Mary Lou WIlliams: Nurturing Leadership
Nurturing Leadership Takeaways
The Nurturing Leadership style is similar to the approach in leadership literature called “Servant Leadership”
Interpersonal relationships are crucial for professional development
Influencing and mentoring other leaders can change the course of history
The great Mary Lou Williams is exemplary of Duke Ellington’s “beyond category” appellation because she performed, composed and arranged in all styles of jazz, on the piano as a solo artist, in small ensembles, and Swing Era big bands. Ellington, who like Williams created sacred works in the latter part of his career, called her “perpetually contemporary.”
Mary Lou’s impact on the jazz idiom, we contend, is through her Nurturing Leadership.
As a composer and arranger, her work ranged from styling similar to the sound of the first great jazz composer, Jelly Roll Morton, and sought-after arrangements in the big band Swing style for Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey, to songs aligned with 1940s bebop, and later works based on astrology (“The Zodiac Suite”) and her strong Christian faith, such as “Black Christ of the Andes,” a choral mass tribute to canonized saint Martin de Porres, a Peruvian brother of the Dominican Order.
Williams’ talent was so huge that in a vastly male-dominated field of jazz, where women more commonly performed as singers rather than as instrumentalists, she was the featured soloist and pianist in one of the top big bands in the land back in the 1930s, the Andy Kirk Orchestra.
Tragedy and Triumph
Mary Lou’s path to Nurturing Leadership, however, was far from easy. Her home environment in Pittsburgh during the 1910s was difficult, dysfunctional. Mary Lou was a prodigy, so, fortunately, music was her refuge and escape. Yet as a black American female artist who refused to compromise to the dictates of popular entertainment, and the roles determined by absurd, idiotic racial and gender social codes, her career was fraught with disappointment and trauma. Her contributions to the forward progress of the music were cut short by an emotional breakdown in the early 1950s.
Yet a decade before Mary Lou’s momentary departure from the music scene into a permanent devotion to Catholicism, she created a generous space, a container to foster the growth and development of younger musicians who transformed the jazz idiom.
Mary Lou’s Impact on Bebop
As a musical genius, Mary Lou not only stayed on top of the artistic direction of the music—she also anticipated the new. While serving as the lead arranger for the Andy Kirk big band from the early 30s to early 40s, in the Kansas City blues-swing-stomp style, Mary Lou discovered chords Kirk felt was “against the rules” of music writing. For her excellent documentary on Williams, producer and director Carol Bash quotes Mary Lou’s response: “I said, ‘But I hear a sixth in this chord, I’m going to do it.”
Turns out that the minor sixth chord would play a key role in the major style that followed the Swing Era: Bebop.
Mary Lou’s influence on the bebop jazz style, a small ensemble rhythmic, harmonic and melodic paradigm shift from the big band era, was profound. Starting in 1943—two years before the revolutionary “Ko Ko” recording by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie was released—Williams began hosting gatherings in her Hamilton Terrace apartment in Harlem, after finishing her Café Society gig downtown in Greenwich Village.
At Mary Lou’s home: Hank Jones (playing piano), Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron, Mary Lou, and Jack Teagarden (far left, looking over the keyboard). The two other persons are unknown.
Artistic peers such as Lena Horne and Billy Strayhorn were regulars, as were younger generation lights who pioneered bebop: Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Tadd Dameron, Dizzy Gillespie, and Art Blakey, who Mary Lou brought to New York from Pittsburgh. Mary Lou was like a godmother to Powell, and very close with Monk, whose song “Rhythm-a-ning” was inspired by a Charlie Christian tune (“Meet Dr. Christian,” based on “I Got Rhythm” chord changes), the first eight measures of which was “lifted verbatim from a horn riff Mary Lou Williams wrote for an arrangement of ‘Walking and Swinging,’ first recorded by the Andy Kirk Orchestra,” writes Robin D.G. Kelley in his phenomenal biography of Monk.
Mary Lou Williams shaped the development of Bebop, shaped its harmonic ideas and was involved in some of the most intense intellectual debates in her apartment about what direction this music ought to go.
–Robin D. G. Kelley, historian and author, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original
Through her nurturing care, deep listening, and heartfelt openness to the new, Williams helped to midwife the birth of a whole new style in jazz. In the 1950s she launched the Bel Canto Foundation to help addicted musicians return to performing. In the 1960s, with the friendship, care, and management of Father Peter O’Brien, she began touring again and even launched the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival. She remained a fierce educational advocate of the music for the remainder of her life. Such nurturing leadership moves the emotional texture of the idiom forward, and her imprint as an American cultural hero remains on artists such as the late, great pianist, educator, and bandleader Geri Allen and piano virtuoso Helen Sung.
But don’t get it twisted: Mary Lou was herself a virtuoso of jazz piano, clearly seen and heard in the following clip. This stunning 3-minute tour-de-force from 1978, just three years before her spirit shuffled off its mortal coil, is proof of insight by Columbia University scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin: “Music, for Mary Lou, is really a documentation of the triumph over the trauma.”