In the Days of Their Music: Marian McPartland Plays the Music of Alec Wilder

by Fritz Byers

Not long after I began hosting Jazz Spectrum in 1989 – I can’t track down the specific date – Lourdes College hosted Marian McPartland for a live solo performance at the Franciscan Center.  I was privileged to hang out with her before the show, although, as I think back, I should have recognized that, so close to going live, she was deep into whatever mindspace she entered to be prepared to play. Still, she was, as you would expect, gracious and witty. Then it was time for me to introduce her. I walked to the microphone as she remained behind the curtain. I was about ten seconds into the briefest praises I could manage, and I heard her growl – yes, that refined voice could growl – “C’mon, hurry up.” I stopped midsentence, said “Please welcome Marian McPartland,” and I got out of the way, lest she run me over en route to the piano.

It wasn’t the first time she’d made an entrance in my life. When I proposed Jazz Spectrum to the station’s program director in 1989, part of my pitch was arithmetic. At the time the station carried exactly one hour of jazz per week, and that hour belonged to Marian. Piano Jazz was a lovely hour of music and talk, but it stood alone. The station’s managers agreed that wasn’t enough, and here we are, thirty-seven years on. I’ve always thought of Marian as the show’s unwitting godmother.

This week’s featured album is one I would put on any short list of the best jazz tributes to individual composers. In June 1973, Marian recorded ten pieces composed by her friend Alec Wilder. Half are duets with the bassist Michael Moore, and half are trios with Rusty Gilder on bass and Joe Corsello on drums. The record came out on Halcyon, the label she had co-founded four years earlier. That detail matters. For a woman in jazz in those years, owning the means of production was a path to making the records she wanted to make, on her own terms and dedicated to the music she cared about. A full album devoted to a composer as unfashionable, and as demanding, as Alec Wilder was exactly that kind of record. We’ll hear all of it in order on Jazz Spectrum Friday.

Alec is one of the great odd figures in American music. He was born in 1907 in Rochester into a prominent family, studied composition privately with teachers on the Eastman School of Music, although he never enrolled, and spent most of his adult life living out of a room at the Algonquin Hotel.  He moved between worlds that seldom touched. There were the chamber octets of the late 1930s, with their whimsical titles. There were popular songs for Mildred Bailey, and, later, for Sinatra, who conducted an album of Alec’s concert music in 1946.  And there were sonatas for tuba, horn, and bassoon, instruments other composers mostly ignored.

His best-known achievement may be a book about other people’s songs.  American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950, published in 1972, is still the most loving and the most exacting study of the form.  It may also be the most generous, coming from a composer whose own songs were never as well known as they deserved to be.

Those songs repay attention. His most famous,“I’ll Be Around,” words and music both his own, sounds simple until you try to hum it, not to mention sing it or find the chords on the piano. The melody takes turns you don’t expect, then lands somewhere that feels inevitable only afterward.  And to pick another of his songs, nearly at random: “Where Are the Good Companions,” whose title hints at a longing that pervades Alec’s work, blurs beautifully the lines between classical composition, American popular song, and jazz. I’m comfortable suggesting that the title reflects a recurring theme in Alec’s life – he deeply valued friendship, conversation, and community, and often lamented the passing of time and the scattering of his favorite friends. (Open his book, Letters I Never Mailed, to nearly any page, and you’ll catch the mood.)  Listening to Marian’s version is particularly affecting, since Alec wrote the tune for her – the original manuscript features Alec’s personal inscription, “for M.M.”

To my ear, there’s a melancholy in much of Alec’s writing that never tips into self-pity. It’s wistful, interior, and a bit stubborn. The songs don’t hawk themselves with showy leaps or brash chordal displays.  They seem to be waiting to unwrap themselves when paid just the right kind of attention.

That’s where Marian comes in. Her training was classical, at London’s Guildhall School, and her harmonic language deepened after she heard Bill Evans. But what she brings to Alec’s music isn’t style imposed from the outside. It’s understanding. She plays these pieces as someone who knew how they were built, and why. Her virtuosity, which often went overlooked because of its unshowy expression, is notably quiet here. You notice the voicings before you notice the technique, and the technique only when you go back to hear how she managed to make it all sound so right. 

I can’t decide – meaning I change my mind each time out – whether I more enjoy Michael Moore’s bass-work on the duets that fill the first half of the record (check his line on “Lullaby for a Lady”) or the bass-drums interplay on the trio tracks that complete the disc (try out “Trouble Is a Man”).

Alec passed in 1980.  Marian kept playing his music for the rest of her long life. In 1991 she played “Jazz Waltz for a Friend” at the Eastman School, when the library dedicated a reading room in his name.  I imagine it as her way of saying to her lost friend: Alec, I’ll be around.