Fabu Carter and Jane Reynolds to Perform at the Kennedy Center: Remember Me
Top: Fabu Carter (r) and Jane Reynolds perform for the Mary Lou Williams Centennial Celebration in Madison Below: Fabu Carter poses with her book of poems about the life of Mary Lou Williams.
By Jonathan Gramling
Fabu Carter, Madison’s first poet laureate, was raised on music from the Black community, primarily gospel and jazz.
“My father was a jazz artist,” Carter said. “And he was stationed in France and as his family, we were there too. France is a country where lots of Black jazz artists migrated to. On Sundays, I would hear spirituals from my mother and I would hear jazz from my father. And that’s how I grew up. It was a beautiful combination. And so I used to scat as a child. He would bring me in with all of his army buddies and play jazz records and say, ‘Watch her scat.’ Scat means when you make sounds to jazz music. I was a tiny, little girl. I don’t even know if I was six-years-old yet. And so I felt like I grew up on jazz.”
Walking through the Madison Downtown Library one day, many years later, Carter happened upon a boo titled “Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams.” Carter was curious.
“I went over to it and started reading it,” Carter said. “I had heard of so many women in jazz, but I had never heard of Mary Lou Williams. I checked the book out. But before I left, I called my father and said, ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me about Mary Lou Williams?’ And he said, ‘Mary Lou, yeah.’ That let me know that she was cool. She was wonderful. But up until that time, I knew women in jazz as singers and not as composers, arrangers, performers and pianists. And that began my life-long journey with Mary Lou.”
Carter was determined that Williams got her just recognition.
“Once I read the biography, once I started looking at her music, once I started researching her, I said, ‘Okay, here’s evidence of another Black woman erased, obscured, forgotten,’” Carter said. “And the more I learned, the more I couldn’t help but wonder why. She was so prominent when she was alive. She just died in the 1970s and I didn’t know about her ever.”
At the beginning of 2010, the centennial of Mary Lou Williams’ birth, a committee formed in Madison to honor Williams with a number of performances, including spoken word, and scholarly presentations to be held during her centennial year. Williams had appeared in Madison in 1969 and 1970. Carter and Howard Landsman were the driving forces to do a weekend of events that did Williams proud, drawing her friend Father O’Brien, jazz scholars and jazz performers to Madison for a culminating weekend on Sept. 30 to Oct. 3 with the Mary Lou Williams Fall Festival Weekend.
During the year of events, Carter teamed up with pianist Jane Reynolds to do a reading about Williams while Reynolds performed her music.
After all the bills were paid, Carter approached the committee about using some of the leftover funds to assist Carter in visiting places where Williams lived and performed so that she could write a book of poetry dedicated to Williams. The committee agreed to fund Carter.
“I traveled to places where she lived, where she worked like Pittsburgh,” Carter said. “I had a whole list of places. I couldn’t go to Europe. But I mostly made it to every place in the U.S. And I wrote that book of poetry.”
Carter wrote I wrote 10-12 original poems. It was called “Remember Me – Mary Lou Williams” and was published in 2017.
“The first section of poems were about her life and what essentially helped form her artistry,” Carter said. “I wrote poetry about her songs and her arrangements of compositions. One day, she said, ‘I have given my life for jazz and now I am all alone.’ This is when she went back on faith she grew up in and became a Catholic because that was the only place open when she finished her performances. She would go to a Catholic cathedral and find the doors open because she lived the life of a jazz artist. Her creative thinking jazz and Alvin Ailey performing her music, that was ever so wonderful. She was a complex woman as I think all people are. She was very controversial. I do include a poem in there saying the artist Mary Lou and poet Fabu meet. And that’s my imaginary conversation if we had ever met. She was a no nonsense woman as well. She didn’t suffer fools gladly. When women used to come to her and say, ‘How do you make it in a man’s world? How do you play jazz with men?’ She said, ‘You outplay them. That’s what you do.’ That was her answer. But it wasn’t simple because everyone had a different level of talent. She was a child prodigy. She started playing at four-years-old. But it wasn’t possible for everyone. Everyone didn’t have the same talent. But yet it made me laugh how some of the greats of jazz would say, ‘I’m not going to play against her. She beats me every time. She just outplays me.’”
But the remembrance didn’t end there. Carter was working on a Ph.D. from the University of Nairobi in Kenya, East Africa and she her dissertation thesis was on Williams.
“I had so much information and it was so valuable,” Carter said. “I have maintained a close relationship with Howard Landsman who was very instrumental in helping me with my dissertation because he did the evaluation for the event and that was a central part. I would never had thought as we were going through that that evaluations were so important and would be a very critical part of my dissertation. I understood how, especially Black women in the jazz world, become obscure. I actually met someone in Madison who said they attended a performance and she would play and turn her head to the side to the audience and talk to them. It was so poignant to me. I always knew that jazz was sacred to her. Duke Ellington followed her. Her sacred jazz was as wonderful as any other kinds of jazz. She wrote music for musicians like Benny Goodman. She was a phenomenal woman. And I wanted — and still want — to lift her up out of obscurity. When Ken Burns did his monumental story on jazz, she was in, but obscure.”
And her academic work allowed her to spread the word about Williams far and wide.
“My degree is from the University of Nairobi African Women’s Studies Center,” Carter said. “It’s the only one on the continent of Africa. And so I was able to introduce Mary Lou Williams to Black women around the world who were there also doing their dissertations. That was very cool.”
Through the years, Carter and Landsman have kept in touch. And if someone in the area was playing — or connected to — Williams music, Landsman would spread the word to committee members and they would make the trip to the performance. Carter was always on board.
“What he has done for the past decade or more is every time a jazz artist came through, he would either introduce me to them with my books and we would talk to the jazz artist about bringing it to the Kennedy Center because of the Mary Lou Williams Festival,” Carter said. “And I always felt like they needed her voice to be there in a different way.”
Although they don’t perform together anymore, Carter and Reynolds kept in touch.
“I was at Cafe CODA and I was performing some Mary Lou Williams poems and Jane was there with a lot of other wonderful artists from Madison,” Carter recalled. “She pretty much said that she was going into retirement. She still taught. And basically her Mary Lou Williams music days were over. Jane, as a pianist, was able to stretch her fingers wide. She was able to play all kinds of chords that I don’t even understand, but musicians do. There isn’t very much of her music that one would call easy. There are some that are easier than others. That is a reality. We don’t do Mary Lou anymore.”
And then the break came.
“We must have seen 5-6 jazz artists throughout the years,” Carter said. “I even went to Milwaukee with Howard. We asked about being introduced to someone at the Kennedy Center. So I am very grateful for the kindness of Dee Dee Bridgewater. When she connected us, then we had a response and then we were given an offer.”
And Reynolds is coming out of retirement to perform at the Kennedy Center.
“She always plays Mary Lou’s music,” Carter said. “It’s her interpretation of Mary Lou’s music, but it is all Mary Lou’s compositions, for the most part, or it is the music that Mary Lou became famous for. It originated with Mary Lou, but there is some like ‘My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me,’where I wrote a poem about that because she had such difficulties with her family not understanding her creativity. And they always thought that she was rich, when actually she was quite poor as an artist until the very end of her life when she was the artist-in-residence at Duke University. She said she chose that song to be her family when she was on the road and in vaudeville and traveling and essentially didn’t get to see family in the way that you and I do.
Carter and Reynolds will be performing at the Mary Lou Williams Festival at the Kennedy Center in May. Their performance is titled “Remember Me in Poetry.”
“To be invited to the Kennedy Center and to be invited to the Mary Lou Williams Festival, for myself as a poet, is really the realization of a dream,” Carter said. “And I’m even happy that we are going to be staged where people can come free. That, to me, is what Mary Lou would have wanted just like our committee made sure we gave scholarships to up and coming young jazz artists. She so much wanted jazz to be preserved. So to be at the Kennedy Center is still wonderful although so much has changed since we were initially invited and we confirmed that we were coming. And then this is also for Jane Reynolds who is a pianist herself and she taught piano equally an honor to be at the Kennedy Center and to be able to play. I find this is a very unique gift to give the world.”
While it is an honor to be invited to perform at the festival, there is that honor and relatively little financially.
“I said when they first offered an amount, it wasn’t even enough to cover travel and hotel,” Carter recalled. “I thought about it that night because we were asked to consider it. And I said, ‘Mary Lou would not have accepted that low of an amount.’ It was incredibly low. And it was for Jane and I to split. And so they raised it by $1,000. It’s enough for airfare. It’s enough for a cheap hotel. But we still have to eat and it’s not really including any performance fee. That’s why we are doing a GoFund Me. Since we are being people poets and people artists at this gig, anyone who thinks it’s important to have her voice heard could give. It’s a bare bones operation for us. I frankly don’t mind — and neither does Jane — being humble and saying, ‘You’re not paying us anywhere what we would normally earn. We would make more down the street here in Madison Wisconsin.’ The opportunity to be at the Mary Lou Williams Festival in The Kennedy Center is too wonderful to pass up.”
To help Carter and Reynolds meet the expenses for their Lincoln Center trip and performance, a GoFundMe campaign has been created. Visit https://gofund.me/cadec274 to make a tax-deductible donation.