mother OF US ALL

Pianist Sumi Tonooka was just 19 years old when she began taking the train from Philadelphia to Harlem to study with Mary Lou Williams. Those formative lessons took place in the same apartment where, a few decades earlier, the leading lights of bebop—Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie, and Elmo Hope among them—would gather for regular salons where ideas were shared that helped shape the direction of jazz. It was a prerequisite that Williams’ young student be very aware of the ghosts that lingered in that space.

“Mary Lou made sure, especially during my first lesson, that I understood that history before I ever played a note,” Tonooka recalled with a chuckle. “I didn’t touch that piano until she ran down who had been in the room. I was already nervous, and then she told me that this was where Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie used to sit and trade secrets while bebop was being created. Of course I was petrified by the time I sat down to play.”

History was always important to Mary Lou Williams, both her own and that of the music. In 1978 she recorded The History of Jazz for Folkways Records, taking the role of narrator while playing representative pieces for each era: spirituals, Kansas City swing, boogie-woogie, blues, bebop, even the avant-garde. (Albeit with considerable trepidation—the title of her strident composition “A Fungus a Mungus” gives some idea of her feelings for the more outré paths the music was then taking.)

Few artists were so well suited to serve as tour guide for that evolutionary journey. Williams was unique in spanning the music’s history and finding her own voice in each stylistic transformation. Born in 1910 and raised in Pittsburgh, Williams was a prodigy who