The modernistic masterpiece Zodiac Suite by pianist Mary Lou Williams turns 75 years. It still stands head and shoulder above most recordings of jazz.
Mary Lou Williams – Signs of the Zodiac (Asch, 1945)
The thing that immediately strikes me whenever I listen to the Zodiac Suite by Mary Lou Williams is the modernity of it. Or perhaps the timelessness of it. Sure, you can hear that it is a historic recording, but it does not in the least sound dated.
It is program music. Each Zodiac sign gets its own piece and they are also meant to describe the temperament of the persons born in them. The changeable “Aries” which goes from up-tempo, to a ballad was meant to portrait Williams’ colleges Billie Holiday and Ben Webster. Williams had Art Tatum in mind when she wrote “Libra” with its delicate melody and impressionistic harmonies.
Mary Lou Williams became a professional musician while still a teenager. She played with or wrote music for Duke Ellington, Earl Hines and Dizzy Gillespie, and she was a mentor for Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. She recorded pieces by Monk and Herbie Nichols while they were still struggling getting acceptance for their music.
She was 35 years of age when she recorded her Zodiac Suite with bassist Al Lucas and drummer Jack Parker. She uses the rhythm section in a modernistic way as well. Sometimes they play just part of the songs with Williams, sometimes she plays duets with Lucas and some pieces are played by Williams alone. The pieces are very rhythmic varied, sometimes going from out of time passages to different time signatures which are one of the reasons the music still sounds so modern.
Equal in importance to A Love Supreme
The concept of recording a suite much like in classical music was still new to jazz. Ellington was one of the few who did it as can be heard on live recordings from Carnegie Hall in the 1940s where he plays Black, Brown and Beige with his orchestra. It would become more common in the 1950s and 1960s with the long-playing albums which could harbor a suite. Williams’ suite had to be issued as two separate sets when it was originally released in 1945. It has since been reissued in many forms and it is currently available in digital form with many alternate tracks.
To me it stands out as a small band concept album much in the same way as Freedom Suite by Sonny Rollins or A Love Supreme by John Coltrane. It has the same artistic depth and invention. But you do not have to take my word for it. Geri Allen who perhaps was the most important pianist of the 1990s was an advocate of Mary Lou Williams. She rerecorded the Zodiac Suite in its entirety in 2006 with bassist Buster Williams and drummer Billy Hart, as a piece of concert music, much in the same way as Branford Marsalis rerecorded Freedom Suite and A Love Supreme with his quartet.
Mary Lou Williams also performed her suite at Town Hall in New York with an orchestra including Ben Webster on December 31, 1945. There is also a recording of her playing parts of it with the Dizzy Gillespie orchestra at Newport 1957. She wrote a couple of later suites with religious motives, but none of them surpasses Zodiac Suite in importance, but then again, not many musical pieces do.
Listen to Mary Lou Williams playing selections from her Zodiac Suite with her trio and with Dizzy Gillespie’s Orchestra, and Geri Allen revisiting it.
Jazz Desk 