If you’re British, white and a woman, you’ll never make it. So the American jazz critic and occasional composer Leonard Feather said in 1946 of a newcomer on the block. That newcomer was Marian McPartland, born Margaret Marian Turner and recently married to Jimmy McPartland, a notable cornetist from Chicago whom she’d met entertaining American troops in Europe after the war.
Two of Feather’s criteria for not making it applied to George Shearing, a blind pianist from England whom he sponsored and who succeeded in a big way at about the same time in the same place as McPartland. He might have said that Shearing’s blindness had the opposite effect to her femaleness and helped take him to success. Or he might have said it was a joke (in fact, he did say so, though she thought he meant it seriously too). Either way, McPartland succeeded, like her husband Jimmy (a decade older) did nearly two decades earlier and like he never had done, for when Marian McPartland, OBE (Officer in the Order of the British Empire), born on March 20, 1918, died on August 20 at the age of 95, she was a household name to millions of jazz fans in a way that Jimmy McPartland never could have been.
Or Shearing for that matter. Sir George Shearing, who also had become an American citizen and was a great friend of McPartland’s, won immense popularity as he was in the forefront of jazz movements, unlike Jimmy McPartland and like Marian, and was into other crazes like Latin jazz besides. But McPartland, who like Shearing studied new trends in jazz, was even more comfortable in them than Shearing was. And so, in 1978 she was chosen to host a programme for US National Public Radio (NPR) called Piano Jazz.
One of the first guests was the great pianist Mary Lou Williams, who, like her, found her feet in an older genre and grew along all the newer trends and thrived in all. Originally conceived as a show in which host and guest, also a pianist, would talk about jazz and play together or solo on pianos, but later had other instrumentalists and vocalists too, Piano Jazz took in such greats of the past as Eubie Blake (who died at the age of 96 in 1983) and youngsters such as Esperanza Spalding, the jazz vocalist and bassist who beat the pop sensation Justin Bieber to the Grammy for best new artist in 2011.
Till I bought a radio in 1983 I knew of only three jazz musicians: Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. Maybe Dizzy Gillespie vaguely. I used to listen to the Voice of America’s Jazz Hour occasionally before, and regularly after, that acquisition. Very soon I became acquainted with its host Willis Conover’s occasional use of Piano Jazz sessions, for instance one with Mercer Ellington, trumpeter and son of the legendary Duke, who was something of a mentor to McPartland and certainly an idol of hers. It was through Conover’s Jazz Hour that I became familiar with many other names in jazz, including the junior Ellington and McPartland.
Soon after McPartland came to New York pursuing the latest in jazz, she started performing in a trio (piano, bass, drums). Duke Ellington regularly dropped into her long-standing act at the Hickory House, a 52nd Street club, as did his composer-partner Billy Strayhorn. She loved Ellington and Strayhorn tunes, and often talked about them and played their stuff on her programme, as did many of her guests of course.
When WorldSpace radio came into existence in 2000 I discovered besides its in-house jazz channel – which one could quickly tire of – another channel it offered, the international edition of NPR, which every week had three or four jazz programmes, including Piano Jazz. And of course it had a dedicated listener in me. And my education continued. It continues despite WorldSpace having died in 2010, for by this time broadband Internet and streaming radio enables one to hear NPR and dedicated jazz stations 24x7. Since she often reprised her earlier shows, I knew she’d been through the pantheon, including Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Shearing, and many more.
It was on NPR that I heard Marian McPartland’s three 90th birthday concerts. At one of those concerts she came on stage, helped because she’d recently suffered a broken bone, saying, “Well I still have my marbles.” McPartland continued with her programme till 2011, after which she retired. But, still having her marbles and having outlived her near contemporaries and close friends Shearing (1919-2011) and Brubeck (1920-2012), she’s joined them in immortality.
