Oregon Music News

Marian McPartland

Evidence that decency, while not thriving, survives is the satisfaction we experience when justice is served. “In Good Time: The Piano Jazz of Marian McPartland”, which will be screened Sunday, October 16 at 4:45 p.m. in the Art Museum’s Whitsell Auditorium as part of the Reel Music 29 festival, does wonderful justice to a sweet American Institution.

When Alec Wilder, pianist, composer, an author of a classic, “The American Songbook,” gave up a public radio show in 1979, an unlikely successor was found. As jazz writer Leonard Feather observed, Marian McPartland had three strikes against her, she was white, English, and a she. A forth handicap could have been added, old. But the program, “Piano Jazz,” is still on the air, a fixture that has attracted the who’s who of jazz pianists and other performers, all of them eager to play with this amazing woman.

On one level, “In Good Time” is a love story, even though her mate, the rambunctious trad trumpeter Jimmy McPartland, died in 1991.  Jimmy, an alumnus of Chicago’s Austin High Gang and associate of Bix Beiderbecke, grounded his wife in the lore of jazz origins and she regularly regales guests and listeners with pungent anecdotes.  The early jazz milieu was big rowdy but, however difficult their days, the couple obviously had an indecent amount of fun.

Ms. McPartland meets Mr. Zappa

Marian’s most notable engagement, prior to “Piano Jazz”, was a long stint at New York’s “Hickory House,” with the likes of Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn and Mary Lou Williams sitting in. Bassist Bill Crow and drummer Joe Morello contribute stories about this memorable period.

Most of the documentary was shot recently in South Carolina, where the public radio station there produces “Piano Jazz”.  At 92, Marian cannot be expected to burn with the technical mastery of her prime and there is precious little film of her demonstrating the earlier mastery. But she has always been daring and is no less so now (“What comes after 92?” she is asked and replies, “93”). A regular feature on “Piano Jazz,” when she has the right guest, is an exercise when one of the two invents a musical figure and the other has to go with it.  And a specialty  of the house is extemporaneous portraits of her guests. Two, with Dave Brubeck and Mulgrew Miller, are included in show and both subjects are tickled to life.

Students at the University of South Carolina play with Marion in the documentary (“she’s 78 years older than I am,” one observes) and a young girl, playing beautifully, ends a piece with tears of joy while Marian beams.

Not all of the guests on “Piano Jazz” are pianists. Guitarist Bill Frisell happily instigates a Brazilian tune and singer Elvis Costello gets emotional on “Our Love is Here to Stay.” His wife, Diana Krall, talks about writing Marian a letter when she was a teenager and receiving cherished encouragement.

Stylists of every stripe have turned up on “Piano Jazz.” People who absolutely could not have played with each other (Dick Hyman and Cecil Taylor, for instance) play happily with Marion, whose harmonic conception was far more advanced than that of her husband.

This began when Mary Lou Williams forced her to confront a B flat 9^th with a flatted 5^th and led to an ability to play in the feeling three different keys at once. And none of this is conspicuously on display. It just enables her to play incomparably with anyone who has some music to offer.

There is plenty of lament about the cruelty of lives cut short. Let’s rejoice in the blessing of this longevity.

Watch her play “Afterglow”