Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Pianist, Aaron Diehl performs and records music with an open mind, tackling early 20th-century jazz as well as the minimalist music of Philip Glass. On his latest album, Aaron works with the orchestral collective, The Knights, to revive a piece by composer, Mary Lou Williams.

Born in 1910, Williams was a virtuosic piano player from a young age who became a major figure in the bebop era jazz of the '40s and later in life, composed liturgical music in a jazz vernacular. She also devoted herself to teaching younger musicians about African Americans' huge contributions to the genre.

In 1975, hers was the first jazz mass ever performed at Manhattan's St. Patrick's Cathedral. Before then, in the 1940s, Williams composed a work called The Zodiac Suite, featuring 12 selections, each named after an astrological sign. Early recordings of it are hard to find, and some errors in the original manuscript have made it difficult for later performers to take it on completely faithfully. Diehl's new album helps correct the record and bring more attention to the work of a talented composer and pianist, and he joins me now in Studio Five at the piano to tell us more. Hi, Aaron.

Aaron Diehl: Hi, Alison. It's good to be here.

Alison Stewart: What are we going to hear first?

Aaron Diehl: Well, I think I'll start off with Cancer. Mary Lou Williams, she wrote each of these pieces, which is a zodiac sign, dedicated them to various friends, some who were musicians, some who weren't. She wasn't a fervent astrologist of any kind, but she wanted to find a way to dedicate music to her friends and people that she loved. For example, Cancer, she says that this movement is a sign of peace and tranquility. She dedicated this to two people, Lena Horne, and then also, Lem Davis, who was an alto saxophonist in Eddie Heywood's band.

Eddie Heywood was a pianist who was the band director of the house band at the Café Society, which was the first integrated nightclub in New York. A lot of the origins of Zodiac Suite come from Barney Josephson, who was the founder of Café Society. He was the one who supported this suite. I'll start off with Cancer, and then maybe we can go off from there.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear it.

[MUSIC - Aaron Diehl & the Knights: Zodiac Suite: Cancer]

Alison Stewart: It was Aaron Diehl performing Cancer, composed by Mary Lou Williams. Aaron Diehl's album is called Aaron Diehl & the Knights: Zodiac Suite. I'm a cancer, so I felt that deep in my soul.

Aaron Diehl: Uh-oh.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Zodiac Suite is an orchestral piece originally composed for solo piano, piano-based duo. That was its original makeup. What is special about Mary Lou Williams as a composer?

Aaron Diehl: Well, she was someone who really lived through the entire evolution of what we know as jazz. At every stage, she was able to reinvent herself, modernize her sound, and take all of the influences from early on with Andy Kirk to the influences of the younger generation, what they call the Beboppers. I mean, Monk and Dizzy and Charlie Parker. They loved Mary Lou Williams. They would hang at her apartment in Harlem. That was like the hang of the '40s and beyond. She was always able to remain modern, remain original, while always keeping true to the foundations of the language of the music and someone who's highly, highly underrated today.

She had a bit of a break in the '50s. She was in Paris. I guess the story goes, she was at a performance, and she just walked away from the piano in '54 and then went on to have a spiritual conversion. She converted to Catholicism, actually, I think, along with Lorraine Gillespie, who is Dizzy Gillespie's wife. She started her own foundation called the Bel Canto Foundation, which supported people who were in need, homeless, musicians who were struggling with addiction. She was a very generous person outside of music. She didn't come back to music until later.

In fact, there's a recording of 1957, Dizzy Gillespie at Newport, it's widely accessible, where she briefly comes out of retirement. Dizzy wanted her to play, and they played, I think two or three excerpts from the Zodiac Suite. She wrote all this great liturgical music. The reason why I really became interested in her is because of her manager for, I think, the last two decades of her life. His name was Father Peter O'Brien. I met him around 2004 when I was at Juilliard. They were doing a Mary Lou Williams concert. I wasn't playing on the concert, but Father O'Brien was there to sort of supervise the programming of the music. I grew up in a predominantly Catholic church in Columbus, Ohio. First of all, I couldn't sort of reconcile the fact that Mary Lou Williams's manager was a Jesuit priest.

Alison Stewart: Priest.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: I know.

Aaron Diehl: I think it's hilarious. I met, again, Father O'Brien when I was playing at a church in Harlem, St. Joseph of the Holy Family, around 2006. He just happened to be the guest priest, guest presider. He went up to give his homily, and I was playing piano there, and he said, "I know you. I remember you." After mass, we started talking and he was like, "Do you know that Mary Lou Williams wrote all this liturgical music, these mass settings? You should maybe play them here."

I think that following year, 2007, during Lent, we played her mass for the Lenten season. Used that as part the mass parts every-- In fact there's only one recording of that and still is from St. Thomas. It doesn't exist anymore. It was on 118th & Frederick Douglass.

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow.

Aaron Diehl: She, I think, might've premiered it there. Unfortunately, Father O'Brien, he passed in 2015. I was really sad because he was such an advocate for Mary's music through the Mary Lou Williams Foundation and he was always very generous about sharing his knowledge about her and sharing her music, which a lot of it still isn't really accessible.

Alison Stewart: With the Zodiac Suite, there were some issues with the original manuscripts. What were the issues, and how did you know how to address the issues?

Aaron Diehl: That's a good question. Well, first off, this particular arrangement that's on the album that I did with The Knights, she orchestrated that fairly quickly. With the help of a guy named Milton Orent, who was a staff arranger at NBC. They were very good friends and she became more interested in orchestration, and I think Barney Josephson actually encouraged her to take the Zodiac Suite in its original form, which was just a piano trio or duo, and expand it for orchestra.

She enlisted Milton Orent to help her with orchestration, although, to my knowledge, it's Mary Williams herself who did the orchestration. I think a number of reasons. They didn't have all these engraving softwares like they do now-

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] Sure.

Aaron Diehl: -where you can easily put stuff on the computer, so everything was done by hand. Then just when you have a short amount of time-- I don't know quite how long she had between when she knew she was going to do this concert at the Town Hall and the actual concert, but she didn't have time to really go through, I think, all of the details and the parts. The rehearsal apparently, and the performance, which you can actually find on CD somewhere, of the Town Hall concert, it was less than stellar, let's say. Partly because of the lack of real preparation time.

As a result, she became really frustrated with this performance and she shelved this particular arrangement. It didn't resurface, I found out during the pandemic, until like, I guess, around 2011 when it was published, but even when it was published, there were still all kinds of errors. How did I go about doing it, correcting for it? Well, I went to the source, specifically the original recording she did.

There is some things that were very obvious, like some accidentals, like if it's sharp or it's a flat, and it's like, "Oh, well, I know in the original recording that's not actually how the melody goes, so there's some obvious issues that can be pinpointed." There are some other issues that took some consulting people and some trial and error. That was the privilege of working with The Knights.

They were very enthusiastic about doing this project because, like I said, I had the idea during the pandemic of doing this, but it was a matter of finding people who would really be interested in going on the adventure with me. I feel like it was maybe around October 2021, I want to say, yes, about 2021, where we all got together at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and we had a reading. We just read through the whole suite and figured out what might need to be corrected. We recorded it, and I spent several months trying to work things out, yes.

Alison Stewart: Well, let's listen to a little bit of what you worked out. Let's play a clip from the album with The Knights so we can hear what the pieces sound like with the whole group. We're going to play a little bit of Sagittarius.

[MUSIC - Aaron Diehl & the Knights: Zodiac Suite: Sagittarius]

Alison Stewart: That is from the album, Aaron Diehl & the Knights: Zodiac Suite. My guest is Aaron Diehl. When you're playing these pieces solo on piano, what kind of decisions are you making to translate? We just heard the orchestration there with The Knights.

Aaron Diehl: Well, I don't even know if it's a matter of translation because most of the original recording on-- There was a record label called Asch Records, Mo Asch. They were mostly either solo piano, duo with bass, like Cancer was bass and piano or trio. Even Williams herself, I think she started off with three that she wrote ahead of time. It was actually for a radio broadcast that she had on WNEW.

Every Sunday she was going to feature a different Zodiac sign. I guess, it came to a point where she was getting a little bit of writer's block, so sometimes she would just, on a broadcast, improvise something and compose really in real-time-

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Aaron Diehl: -that that became the movement.

Alison Stewart: That's so cool.

Aaron Diehl: As I've grown to understand a bit more about these pieces and hearing some other interpretations of The Suite including, especially I'd say Geri Allen, I try to take more of a freeform approach to it and keeping all the themes and the motifs in, but trying to expand the core of the original and try to make it my own in a way. It's been a wonderful journey with this piece certainly.

Alison Stewart: Maybe hear another piece?

Aaron Diehl: Oh yes, we can do that. Well, I'm a Virgo. Maybe, yes, we'll do Virgo. I think she dedicated this. One of the people she dedicated this to is Leonard Feather. It's probably the most swinging movement of the entire suite and really hearkens their days with Andy Kirk band and the whole Kansas City style. This is Virgo.

Alison Stewart: This is Aaron Diehl.

[MUSIC - Aaron Diehl & the Knights: Zodiac Suite: Virgo]

Alison Stewart: And wrap. [claps] Yay. Aaron, thank you so much.

Aaron Diehl: Thank you.

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