Mary Lou Williams – Biography
Jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century — and also one of the most underrated. She was a musical prodigy at a very young age, impressing the likes of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong as a teenager in the early 1920s. By the following decade, she was leading her own jazz band and writing/arranging compositions for Benny Goodman, Earl Hines and Tommy Dorsey. Her greatest innovations came in the 1940s, when she combined jazz with impressionist classical techniques, thus paving the way for bebop pioneers like Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, all of whom she tutored.
Even though Williams was never as commercially successful as the jazz legends she played with and influenced, her contributions to the genre cannot be understated. Throughout the rest of her career and until her death in 1981, she was at the forefront of jazz experimentation. Keep reading below for Mary Lou Williams album reviews and accolades.
Discography
- Zodiac Suite (1945) A+
- Mary Lou Williams (1951) A
Accolades
- Colin’s Review Music Hall of Fame
- 1940s Greatest Albums – #1
- 1940s Best Songs – #32 & #39
- 1940s Artists of the Decade – #9
- 1951 Top Albums – #9