Events

Series 11 contains lacquer discs, open reel tapes, audio cassettes, and 8-tracks covering radio broadcasts, production recordings, religious, club, and festival performances, educational recordings, recordings of friends and family, dubs of Williams’s commercial recordings prepared by and for Williams herself and unidentified recordings from throughout Williams’s life and career.
Among the highlights are a nearly complete run of lacquer discs from Mary Lou Williams’s Piano Workshop broadcast on WNEW in 1945. These recordings were where many of the constituent works in the Zodiac Suite were performed and heard for the first time. There are also lacquer discs from Williams’s recordings of the Zodiac Suite for Asch Records, also from 1945. Many have not seen official release as of this writing. There are live recordings of performances of Williams’s liturgical works, including the Carnegie Hall performance of 1967, the Pittsburgh Mass at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in 1967, Mass for Lenten Season at St. Thomas the Apostle Church, New York in 1968, and from the Vatican Radio in 1969, and Tom Mboya Memorial Mass in 1969, and multiple performances of Mary Lou’s Mass from 1970 on. There are production masters from Williams’s recordings for Mary Records, including her 1964 self-titled album, Music for Peace (1970), updated as Mary Lou’s Mass in 1975, Zoning from 1975, and multiple singles from throughout the label’s existence.
There are recordings of Williams’s orchestral performances of the Zodiac Suite at Town Hall on December 31 and Carnegie Hall 1946 June 22, recordings of live club and festival dates including the Cookery and Café Rick’s Americain, Montreux, and Newport, even the White House in 1978. The series also includes personal recordings of Williams’s nephew, Robert Mickles, and her own biographical recordings. Williams also maintained a personal collection of her own recordings dubbed on to open reel tape and later cassette, grouped at the beginning of subseries 11.1, that correspond with an inventory developed by Peter O’Brien, as well as original pressings of releases on which she performed. There are demos, interviews, and recordings of Williams educating students. Tribute concerts, interviews, and other recordings created after Williams’s death that were including in the inventory developed during the collection’s 2000 processing are included in series 11.3. The Foundation has an audiovisual recordings series that contains many more. Series 11.4 includes commercially released recordings from Williams’s personal music library on which she performed. It includes several “white label” singles and a copy of self-titled 1953 recording for Contemporary (C2507) with an inscription to “Marian” [McPartland].