The Permanence of Mary Lou Williams: Dave Douglas’s Soul on Soul

by Fritz Byers

Duke Ellington said Mary Lou Williams was “perpetually contemporary.” He should know. And he did.

In describing Mary Lou, he also coined the phrase that gave this week’s Jazz Spectrum Friday featured album its title: she was, he said, like “soul on soul.”  

Dave Douglas’s album, Soul on Soul, is an unusual and illuminating tribute to Mary Lou. Often, a tribute album tries to make its claim by looking backward. Dave’s succeeds in proving its point by writing forward – his own compositions that, to my ears, bear an unmistakable connection to Mary Lou’s musical spirit, and four of Mary Lou’s compositions, arranged to showcase their permanent modernity.

Mary Lou has been on my mind because of the class I’m teaching this semester: Women in Jazz. I believe I can safely say that I didn’t need Dave’s 2000 release to call my attention to Mary Lou, but I’ve been listening to the record for the last couple of weeks, along with dozens of hours of Mary Lou’s pathbreaking recordings. This week in class, I began our focus on her with her 1930 tour de force, “Night Life,” recorded around her twentieth birthday. If I hadn’t said the date before I played it for the class, I’ve no doubt they would have been off by, say, six or so decades.

Jazz Spectrum Saturday opens with an entire set of Mary Lou’s music. Friday, the spotlight is on Dave’s tribute. It was recorded in 1999. By then, Dave had established and burnished a reputation for ceaseless exploration and extension of the jazz tradition through his compelling compositions and his migrations into adjacent traditions, including Balkan and Jewish idioms. He dedicated this album, his debut on a major label, to a woman many jazz listeners still knew by name but not much else. It was the third in a run of homages, after In Our Lifetime for Booker Little, and Stargazer for Wayne Shorter. As was true with those marvelous recordings, the Mary Lou tribute is mostly in his own writing, although, as I said, his treatment of her four originals is revealing. His originals, which are implicitly written for Mary Lou, or at least with her foremost in mind, reflect a respectful attention that in fascinating ways is more faithful and more reverent than had he devoted the release to only Mary Lou’s tunes.  

The four compositions of Mary Lou’s that Dave and the group play cover nearly her entire career.  “Mary’s Idea” goes back to 1930 and her time with Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy, and she revised it for Andy’s larger band in 1938. “Aries” comes from her Zodiac Suite in 1945. “Waltz Boogie,” cut with her trio in 1946, puts a boogie-woogie bass into three-quarter time, which few people at the time (perhaps even fewer since) would have thought to try. And “Play It Momma” dates from Zoning, her 1974 album. That’s more than four decades in four tunes. They make such a good foundation for the tribute because she built them to be reshaped. She regularly rewrote her own charts, and she kept moving from one idiom to the next, never treating any of them as a destination.  A composer who works that way leaves behind structures that hold up, that can handle the kind of pressure a genius might apply decades later.

Dave puts pressure on them. With his virtuosity, range, and taste, he handles the swing-era material with a respectful refusal to hew to the prevailing harmonies of the time. This is one of the ways he proves Duke’s point about Mary Lou’s perpetual modernity. Listeners who, at the time of this release, knew him from John Zorn’s Masada or from his own Tiny Bell Trio heard something here they may not have expected: a player with a deep command of the tradition, and no interest in staying inside it. Trumpeters noticed. The International Trumpet Guild would in time publish a transcription of his solo on “Play It Momma.”

Then there’s the pianist, Uri Caine. He has made a career of revealing conversations with the past: Mahler, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the Tin Pan Alley songbook, each broken apart and put back together with his fiendishly brilliant iconoclasm. By the time they worked on Soul on Soul, Uri and Dave had played together for several years, at least since In Our Lifetime (1995). For an album about Mary Lou, Uri might be the ideal pianist, because her playing ran from stride through swing and bop into the avant-garde, and he can move through those styles in a single chorus. On the title track, he plays stride, then lets dissonances cut through it, the kind she would have recognized from her own late playing.  

This piece is already too long, so I’ll do an omnibus shout-out to the rest of the outstanding band: Chris Speed and Greg Tardy on reeds, Josh Roseman on trombone, James Genus on bass, and Joey Baron on drums.

To borrow the familiar financial-services tagline: when Duke Ellington talks about a pianist, people listen. Another telling thing he said about Mary Lou is that she was always a little ahead. Listening to Dave’s tribute, a quarter of a century after it was recorded, I sense that the album is still trying to keep up with her. Dave does it better than most, and I think that’s because he too was looking far ahead.