Marian mcpartland musician biography worksheet answers

Despite her family's efforts to keep her at Guildhall, Turner left to join Billy Mayerl's Claviers, a four-piano vaudeville act. There, she elected to perform under the stage name of Marian Page. She promised her family that she would one day return to finish her degree at Guildhall. Marian was assigned to a group called the Band Wagon, which followed the Allied forces after the D-Day invasion.

In anticipation of wartime demands, Marian learned to play the accordion in the event that there was no piano available with which to play for the troops. McPartland had volunteered for the army and was serving active duty when his superiors realized that he could do better work as an entertainer, since he was well known among the troops.

Marian mcpartland musician biography worksheet answers: Marian McPartland (née Margaret Marian Turner)

Jimmy was solicited to put together a sextet to entertain the troops, and invited Marian to join him as their pianist. They soon fell in love, and signed an official US Army marriage document on 14 December They married on 3 Februaryin AachenGermanyand played at their own military base wedding. Her marriage to an American male automatically gave Marian US citizenship, side by side with her British citizenship.

Jimmy and Marian did their first recording together on 6 January in London before leaving for the US. After the war, Marian and Jimmy moved to Chicago to be near his family. Jimmy was raised in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago, and was an original member of the Austin High Gang that played Chicago-style Dixieland jazz in the s. Soon, Jimmy's group, which now included Marian, landed a standing gig at the Rose Bowl through the end of Marian flourished in Jimmy's group, and by her association with him.

This was semi-important for their association with the European jazz scene, but more significant because it marked the beginning of Marian's writing career. Marian's testimonial about the festival ran in the July issue of DownBeat. Inthe McPartlands settled in Manhattanliving in an apartment in the same building as the Nordstrom Sisters. Inshe announced that she would no longer go by her stage name, Marian Page, but would now go by her married name, Marian McPartland.

With Jimmy's help and encouragement, Marian started her own trio, which started performing at the newly opened 54th street club called The Embers on 8 May Here, she marian mcpartland musician biography worksheet answers how to lead her own group, and played with musicians such as Roy EldridgeColeman Hawkinsand Terry Gibbs. After trying out different combos, she settled on a trio of piano, bass, and drums that would soon become standard.

This gig led to a laudatory DownBeat profile by Leonard Featheran advocate for women in jazz, who wrote that French fans would be unlikely to accept her because "She is English, white and a girl--three hopeless strikes against her from the Gallic angle. Yet, if you ask Coleman Hawkins She's a fine, swinging pianist During her time at the Hickory House, Duke Ellington would often be in the audience.

Ellington was influential on McPartland's development as a pianist, and told her she played too many notes, a sentiment she would take to heart. The success of this trio would lead to the signing of McPartland to Capitol Records for five albums. It has been argued that McPartland never received the acclaim she deserved because she never stayed with any sidemen long enough to develop a unique sound, her group being the exception to this rule.

InMcPartland and Morello began an affair that would continue for almost ten years. In lateMorello's wife discovered their affair, and Brubeck hired Morello away. McPartland continued writing testimonial pieces for journals such as Down Beat after the favorable reception of her first piece in Toward the end of the s, she began to write about the issue of being a woman in jazz.

She questioned "Can't we women make our own contribution to jazz by playing like women, but still capturing the essential elements of jazz — good beat — good ideas — honesty and true feeling? In a black and white group portrait of 57 notable jazz musicians, including McPartland, was photographed in front of a brownstone in HarlemNew York City. Art Kanea freelance photographer working for Esquire magazine, took the photo, which was called, " A Great Day in Harlem ", and it became a well-known image of New York's jazz musicians of the time.

Immediately preceding her death in Augustshe was one of only four of the 57 participating musicians who were still alive. We need you! Help us build the largest biographies collection on the web! Add a New Bio. Powered by CITE. Notify me of new comments via email. Cancel Report. Lawrence : Yeah. I can't let—even once she decided that you were okay to do it, she couldn't quite just let you do it.

Paul : No, and although I'll give her credit because she also knew that her old agent, Pam, really disliked her. And she had, you know, because she wanted to do it herself. So I just thought, well, I need to get this on the record from at least one person. And Pam just did a great job. She said, "You know, I love Marian, but here's how it was: You'd call her up and you'd say, 'Why don't you call so and so and see if we can get a gig in Pittsburgh?

Never mind you, I don't need you anyway. She was just trying to put people in their place all the time. But it was mostly out of fear. It wasn't because she was a jerk—that was how it manifested, but it was just out of fear, I think, all the time that she wasn't going to make enough money, that she wasn't going to make ends meet, that her career wasn't going anywhere.

And in fact, she overcompensated so much that she wound up making a really good living as a jazz musician, which is saying a lot. If you come around and you get paid eight to fifteen thousand dollars to play a week in a jazz club in the seventies and eighties, you're making a good living. And many jazz musicians were not, and they became frustrated and had to teach and do studio work and this and that and the other thing to make ends meet.

But Marian was a very hard worker and good at selling herself and very ingenious at coming up with ideas for how to keep her career going and also to keep fresh musically. Lawrence : Something I really liked early on in the book, and again, as a reader that struck me, is just the span of time that her life and career encompassed, but also that sort of, you know, now we look back and it's almost like the dark ages of the modern entertainment business.

The way she toured around England and that period between when she first left school and the war is just fascinating. You talk about that really interesting combination of where she sits—jazz, classical, entertainment music, house concerts Lawrence : And she was just there for that with, you know, this idea, like these reviews with a comedian and dancers and sword swallowers and all that kind of thing.

But you also talk about how that stuff shaped her music, too. Lawrence : Could you play musicologist for a minute and talk a little bit about the musical stew she came out of and how maybe you saw that manifesting? Paul : Not so much on a musicological note, but maybe we could get to that. I think what she learned doing variety entertainment was to be an entertainer.

She started as an entertainer. Most of our jazz contemporaries today do not. They don't have any notion that they're in a place where everybody's supposed to clap, everybody's supposed to go home happy, be amused. That has gone out of jazz and it's become more like classical music where it's like, "No, I'm an artist and I'm going to present my newest concept of my art and I hope you like it.

She came out of a completely different tradition of being a variety entertainer. I think it did her a disservice for many years because I think she was so good at it that she leaned on audience-pleasing things for many years in her music. Tricky figures or illusions that were humorous or playing the sort of tired role of the jazz lady who can also play classical music.

None of that was ever going to really get her anywhere artistically. The fact that she was such a really good reader and such a great—actually she wasn't a great reader, but a great listener. She had a great ear. And she was a good mimic. I think it really helped her in those years where she could come in for a rehearsal in the morning for a show that was going to be that night and have the book down.

What makes you a great jazz player is reaching into yourself and finding what's inside there, putting it into music and swinging. Musicologically, I would say that—and she was very straightforward about this—England was just way behind the jazz curve because the BBC didn't like jazz. So the music that she heard, like the music our grandparents or parents were listening to in the thirties—Benny Goodman, Jimmy Lunceford, Count Basie—they didn't get that music.

It just wasn't played. And I verified this by talking to other jazz historians in Britain and they gave me playlists of what you could have heard. Paul : Yeah, and it was warmed-over jazz and it really had a racial bias. I mean, it was really like the Paul Whiteman bias of "let's make this Black music not sound so African. And that's what she grew up listening to.

Hence bouncy feeling music when she first finally starts playing jazz. It's just not swinging. She doesn't have this feel for swing music. And we talked pretty deeply about this because, you know, I told her—and I think I may have even talked to somebody else about this and quoted it in the book—when you come up as a white person in America and you're enamored of Black music, there's places to go to get it.

I grew up as a tenor saxophone player wanting to sound like King Curtis. Well, that wasn't an impossibility in You had the records and you had Black guys playing the music that you could go see. You could go talk to Frank Wess in the Count Basie band. You could listen to James Brown right in person. She didn't have any of that. The Black guys that were playing in England, marian mcpartland musician biography worksheet answers of them were from the islands or they were just kind of hinky in the slang of those days.

What is he doing exactly? What is that feeling? How do I get that feeling? It's not just the horn. And as white kids, you learn that in America. She was a white woman, a girl in England. Prim and proper middle class. How was she going to figure this out? And, as I pointed out in the book, George Shearing, even though he's blind, he doesn't have the handicap of gender, so he can go down to Soho and hang out with Fats Waller.

Marian didn't have any of that, and so she really learned very slowly, I think, how to swing from Jimmy, Bill Crow, and Joe Morello. Lawrence : No, no, we're good. It's all good. I think now we're at a sort of a branching point for a few different parts of the conversation, but you brought up Jimmy. In reading the book, almost as soon as you introduce him, there's the foreshadowing of like, you know, this is never going to work.

Lawrence : Yet they were connected forever. Did that story exist just for you to pick up and tell? Or did you have to—were you reporting something that was so obvious and you were just documenting or did you have to tease that out from her? Paul : Well, I never got it out of her. I mean, I'm the first person to write that story.

Marian mcpartland musician biography worksheet answers: McPARTLAND: My mother played piano. She

She always made up a different story, which is that Jimmy quit drinking. Jimmy never quit drinking. George Wein disabused me of that. I went to George's apartment in New York and said, "Well, Marian said Jimmy quit drinking in like or something," and George just laughed. He said, "Well, that's funny. I played a gig with Jimmy in in Toronto, and he was drinking Brandy Alexanders for breakfast.

But let me just go back for a minute to your question about Joyce, because I think that was really perceptive. I so regretted not being able to meet Marian's sister Joyce. She just sounded like such a charming person, and she was funny, and she had a great perspective on Marian and Marian's relation with her mother and the family growing up in a way that Marian could never have expressed because she didn't have the distance.

Joyce had that kind of just amused distance. Yeah, that sisterly tone really came out, didn't it? And I just, again, that was one of the great benefits of having Marian's archive at my feet, who had letters from the sister, you know? But apart from that, it also gave me a better perspective on Marian's view of things because here was this perfectly normal, sweet human being who was raised by the same woman she said was a monster, so how much of a monster could she have been?

It was one of those interpersonal things. Like, of course, her sister also saw her mother's failings, but it didn't get under her skin in the same way. So it's really clear that Marian as the eldest daughter and the mother just had one of those classic mother-daughter conflicts. Lawrence : So I think you just—I think the clue for me in that was Marian's relationship with her dad, Frank.

Lawrence : And the fact that the mother made Frank miserable, even though he showed up and did what he had to do to be the man of his time. I can't help but think there's something a little oedipally complex going on there. Paul : But no, nobody had really told the true story, and I got as close, I hope, I got close anyway, thanks to people like Hank O'Neill, who knew Jimmy before Marian, well, not before Marian did, but knew Jimmy for a long time, thanks to people who would come forward and say, "Well, no, you know, it was like a very complicated relationship and Marian misrepresented it professionally to protect herself and to protect Jimmy.

Lawrence : Yeah, because you're tempted to say that the alcohol is the other person in their relationship. But it seems pretty clear that they were so different temperamentally and how they viewed like life and how to approach life that it's not clear that, you know, maybe if he didn't drink, it would have been one of the great love stories of all time.

But it seems like they were designed to make each other crazy or that he was certainly designed to make her crazy.

Marian mcpartland musician biography worksheet answers: Typescript biography of Marian

Paul : And yet they really did have a lot in common in that they were both rebellious. They did not want to be bossed around by anybody. They had this kind of jazz attitude of like, "I'm going to do things my own way. And they liked the role that music played in that. So they really shared a lot of kind of basic jazz music values, even though he came from this ruffian background in Chicago, and she came from this kind of bland middle class background in Bromley.

I said, "What about a film about Marian? Paul : And he'd be the right one, because it's a knock-down drag-out jazz drinking story. Lawrence : In the reviews of the first edition of the book, it seemed like the trope that most reviewers clung on to was like, and I have this in air quotes, the "bombshell revelations" around Marian and Joe Morello.

As again, as a writer and as a writer who's close sometimes in terms of physical proximity, like you said, the den in the basement or the den down the stairs. How did you even frame for yourself how to navigate that part of the story? Paul : I just—you know, I tenderly approached it. I knew that it didn't take long for me to figure out that Marian was still in love with Joe, even at this late date.

I mean, she offered to drive me to his house in East Orange. And that was another way that I had to, and I regretted having to do it, but Marian had money and she had car service. I had no car. I was staying with a friend and riding a bicycle to her house. And she'd say, "Why are you taking the bus all the way to Orange, New Jersey? I'll send you over there in a car.

I start taking stuff from you, I'm in your pocket.

Marian mcpartland musician biography worksheet answers: View Marian McPartland Long Ago Far

She wanted to go over there and say hi. I knew that's the reason she offered to take me, other than the fact she was also being generous. And same with Eddie Gomez. She said, "Boy, you know, I'll take you into the city, take car service. She was pretty darn open about Joe. And I think that my conclusion at the end of the book that she really was in love with both of them all of her life is true.

That seems pretty clear. She was devastated when Joe got remarried. Just devastated. Even though she thought she was over it. She'd been through all the psychotherapy and then somebody called her and said, "Oh, Joe got married. It was really clear with Marian and she had so much heart and she clung to things. She didn't let things go easily, anything.

So I could understand that myself and it kind of made me like her more. At the London House Argo, Ambiance Halcyon, At the Festival Concord Jazz, In My Life Concord Jazz, Great Britain's Savoy Jazz Live at Yoshi's Nitespot Concord Jazz, Silent Pool Concord Jazz, Just Friends Concord Jazz, Reprise Concord Jazz, Live at Shanghai Jazz Concord Jazz, Windows Concord Jazz, Personal Choice recordedConcord Jazz.

Interplay Halcyon. As ofover 30 recordings of Piano Jazz programs were available on the Jazz Alliance label. Source: Billboard. Hitchcock, H. Periodicals Atlantic, September Audio, May Boston Globe, September 1,p. Jazziz, May JazzNow, October Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 30,p. Ottawa Citizen, July 5,p. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 16,p.

San Antonio Express-News, September 29,p. Stereo Review, October