Zodiac Suite

With just a casual interest in astrology, Mary Lou Williams created her 1945 Zodiac Suite as a series of character sketches, musical portraits of friends from each sign that she would debut on a weekly radio show. "Aries" is for Ben Webster and Billie Holiday, "Taurus" for Duke Ellington and "Libra" for Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. The pieces include piano solos, duets with bassist Al Lucas and trios with the addition of drummer Jack "The Bear" Parker. The suite is both a remarkable exercise in extended composition and an index of Williams' varied palette. Her mix of blues and boogie roots and strikingly modernist harmonies is sometimes similar to Monk's, while her lighter, impressionist playing can evoke Claude Debussy (and the way Debussy coloured the piano music of Bix Beiderbecke). The cumulative work, though, has a warmly sustained lyricism that can only suggest comparisons with Ellington. The Zodiac Suite would assume more ambitious forms, with a chamber orchestra setting for the entire suite later in 1945 and a large-orchestra adaptation of three movements a year later. Dizzy Gillespie recorded three movements with his big band in 1957. But the intimacy of these original recordings is very special, with Williams effectively blurring the line between composition and improvisation. --Stuart Broomer

Label: Unknown
Studio: Smithsonian Folkways
Released: 1995-10-26
Format: Audio CD