Mary Lou Williams at her Harlem apartment, 1958 (Dennis Stock)
On Sunday, February 15, 1959, Mary Lou Williams was playing with her trio at The Composer.
Her most recent recording had been in 1955, with an album called A Keyboard History; in the mid-1950s, she had briefly retired from public performance to devote her life to religion and service, caring for musicians struggling with addiction in her Harlem apartment. The Composer was the first venue where Mary Lou performed after her return to the stage at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival with the Dizzy Gillespie orchestra; she started a run with Marian McPartland on August 22, 1957, with The New Yorker billing her as “an Edison and Einstein of modern piano.”
Here’s a later New Yorker listing from the same run:
…and a write-up from the same magazine.
Here’s a Variety review from not long after her first run there following her hiatus.
And here’s A Keyboard History:
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