Deanna Witkowski: Walking a Labyrinth with Mary Lou Williams

For the last two years, I have been aware that I am in the midst of walking a labyrinth. The bubbling up of this knowledge began when I chose to live in Mary Lou Williams’s hometown of Pittsburgh for seven weeks in the fall of 2019. I was working on a new biography of Williams and began wondering what it might be like to live in the city on a longer-term basis. During the last week of my stay, I visited a used bookstore and found Alice Walker’s The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult. I bought the book mainly because an image of a labyrinth included in the front matter, along with its accompanying epigraph by Jean Shinoda Bolen. A portion of that quote reads:

“Once we enter [the labyrinth], ordinary time and distance are immaterial . . . we do not know how far away or close we are to the center where meaning can be found until we are there; the way back is not obvious and we have no way of knowing as we emerge how or when we will take the experience back into the world until we do.”

         I immediately identified with the gut feeling that my life was about to shift in a significant way. I also recognize now that the experience that Bolen describes is akin to what occurs in the act of composition. We always go through periods of not knowing of where a (musical) section will end, or, even knowing its ending, how we will arrive there. Kind of like daily living. Or living during a pandemic.

         Another book that I picked up at the same store, Composing a Life (note “composing” in the title) by Mary Catherine Bateson, makes explicit (as does Walker) the fact that the act of creating one’s path involves improvisation and incredible courage. Bateson’s and Walker’s books—and Williams’s life—have helped me immensely in following my path over the last two years.

         Just as we keep following threads or instincts to create musical compositions, long-term devotion to following a particular path composes a life. In my case, following Mary Lou Williams’s story led me to move from my longtime Manhattan home to Pittsburgh in August 2020. Two dreams of mine have come true: I’m now a first-time homeowner and also the owner of a Steinway B piano. When I bought my house last February, I didn’t realize that it was located exactly one mile from Williams’s grave site. I’ve made two visits so far, and I know that Mary (as I call her) is close to me. After leaving my old upright piano in New York, I decided to ask my fans for help. Over the course of nine months, my fans donated $25,000, and in October, a seven-foot Steinway was delivered. I still can hardly believe that this instrument is in my living room! My biography, Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul (Liturgical Press) was published in September; and my all-Williams recording, Force of Nature (MCG Jazz), comes out in January. I also spent much of the last year creating a new performance edition of Williams’s third Mass, Music for Peace (also known as Mary Lou’s Mass) for the Mary Lou Williams Foundation. In October, I produced and performed on a concert of Music for Peace as well as selections from my own Evening Mass with twelve singers and an instrumental jazz quartet at Sacred Heart Church here in Pittsburgh. The response was overwhelming: while the church expected about 250 attendees, 500 people showed up. Next March, I’ll be in New York to perform Williams’s little-known second Mass (written in 1968), Mass for the Lenten Season, with the Stonewall Chorale. And on top of everything else, I’m in my second year of doctoral studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

         Following my labyrinth, I know that I haven’t yet emerged from the experiences of the last two years (and I’m sure that many of us can say the same thing). I’m still in the daily thicket of living this new reality. The only two constants I know are change and that the next step will be revealed, but that the revelation may not come until I actually lift my foot and take the step.

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The following excerpt (pages 1-6) from Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul is included by permission of the author. © 2021 Deanna Witkowski. Published by Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved.

         As a new resident of Mary Lou Williams’s hometown of Pittsburgh, I see Williams everywhere. The cigarette-stained keys on her well-worn Baldwin upright piano are on display among belongings of other local jazz legends at the Heinz History Center. She gazes at me from the murals of Pittsburgh icons that appear on downtown buildings and along the East Busway. Minutes after boarding a bus from Saint Benedict the Moor parish in the historic Hill District, I gasp on seeing Williams’s image on the side of an old theater as I whiz by. I later find out that the building was the New Granada Theatre (formerly the Pythian Temple and the Savoy Ballroom), a major jazz venue where Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong performed.

         Williams keeps leading me deeper and deeper into the musical legacy of this welcoming city. Less than a year prior to moving here, while renting a room for seven weeks, I often mentioned Williams in conversation. Almost invariably, whether I was speaking with a lifelong Pittsburgh resident, a professional jazz musician, or a college music student, I heard variations on the same refrain: “Wow! Williams was a great pianist, right? And didn’t she compose a lot of important jazz tunes? I mean, I don’t know any of her pieces. What did she write? Wasn’t she a mentor for [pianist] Thelonious Monk?”

            These responses reminded me that, to this day, most jazz musicians—let alone historians or Pittsburgh residents right- fully proud of their city’s rich jazz legacy—know Williams’s name and almost none of her music. Her compositions are not played in piano trios (piano, bass, and drums), one of the standard instrumentations in jazz. And while some of her big band music is available and is starting to receive more programming, it’s not yet in the regular repertoire of collegiate or professional jazz orchestras. In the “great man” narrative all too common in jazz history today, Williams is often reduced to a role as an early big band arranger and a mentor to bebop musicians whose names and compositions are front and center in the pantheon of jazz greats, such as Monk, saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, and trumpeter John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie. Williams’s work—her musical output—is understudied and underperformed.

         Williams’s spiritual journey is also commonly reduced to a one-dimensional story emphasizing how her mid-life conversion to Catholicism made her somewhat of a religious fanatic. Rather than honoring the months of rigorous religious education and decision-making that a person wishing to enter the Catholic faith undertakes prior to baptism, Williams’s choice to embrace Catholicism gets glossed over as a retreat from her arduous life as a performer in which “she trusted everybody and was treated so bad.”¹John Williams, quoted in Linda Dahl, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 246. Used by permission of Linda Dahl. Yet as her friend Dorothy Day knew all too well, Christianity is not simply an interior, personal faith. It requires seeing God in all things—in all people—and demands that we care for the poor in our midst. Williams cared for the poor and, like Day, chose voluntary poverty in order to rehabilitate the sick in her community, especially jazz musicians. She performed these works of mercy even prior to her religious conversion. A 1950 album cover of a recording by pianist Bud Powell shows Williams—partially hidden—and Powell at an upright piano, perhaps at Mary’s piano in her Harlem apartment. Mary was a behind-the-scenes, one-woman support system for Powell, not only coaching him musically and recommending him for gigs but calming him when his mental exhaustion turned into explosive episodes, which led to several stays in mental institutions.

            Williams’s charitable work via her two Manhattan thrift shops and her founding of the Bel Canto Foundation, a charitable nonprofit organization dedicated to rehabilitating jazz musicians who suffered from drug addiction, is well documented. Less discussed is her ministry of letter-writing conducted over decades with fans from all walks of life, including priests and nuns. Williams cultivated nascent friendships by writing to religious sisters who she met during her many spiritual retreats. In the 1960s, her frequent letters to Fr. Michael Williams, the new director of the Catholic Youth Organization in Pittsburgh, facilitated the production of the first Pittsburgh Jazz Festival, a historic piano workshop including Williams, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, and Willie “the Lion” Smith, and a teaching position at Seton High School where she wrote her first jazz Mass.

         Williams found sustenance for her daily work in letters she received from men and women religious as well as from listeners who found healing in her music and her words of encouragement. Her kindheartedness extended to notes she wrote on the backs of torn envelopes from fans who shared how their lives had been transformed after they heeded her admonitions to go back to church or after she spoke with them following a performance. Her scribbled writing often simply said, “Send record [her recordings].” And send she did. Williams gave away everything she had—her scant physical possessions, her apartment, her music, her time—to save the world.

            As Dorothy Day said, quoting Dostoevsky, “Beauty will save the world.” Williams showed that the discipline, freedom, and beauty inherent in being a jazz musician and a person of faith has the power to heal the troubled soul.

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         A further word about my own connection to Williams. As a professional jazz pianist, composer, and liturgical musician, I was introduced to Williams in 1999, when pianist and educator Dr. Billy Taylor invited me to perform at the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival. On accepting, I realized that I knew almost nothing about the festival’s namesake. Like the majority of jazz musicians, I only knew that Williams had been a lauded pianist- composer who had mentored other jazz stars whose music I did know. I asked myself why I had never heard any of this woman’s music.

            My eagerness to learn more about Williams came at an opportune time: Morning Glory, a new Williams biography by Linda Dahl, had just been published. Trumpeter Dave Douglas had recently released a Williams tribute album, Soul on Soul, so I emailed him asking for a list of essential Williams recordings. I started listening to Mary’s music— and, since then, have never stopped.

         From Dahl’s biography, I learned that Williams was a liturgical jazz pioneer who had composed three Mass settings. I was astonished. Just two years earlier, I had relocated from Chicago to New York to serve as a full-time music director at All Angels’ Episcopal Church. I had recently composed my second jazz Mass for the congregation and began presenting my music in churches outside of New York. I realized that I shared a goal with Williams, whether composing for a specific congregation or playing in a jazz club: to make jazz—or, more broadly, all of my original work—accessible to all. Like Williams, I believe that jazz should be played everywhere: in the club, at the community center, on the sidewalk, in church. In Williams, I had unexpectedly found a soul companion and lifelong mentor.

         Over the intervening years, Mary (whom, from this point on, I will call by her first name) has become more and more a part of my life. As an adult convert to Catholicism who converted through the influence of the Jesuits—even attending a lay spirituality program at the same New York parish where Mary presented “Saint Martin de Porres,” her first major liturgical work, in the early 1960s—I began to realize that I was literally walking in Mary’s footsteps. As a musician who presents jazz in churches of all different denominations, I often picture Mary seated at the piano in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, playing her joyous Mary Lou’s Mass with her trio in front of 3,000 people as five priests process to the altar. Mary gives me courage. Sometimes I speak with her before I play, knowing that in a very real sense, she has been here before me. Once I began spending extended time in her hometown of Pittsburgh, I came to realize that the warmth I felt in the welcoming, soulful people in the city where she grew up was the same warmth I’ve experienced in all of Mary’s playing. Now I, too, call Pittsburgh home. Each time I step onto the stage to play just mere feet from the Charles “Teenie” Harris photo of her that hangs proudly at the Pittsburgh jazz club Con Alma, I send a quick prayer to Mary, thanking her for being with me, and then I start pressing down the keys, letting the sound, the space, and everything it has taken to get me to this moment, all come out. I hope that a fraction of what I feel when I play is expressed in these pages and that Mary’s story will bring you to what, for her, was the most important thing: her music.

Known for her adventurous, engaging music that heals the soul, pianist-composer-vocalist Deanna Witkowski moves with remarkable ease between Brazilian, jazz, classical, and sacred music. The award-winning bandleader releases her seventh recording, Force of Nature (MCG Jazz) in January 2022, a companion piece to her biography, Mary Lou Williams: Music For The Soul (Liturgical Press), published in September 2021. The two projects cap a twenty-year deep dive into the ground-breaking impact of Williams’ life and music, making Witkowski one of the few living authorities on the iconic pianist. As a sought after Williams expert, she has presented at the Kennedy Center, Duke University, Fordham University, and performed Williams’ compositions as a featured guest with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

Witkowski’s explosive performances combine virtuosity and heart, telling stories that reveal her innate curiosity of the human condition. She has recorded with jazz Grammy nominees John Patitucci, Kate McGarry, and Donny McCaslin, and has performed and toured with renowned vocalists Lizz Wright, Nnenna Freelon, Erin Bode, Filó Machado, and Vanessa Rubin.

A prolific choral composer, Witkowski has won multiple competitions for her concert and sacred works. Commissions and new compositions have been funded by organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts (for her Afro-Brazilian project, the Nossa Senhora Suite) and the the Choral Arts Initiative PREMIERE|Project Festival.

Following in the steps of her chosen soul companion and lifelong mentor, Witkowski relocated to Mary Lou Williams’ hometown of Pittsburgh in 2020. She is a second-year doctoral student in jazz studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Experience her work at deannajazz.com.