Jazz and emancipation-a high on zombie music

A little depressing when you come back to the fact that you have much less idea than you think. Where I like to be tough to know myself a little bit with jazz; Log in the round that Sun Ra does not immediately go from a planet outer space Came, but first trained at the end of the 40s as a rhythm & blues pianist at Wynonie Harris, no secret, dear people.

But what, hell, is “zombie music”?! And who was the pianist Mary Lou Williams, who left planet Earth on May 28, 1981 at the age of 71? No idea, never heard.

Until I recently got to the thousand pages strong anthology “Reading Jazz”. Also a literarily great compilation, published in 1995 by “New Yorker” editor Robert Gottlieb, with excerpts from musicians, concert reports, essays, reviews. With everything that has happened since the early jazz days between Black & White and Ragtime & Free. By Mary Lou Williams is the longest autobiographical text that she had published in 1954 in the British “Melody Maker”. An adventure story like Jack London about the fabric that gangster jazz films such as »Cotton Club« were made. Because the 1910 born and (as Gottlieb presented) “by far the most important and most influential woman in the story of jazz” was “everywhere, knew everyone and saw everything”.

She never got proper piano lessons, but the best down -to -earth training, first of all playing the mother playing by the pumpharmonium. When she came to school, she was already “The Little Piano Girl” all over Pittsburgh, which was booked by “White Society People” or by poorer African Americans who organized parties to collect for the rent, and her father, a professional player, took them more often to the smoky clubs, where she was drawn more for a few dollars before the cards were drawn. The little one took an unknown pianist as a model: »She was sitting on the piano with crossed legs, cigarette in her mouth, wrote notes on a sheet with her right hand and accompanied the show with her swing left! I was impressed by myself: ‘Mary, that’s how you do it one day.’ «In 1927, her brisk ragtime” Nightlife “was on the first shellac plate with her name, and she finally knew everything about it since she was on tour with a” Black Vaudeville Show “with 14 months. The show included that she also edited the keys with fists and elbows and sometimes ran around the piano.

Bad cards could not get one: young woman, black, and jazz (not as a singer, but as a band musician). But her skills as a pianist, arranger, composer spoke around so quickly that she soon got orders from the stars Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman.

Her story hit me, although hardly interested in jazz before around 1945, completely from the stool, and I finally started to listen until her friend Thelonius Monk appeared. And that with the immediately fascinating expression “zombie music”.

In the mid -30s, Mary Lou Williams met the teenager Monk in “Kaycee” (Kansas City), who also played with a “Evangelist Or a Medicine Show”, and both of them were the first to have played these “weird harmonies” (with which he should be conspicuous), “only that we called this in those days› Zombie Music ‘, and that was mainly for musicians Provided presence. Why Zombie Music? Because the crazy chords reminded us of the music from ›Frankenstein‹ or another horror film. «

Trying around curiously-that was something special about this extraordinary Mrs. Williams that she always kept up the blues-gospel-ragtime tradition from which she came and at the same time observed and had any renewal. She angrily told about the problems that had to deal with the zombie aspects of jazz in the early 1940s in New York. For African Americans it was the same old story that innovative things were always stolen and exploited quickly and “as usual in the music business” would be the names “that have enough money for paid publicity”. Until Monk has finally announced: “We are now doing something new that they cannot steal because they cannot play it.” The “music reactionary only said bad stuff about BOP from the start,” wrote Williams-because Bebop, Jean Améry wrote, “the violent revolution in jazz”.

With the revolutionaries around Monk and Art Blakey, who had started as a teenager in her band, she had hardly been on Milton’s or another stage because she had a permanent commitment, but always in the middle. With “Disc Jockeys and New Papers”, they ran at four in the morning when all the jobs were done in their apartment, “we played and exchanged ideas” and “really hit the plaster.” Which typically led to their classification as “Mother of Bebop”. Why not sister? Why not the nurse right away! She did not take any drugs, but founded aid organizations several times, not only for the many jazzers who were difficult to do.

Zombiemusic, crazy chords against any kind of music reactionary, should never forget in the next few decades. Regardless of whether she took up lessons for folkways or her own Mary Records records, had to get through bad phases, became a Catholic, orchestra works, with Dizzy Gillespie in the flash of lightning, got a doctorate: she remained unpredictable, always connected to the blues roots and at a standstill. What kind of statement was one of her last albums in 1978: a concert, the best hate food for jazzologists who don’t understand improvised fun, a crazy zombie meeting with the brutal avant-gardist Cecil Taylor, who, like all the big ones, knew the old stories and, as it were, often violent and as it were, as the little Mary Lou, also with fists and elbows built up.

In jazz lexica she gets, if at all, only a little space, and even in the extensive new, entirely dedicated to the African Americans “The Sound of Rebellion – on the political aesthetics of jazz” only a few lines, but she is present in the United States. With three biographies, a “Mary Lou Williams Woman in Jazz Festival” (until now at the Kennedy Center), a foundation to promote the youngest, new recordings (e.g. Geri Allen with Oliver Lake and Andrew Cyrille) or, as is the case, a hymn from Moor Mother on her History Hiphop-Jazz-Poetry Collage album “Jazz Codes”.

The mother of Zombiemusic had already written sentences for the future in her unfortunately never continued memoirs from 1954: “I will never admire a robot pianist, whose runs only come from his studies and not from his feelings.”