Jazz legend's collection comes to Newark campus
Archived article from Oct 8, 1999
By Carla Capizzi
Jazz lovers and music students will have a new resource to draw upon at the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies at Newark's Dana Library. All of the materials collected by renowned performer, composer and arranger Mary Lou Williams over her rich career have been donated to the university.
Williams, who died in 1981, was a rarity in her time, a successful female in the almost exclusively male jazz world. She was so well-respected by her male peers that Duke Ellington described her as "perpetually contemporary," a writer and per-former whose "music retains, and maintains, a standard of quality that is timeless."
Nearly 200 boxes of materials -- mainly musical manuscripts and scores, personal papers and news clippings, photographs, audiotapes and videos -- are being processed and cataloged at their new permanent home on the Newark campus. Materials include photographs, scrapbooks, sound recordings and videos, programs, posters, clippings, manuscripts, letters, financial records and artwork by Williams herself.
The Rev. Peter O'Brien, Williams' longtime manager and friend, donated the materials to Rutgers over a period beginning in 1985 and ending this summer.
In addition to her jazz compositions, Williams, a convert to Catholicism, also composed religious works, including "Mary Lou's Mass," which has been performed at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York and the Washington National Cathedral.
Williams is considered one of the most gifted but underappreciated figures in jazz, with a musical repertoire that extended to swing, blues, bebop and boogie-woogie. According to Dan Morgenstern, director of the jazz institute, the materials provide a "complete record of a fascinating, long and productive career. The depth and breadth of the collection is amazing --everything from handwritten notes to cocktail napkins on which nightclub patrons wrote song requests for Williams."
The collection, which is the largest ever received by the jazz institute, was also sought by the Smithsonian Institution. It will take two years to process the materials, which are actually drawn from two separate collections: the private collection of Williams, spanning the period from the 1920s until her death; and the collection of the Mary Lou Williams Foundation, which details the foundation's work in promoting jazz education and disseminating Williams' work.
Access to the collection will be limited while the materials are processed. Archivist Tad Hershorn is overseeing the project.
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