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Wednesday, 28 May marks the 33rd anniversary of the death of Mary Lou William. Williams was an African-American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and contemporary of both Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne, is often overlooked as a key contributor to the jazz movement of the 20th century.

Born in Atlanta, Williams had her first taste of arranged music while attending church in her hometown. Moving to Pittsburgh in 1915 only spiked her interest in music, specifically jazz, as the city was a stop on the Theater Owners Booking association route, a vaudeville circuit for African-American performers.

Williams was first able to truly experiment with her musical talents as the pianist and arranger for the band Andy Kirk’s 12 Cloud’s of Joy. She came to this opportunity through her husband, who was the saxophonist for the band. Williams continued to arrange for the group creating household hits like “Walkin’ and Swingin’,” “Little Joe from Chicago,” and “Roll ‘em” until her departure from the band in 1942.

Mary Lou Williams by William Gottlieb, c. 1946. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Williams’s arrangements were not limited to Andy Kirk’s band. Her compositions were featured by jazz greats including, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, and Jimmie Lunceford. The New York Philharmonic performed Williams’s Zodiac Suite at Carnegie Hall in 1946. The Suite was composed of twelve arrangements, each labeled for a sign of the zodiac and all inspired by different jazz musicians.

Facing gender barriers in the states that hindered wide-spread success, Williams traveled to Europe in the 1950s. After performing in both London and Paris, Williams’s returned to the Unites States and simultaneously entertained a brief intermission in her musical career to concentrate her efforts on more religious pursuits.

Returning to music in the late 1950s, Williams reentered the scene with more of a devout lens. Throughout the late 1950s and 60s, Williams composed a number of religious arrangements and musical masses including “Hymn in Honor of St. Martin De Porres,” “Mass for Lenten Season,” and most notably “Mass for Peace and Justice” which was later renamed “Mary Lou’s Mass.” This last mass was the musical backdrop to Alvin Ailey’s series of dances presented under the same name and was also performed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1975 as the first jazz music performed in this iconic cathedral.

Williams returned to secular composing in the last decade of her life and also worked as an artist-in-residence at Duke University up until her death in 1981.

Grove Music Online has made several articles available freely to the public, including its lengthy entry on the renowned jazz singer Mary Lou Williams. Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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As many an artist know, creating art can be a bit of a draining process.  The mental strain, time constraints, being one’s own worst critic… all of these weigh upon me yet I still love to create and show my work.  Must mean I was born to be an artist, so create I must and create I do, so I am here to give you a bit of a preview of what is to come, both in art and blog posts.

First up I am teaming up with the talented Paoling Che of KOKOCANDLES to design artwork for a line of candles with a Zodiac theme.

Aries are the cutest of all, if I do say so myself.

Second up is a bit of new artwork I am in the process of creating for my Alice in Wonderland collection, the White Knight and his mighty steed.

Along those lines, I saw the trailer for the new Sam Raimi movie, “Oz: The Great and Powerful,” which got me thinking that I do need to do a collection for the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  Possibly with a steampunk flair, but as always with the dark but cute style that I so love.  But as many artist know, when using established work that is in public domain, one must check to make sure certain interpretations of said material are not copyright protected (hint: those damn ruby slippers).  But that is a post for a later date.

Lastly is a small poem, written by Shawn Givens, for one of my more popular drawings Zombie Girl.

There was a girl with a Glasglow smile,

who walked for what was many a mile.

A rose in hand to lay on the grave bed,

of her boyfriend who is quite undead.

I seriously think there may be something to the whole stars, charts, and rising signs astrology thing. I’m not so invested that I would refuse to leave the house based on a dire horoscope, but if the tides are influenced by the movement of the planets and our bodies are mostly water, it just makes sense that when they move, we get a little cosmic tug. I also have two children born at the tail end of May, which means I’ve got more Gemini folk than I can comfortably handle sometimes. In the zodiac, Gemini represents the twins. In my house, Gemini represents the drastically polar personality shift that can happen to kids #2 and #4 at a moment’s notice. These are children who give new and more profound meaning to the metaphors associated with emotional swings--hot and cold, night and day, Jekyll and Hyde, etc. It is always amazing, and sometimes a little bizarre or frightening, to see a small person in the progression from sun to wild storm and back again in the amount of time it takes for toast to pop up. This duality kept going through my mind as I was reading Michael Bond’s Paddington’s Opposites to the littlest quick-change artist in my life. The contrasting conditions in the book are pretty straightforward--on/off, neat/messy, open/closed--but the illustrations are a bit outrageous, especially on the “negative” parts of the pairs, and those are (naturally!) the ones Scarlett likes best. Or not. It all depends on her mood.