Music: No Kitten on the Keys

If you shut your eyes you would bet she was a man. But last week's audiences at Manhattan's Downtown Cafe Society lad their eyes open. They heard a sinewy young Negro woman play the solid, unpretentious, flesh-&-bone kind of jazz piano that is expected from such vigorous Negro masters as James P. Johnson. Serene, reticent, sloe-eyed Mary Lou Williams was not selling a pretty face, or a ow decolletage, or tricksy swinging of Bach or Chopin. She was playing blues, stomps and boogie-woogie in the native Afro-American way—an art in which, at 33, she is already a veteran. Yet Mary...