Williams, Mary Lou. (1910–1981) [Martin, David Stone. (1913 - 1992)]
"Music for Peace" - Signed LP
The singer's 1970 album by "Mary Lou Williams... and her friends" issued on Mary Records, inscribed "Sincerely, Mary Lou Williams," and featuring a graphically striking cover design by David Stone Martin of variously toned hands coming together to form a peace sign. 12" LP, with light discoloration on front and back of record sleeve, else fine.The pianist, arranger, and composer Mary Lou Williams' s career in jazz traced a line all the way from the Kansas City scene of the late 1920s through the swing era, bop, the 1950s jazz expatriate community, and an academic job at Duke in the late 1970s, also helping to pioneer sacred jazz in the early 1960s. After converting to Catholicism in the mid-1950s, Williams maintained a low, almost non-existent profile in the jazz world, emerging briefly in 1957 to play with Dizzy Gillespie at Newport. In the early 1960s she began composing jazz pieces with religious underpinnings, culminating in a series of jazz masses. This is her magnum opus of religious jazz: Mary Lou's Mass. A landmark recording which addressed many of the social ills of the 1960s and 70s, Newsweek called the score "an encyclopedia of black music, richly represented from spirituals to bop to rock." It is perhaps the most openly religious jazz recording made at that time. In her own words, it is "Music for the Soul." (18452)
Signed Document/Item Jazz