Preface

The remarkable spiritual journey of America jazz musician and Catholic convert Mary Lou Williams (1910–81) is brought to our attention by the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, which has reissued two compact discs of Williams's stirring jazz compositions composed for liturgical use.¹ Indeed, there seems to be a revival of interest in the music of Williams, as Edward M. Komara notes in his review of a new biography of Williams, the second biography to appear in recent years.² Her music and her life integrate her profound musical talent, her Catholic faith, and important developments in the Catholic tradition in the second half of the twentieth century, demonstrating the vitality of that tradition as theological developments and artistic innovation come together in the vocation of a great artist. The subtitle of a recent article about Williams in The Musical Quarterly concisely names some of the elements that come together in the music of Mary Lou Williams: "Vatican II, Civil Rights, and Jazz as Sacred Music."³

Williams proudly describes herself as one of the few jazz artists who was active in every era of jazz, with blues, swing, bop, and avant-garde elements evident in her work throughout the stages of her long career. The spiritual roots of her music came to the foreground for her following a period of spiritual crisis in the 1950s, a crisis that eventually led her to Our Lady of Lourdes church near her apartment in Harlem and to her conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1957 at the age of forty-seven. When she released her beautiful jazz hymn, "St. Martin de Porres," shortly after the saint's canonization in 1962, she described what she saw as the religious origins of jazz, origins that she strove to keep active and alive within her music: "From suffering came the Negro spirituals, songs of joy, and songs of sorrow. The main origin of American Jazz is the spiritual. Because of the deeply religious background of the American Negro, he was able to mix this strong influence with rhythms that reached deep enough into the inner self to give expression to outcries of sincere joy, which became known as Jazz."⁴

The first of the two compact discs reissued by the Smithsonian Institution can be described as a sacred cantata, Black Christ of the Andes (originally released as an LP in 1963). Fr. Peter O' Brien, SJ, who first sought out the composer when he was a young seminarian and who became her friend and manager, places this work in the context of the civil rights movement of the 1960s: "in placing the words 'Black' and 'Christ' together in the one electrifying phrase 'Black Christ,' [Williams] unified her own religious belief with the political struggle of the period. This album is the statement of her intertwined beliefs about faith in God, faith in black people, faith in America, and faith in jazz. It was her civil rights statement in 1963." The opening piece of the cantata, the jazz hymn to which I have previously referred, exhibits a remarkable harmonic complexity as it sets a simple text composed by her friend Fr. Anthony Woods to "bop harmony, with chromatically altered ninths and thirteenths," according to the analysis of musicologist Gayle Murchison (606). The music beautifully celebrates the Christian charity of the saint and then becomes an urgent prayer of intercession addressed to the saint: "Oh, Black Christ of the Andes / Come feed and cure us now we pray."

Williams, following her conversion, sought to bring her musical talent fully to the service of the liturgy. Here the developments of the Second Vatican Council, in particular the "Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy" (1963) in the sections dealing with liturgical reform, opened new opportunities for the expansion of musical forms in the service of divine worship. Her development of a jazz Mass was not without difficulty and controversy—Williams had hoped her Lenten Mass would be performed for the Pope in 1969, but a Vatican official apparently objected to the inclusion of drums in the Mass, so it was performed in a...