The musician recorded with the likes of Dizzee Gillespie, Rosemary Clooney and Steely Dan
British-born pianist Marian McPartland, who became a fixture on the US jazz scene, has died aged 95.For more than 40 years, the musician also hosted a US radio show, giving listeners an insight into the elusive topic of jazz improvisation.
Born Margaret Marian Turner in Windsor, she started out entertaining troops during WWII and married US soldier and cornetist Jimmy McPartland in 1946.
She died of natural causes at her home in Long Island, New York.
McPartland said she had been drawn to the piano at the age of three, after hearing her mother play.
"From that moment on, I don't remember ever not playing piano, day and night, wherever I was," she told US broadcaster NPR in 2007.
She studied classical piano at the Guildhall School Of Music but, to her family's disappointment, left the course and her home to tour with a vaudeville act aged 17.
"My mother said, 'Oh, you'll come to no good, you'll marry a musician and live in an attic'," she recalled. "Of course, that did happen."
After she married McPartland, whom she met during the war while playing a jam session in a tent on the Belgian border, the newly-weds moved to Chicago in 1946.
Prejudice
She played with her husband's band for a time but his traditional Dixieland style held less appeal than the adventurous sounds emanating from New York, where the couple resettled in 1949.
There, McPartland tracked down one of her idols, bebop pianist Mary Lou Williams, and began to engage with the jazz scene.
She succeeded despite the "three hopeless strikes against her," as critic Leonard Feather put it 1951: She was British, white and a woman.
In an essay included in McPartland's collected works, You've Come a Long Way, Baby, she wrote about the prejudice she faced at the start of her career.
Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23792381
McPartland, pictured on her 90th birthday, played piano every day from the age of three
0 Comments:
Post a Comment