MARY LOU WILLIAMS

"Black Christ of the Andes"

LP on MPS Records (# 15020)
Recorded October/November 1963
Originally released on Mary Records, #M 101 (and later released by Folkways Records as #FJ 2843)

OUT OF PRINT ON VINYL!

PERSONNEL:
Mary Lou Williams, Arranger, Author, Composer, Main Performer, Piano

with (on various tracks):
Grant Green, Guitar
Percy Heath, Bass
Budd Johnson, Bass Clarinet, Tenor Sax
George Gordon Singers
Larry Gales, Bass
Tim Kennedy, Drums
Howard Roberts and his Choral Group
Theodore Crommwell, Bass
George Chamble, Drums
Larry "Lonnie" Gales, Bass
Ben Tucker, Bass
Jimmy Mitchell, Vocals
Melba Liston, Arranger, Conductor
Percy Brice, Drums

TRACKS:
1. Black Christ of the Andes (St. Martin de Porres)
2. It Ain't Necessarily So
3. The Devil
4. Miss D.D.
5. Anima Christi
6. A Grand Nite for Swinging
7. My Blue Heaven
8. Dirge Blues
9. A Fungus a Mungus
10. Praise the Lord

"Mary Lou Williams's "St. Martin de Porres," recorded soon after the 1962 canonization of "the patron saint of the broom," a 17th-century Peruvian priest who was the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman and a freed black slave, suffers by comparison to Ellington's near-contemporaneous Sacred Concerts, as do three other Williams choral pieces on Black Saint of the Andes. Despite the role of the black church in both the civil rights movement and soul jazz, there was something almost quaint about the notion of a devout Christian (a Roman Catholic, in Williams's case) jazz musician in an era when so many were embracing Islam and Eastern mysticism. With Ellington, it hardly mattered. He was a showman as well as a Christian, and his idea of worship was vaudeville right down to the tap dancers. Williams's harmonically ambitious scores for mixed choir encourage no such suspension of disbelief; whether because she lacked experience writing for voices or because the singers frequently sound so damn white, these performances fail to stir the soul. (On two, she and the choirs settle for moving the body, and Williams, Budd Johnson, and Grant Green get to wail.) Nevertheless, this is an essential reissue for the nine trio performances (and one solo) on which we hear a pianist who could have rested on her swing-era laurels investigating such modernist touchstones as Monk's skipping intervals, Horace Silver's stabbing bass vamps, and Ahmad Jamal's syncopated ostinatos—and nimbly making them her own. Listening to Williams move from major to minor and back again with implacable logic on "A Fungus Among Us," you can understand why some folks thought she should get together with Cecil Taylor. But that's another story."

-- Francis Davis,
from "That Old-Time Religion—Plenty of Piano, but No Vaudeville",
a review of the recent CD reissue of this LP
The Village Voice, July 19th, 2004 11:45 PM
(http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0429/davis2.php)

LP and gatefold sleeve are in excellent, NEAR-MINT condition. Looks new.

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