(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I have sort of a few questions in my first question, so I'm going to ask them together because I suspect maybe the answers will bleed. I'm curious about your attraction to her as a subject. What were your feelings about her standing or her place in the tradition when you first decided to take on the project? And did how you felt about her place in the canon change throughout the project?
Paul de Barros: It did change. When I came to Marian, I thought of her as an interesting piano player, but what really attracted me to her was her jazz advocacy because I'd spent so many years in my life running a jazz nonprofit, trying to promote jazz, get people to listen to jazz. I was that kid who grew up in high school telling people they should listen to jazz—it's more interesting than rock music. I was always a big flag-waver for jazz.
I was really intrigued that this woman from England who had this amazing voice on the radio was so fluent, not only in playing the music but with the personalities and the culture of the music. Unlike many other people who loved the music, she could get across to the average person. Marian was someone where if you're at a cocktail party and you said you're into jazz, inevitably the first thing out of somebody's mouth would be either, "Yeah, I love Dave Brubeck" or "I listen to Marian McPartland." She's a common denominator. And that really intrigued me. I said, how does she do this? What kind of a person is she?
Lawrence: You talk a lot in the new forward about obviously the specific challenges of working with her as well as, more broadly, having what I'll put in air quotes, "official access" to somebody who's still alive and their papers and their material. I'm wondering, for people that haven't read the book yet, could you talk a little bit about the tension as well as the constraints and opportunities that having that direct access and sort of official biographer status creates? Because I would imagine it's a different experience if you're just combing through archives in a library or a private collection and you don't really care about the subject's perspective.
Paul: Well, it was intimate, that's the best word for it. It was like a biographer's dream. We go to libraries and sift through people's archives. We look for every scrap of information. Where were they? Who did they play with? Who were their side men? Who were their side women? Why did they play this way? Who influenced them? How did this happen? What's the timeline?
Marian was her own archivist. So down in her den, below the kitchen in her lovely little house in Port Washington on Long Island, she had virtually the Marian McPartland and Jimmy McPartland archive and library. There were a few things she didn't have, like the interview with the Schomburg and the library in Harlem, she didn't have a copy of the Smithsonian interview that James Williams did with her, which is a 175-page transcript.
Actually, that's maybe a sidebar that would shed some light on what it was like to work with Marian. A colleague of mine was originally going to do this book. Marian was very demanding. She was used to being in charge, and she didn't mind telling you what to do or asking you to do something for her.
When this friend of mine initially started talking to her about doing a book, she said, "Well, you know what I'd like? I would like a copy of my Smithsonian interview. They never sent me one, and I just want to read it and see what I said." And so this pal of mine sent her a digital copy of the interview, like the actual sound, not the transcript. And she called him up and said, "It's not what I asked for. I want a transcript." [laughter] She really just read the riot act to him and he started thinking, "Wow, maybe I don't want to deal with this person." [laughter] So that fell apart.
That's what it was like. It was like the biographer's dream in one sense, in that you're down in the den and you've got all the articles and then you're reading something that makes you think of a question. Like, when did you meet Django Reinhardt? And all you have to do is walk up the stairs and there she is in the kitchen having tea and you can say, "So when did you meet Django Reinhardt?"
But on the other hand, she was a very guarded person, so despite that physical intimacy for four or five months at her house, six days a week, she also kind of had a ready-made answer for every question and it wasn't always true or complete. She was her own biographer, and that was one of the reasons that she was having so much trouble letting somebody else write the story.
Lawrence: Yeah, yeah, I don't remember the exact number, but you weren't the first and maybe not even the second to try, right?
The sixth! There you go. That reticence that she initially had, and you talk about the breakthrough with her or her coming around, how common is that when you work? We were talking off mic, you interview a lot of people that you've done this a lot over the years in different degrees of depth. Both that sense of being able to tell when the answer is canned and also just that psychic resistance that you know you're running into. How common is that? And as a craftsman, like how do you chip away at that?
Paul: Oh, well, it's a life's work. It's like being in a boxing match, you know, you're just like, are they leading with their left? Their right? When do they duck? When do they not duck? Some people are easy. Other people are guarded. Other people are just plain liars. You have to really just read the room.
There's two or three things that I think are really important that all of us that have been in this field would agree on. The first one is really, really do your homework. There's nothing more frustrating for an artist than to have some ignoramus sitting there asking idiotic, inane questions that they could have asked their cat. "Well, when did you think you were a musician?" Come on. I just had that happen to me actually as an interviewee with a student newspaper. I put up with the whole thing and at the end I said, "Can I just tell you a couple things, just with all the greatest love in the world? Don't ever interview an author without reading their book."
Lawrence: Yeah, we have artists a lot who, as you know, in covering jazz or creative music or any of the sort of non-mainstream musics, artists are grateful, right? There's not a lot of coverage these days. And we get a lot of feedback like, "Thank you so much for actually listening to the music." And I think you're giving me an hour of your time. Like, why would I not? [laughter]
Paul: And so many people don't. I mean, I can remember the first time I interviewed Diana Krall. Her mom was in the hospital in Vancouver and it was in a phone booth. I happened to be in Vancouver, and it was the only way we could do it. I was taking notes in a phone booth on Burrard Street. At the end of the interview, she said, "Wow, that was great. Thank you so much—you really have listened to my records." As if to say, you know, half the people who call me don't.
But in any case, that's it. Know the stuff. But then beyond that, I have a rule of thumb—and I think somebody twigged me to this early in my career or maybe I came up with it myself—but always ask your hippest question first. And what I mean by hip is to really show not only have you listened to all the records everybody knows about, but you've listened to that record nobody knows about. You say, "Man, how did you wind up doing that record with Bob James in Philadelphia in '71?" The person at the other end of the line or across the table from you is going to say, in their mind, "Oh, this person knows who I am." Because that's what we want. We want to be seen.
Sometimes it doesn't work. And again, you just have to be aware, just like as if you were playing music. When I went down to interview Ray Charles for the Jackson Street After Hours book, the history of jazz in Seattle, Ray Charles was notoriously unpleasant despite his public image. He was mean. He didn't have any time for anybody who he didn't trust, and he didn't trust most people for obvious reasons. The way he grew up, he was blind. People tried to cheat him all his life, but he was a very mistrustful person. And he had a very tight iron circle around him.
The only way I could finally get in to interview him in his studio was to actually have Quincy Jones call him on the phone personally and say, "Ray, you have to do this. Paul's okay." And I was so grateful to Quincy for him actually doing that. It wasn't even enough that I could call the manager and say, "Quincy says it's cool." He said, "No, no, no, we need to hear from Quincy." It was just ways of making sure it wasn't going to happen, you know, but it finally did.
So I get into Ray's studio. There's all these keyboards and he's drinking tea. He just is not putting out a friendly vibe. It's just like, you know, how long do I have to put up with this guy? I ask him what I think is the hippest question about the Seattle scene, which is about this bass player named Milt Jarrod, who incidentally was the guy who first encouraged him to take heroin. [laughter]
But I didn't bring that up first, but I knew that Milt was important to him in his life, and this was nothing. Things twenty minutes, and I was finally like, "Wow, I'm not getting anything that's not already in your book, and your book is full of a bunch of BS. There's all kinds of stuff in there. I've already interviewed your guitar player. I know that you didn't come to Seattle by yourself. I know he came here and brought you here, but you've never told anybody that."
So if I'm getting kind of frustrated and worried, I'm looking around the studio and I see a Rhodes. I just, out of the blue, off my own list of questions, I said, "Ray, how do you like the Rhodes, man? I know you started with the Wurlitzer, and nobody else was really playing that, and then everybody turned to the Rhodes." And all of a sudden, if Ray Charles could see, you would see his eyes light up. He looked at me and he said, "You recognize that's a Rhodes over there in the corner?" I said, "Yeah." "Well, what else do you want to know?" [laughter]
Lawrence: Yeah, it's really interesting point because I have found in these contexts, as well as even working with artists in their art or in the professional life, they're essentially most of them are essentially music nerds like us.
Paul: There's a kindred spirit. That's right.
Lawrence: Not exploitation.
Paul: And I think Marian, I hope, she came to feel that way. She, like Ray Charles, was not a trusting person. I don't know why. I never found anything in her background, other than her just very bad relationship with her mother, to make her feel like everybody was trying to trick her or dupe her or get something out of her. But that's really the way she acted. And it was really hard to gain her trust.
Lawrence: You mentioned her mom. I found your use of her sister Joyce's voice in the book really interesting, especially since the words were directed at Marian. So as a reader, it was just very impactful. And the way it broke the spell of being dispassionate while you're reading the book. It's almost like you're addressed by Joyce as a reader. It's really a neat construct that you revisit throughout the book. Were there any specific challenges knowing how Marian was? I assume everybody in her life knew how she was. Did you have to cajole people to talk to you or did you have to ask her to clear the way for you? Was it the type of biography where she called people and said, talk to Paul?
Paul: Actually, it was the other way around. She kept wanting me to stop talking to people because she said, "You've got the story. The story's about me." She was a bit of an egotist. I remember when I called Ben Tucker, who was a bass player who has a claim to fame in the jazz world, in that he wrote that song Mel Tormé sold so many records on. "Going, Going Home?" Is that what it's called? [sings a snippet of the song] I mean it's really this sneaky song that Mel Tormé had a huge hit on. And Ben Tucker, I think he made thirty thousand a year off the royalties of that one tune.
When I told her I was talking to Ben, she said—I think this might even be in the book, I can't remember—she said, "Why are you talking to Ben Tucker? I know more about Ben Tucker than he knows about himself." [laughter]
So I just—no, it was kind of the other way around. There were very few people, at least that I'm aware of, that she called up and said, "Yeah, be sure to talk to Paul." One of them may have been her great bass player, Eddie Gomez, because he was remarkably open, which pleased me.
But when I say the other way around, Helen Merrill, the great singer—Marian told this great story about when she first heard Helen Merrill, she and Jimmy were driving on the highway, and they just pulled off the highway so they could listen to the rest of the song. But Helen kept telling Marian, "Just tell this guy the story. Why are you making up all this stuff? He wants to know the truth. He's not going to do anything wrong." She kept being on my side. [laughter]
Lawrence: It's interesting that even dissuading you from calling people, that hook of control…
Paul: Oh yeah.
Lawrence: Yeah. I can't let—even once she decided that you were okay to do it, she couldn't quite just let you do it.
Paul: No, and although I'll give her credit because she also knew that her old agent, Pam, really disliked her. And she had, you know, because she wanted to do it herself. So I just thought, well, I need to get this on the record from at least one person. And Pam just did a great job. She said, "You know, I love Marian, but here's how it was: You'd call her up and you'd say, 'Why don't you call so and so and see if we can get a gig in Pittsburgh?' And then you'd do it and she'd call back and say, 'I already did it. Never mind you, I don't need you anyway.'" [laughter]
She was just trying to put people in their place all the time. But it was mostly out of fear. It wasn't because she was a jerk—that was how it manifested, but it was just out of fear, I think, all the time that she wasn't going to make enough money, that she wasn't going to make ends meet, that her career wasn't going anywhere. And in fact, she overcompensated so much that she wound up making a really good living as a jazz musician, which is saying a lot.
If you come around and you get paid eight to fifteen thousand dollars to play a week in a jazz club in the seventies and eighties, you're making a good living. And many jazz musicians were not, and they became frustrated and had to teach and do studio work and this and that and the other thing to make ends meet. But Marian was a very hard worker and good at selling herself and very ingenious at coming up with ideas for how to keep her career going and also to keep fresh musically.
Lawrence: Something I really liked early on in the book, and again, as a reader that struck me, is just the span of time that her life and career encompassed, but also that sort of, you know, now we look back and it's almost like the dark ages of the modern entertainment business. The way she toured around England and that period between when she first left school and the war is just fascinating. You talk about that really interesting combination of where she sits—jazz, classical, entertainment music, house concerts...
Paul: Or concert parties.
Lawrence: Yeah, concert parties.
Paul: Vaudeville. It was just somewhere in there with our vaudeville idea.
Lawrence: And she was just there for that with, you know, this idea, like these reviews with a comedian and dancers and sword swallowers and all that kind of thing. But you also talk about how that stuff shaped her music, too.
Paul: Yeah, the whole thing.
Lawrence: Could you play musicologist for a minute and talk a little bit about the musical stew she came out of and how maybe you saw that manifesting?
Paul: Not so much on a musicological note, but maybe we could get to that. I think what she learned doing variety entertainment was to be an entertainer. She started as an entertainer. Most of our jazz contemporaries today do not. They don't have any notion that they're in a place where everybody's supposed to clap, everybody's supposed to go home happy, be amused. That has gone out of jazz and it's become more like classical music where it's like, "No, I'm an artist and I'm going to present my newest concept of my art and I hope you like it." [laughter]
She came out of a completely different tradition of being a variety entertainer. I think it did her a disservice for many years because I think she was so good at it that she leaned on audience-pleasing things for many years in her music. Tricky figures or illusions that were humorous or playing the sort of tired role of the jazz lady who can also play classical music. None of that was ever going to really get her anywhere artistically.
The fact that she was such a really good reader and such a great—actually she wasn't a great reader, but a great listener. She had a great ear. And she was a good mimic. I think it really helped her in those years where she could come in for a rehearsal in the morning for a show that was going to be that night and have the book down. "Okay, let's go with this, this sounds like here's the segue to this," but knowing those things doesn't make you a great jazz player.
What makes you a great jazz player is reaching into yourself and finding what's inside there, putting it into music and swinging. Musicologically, I would say that—and she was very straightforward about this—England was just way behind the jazz curve because the BBC didn't like jazz. So the music that she heard, like the music our grandparents or parents were listening to in the thirties—Benny Goodman, Jimmy Lunceford, Count Basie—they didn't get that music. It just wasn't played. And I verified this by talking to other jazz historians in Britain and they gave me playlists of what you could have heard.
Lawrence: It's like easy listening or what we would think of as easy listening.
Paul: Yeah, and it was warmed-over jazz and it really had a racial bias. I mean, it was really like the Paul Whiteman bias of "let's make this Black music not sound so African." Let's get this rhythmic business out of there and make it a little more sweet. And that's what she grew up listening to. Hence bouncy feeling music when she first finally starts playing jazz. It's just not swinging.
She doesn't have this feel for swing music. And we talked pretty deeply about this because, you know, I told her—and I think I may have even talked to somebody else about this and quoted it in the book—when you come up as a white person in America and you're enamored of Black music, there's places to go to get it. I grew up as a tenor saxophone player wanting to sound like King Curtis. Well, that wasn't an impossibility in 1961. You had the records and you had Black guys playing the music that you could go see. You could go talk to Frank Wess in the Count Basie band. You could listen to James Brown right in person.
She didn't have any of that. The Black guys that were playing in England, some of them were from the islands or they were just kind of hinky in the slang of those days. And so she didn't have that way like Jimmy McPartland had—Louis Armstrong on the South Side of Chicago to go listen to and say, "Oh, that's how you do it. What is he doing exactly? What is that feeling? How do I get that feeling?" Oh, it seems to have something to do with the way you dance and the way you walk and the way you talk and your whole attitude to life. It's not just the horn.
And as white kids, you learn that in America. She was a white woman, a girl in England. Prim and proper middle class. How was she going to figure this out? And, as I pointed out in the book, George Shearing, even though he's blind, he doesn't have the handicap of gender, so he can go down to Soho and hang out with Fats Waller. [laughter] Or, I'm not sure if it was Fats Waller himself, but he could hang out with Black musicians who could help him learn to play jazz.
Marian didn't have any of that, and so she really learned very slowly, I think, how to swing from Jimmy, Bill Crow, and Joe Morello. [laughter] I forget what the question is now, but...
Lawrence: No, no, we're good. It's all good. I think now we're at a sort of a branching point for a few different parts of the conversation, but you brought up Jimmy. In reading the book, almost as soon as you introduce him, there's the foreshadowing of like, you know, this is never going to work. [laughter]
Paul: Thank you for complimenting my fiction writing abilities. [laughter]
Lawrence: Yet they were connected forever. Did that story exist just for you to pick up and tell? Or did you have to—were you reporting something that was so obvious and you were just documenting or did you have to tease that out from her?
Paul: Well, I never got it out of her. I mean, I'm the first person to write that story. She always made up a different story, which is that Jimmy quit drinking. Jimmy never quit drinking. George Wein disabused me of that. I went to George's apartment in New York and said, "Well, Marian said Jimmy quit drinking in like 1950 or something," and George just laughed. He said, "Well, that's funny. I played a gig with Jimmy in 1951 in Toronto, and he was drinking Brandy Alexanders for breakfast."
But let me just go back for a minute to your question about Joyce, because I think that was really perceptive. I so regretted not being able to meet Marian's sister Joyce. She just sounded like such a charming person, and she was funny, and she had a great perspective on Marian and Marian's relation with her mother and the family growing up in a way that Marian could never have expressed because she didn't have the distance.
Joyce had that kind of just amused distance. Yeah, that sisterly tone really came out, didn't it? And I just, again, that was one of the great benefits of having Marian's archive at my feet, who had letters from the sister, you know? But apart from that, it also gave me a better perspective on Marian's view of things because here was this perfectly normal, sweet human being who was raised by the same woman she said was a monster, so how much of a monster could she have been?
It was one of those interpersonal things. Like, of course, her sister also saw her mother's failings, but it didn't get under her skin in the same way. So it's really clear that Marian as the eldest daughter and the mother just had one of those classic mother-daughter conflicts.
Lawrence: So I think you just—I think the clue for me in that was Marian's relationship with her dad, Frank.
Paul: Right.
Lawrence: And the fact that the mother made Frank miserable, even though he showed up and did what he had to do to be the man of his time. I can't help but think there's something a little oedipally complex going on there. [laughter]
Paul: Oh yeah. I think it's all there.
Lawrence: Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. It's all, it's definitely all there.
Paul: But no, nobody had really told the true story, and I got as close, I hope, I got close anyway, thanks to people like Hank O'Neill, who knew Jimmy before Marian, well, not before Marian did, but knew Jimmy for a long time, thanks to people who would come forward and say, "Well, no, you know, it was like a very complicated relationship and Marian misrepresented it professionally to protect herself and to protect Jimmy." That was my take.
Lawrence: Yeah, because you're tempted to say that the alcohol is the other person in their relationship. Yeah. But it seems pretty clear that they were so different temperamentally and how they viewed like life and how to approach life that it's not clear that, you know, maybe if he didn't drink, it would have been one of the great love stories of all time. But it seems like they were designed to make each other crazy or that he was certainly designed to make her crazy. [laughter]
Paul: And yet they really did have a lot in common in that they were both rebellious. They did not want to be bossed around by anybody. They had this kind of jazz attitude of like, "I'm going to do things my own way." They were both actually very compassionate people who wanted the world to be a nicer place. And they liked the role that music played in that.
So they really shared a lot of kind of basic jazz music values, even though he came from this ruffian background in Chicago, and she came from this kind of bland middle class background in Bromley. The Jimmy-Marian story, when I talked to Clint Eastwood about Marian and Monterey, because he was on the board, I've talked to him about his films at Monterey and about Marian. I said, "What about a film about Marian?" He said, "I would do a film about Jimmy and Marian." But now I think we've missed that opportunity—he announced his retirement.
He was really fascinated by Jimmy, who he heard in Oakland when he was growing up.
Lawrence: Yeah, that would be the right one.
Paul: And he'd be the right one, because it's a knock-down drag-out jazz drinking story. [laughter]
Lawrence: In the reviews of the first edition of the book, it seemed like the trope that most reviewers clung on to was like, and I have this in air quotes, the "bombshell revelations" around Marian and Joe Morello. As again, as a writer and as a writer who's close sometimes in terms of physical proximity, like you said, the den in the basement or the den down the stairs. How did you even frame for yourself how to navigate that part of the story?
Paul: I just—you know, I tenderly approached it. I knew that it didn't take long for me to figure out that Marian was still in love with Joe, even at this late date. I mean, she offered to drive me to his house in East Orange. And that was another way that I had to, and I regretted having to do it, but Marian had money and she had car service. I had no car. I was staying with a friend and riding a bicycle to her house.
And she'd say, "Why are you taking the bus all the way to Orange, New Jersey? I'll send you over there in a car." And I said, "Marian, I can't do that. I start taking stuff from you, I'm in your pocket." She said, "Well, no, it's not going to influence me." I said, "Well, it, I can't let that happen." But, you know, it took me two and a half hours to get to his house by train and bus. She wanted to go over there and say hi. I knew that's the reason she offered to take me, other than the fact she was also being generous.
And same with Eddie Gomez. She said, "Boy, you know, I'll take you into the city, take car service." It wasn't hard to navigate. She was pretty darn open about Joe. And I think that my conclusion at the end of the book that she really was in love with both of them all of her life is true.
Yeah. That seems pretty clear. She was devastated when Joe got remarried. Just devastated. Even though she thought she was over it. She'd been through all the psychotherapy and then somebody called her and said, "Oh, Joe got married." She said, "Ah." I mean, I think I quoted Leigh Poe in the book, there's no end to things of the heart.
It was really clear with Marian and she had so much heart and she clung to things. She didn't let things go easily, anything. So I could understand that myself and it kind of made me like her more.
Lawrence: It's really interesting to sit here and talk it through with you because the way you described her music and her musical evolution a few minutes ago, it also sounds emblematic of somebody who could or would give a little but not give it all. Like it took a while for her to be able to be vulnerable musically.
Paul: I think that's very perceptive. Yeah, it did. It was like, I think as for many artists who never even crossed that threshold, it was difficult for her to realize that the place where you reveal yourself the most is the place where you're usually most scared to go. Because you lose control or you think it's stupid.
I mean, getting back to Ray Charles for a minute, and this is true verified by at least three people. Ray Charles used to sing in Seattle the way he got famous for singing as a joke. He thought it was funny to sing a blues in the style of gospel music. He thought it was just cute. Turned out to be like the invention of soul music. [laughter]
So, you know, sometimes the things that we think are just trivial of our own creativity are really the best thing we have to offer. And I think that Marian didn't know that, and it took her a while, and I asked her, "Why did you play that way with Link Milliman on this record? Like, it's like you're somebody else." And she said, "I don't know, I just decided it was time to let it all hang out." And she put it that way, and it made me realize, and it's one of the reasons I qualified that whole era in her life, in the book, in this way.
I said, this was in the air. This was the sixties. This was when you, the era when you woke up and your friends all say, "Yeah, I'm going to India. I quit my job." Or, "Yeah, I got rid of the motherfucker." Or, it was people just made crazy decisions to be free. And I think that helped her.
Lawrence: It's really interesting. The framing of the before and after for her with the sixties, like the way you talk about, she really came into the seventies different.
Paul: I mean, she did. Yeah. Divorced on top of her own machine. She knew what she wanted to play and she was fed up with trying to please everybody else to make money. She figured, well, what the heck, I'll just make money in the schools. But when I make records, I'm going to make music I like instead of trying to do this garbage I've been making for Capital Records, well, I don't think she thought the Capital stuff was garbage, but that horrible record My Old Flame and some of the, and there were even some things I found that she didn't even tell me about. She actually did like a record for Muzak.
Lawrence: Oh, really? You gotta eat! [laughter]
Paul: You gotta eat. You know, she didn't want anybody to know about that stuff. I can't blame her. Yeah.
Lawrence: When we were talking at the beginning of the conversation, you were talking about advocacy and how that was a big part of her life and a big part of your life. You can't really dodge the word legacy as, as sort of trite as it is. What's her relevancy to what's going on contemporarily in jazz? Like there's such an emergence. I wouldn't call it a women's movement, but women really finally seem to have more voice and leadership. And I'm just curious, can you draw any strands? Do you talk to contemporary artists that know her and that look back to her? Is her work known? Both her piano work but also her Piano Jazz and her other roles. Like how is, do you have a sense of how she's seen?
Paul: I do and I think that her influence is huge amongst a certain cohort of women that includes people like Joanne Brackeen and Maria Schneider who would readily tell you that Marian was inspirational in the way she just stood up constantly for women musicians without making a big feminist deal out of it. Just saying, "Well, haven't you heard this person? Why aren't you listening to that person? There's all these women players who can really, really play."
And thanks to a really dedicated cohort of musicians now that kind of picked up the flame. I mean, people like Terri Lyne Carrington and the women like the trumpet player from BC, Ingrid Jensen. These people are stepping forward and they pull some political levers that Marian never did. Instead of saying, "We're going to have a women's jazz festival," they went to the main jazz festivals and said, "You are having a women's jazz festival. We're playing here. How many of us are you going to hire now?" And that's what's happened in the last ten years.
I can't say Marian's responsible for that, but there's a direct line between what she was doing and saying all those years, and I don't think any of the women that are involved in that movement today would deny it or suggest that there's not a straight line between her and them.
I'm a little disappointed that right now we seem to be in kind of a trough of respect and memory and memorialization for Marian. I really think that her time is due. I've actually proposed panel discussions at various places and there hasn't been that much interest. So it's disappointing to me.
Not just because I wrote a book about her, but because I really think that, and the Piano Jazz programs are still available online. I really think that she had a huge influence and that there's a direct line between what's going on now in Monterey and Detroit and Newport and everywhere else where they finally started booking forty to fifty percent women jazz acts and what Marian had to say.
I think her influence as a stylist is much less, but I will say this, people would always ask me this, like, you know, well, where does she fit in, in kind of the history of jazz piano? She's certainly not an innovator on the level of Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Bill Evans, Cecil Taylor, Keith Jarrett, I mean, you know, McCoy Tyner, we know who's established the major stylistic boundaries.
She's not one of those, but is she right in there with Hank Jones and Kenny Barron and Richie Beirach? In a kind of a second tier level of pianists who are amazingly accomplished and have a readily identifiable personal style? Yeah, I would say she is, and that's quite an accomplishment.
Lawrence: When the book was reissued and you finally had your forward able to be in place, what personal experience did you have with revisiting the book? Do you go back and read your own work, or did you have a new relationship with the book, or did you just stick the forward on and, you know? Which is fine, [laughter] but I'm curious about your interaction with your work.
Paul: Well, the first interaction that any author has with their work is going back to fix the errors. So there were still, despite the fact that I had an incredibly great copy editor at St. Martin's, there were still several typos. There were a few errors of fact. I think I described the famous four saxophone group as being four tenors, but it was three tenors and a bari, you know, little things like that.
But, you know, I kept track of them because there's a whole audience out there that loves nothing better than to tell you you made a mistake. So I made a comprehensive list of the mistakes. The worst one being that I attributed a quote to the wrong person in the same family. But I fixed that.
I was so pleased. But no, did I have a better, a new relationship with the work? No, I really, I have reread parts of it because I gave a lot of readings over the years. And frankly, I was still really proud of the kind of novelistic structure that I used to tell the story. Because I thought that the story was so much like fiction that it really could be a page turner.
So that's the reason, without being too melodramatic about it, I ended each chapter with kind of like a teaser. Like, what's going to happen next? And I really saw Marian's life as this incredibly dramatic panorama that I wanted to novelize. And then, of course, the idea of the relationship with Jimmy also just being such a passionate, fun story.
That was one thing that we haven't talked about. That's all about what Marian wanted control of. When I was writing the book and I had to become much more conversant with Jimmy McPartland than I ever had been before. So I went to the University of Chicago archive and I listened to all of his old records and read every scrap of material I could find about Jimmy and even saw the old movie that he's in and TV show he was in and I just did a lot of homework about Jimmy.
And it occurred to me—even though I'm writing a book about a woman jazz player, I really needed to have a chapter about Jimmy. And I was really conflicted about that. I said, really? Like, you have to write about the husband? [laughter] I mean, isn't that sexist? And so I brought this up with Marian in the kitchen, sitting there having tea.
I said, "What do you think, Marian? I think Jimmy has been so important in your life that maybe we need a separate chapter about Jimmy just to fill people in about him because you refer to him so often and he was such a huge influence on you." And she said, "Oh, that's a great idea." She said, "That's, you know, I've been trying to write a little book, chapter or a long novella or book, you know, monograph about Jimmy all my life, and I've never been able to do it." And that really was one of her goals, that she wanted to get people to understand how valuable Jimmy was as a player.
About a month later, she called me. She said, "Paul, I've changed my mind. I don't think you should have a chapter about Jimmy." And these alarm bells went off. I thought, oh, she's afraid I'm going to actually tell the truth. And that made me want to do it even more. I said, "Well, no, Marian, and I think I'm going to do it. I think we need to tell Jimmy's story." And, you know, ultimately, she didn't complain to me about it.
Lawrence: Once you got going, and you got past her initial reticence, and she, I'll call it her epiphany, or her breaking down, or whatever it was, were there ever moments where you were like, "Uh oh"? Like, once you were in the clear, were you in the clear, or were you, was there always a specter of like, she's gonna shut this down?
Paul: No, because we had a contract and it was approved by her attorney, who actually became a really good friend of mine. There was no way she could shut it down, so I was never afraid of that. Was I afraid she'd get mad and stop talking to me? Yeah, that one time, which I wrote about in the new foreword. When I called her on being so bitchy, and I thought, "Whoa, maybe she's just going to tell me to go home." Like she told everybody else to go home.
And as I explained in the foreword, the woman that cleaned her house and cooked for her, wonderful woman named Gosha. She said, "No, Paul, if you don't put up the stop sign with Marian, she rolls right over you." And that was the truth. That was the truth. She liked people to stand up to her and it wasn't easy. Because she was very formidable, and she was a good talker, and she was very persuasive, very argumentative, and sometimes she could really put you in a corner.
Lawrence: It's such a sweeping, you know, you used the word novelization, and it really is, it's a—for people who have yet to read the book, I came away from it feeling like, man, I would love this treatment applied to so and so or so and so, I mean, it's such a, it's really, it's an epic, and her life is incredible. Really incredible.
Paul: Well, it is. You figure it starts in the 1920s in England, whenever England is completely devastated by World War I, takes you through the Depression, which was basically a depression in England in the twenties as well as the thirties through, as you point out, this era of the heyday of live music.
I mean, when she grew up, there was no TV. There was radio, but there was no TV. So people went out to see music live. And then World War II, for God's sake, when I found out that Jimmy was actually at D-Day, I was like, really? Did somebody make this up? No, he really did. That's a thirty-seven-year-old guy going to shoot up the Germans, because he was mad at the Japanese. [laughter]
Lawrence: Yeah, and she's a couple of miles away from the front the whole time. Like, yeah, it's really like, it's a screenplay waiting to happen.
Paul: It's a screenplay waiting to happen. And then the liberation of Paris, Django Reinhardt, the birth of bebop, Chicago jazz in the forties, jazz in the fifties and sixties in New York, like the golden age of mainstream jazz. And she's there right through it all. Knowing everybody, and I think one of the things that really made me aware of that sweep, and one of the reasons Jimmy was so important to her—as I listen to the shows, there's about 800 of them, and I guess I've listened to probably 500. There's still some I haven't listened to, but I realized she mentioned Jimmy a lot.
And one of the reasons she mentioned Jimmy a lot is that it gave her an in to the people that were playing jazz before she came up. So she was a person who had a first or second hand personal relationship with the entire history of jazz. Nobody else had that. And that's why when she finally gave up the show, and her producer and people at NPR started asking, "Who are we going to get to replace Marian?"
I said, "Nobody. Nobody can do that. Have another show, have a different kind of show, but nobody can do what Marian McPartland did." She met Louis Armstrong through Jimmy McPartland, and Jimmy was adored by Louis. Joe Sullivan, all these people that came up playing the music, she knew them all. She even played with Baby Dodds!
Lawrence: Yeah, his mythical figures in the jazz history. Yeah.
Paul: And she played with everybody from Baby Dodds to Cecil Taylor. Who can say that? Nobody. She was an unusual character. Not just a great journalist and advocate, but a great piano player who could sit down and play with anybody. She had that immediate empathy.
Talk about reading the room. I think I'm reading her. She's reading me. What does this guy want? What do I need to say? What can I say next? What are his strengths? What are his weaknesses? She's looking through all the time because she can hear that.
And speaking of ear, when I would talk to her in her kitchen, she always had WBGO playing, the station from Newark, and Michael Bourne would come on I think at about four, but the show was always on, and she somehow had the ability to listen in one ear to the music and listen to you in the other ear and carry on a conversation, because after it was over, she remembered everything she'd heard. Almost to the point where she could sit down and play it. I've never met anybody like that.
Lawrence: Yeah. Yeah. That, that, I mean, that's incredible, but it also makes sense in the context of, you know, you mentioned earlier, she, she wasn't a great reader and she definitely felt like she wasn't a great reader, but give her a morning rehearsal and like, she's good for the whole gig. It's really, I would love to see the CAT scan or the MRI on a brain like that, you know, like what was going on there that gave her that facility.
Paul: She really had, for most of her life, perfect pitch, but perfect recall.
Lawrence: Before we wrap up, I want to ask you about Piano Jazz. About the show and, how do you view it as not necessarily a time capsule, but as a documentary collection, as an archive, as a library, is it a resource? Is it a curio? Like, you know, especially as someone who does a lot of research work, how do you value that body?
Paul: I think the Piano Jazz Archive is a huge resource. Shari Hutchinson, who was Marian's producer for almost the entire length of the show, and I have talked at length about trying to turn it into an accessible archive, jazz education resource. We've never gotten anywhere with it. I need to check back in with Shari again about it. I just saw her when I went out to Columbia, South Carolina to launch the book for the University of South Carolina Press.
We had a wonderful day. But yeah, I think it's an incredible document. I mean, you've got Teddy Wilson and Cecil Taylor and the early Diana Krall and Nora Jones. You've got Dave McKenna. You've got all these piano players and horn players and Dizzy Gillespie and the Bill Evans tape. For students of music, there it is.
Not only is the playing there, but you have somebody who's knowledgeable asking questions and drawing out answers and analyses in many cases. Sometimes guys just came in and played and left, but so many times they didn't. I mean, the Dizzy Gillespie one is one of my favorites where Dizzy recognizes that Marian isn't hearing bebop the way he hears bebop.
And so he beats out the counter rhythms for her. It's like, "No, Marian, this is, it's like this" and talks to her in a very sophisticated way about six chords and how they can work in another way than she's thought of. I mean, God, where are you going to get information like that?
Lawrence: That's incredible. And accessible to the public.
Paul: And accessible. And she had to learn to do that. I remember Shari told me this, that the first time she had, I think it was Bill Evans in the studio, or maybe it was the only time, she started referring to musicians and not even explaining who they were, as if everybody knew, and Shari had to take her aside and say, "Marian, most of the people listening to this show don't know who that person is. You need to say bass player from the forties" or, you know, but she was a quick study.
Paul: It was a rare privilege to be able to get to know somebody as creative and intelligent who'd lived such an epic life as Marian Ann McPartland. Not too many people get that opportunity in their lives. I'm very grateful for it.
Lawrence: If you could have a shot at one more person to have that level of intimacy with, or with their material, who would it be?
Paul: Well, this may shock you, but once I finished that book, I vowed I would never write another biography again. [laughter]
Lawrence: Fair enough.
Paul: It was frankly just too emotionally much of a turmoil. At some points, it wasn't fun to be that deeply involved with somebody else's life. It gets a little confusing. But it was sure a great experience. No, I've been asked about other people, specifically asked to do various biographies. And I just said, you know what? I think I'm done with biography. If I work on another book, it'll be a novel or a book of short stories. [laughter]
