Audiovisual recordings, circa 1981-2015

Series 5 contains audiovisual materials created or collected by the Foundation, including compact discs, cassettes, DATs, open reel audio tape, open reel video tape, VHS cassettes, U-matic tapes, DVCAMs, DVDs and Blu-Rays. Contents include performance recordings related to the Foundation or Williams’s music, interviews, radio programs, dubs of commercial recordings and archival material from the Williams Collection, production materials from Foundation releases, documentaries, submissions from other musicians, and commercial recordings.
Highlights include masters from the Mary Lou Williams Collective’s Zodiac Suite: Revisited and Joanne Burke’s documentary film Music on my Mind; radio programs featuring Dizzy Gillespie, Garrison Keillor, Vincent Pelote, and others, on WNYC, WBGO, WOR, WDUQ, and other stations; recordings of concerts at Symphony Space in 1983, Geri Allen performing Mary Lou’s Mass and other Williams compositions at Duke University, Jazz at Lincoln Center in Madison, Wisconsin,and elsewhere; performances by The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, and Fletcher Basington Orchestra, and others; and a sequence of interviews by Peter O’Brien of Williams’s close friend and spiritual confidant Brother Mario Hancock made in the year following her death, her early religious advisor Father Vincent O’Keefe discussing Williams’s 1969 trip to Rome, close friends Sam and Margaret Atkinson and Marsha Vick, her step brother Willis Scruggs, and musician Doc Cheatham, and others.
There are also dubs of archival materials and commercial recordings. While most of those recordings were sourced from the Williams Collection, O’Brien frequently collected recordings that were not in Williams’s personal collection or that supplanted Williams’s own copies in quality. These include a 1968 Danish radio broadcast and a transfer of the 1946 Carnegie Hall Zodiac Suite performance from lacquers found in Timme Rosenkrantz’s archives.
The Foundation prepared recordings for special projects, including reissues, a prospective release for Mosaic Records, and grant and copyright submissions, among other items. And the Foundation collected commercial recordings, the majority of which incorporate compositions, arrangements, and/or performances by Williams.