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 Lou Williams felt nervous: for the first time in 6 years she was going it alone.
Says Mary Lou: "I don't feel right all by myself. I need the band there to back me up." For no less than twelve years she had one of the best Negro bands back of her: Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy. She was Kirk's pianist from New York's Famous Door and Cotton Club to Chicago's Grand Terrace, Kansas City's Lone Star and Los Angeles' Paramount theater. And while the band backed up Mary Lou, she backed up the band. She wrote most of its arrangements, and many of them (Roll 'em, Froggy Bottom, etc.) are classics among jazz players. One week she got down 15 scores and, all told, she provided the Clouds of Joy with 200. With them she has made dozens of Decca records.
Lou for Louis. Mary Lou, born in Pittsburgh, was one of eleven children. She started playing and composing at six. At 14 she was taken on the Orpheum Circuit. The following year she played with Duke Ellington and his early small band, the Washingtonians. Today she is one of Ellington's arrangers. But her mind keeps turning to oldtime sessions with the Kansas City greats: Benny Moten, Pete Johnson, Joe Turner, Count Basic. Mary Lou's special contribution was an unearthly swinging dirge which the boys called "zombie." It was musicians' music. Asked if she would try it on her Cafe Society audiences, she said: "They'd all go home."
One high and learned salute to her talent came when she was only 15. One morning at 3 she was jamming with McKinney's Cotton Pickers at Harlem's Rhythm Club. The great Louis Armstrong entered the room and paused to listen to her. Mary Lou shyly tells what presently happened: "Louis picked me up and kissed me."