Marian McPartland born 20 March 1918

Margaret Marian McPartland, OBE ( 20 March 1918 – 20 August 2013), was an English-American jazz pianist, composer and writer. She was the host of Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz on National Public Radio from 1978 to 2011

Legendary jazz pianist Marian McPartland was born Margaret Marian Turner in 1918 near Buckinghamshire, England. A musical prodigy, McPartland studied classical music and, in addition to her 
piano studies, mastered the violin. She pursued classical studies at the Guildhall School of Music in London and left to join Billy Mayerl’s Claviers, a four-piano vaudeville act, performing under the stage name Marian Page. 

The group toured throughout Europe during World War II, entertaining Allied troops. While touring with USO shows in Belgium in 1943, she met and began to play with a Chicago cornetist named Jimmy McPartland.

The two were married and performed at their own wedding at a military base in Germany. After the war, the couple moved to Chicago, but in 1949 they moved to Manhattan. With her husband’s encouragement, McPartland started a trio in 1952, and the group began an eight-year residency at the Hickory House, the famous New York City jazz nightclub.

                             

In 1955 McPartland began to initiate projects to introduce jazz to schoolchildren and her enlightened work with black students in Washington DC was significantly ahead of the general thinking on educational issues and race in the US at the time. However, she was encountering storms in her marriage and went through a difficult

period during the later 1950s and early 60s, which culminated in an unhappy tour with the bandleader Benny Goodman.

It was Goodman who first sought McPartland out, but he was a notoriously hard man to please and his relationships with musicians were often fractious. Goodman made it abundantly plain that he disliked his new pianist's modernisms and felt she was out of sympathy with his style. McPartland went into therapy at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas after a tour was abandoned following the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963 and Goodman expressed nothing but surprise at her need for sympathetic attention.

Marian, Mary Lou Williams & Thelonius Monk 1958

She began a parallel life as a jazz broadcaster, discovering she could treat interviews the way she treated small-group improvisation – by knowing when to perform and when to listen. Growing increasingly independent, McPartland also launched her own Halcyon Records label in 1969 (despite having recorded extensively for big jazz labels including Capitol, Savoy, Argo and Concord in earlier years) and began to tour, play at clubs and give workshops again.

Marian with Rose Murphy

She confirmed her class as a sensitive interpreter on an intimate recorded tribute to the composer Alec Wilder in 1973, and unique re-workings of standard songs, jazz classics by Strayhorn and Benny Carter, and contemporary pieces by Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea flowed from her fingers on memorable sessions in the 1970s and 80s. Though in 1970 she divorced Jimmy, she still threw a 70th birthday party for him seven years later. The couple also performed together at the Newport Jazz festival in 1978.

Marian and Mel Torme

In June that year, NPR began broadcasting Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz – with the host interviewing her guests from the keyboard, and eventually including practitioners of many instruments, though fellow pianists formed the majority. Artists and performers as different as Dizzy Gillespie, Steely Dan, Studs Terkel and the emerging young star Geri Allen were among the guests.

Through the 1980s, affected by the downturn in jazz's popularity, McPartland returned to classical music, performing Grieg's Piano Concerto across America. She also continued to work tirelessly for jazz education, and turned out to be an eloquent writer on the subject – her engaging pieces were collected in the anthology All in Good Time (1987). She also composed a number of enduring originals, including In the Days of Our Love, With You in Mind and Ambiance.

In the 1990s, the septuagenarian explored the music of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Lennon and McCartney in the company of the cutting-edge saxophonist Chris Potter; paid a recorded tribute to her old friend Williams; and played an 80th birthday gig at Birdland, New York, as a reunion of her old trio, with the bassist Bill Crow and Morello on drums. For her 85th at Birdland in 2003 (recorded for the Concord label), McPartland was accompanied by a raft of stars but still right at the heart of things, notably in a superb duet with the guitarist Jim Hall.

She went on to win a Grammy in 2004 and was appointed OBE in 2010. She died in August 2013 at her home in Port Washington. She was 95 years old. (Edited mainly from The Guardian & limusichalloffame.org)