Music For Peace - Signed Album With Dsm Cover Design. Williams, Mary Lou.

Inscribed copy - "Sincerely Mary Lou Williams" - of her "magnificent and variegated" mass (Cook & Morton), the summation of her efforts to express her religious and social perceptions though her music. Performed by "Mary Lou Williams. and her friends" and issued on her own Mary Records label, featuring a typically well-judged cover by David Stone Martin with Gerald Holtom's CND "peace sign" formed by two arms with hands clasped in solidarity crossing another giving the "V" for victory sign, tied together by a loose smoky grey wash circle suggestive of the Enso of Japanese Zen calligraphy. The pianist, arranger, and composer Mary Lou Williams's career in jazz traced a line all the way from the Kansas City scene of the late 1920s through the swing era, bop, the 1950s jazz expatriate community, and an academic job at Duke in the late 1970s, also helping to pioneer sacred jazz in the early 1960s. After converting to Catholicism in the mid-1950s, Williams maintained an ultra-low profile in the jazz world, emerging just briefly in 1957 to play with Dizzy Gillespie at Newport. In the early 1960s she began composing jazz pieces with religious underpinnings, culminating in a series of jazz masses. The present album is widely considered her "magnum opus of religious jazz: Mary Lou's Mass. A landmark recording which addressed many of the social ills of the 1960s and 70s, Newsweek called the score 'an encyclopedia of black music, richly represented from spirituals to bop to rock.'. It is perhaps the most openly religious jazz recording made at that time. In her own words, it is 'Music for the Soul'" (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings reissue blurb). Richard Cook & Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, ninth edition, 2008, awarding *** of a maximum four). 12-inch vinyl LP (MG-7-202, 488); original sleeve with striking design by David Stone Martin, and inner sleeve with lyrics. Light damping to the open side of the sleeve, more visibly discoloured on back than front, inner sleeve also slightly affected with associated short split, disc clean and surface bright, overall very good.