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Dear Subscriber,

This March 2008  issue profiles the honorees of the Women in Jazz Festival in New York City, in April.

I am honored to have been chosen from a blind listening session of the board members. My band, Jazz Hotline will appear on April 5 at 1:00 p.m. 

Meet these divas send your comments  for upcoming issues!

Love and music,
Diva JC
Publisher

JAZZ WOMEN

Marian McPartland

Marian McPartland b. March 20, 1918, Margaret Marian Turner in Slough, England, she is a jazz pianist, violinist and host of Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz on National Public Radio. The jazz critic Scott Yanow has said that McPartland is "... a harmonically sophisticated improviser, open to the influence of later stylists including Bill Evans. She pursued classical studies at the Guildhall School of Music in London. While enrolled there in 1938, Marian left to join The Claviers, a four-piano vaudeville act, performing under the stage name Marian Page. The group toured throughout Europe during World War II, entertaining Allied troops.

While touring with USO shows in Belgium, she met and began to play with a Chicago cornetist named Jimmy McPartland in 1944. The two were married and performed at their own wedding at a military base in Germany.

After the war, the couple moved to Chicago. Then, in 1949, they moved to Manhattan where they lived in a floor through apartment in the same building as the Nordstrom Sisters. With Jimmy's help and encouragement, Marian started her own trio in 1952 and began a long residency at the famous New York City jazz nightclub, the Hickory House, from 1952-1960.

She began her own record label, Halcyon Records, and gradually began recording her own compositions, along with solo and ensemble works by others. Famous compositions include "There'll Be Other Times", "Twilight World", and "In the Days of Our Love".

McPartland claims not to read music (despite her early training). On the other hand, she plays and transposes in all keys.

In 1964, Marian McPartland launched a new venture on WBAI-FM (New York City), conducting a weekly radio program that featured recordings and interviews with guests. Pacifica Radio's West Coast stations also carried this series, which paved the way for Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz, a National Public Radio series that began on June 4, 1978 and is currently the longest-running cultural program on NPR. Several programs in the new series, which features Ms. McPartland at the keyboard with guest performers (usually pianists), have been released on CD by the Concord Records label. McPartland celebrated the 25th anniversary of the NPR series with a live taping at the Kennedy Center for which Peter Cincotti was the guest.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_McPartland

• Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz : NPR Music
• McPartland at 90

Sarah McLawler was born in Louisville, Kentucky. She plays Hammond B-3 organist.  She was raised in the church with gospel music. She studied organ at an Indiana Conservatory. Influenced heavily by the music of the big bands, McLawler used to sneak into clubs in Indianapolis to hear Lucky Millinder's big band. She ended up going on the road with the bandleader, and later formed an ahead-of-its-time all-woman band, the Syn-Co-Ettes. They spent some time as a house band at Chicago's Savoy Club.

After meeting Richard Otto, a classical violinist who liked to play jazz, at a residency at a Brooklyn club, she married him and the two spent years touring and recording together. As fixtures on the New York jazz scene in the 1950s, they became friends with the likes of Milt Jackson, Errol Garner, Dinah Washington, Cab Calloway, Nat Cole, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis, Jr. and others. Washington was so taken with her playing, she once offered to be her manager.

McLawler's singles for the King and Brunswick labels, recorded in the 1950s, are now collectors' items, and they include sides like "I Can't Stop Loving You" "Love, Sweet Love," both for King, as well as "Red Light" "Tipping In" "Let's Get the Party Rocking" and "Blue Room." Her recordings with violinist Otto include "Somehow," "Yesterday" "Body & Soul" for Brunswick, and "Babe in the Woods" "Relax, Miss Frisky" "Flamingo" "Canadian Sunset" and "At the Break of Day" for Vee-Jay.

She continues to perform jazz standards, because she feels a lot of the popular jazz standards have never gotten enough recognition. Her major shows include recent Newport Jazz Festivals and the Newark Jazz Festival. She's based herself in New York City for many years, and can performs periodically at the Novotel hotel there. Source:  Richard Skelly, All Music Guide 

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