Saturday Night Fish Fry [updated]

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Happy 100th birthday to the late Mary Lou Williams, who would have been very welcome in the pantheon of immortals born 2 days earlier than May 8. You can hear a bit about her from this so-so commemoration from NPR's Weekend Edition this morning, but her Wikipedia entry gives a much better impression of her place in jazz history from the early big band era well into bop, and then later, into Catholic sacred music.

The fact that she was a teacher and colleague of people like Monk, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie must speak volumes about her charisma and musical gravitas. Jazz was always an insanely macho-asshole culture, where newcomers were mercilessly humiliated in after-hour jams --- "cutting contests" --- by established musicians who had previously suffered the same way and should have known better. (Who knows how many potential giants wept, packed their bags, and took a Grayhound back to the sticks because of this pointless malevolent treatment?)

Anyhow, take a look at her portrait on the Morning Edition site --- looks like a tough lady, all business and sultry in a "forget it, Buster!" sort of way. Then listen to this oddball piece, "The Land of O0-Bla-Dee," recorded by Dizzy in 1947 (I think). Mary Lou composed the tune to accompany a ridiculous "bop fable" penned by a guy named Milton Orent (about whom I can find nothing on short notice). The lyrics are funny but surrealistically creepy, sort of like that Looney Tune from the same era where Bugs Bunny is giving Elmer Fudd Daliesque nightmares. The chart lurches along like the two ungainly sisters of the Beautiful Princess, with stutter-steps, asymmetric lines, and unexpected minor chords at the ends of verses where you'd expect majors. The melody line sounds utterly drunk in trajectory, which vocalist Joe Carroll helps to really "sell" with his delivery.



I knew this tune long before I knew Mary Lou composed it, and I never would have guessed that. It really sounds like something Dizzy would have come up with --- really not a "ladylike" sort of sound at all. And despite the hardened nightclub sexuality of the portrait at NPR, all accounts I've read of her agree that she was a very sweet and dignified lady, as she appears in the 1930s portrait shown below, before another decade of playing with some very tough customers. Happy birthday, Beautiful Princess.

Update: looks like I missed the midnight deadline by a few minutes when posting. Mary Lou's birthday was May 8, not May 9, just to be clear about things for a change.

Another update: while poking around for something else on Google I found this nifty piece about Mary Lou published on 12 September 1949 in Time. Of note: the Time says she characterized Oo-Bla-Dee as a five-course satire of the Bop genre... in 1949! Making fun of the giants!