Mary Lou Williams
Self-taught on the piano. Couldn’t read music. But by the age of seven, Mary Lou Williams was playing publicly as East Liberty’s “Little Piano Girl.” At twelve, she went on tour. By thirteen, she was playing with Duke Ellington. And at 20, she recorded one of the most critically-acclaimed piano jazz solos of the 20th Century on the tune “Night Life.”
She wrote hundreds of compositions and literally inspired a generation of jazz legends. She hired a young Art Blakey, she mentored Thelonious Monk and taught Charlie Parker. She was a foundational force in jazz.
But her most acclaimed work came after a later-life religious conversion when she wrote Mary Lou’s Mass, and had it performed in front of three thousand at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
Prodigy. Performer, Teacher. Muse. Mary Lou Williams’s genius is a permanent beacon in the Pittsburgh jazz universe.
