Jazz and Emancipation | Cheers to Zombie Music

It's a bit depressing when you realize, once again, that you know far less about something than you thought. I like to brag about knowing a bit about jazz; I casually throw out that Sun Ra didn't just come from a planet in outer space , but first trained as a rhythm and blues pianist with Wynonie Harris in the late 1940s—no secret, folks.

But what the 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 of her.

Until recently, I came across the thousand-page anthology "Reading Jazz." A literary compilation, also superb from a literary perspective, published in 1995 by "New Yorker" editor-in-chief Robert Gottlieb, with excerpts from musicians' memoirs, concert reports, essays, and reviews. Including everything that happened since the early jazz days, between black & white and ragtime & free. The longest autobiographical text by Mary Lou Williams, published in 1954 in the British magazine "Melody Maker," is a Jack London-like adventure story about the stuff that gangster jazz films like "Cotton Club" were made of. Born in 1910 and (as Gottlieb introduced her) "by far the most important and influential woman in jazz history," Williams was "everywhere, knew everyone, and saw everything."

She never received proper piano lessons, but she did receive the best, down-to-earth training, first from her mother, who played the harmonium. By the time she started school, she was already known throughout Pittsburgh as "the little piano girl," booked by "white society people" or poorer African Americans throwing parties to collect rent. Her father, a professional player, often took her to smoky clubs, where she played for a few extra dollars before the cards were drawn. The little girl took an unknown pianist as her role model: "She sat cross-legged at the piano, cigarette in her mouth, wrote notes on a piece of paper with her right hand and accompanied the show with her swinging left hand!" Impressed, I said to myself: 'Mary, you'll do it like that one day.'" In 1927, the first shellac record bearing her name featured her lively ragtime "Nightlife," and she definitely knew everything about it since she had toured for two months with a "black vaudeville show" at the age of 14. The show included pounding the keys with her fists and elbows and occasionally running around the piano.

A young woman, Black, and jazz musician (not as a singer, but as a band member) couldn't have had worse luck. But her skills as a pianist, arranger, and composer spread so quickly that she was soon receiving commissions from stars Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman (when this "Anglo-Jewish plague" was to be banished in Nazi Germany).

Her story completely blew me away, even though I had little interest in jazz before circa 1945, and I finally started listening until her friend Thelonius Monk came on. He used the phrase "zombie music," which immediately fascinated me.

In the mid-1930s, Mary Lou Williams met the teenage Monk at "Kaycee" (Kansas City), who was coming along with an "evangelist or a medicine show." Even back then, they were the first to play those "weird harmonies" (with which he would forever become famous), "only in those days we called it 'zombie music,' and that was mostly reserved for musicians after a gig. Why zombie music? Because the crazy chords reminded us of the music from 'Frankenstein' or some other horror movie."

Always curious and experimenting – that was something else special about this extraordinary Mrs. Williams: she always upheld the blues-gospel-ragtime tradition from which she came, while at the same time observing every innovation and allowing herself to be influenced. She spoke angrily about the problems associated with the zombie aspects of jazz in New York in the early 1940s. For African Americans, it was the same old story: innovative things were always quickly stolen and exploited, and "as is usual in the music business," the names that became big were those "who had enough money for paid publicity." Until Monk finally announced: "We're going to make something new that they can't steal because they can't play it." "From the very beginning, the musical reactionaries said nothing but the worst things about bop," wrote Williams – because, as Jean Améry wrote, bebop was "the violent revolution in jazz."

She had rarely performed on Milton's or any other stage with the revolutionaries around Monk and Art Blakey , who had started in her band as a teenager, because she had a permanent commitment, but she was always in the thick of it. With "disc jockeys and newspapermen" they would arrive at her apartment at four in the morning, once all their jobs were done, "we played and swapped ideas" and "really let loose." This typically led to her being labeled the "Mother of Bebop." Why not a sister? Why not just a nurse! She didn't take drugs, but founded several aid organizations, and not just for the many jazz musicians who were high.

Zombie music, crazy chords against every kind of musical reactionary, was something she would never forget in the decades to come. Whether she was recording for Folkways or her own Mary Records, giving lessons, enduring difficult times, becoming a Catholic, writing orchestral works, being in the spotlight with Dizzy Gillespie, or earning a doctorate: she remained unpredictable, always connected to her blues roots and against stagnation. What a statement one of her last albums was in 1978: a concert, the best hate fodder for jazz scholars who don't understand improvisational fun, a crazy zombie encounter with the brutal avant-gardist Cecil Taylor, who, like all greats, knew the old stories and, like little Mary Lou, built his often enormous and equally violent mountains of sound with fists and elbows.

She receives only a modicum of space, if any, in jazz encyclopedias, and even in the comprehensive new book dedicated entirely to 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" (still held annually at the Kennedy Center), a foundation to support young musicians, new recordings (e.g., Geri Allen with Oliver Lake and Andrew Cyrille), and, as topical as it is meaningful, an anthem by Moor Mother on her history-hip-hop-jazz-poetry-collage album "Jazz Codes."

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