997 photo drew a considerably large jazz contingent and Marian can be spotted next to the late Dave Brubeck, a mutual admiration society. I stumbled across this audio YouTube today of Dave and Marian playing “Take Five” together.

Her personality and spot-on memory enabled her to make the NPR program “Piano Jazz” a long running hit. For over three decades Marian interviewed and performed with a long list of both veteran and up and coming musicians. Her willingness to take risks and her encyclopedic knowledge of the history of jazz piano enabled her to perform with everyone from Eubie Blake to Cecil Taylor, and with young jazz artists of today. When it came time for Marian to step aside, she chose fellow pianist Jon Weber to become her replacement. When I interviewed Jon at Hamilton College in June of 2012, he was understandably honored to fill the role:

JW:    I am humbled beyond belief that Marian has chosen me to follow her concept into the next generation. I’m very, very happy about it. She started something in 1978 from scratch. There were no jazz radio programs like it. There wasn’t one where you brought on a guest, another musician, and they played together, and they said “oh remember that time at the Hickory House” “remember at the Palladium when the Duke was there, yeah, and Tito Puente walked in and Monk was there.” They have these stories, these jazz stories, that sort of humanize jazz musicians and in a little bit take away from the mystique and make them, oh jazz musicians aren’t so brooding and indecipherable as I had thought, they’re just regular people. And yes, to follow Marian’s concept is an honor that I am humbled beyond belief. I try to research everything about every guest that I have on the show. Because I want to know something, I want to ask something if I possibly can that hasn’t been asked before. Marian does this naturally. Marian could just listen to someone’s records, in those days the albums and probably iron clothes and make a turkey and, you know, write a chart. And then the next day go on the show and say “oh yes on the eighth album on the second side that thing you did in your solo, I got a kick out of it.” She remembers everything.

Marian had an adventurous musical spirit, and during our pre-concert interview in Utica I asked her about playing free jazz, and mentioned one of her more harmonically challenging records called “Ambience.”

MM:    Michael Moore had written several of those tunes that were on “Ambiance” and then I had written “Ambiance” and there was a couple of other things. But we had this very freestyle drummer too, Jimmy Madison. He was on most the tracks, and Billy Hart was on the rest of it. And boy if I could just set up that same thing again I probably would get into that same bag. You’re making me think I should do some more. I mean I can and I do, like every time on “Piano Jazz” if the guest wants to do it, we’ll do at least one free piece. Some of them turn out better than others. It’s always a kick doing it.

MR:    Well there’s always tonight.

MM:    Yeah, that’s true.

Two hours later, at the halfway point in her concert she said to the audience, “well my friend Monk Rowe challenged me to play something free tonight, so here we go,” and they launched into an extemporaneous exploration. I don’t have much of an ego, but I will say that I was proud to have had Marian call me her friend.

Marian so inspired me as an interviewee that I tried to capture her personality in this song called “Queen’s Waltz.”

Ironic Iconic Hits

So how do you write a hit song? You can find books and blogs that profess to have the secret. There have been songwriting teams called “hit makers,” and it’s safe to say there are certain formulas that increase the chance of a song becoming a hit. In the jazz world some of the most successful recordings have come about through a combination of serendipity and a large dose of irony. One reason I call them “ironic hits” is that the musicians who made them famous were not the writers of the tune, although they were composers themselves. Let’s take a look at three.

Duke Ellington, arguably America’s greatest composer, was a well-established bandleader and hit maker in 1940. Ellington was a member of ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and when the organization raised its licensing fees, Duke found he could no longer perform his own compositions during live radio broadcasts. This happened shortly after he had hired composer and pianist Billy Strayhorn. Strayhorn brought an arrangement to the band called “Take the A Train.” Jazz lore has it that the title came from the first line of Ellington’s directions that would lead Strayhorn from his Pittsburgh home to Ellington’s apartment in Harlem. Take the A Train. Duke’s son Mercer Ellington, also an arranger, stated that he found Strayhorn’s original draft for the song in the trash. Strayhorn stated that it was too similar to a Fletcher Henderson arrangement, and so had discarded it. Whether or not that is true, it’s fascinating to realize that one of Ellington’s most enduring songs was not his composition at all. Ellington had the good sense to embrace talent when he found it, and he replaced his then current band theme, “Sepia Panorama” with Strayhorn’s first effort. The fact that Duke’s new collaborator was not an ASCAP member solved the licensing issue for a time.

A measure of a hit is not only the impact it first makes, but how long it lasts. “Take the A Train” is now a standard at jam sessions and any swing affair. Like most instrumental hits, lyrics were added later, in this case by vocalist Joya Sherrill, who later became a singer with Ellington. Joya’s lyrics hold up fairly well and are essentially an early Google Map: “You must take the A train/To go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem.”

Amongst Ellington’s most ardent admirers was composer and pianist Dave Brubeck. When Brubeck was chosen to be on the cover of Time magazine, he unequivocally stated “it should have been Ellington.” The song “Take Five” has somehow entered the consciousness of the general population and provides another fascinating story of odd circumstances and irony. One of the first things I noticed after being hooked on the song and purchasing the LP was that the composer was the group’s saxophonist, Paul Desmond. As a devourer of liner notes and music trivia, this fact was not lost on me. Brubeck, whose success was tied to his writing, was not credited for what became the band’s biggest hit, and indeed went on to become the largest selling jazz single in history. The story is slightly more complicated. Apparently drummer Joe Morello was often given an extended solo feature at the end of their concerts in the early sixties. Often he would transition into the rarely-played time signature of 5/4, and eventually suggested to Dave that perhaps a song should be written over this groove. Paul Desmond stepped up and said “I’ll write something.” According to an NPR interview, Brubeck stated that Paul came back with two seemingly unrelated saxophone melodies to fit over the 5/4 time signature. Brubeck formed them into an A-A-B-A structure and provided the ear-catching vamp. The irony continues. It is a Brubeck hit without a hint of a piano solo, and features two other members of the group. Desmond thought the song was a throwaway and joked that his royalties would allow him to buy a new electric shaver. He also didn’t like the title “Take Five” suggested by Brubeck. In addition, Columbia Records was not pleased with the album as a whole. In her interview in 2011, Iola Brubeck reminisced about the attitude of the record company:

MR:    Were you surprised at the success of “Time Out?”

IB:     Of “Time Out?” Well yes. There was no anticipation that it was going to be a hit of any kind. And in fact, it’s an old story now that Dave has often told of having to fight at Columbia to even have it released and Goddard Lieberson liked the concept and he said he thought he could sell it to the people on the west coast maybe, and he took “Take Five” and went out to sales meeting on the west coast, saying this is something new and I think we can really push this, and the sales people saying “no way.” So it really was a result of — God bless ‘em — disc jockeys who were looking for something different to play and saying well this sounds different and then putting it on and then it got a public reaction, and then it started taking off. So it was really the public deciding that this is what they wanted to hear. It broke the mold and that’s always a little challenging to a lot of people who don’t know how to handle it. And of course by this time — it’s notorious in jazz history lore — that terrible review that Downbeat gave “Time Out.” I think it got a star and a half or something.

Thanks to the unique quirkiness of the song and those DJ’s, “Take Five” took its place in music history. The record company put out a 45 RPM single which required some snipping of the drum solo to fit into the three minute format. “Take Five,” has certainly stood the test of time and has since been lyricized by Al Jarreau, “Won’t you stop and take a little time out with me/Just take five, just take five.”

When Billboard released their 1961 Top 100 chart, “Take Five” stood at #95, preceded at #94 by Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again,” and followed by Elvis Pressley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight” at #96. You’ll never see that in this day and age. Imagine a Wynton Marsalis recording on the charts, sandwiched between Justin Bieber and Adele.

I’ve stated numerous times that Cannonball Adderley was my musical hero. Not only was he the quintessential alto saxophonist, but also a savvy bandleader and major contributor to the soul jazz movement. In February of 1967, the Cannonball Adderley Quintet landed at #11 on the Billboard charts with the song “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” Cannonball wrote the occasional tune, but it was brother Nat who had penned some of the previous successes. In this case the liner notes conveyed that this Gospel-tinged song, steeped in American soul, was written by an Austrian. Pianist Joe Zawinul was born in Vienna and spent ten years as a member of Adderley’s quintet, contributing many compositions to the band’s repertoire, none bigger than “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.”

Musicians don’t usually know when they have a hit on their hands, but Cannonball’s drummer Roy McCurdy stated in his interview that they thought they had something with potential.

MR:    With tunes like “Mercy, Mercy” and stuff, when you read them in rehearsal, did you get a sense that this tune is going to sell a lot of records?

RM:    Yeah. You know we were hoping, we were always experimenting. That band was experimenting all the time. And we played straight ahead jazz, we played all kinds of stuff. So when Joe [Zawinul] brought that tune in I think we were rehearsing in Teaneck, New Jersey. We rehearsed in Nat Adderley’s basement out there. When he brought that tune in he says “listen to this,” and he started playing it. And we were just starting to get into the electronics you know, where we were using electric piano. And we had a Wurlitzer that we wanted to use. And he played this tune and we says, “yeah, let’s try it.” We rehearsed it and got it together. We went and tried it and people loved it.

Perhaps the atypical characteristics of “Mercy, Mercy” are what propelled it to that unlikely spot on the charts. The song is unlike a hard-swinging Adderley performance. The slow groove is intimate but not overwhelming. The melody is simple but builds powerfully to its climax. There are no solos by Cannonball on saxophone nor brother Nat on cornet anywhere in the song. The only improvising was provided by Joe Zawinul on the Wurlitzer, and even this solo relies mostly on spare Gospel-flavored fills, as if to say the groove is sufficient. The song clocked in at close to five minutes, but as they did in “Take Five,” the record company needed to edit it for the 45 RPM. The engaging verbal introduction offered by Cannonball (“sometimes we’re not prepared for adversity”) was snipped out for the short version. Listen to the LP version to enjoy Cannonball’s eloquence.

Even the recording of the song had some jazz lore to it. The album is titled “Live at ‘The Club,’” when in reality “the club” was actually a recording studio. Invited guests sat at tables around the band recreating the atmosphere of a live performance. You can hear it and feel it on the record.

“Mercy, Mercy” lives on, although not as “Take Five” or “Take the A Train” did. The song was recorded by various artists in a number of settings, including the Buddy Rich Big Band. Somehow “Mercy” did not lend itself to memorable lyrics. The pop group The Buckinghams put out a cover version almost immediately, singing, “My baby she’s made out of love/Like one of the those bunnies in a Playboy Club.” Years later a set of lyrics that was only slightly better was penned, oddly credited to both Curtis Mayfield and songwriters Gail and Vincent Levy, “My love has turned her back on me/Heartache, why won’t you let me be?” Personally, I’ll stick with the instrumental version.

Joe Zawinul’s hit writing was not a onetime event. He penned memorable follow-ups for the Adderley band with “Walk Tall” and “Country Preacher,” and years later wrote the marvelous ear-catching composition “Birdland” as leader of the band Weather Report.

Regarding hit songs, Fats Waller’s famous phrase applies: “One never knows, do one.”