We Have No More Creators: Mary Lou Williams Performs the Jazz Canon

Abstract

Pianist Mary Lou Williams spent the last decade of her life as an educator as well as a performer. She presented many lecture-recitals, during which she would imitate famous musicians, play examples of jazz styles, and present her own works. From 1977 to 1981, she held a position at Duke University, teaching jazz to musicians and non-musicians. In this essay I examine archival materials from her lecture-recitals and recordings from her Introduction to Jazz course. These educational activities reveal Williams’s unconventional understanding of jazz history. By examining jazz history as played by a performer who experienced it, we find Williams questioning the historiographers’ understanding of the racial composition of jazz’s background, the distinction between accepted jazz styles, and the body of canonized jazz masterworks.  Williams’s educational activities provide a starting point for adding musicians’ voices to the rich body of jazz scholarship. The lecture-recitals also show Williams’s views on jazz education, colored by her opinions of other musicians. I present evidence that her performance-oriented lecture style brought her spiritual beliefs to her college audience. After converting to Catholicism in the 1950s, Williams’s compositional output turned increasingly to spiritually oriented and sometimes overtly religious music. She avoided speaking specifically about God in her classroom, but her beliefs on the spirit of jazz performance and improvisations colored her lectures. While she located positive emotions and brotherhood in some artists’ outputs, she attacked others for lacking the “spiritual feeling” in their music. This group of others was primarily comprised of avant-garde musicians, making her a divisive figure in post-bop history. I suggest here that the controversial views advocated in her lectures that bop and pre-bop music were superior to later styles were dictated by her general beliefs on spirituality.