Land of Oo-bla-dee

When Mary Lou Williams was only eleven, Pittsburgh's jazzbos, including Pianist Earl ("Father") Hines, were already calling for her after school to come and jam with them. Count Basie and Duke Ellington used to slide off their piano benches so she could sit down and they could listen. The night "Satchmo"

Armstrong first heard her in Harlem, he picked her up and kissed her.

Last week, Mary Lou was still playing the same kind of exciting piano in a jammed Greenwich Village basement bistro called the Village Vanguard--even though no bigwigs of jazz happened to be around to do any picking up and kissing.

When she got to the piano, she didn't have much idea of what she was going to play. She has never worried much about that. "If the crowd is noisy, or I don't feel so good, I just play some of my old arrangements and get out," says Mary Lou, flashing her white teeth. "If I feel like it and the crowd is good, then I just settle back and maybe do a little composing right on the spot."

By the time she got through Caravan, everyone knew Mary Lou was feeling all right. She had always relied more on her piano than her personality, and this time, bobbing to the beat with an impish smile, she was giving them everything--boogie-beat, bop-beat ("You don't hear it, you feel it"), right-hand ripples, thick, murky chords ("Right now I've got chords way ahead of bop"). She even took a rare fling at singing one of her latest, a "five-course" satire on bebop called The Land of Oo-bla-dee.

At 39, twice-married Mary Lou was having no trouble adding more diamonds to her crown as a queen of jazz. In her spare time, she was still turning out such imaginative first-class concert arrangements as her Georgia Brown, Blue Skies and Shorty Boo for Duke Ellington (her latest: Scorpio and Lonely Moments). She had already conquered Carnegie Hall (in 1946), has since been on even more consecrated ground with concerts at Yale and Cornell.

Last year, she got a sort of final accolade when five Juilliard students came around for lessons. She had to send three back to

Bach. Says Mary Lou: "You just can't teach jazz to anyone who has had ten to 15 years of classical study. There is an age limit to jazz, you know; you're not supposed to start playing it after 30." Mary Lou should know: she started at three.

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