There’s still plenty of work left to do when it comes to spreading awareness of the brilliant and manifold contributions of Mary Lou Williams, as a cheerfully uninhibited audience member demonstrated on Sunday night, Jan. 26, at the Joe Henderson Lab (JHL).
South Korean-born New York bassist and composer Jeong Lim Yang was making her SFJAZZ debut, bringing a top-notch trio into the intimate JHL to explore material from her highly praised 2022 album Zodiac Suite: Reassured (Fresh Sound Records). A groundbreaking work by Williams, released in 1945 and combining jazz with European classical music influences, Zodiac Suite was “way modern, ahead of its time,” Yang said after interpreting several movements with a decidedly contemporary rhythmic feel.
In the midst of introducing her band and the tunes, a patron near the front started peppering Yang with questions. What instrument did Williams play? Did she leave recordings or sheet music? Yang patiently provided some spoken answers, but it was in performance that her trio delivered a true treatise on Williams’s enduring legacy as a composer.
Each of the suite’s 12 pieces are named for a sign of the Zodiac and were inspired by the personalities of Williams’s musical friends and colleagues. Yang’s trio, featuring East Bay-raised drummer Mark Ferber and Argentine pianist Santiago Leibson, opened the first set with an arrangement of “Virgo” that hewed closely to Williams’s original conception and a slowly building version of “Aries” that evolved from a smoldering cymbal beat to a full-on conflagration.
They extrapolated on the playful singsong cadence of “Gemini,” bouncing ideas back and forth. A spritely improviser with a bright, firm touch, Leibson referenced Williams’s full-spectrum approach to the keyboard without surrendering any of his effusive personality. With Yang often taking melodic lead, he inhabited the middle ground with supple dynamics, supporting her arco and strummed passages with telegraphic block chords. A powerful player with a commanding bounce, Yang held attention with her stimulating choice of notes. Her only original of the set was a rippling Williams tribute, “Madam, Thank You, Madam.”
Williams recorded Zodiac Suite with bassist Al Lucas and drummer Jack Parker during a period when her apartment served as an after-hours hang for many of the modernists creating the vocabulary for bebop. Along with Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, and Earl “Fatha” Hines, she was one of only a handful of jazz giants who came of age in the 1920s and went on to influence and comfortably consort with the leading modernists of the 1940s and ’50s. A century after she first hit the road as a touring professional player at the age of 15, Williams is still inspiring musical invention.
