Jazz pianist Marian McPartland makes UMS debut in special double-bill performance

ANN ARBOR – Marian McPartland, jazz pianist and popular host of NPR's "Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz" makes her UMS debut at 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 7 in Ann Arbor's Hill Auditorium as part of the University Musical Society's 06/07 Jazz Series. McPartland, who has been performing around the world for more than 65 years, will share the stage with another noted jazz pianist, Bill Charlap. Charlap will open the concert with his trio, and close the performance with piano duets alongside McPartland.
When considering the long and storied career of Marian McPartland, it soon becomes apparent that the remarkable breadth and manner of her accomplishments are, in all likelihood, unmatched in the history of jazz. A pianist and composer gifted with a vast, encyclopedic memory and an intuitive sense of harmony, McPartland has been performing professionally for 65 years, delighting audiences with her engaging artistry in clubs and concert halls around the globe and on scores of recordings.
To millions of radio listeners, she is also the genial host of "Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz," the popular Peabody Award-winning National Public Radio program that premiered in June 1978. Additionally, McPartland has mentored countless musicians, spearheaded efforts in jazz education and served as one of the best ambassadors of jazz the world has known.
A musical prodigy from the time she could sit at the piano, she studied classical music, mastered the violin, and simply worshipped jazz, taking Duke Ellington, Teddy Wilson and others to heart while looking to Mary Lou Williams, Lil Hardin and Hazel Scott as trailblazers she'd likely follow. In 1938 McPartland was enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music in London when Billy Mayerl, a well-known music hall entertainer, asked her to join The Claviers, his four-piano stage act. Despite a thousand pound counter-offer from her father to stay in school, the young pianist assumed the stage name of "Marian Page" and hit the vaudeville circuit with Mayerl. Subsequent work in a piano duo with Roma Clarke undoubtedly enhanced McPartland's skill in sympathetic accompaniment – and, one could say, paved the way for the duets featured on her "Piano Jazz" radio program.
A pivotal moment in the young pianist's life came in 1944 while entertaining British and American troops in Belgium when she met Jimmy McPartland, a prominent Dixieland-style cornetist from Chicago (and 11 years her senior). The two musicians fell in love and the following year they were married at a military base in Germany.
After the war, Jimmy McPartland brought his young wife to the Windy City, where the couple worked until they moved to Manhattan in 1949. Louis Armstrong greeted them on their first day in the city, and in no time they were ensconced in the middle of the bustling jazz universe. Although the McPartlands divorced in 1970, they continued to work together, stayed friends and eventually re-married. To this day Marian McPartland credits her late husband for helping to establish her professional career in the U. S. and for encouraging her broader musicianship through jobs with other bandleaders and instrumentalists.
The best-known forum for her enthusiastic advocacy of the improviser's art is "Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz," a radio program heard weekly on National Public Radio for over 25 years, making the series NPR's longest-running cultural program. Developed and presented by South Carolina Educational Radio, "Piano Jazz" today reaches listeners in 45 states and 24 foreign countries.
Winner of the prestigious Peabody Award in 1984 and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 1991, "Piano Jazz" has also received honors from the New York Festival and the Foundation of American Women in Radio and Television. In 2000 McPartland was named one of the American Jazz Masters by the National Endowment for the Arts.
For more than a decade, pianist and bandleader Bill Charlap has forged a solo career characterized by hard-swinging brio, eloquence and a rigor-meets-romance musical sensibility. With his fine long-term working trio of bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington (unrelated), he has released four superb albums for Blue Note Records — CDs celebrating the American songbook tradition, the songs of Hoagy Carmichael, Leonard Bernstein, and George Gershwin – that have afforded him an increased visibility as one of jazz's foremost pianists.
Unlike most artists who can trace their first explorations on a musical instrument to a certain age, the New York-born and bred Charlap says he can't recall a time when he wasn't playing a piano. The son of two accomplished artists, he grew up immersed in a household of song. "My relationship with music occurred naturally," says Charlap, whose father, Broadway composer and songwriter Moose Charlap, and mother, cabaret/pop singer Sandy Stewart, entertained popular songwriters and musicians from the show world at their Upper East Side home.
Charlap says that his mother's singing has influenced him: "Her phrasing influences the way I play melody. In many ways I approach the song from a singer's perspective, music and lyrics are of equal importance." Mother and son often perform together. In 2004, they were honored with a top jazz duo Bistro Award for their engagement at the Algonquin in New York. The first recorded collaboration was released on Blue Note last year — a piano/voice duo session titled "Love Is Here To Stay." The CD followed hot on the heels of Charlap's acclaimed tribute to the music on of America's greatest songwriters, "Bill Charlap Plays George Gershwin: The American Soui."
His pianistic talents are much in demand. Aside from regular sessions with friends Phil Woods, Harry Allen and Warren Vache, Bill has recorded and/or performed recently with Marian McPartland, Steely Dan, Tim Ries & The Stones Project, Paula West, and Scott Hamilton. Of special interest, Bill plays on four tracks of a forthcoming Blue Note tribute to Billy Strayhorn including a version of "Bloodcount" in trio with Elvis Costello and label-mate Joe Lovano.
Tickets to the event are $10-$80.