Jazz Great Marian McPartland
Grooving in Her Twilight World

By Margaret Michniewicz

Ever among the avante-garde: the Empress of Jazz Piano with Elvis Costello at NPR’s studio. McPartland has hosted the award-winning Piano Jazz since 1978. Photo: R.J. Capak

preeminent figure in American jazz, from her halcyon days at the epicenter of smoky and smokin’ New York City jazz joints in the 1950s, to her encounters with such real or imagined career challenges as being “English, white, and a woman” and developing arthritis.

Rebel without a Pause

It’s a funny reminder that you never know what series of events you’ll put into play by what you do. In Great Britain in the 1930s, a young English fellow would visit his sweetheart, bringing to her family’s house his phonograph collection of jazz recordings from America. Drinking in the visitor’s music was a young Margaret Marian, a gifted musician by the age of three, raised on Chopin, and bowled over by the exciting new sounds she was experiencing. So began Margaret Marian Turner’s ultimate life and career as an American jazz icon.

In 1938, while enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music in London, the future Marian McPartland had the choice of receiving a thousand pounds from her father if she would remain in school, or accepting an offer by a well-known music hall entertainer to join his four-piano stage act, The Claviers. She opted for the latter. After several years of performing in the vaudeville circuit, she met her future husband, jazz cornetist Jimmy McPartland, while entertaining Allied troops in 1944 in Belgium.

The McPartlands married and settled in New York, and though her entrée into the U.S. jazz scene came through her husband, her musical affinities were more modern than his Dixieland style. By 1952 she had her own gig at the legendary Hickory House on 52nd Street as the Marian McPartland Trio, rounded out by musicians like bassist Bill Crow and drummer Joe Morello, which lasted eight years. In between sets, she often made a mad dash out to neighboring clubs to hear other musicians play, including Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Dave Brubeck. She wasn’t just a fan, however; luminaries such as Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, Artie Shaw, and others could be found in the Hickory House listening to – or sitting in with – her. She was in the thick of it, one of the Jazz Pantheon pictured in the famous 1958 Esquire magazine photo, “A Great Day in Harlem” (view the image at www.harlem.org).

Not bad for someone with three strikes against her. Early on, in 1952, Down Beat jazz critic Leonard Feather predicted that she was not going to make it because she was English, white, and female. “I didn’t really take [his comment] that seriously,” McPartland tells me when I ask how she negotiated this hex applied to her career. “I never for a minute thought it was going to have any effect on my career – except in a good way. To me, it was like a good piece of publicity, [and I was not going to let it] destroy me at all. But people have always quoted that and I’ve always laughed. I later said to Leonard ‘You thought you were being very insulting.’ He said ‘Oh, I just said it for a joke.’”

Perhaps Feather had to say this to save face, for McPartland rapidly rose to prominence in the American music scene, ultimately recording over 60 albums, and working with many of the major jazz icons. In 2003, Newsday columnist Gene Seymour wrote, “Funny how the word ‘jive’ has slowly drifted from widespread use, especially within society’s younger, hipper precincts. Too bad. The word still has legs among us moldier hipsters as a label for people and things that are duplicitous, bogus, artificial, inauthentic and phony… Few people in jazz are so conspicuously lacking in jive as Marian McPartland.”

Indeed, it’s difficult coaxing McPartland to say that much about herself; but focus on the music or ask about those she has worked with, and the conversation runs up and down the keyboard with a flourish.

As Seymour sees it, “Her avid intelligence and gentle probing can loosen the stiffest tongues among musicians, some of whom are reluctant to talk in public about their art for fear it will wither from exposure.”

Exposure, especially to outside influences, has had seemingly the exact opposite effect on McPartland. This pianist’s long and thriving career has been one long, joyful and courageous exploration of the new. She embraced the avant-garde sound from overseas as a child; today, she is still as open to experimental music as a college student. She is perplexed at my suggestion that it may have been a risk to do a Piano Jazz show with musicians such as Willie Nelson or Elvis Costello – certainly not topping the jazz charts, either of them. “Why did you think of the word ‘risk’?” she exclaimed. “I was thrilled to have Willie, my God! I never thought of it as being a risk.”

Shari Hutchinson, her Piano Jazz producer since 1986, described McPartland to The New York Times in 2002 in this way: “What’s best about working with Marian is that she approaches each show with a sense of newness and a sense of inquisitiveness, which makes it exciting for everybody involved. She’s taught me a lot about jazz, and a lot about living, too.”

Taking a long view of the show, McPartland concedes there may have been “one or two occasions when I think that I might have needed a little extra courage. I might have had one or two people who were such good players that they would outplay me. I had to really work hard to maintain myself. Dorothy Donegan was a very strong player. She really wanted to make it competitive... Everything I played she would copy and try to show she was doing it better.”

So much for women only being able to play as though their “pinky is in the air,” as McPartland describes the assumption by some back in the day. She relates the time someone expressed surprise at how “like a man” she played – in other words, how strong. “Well why shouldn’t I play so strong?” McPartland asks. “I have to do things like making beds; women have to do things like taking care of babies. They do all kinds of things [in order] to create which require great strength – why should you think a woman can’t play with strength?”

Time after time, McPartland’s peers praise her not only for musical talent but for her tireless efforts to promote jazz music itself, by advocating for unknown stars on the horizon and extraordinary but forgotten individuals in danger of vanishing into history without a trace. Jazz historian and pianist Dr. Billy Taylor hails McPartland for all she has done for others, especially women: “Because of the nature of the business, women don’t get together as much as the men do,” he noted, touting McPartland as someone who sought to reverse that trend. In a 2003 interview, McPartland admitted about her early career that she “wasn’t looking out for other women – I was looking out for myself.” She continues, “There was prejudice against women players to a certain extent, but I never experienced any of it because I had gone through the mill with Jimmy.”

Since then, McPartland has more than made up for any failure to support her sisters in jazz. While filmmaker Ken Burns has been taken sharply to task for his omission of the great Mary Lou Williams from his documentary, Jazz, McPartland was a fan of Williams long before coming to America, where they eventually did meet and become friends. In the photo A Great Day in Harlem, they are standing together. McPartland selected Williams as the honored guest of the premiere show of Piano Jazz, though she concedes that Williams made it clear that she thought the gig as host should have been given to her, not McPartland. “She was a much admired black woman,” McPartland explains, and “she probably thought of me as an uppity white woman, I don’t know! Anyway… the show turned out very well and then later on, after she died, I recorded an album of her tunes –[she] wrote a lot of good tunes and was really a wonderful musician.”

And McPartland preserves the legacy of the first racially-integrated “all girl” jazz band of the 1940s, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, in an essay in her 1987 collection, All in Good Time.

In addition to awards for her music and radio show, McPartland has been recognized for her tireless efforts in jazz education programs. In 2004, she was awarded her first Grammy, a Trustees Lifetime Achievement Award celebrating her work as an educator, writer, and radio host.

That Entrepreneurial Spirit

By the end of the 1960s, jazz music was largely eclipsed by rock-and-roll in the record industry. After more than a decade releasing albums on Savoy, Capitol, and other labels, McPartland found herself unsigned yet still compelled to create music. What to do? “I just said to myself, well there’s only one thing to do – start your own label.”

And that she did, calling it Halcyon Records for the mythic bird that would alight on the sea to lay eggs, thereby calming the waves. A friend helped with recordings; husband Jimmy was enlisted at times to help pack and ship out the records. McPartland describes it in simple terms as being much like running a mail order business out of your house – but pauses as she starts to recall all that was involved: “It was quite hard, but I was a lot younger then.”

The Halcyon label lasted for nearly two decades; during this time, McPartland began her tenure as Piano Jazz host, and was taken on by the Concord Records label, which has subsequently released many of the artist’s Halcyon recordings. “The label has sort of remained today,” she tells us. “I still occasionally can sell a few.”

In fact, McPartland made a recording with a somewhat obscure but highly regarded singer/musician named Teddi King who died in 1977 at age 48 of lupus. Three years ago a tribute concert to King was part of the George Wien’s JVC Jazz Festival, and McPartland had 3,000 copies of the old Halcyon recording made and available for purchase at the benefit.

Summertime

In the 2005 concert celebrating McPartland’s 85th birthday, available on a CD titled 85 Candles, McPartland performed a piano duet based on the tune “Summertime” with rising star Jason Moran. Their performance was subsequently described by critics as “musical jousting,” a phrase which seems incongruous with the languorous Gershwin classic. But McPartland eagerly affirms: “That’s exactly what it was – one person trying to outplay the other… he would play something and I would play something  like that or else utterly different – and then maybe I would follow up with something that I would think ‘oh, he’ll never be able to get this,’” she says slyly. “So, musical jousting – that was the right phrase, I think.

“Jason happens to be a young man who, for whatever reason, doesn’t particularly want to play the song so that you would recognize it,” she continues. “His playing is what you might call ‘far out’ – he chooses to do it that way. He could just as well play the song note for note, play it so you all recognize it. He chooses not to do that. I must say I’m not somebody that wants to – what shall I say? – disguise the tune or get away from the melody as much as he does. I really prefer the tune to be more melodic. If I played it as a solo you would recognize it as “Summertime,” whereas if he played it as a solo you might not, because he gets so far away from the melody.

“Maybe I should play ‘Summertime’ in the set that I’m going to play [in Burlington],” McPartland muses. “I would start out by playing the melody so people would know what I was doing. When you start out doing something fantastically weird – I might do that later – but I wouldn’t start out that way. I would start out by playing the tune so they would all know what I was doing – then I might stretch out and improvise something away from the tune, far away from the melody.”

“That’s the whole thing [about jazz]: it allows everything ! I think that’s one of the reasons I went to jazz: because you don’t have to play note for note as the composer wanted. You can do your own thing and I think I was destined to improvise because I always did that from the age of 3 – I mean, I couldn’t really play but I was 3 and I was trying. I heard my mother playing a Chopin waltz and I tried to play it. I don’t remember how good I was – of course my relatives all thought I was great!” she gives her distinctive chuckle. “All the people I listened to were jazz musicians, people who improvised. And so I did the same.”

Twilight World

One of McPartland’s most popular compositions, “Twilight World,” is a lovely melody which came to her as a title first. “I sat down at the piano and wrote a tune based on that title; that’s all I did. The tune kind of fell together very easily. Then, at a club I played the tune and Johnny Mercer and his wife Ginger were there that night. I said to him, ‘I would love it if – is it possible you could write lyrics to this tune?’ He said something like ‘Well honey, put it on a cassette for me and let me listen to it.’ These are the words he came up with; and, he told me I could have it for my own,” she recalls.

Faced with a new challenge in the form of arthritis in her hands and to some degree her knees, this jazz legend has simply continued to improvise. “It ran in my mother’s side of the family; she was very crippled and so was my sister,” McPartland explains. “I’ve been lucky, [but] I did have it in my hands and it looks awful, my hands look very knobbley. There was a period when I did have pain in my hands. I decided the only thing to do was to play through it. I just had to ignore it, and it went away.

“The only thing I don’t do that I used to do is play so many notes, and it’s probably better. I think I’m more judicious in the way I play now than I used to be. I used to tear up and down the keys. I remember getting a very good criticism from Duke Ellington, who said to me, ‘Oh, you play so many notes!’ And I thought about that for a while and I thought, what he’s really telling me is that I shouldn’t play so many. So, when I developed the arthritis, I could hold back quite a bit and still get all the effects that I want!”

Marian McPartland continues to groove in her twilight world, doing what she loves and improvising in life just as courageously as in music, with the stars ever twinkling around her.

“I’ve got everything I need, I’ve got a job that I love, playing piano, I have my health, I don’t owe a lot of money. I’m in a fortunate position,” McPartland concludes. “I think that’s one of the most important things in life: doing what you enjoy, not being like some people who hate to go to work, who just work to make money and then retire. I don’t think like that at all.”

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm toured coast-to-coast in their bus, Big Bertha, and their performance overseas was the first time the USO included black performers. As a racially mixed band, they defied the Jim Crow laws of the south: the white girls in the band wore dark makeup on stage and stayed in the bus when they traveled in order to avoid arrest. To learn more about these pioneers, check out their music at riverwalk.org, or read McPartland’s book Marian McPartland’s Jazz World (Music in American Life), University of Illinois Press; Updated edition January 2003.

Kick off Summertime with Marian McPartland on Wednesday May 10 at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts; for info or tickets call 863-5966.

Dedicated this Mother’s Day to the memory of my mother, musical marvel Mary Lindstrom Michniewicz.

Vermonters Hail McPartland

Jerry Weinberg(restauranteur and jazz fiend) waxes rhapsodically about McPartland:

“Marian is a wonderful musician who goes way back. Her memory keeps many old jazz musicians [who have died] alive. Yet, her wonderful talent goes largely unrecognized. She is such a selfless person in terms of pushing people in jazz. She is responsible for educating the rest of us on what wonderful self-knowledge [jazz musicians] have of being human.

I invited Marian to be a guest of Five Spice, but she said she can’t eat that kind of food anymore… She is fortunate to have succeeded when many jazz musicians can’t eat and have no place to live. The Jazz Foundation is an important organization that raises money in order to support great jazz musicians who are broke.”

Ellen Powell (Vermont’s shining star of jazz bass):

“She is a master jazz musician whose playing I love. Rhythmically and harmonically, her music is my cup of tea. She is an amazing role model for those of us looking into the maw of old age (like me!). She always has been courteous to every single musician who has come onto her Piano Jazz radio show. It’s all about the music with her.”

George Thomas (host of Vermont Public Radio’s Jazz in the Evening, who will present a pre-performance lecture about Marian McPartland on the evening of the show):

Every Friday night I listen as Marian effortlessly plays piano, shares insights only another musician could know, and has a generous conversation with a wide variety of performers, producers, writers, composers, songwriters, and other jazz lovers. She is constantly pulling out unknown names and making them familiar friends.

What she does as a performer is what really counts, as she accompanies singers, trades choruses, and effortlessly improvises with great intelligence based on years of play. Many years. She uses classical skills polished with jazz chops. Her improvised “portraits” of her guests are usually dead on the mark and stray from the safe into the inspired.

She has won numerous awards in the more than 25 years of Piano Jazz and still finds time to tour and continue her remarkable program when most would have retired to the lush life years ago.

Thanks for your generosity and heart, Marian. You are true royalty.

David Beckett (Discover Jazz board and WWPV DJ):

“Marian McPartland’s name is recognized as widely as perhaps that of any living Jazz musician, due to her award winning syndicated NPR program Piano Jazz. As a performer, she plays piano like there’s no tomorrow – and there she is yesterday, at age 38, in the canonical 1958 Art Kane photo, just hanging out with Monk, Basie, and Mingus. On the show, she’ll happily talk about departed friends with her peers in the Jazz world, or show her interest in the work of young rock and pop musicians. She’ll gamely play well-known popular songs with composer/pianists who wrote their popular songs when she was a girl. And the next week she’s making some atonal composition by an imposing avant-garde composer seem like a Chopin waltz. She’s eternally fascinated by the playing of other pianists, and in turn, dazzles audiences every time she plays a concert.

Marian McPartland is a world-class songwriter, a Peabody award winning broadcaster, a vital part of Jazz history, and perhaps just as importantly, a terrifically exciting Jazz piano player.