From center-left: O’Brien, Allen, and Bonaiuto, with BC bOp! musicians, in Robsham Theater. Photograph: J.D. Levine

A big band sound rocked Robsham Theater late into the night on Sunday May 9 as the veteran Boston-based Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, the Boston College student jazz ensemble BC bOp!, and a specially formed chamber choir joined with renowned pianist and composer Geri Allen to commemorate jazz musician Mary Lou Williams (1910–81). Williams’s 57-year career as a composer, an arranger, and a mentor of musicians such as Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis places her at the “very top echelon of the jazz pantheon,” according to music critic George Kanzler, and significantly influenced the evolution of jazz in the 20th century. Her music, said Duke Ellington, was “perpetually contemporary,” her writing and performing, always “a little ahead.”

The idea for the concert, billed as “A Mary Lou Williams Centennial: From Swing to Sacred Music, a Journey of Faith,” came from Williams’s spiritual advisor and manager, Peter F. O’Brien, SJ. In 2009 he proposed the event to Mark Harvey, a lecturer in music at MIT and founder of the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, who in turn approached Sebastian Bonaiuto, director of bands at Boston College. The University had conferred an honorary doctorate of arts on Williams in 1975 for her music and her charitable efforts on behalf of children and down-and-out musicians, so Boston College seemed a fitting place to celebrate the performer, composer, and Roman Catholic convert who said of her music: “every time I play, I count it a prayer.”

The concert was cosponsored by the Boston College Bands program and the University’s Arts and Social Responsibility Project (ASR) whose chair, associate design professor Crystal Tiala, said that Williams’s musical achievements and her philanthropy dovetailed with the ASR mission to ally the arts with “positive social change.” (Previous ASR projects include a student-produced documentary on homelessness.) Tiala cited Williams’s Bel Canto Foundation, started in 1958 to aid musicians with drug and alcohol problems, and the Mary Lou Williams Foundation, created in 1980 to bring jazz to children. She also noted that Williams was a pioneering African-American woman in a male-dominated field. In her early teens, she played with Duke Ellington’s band; later she composed and arranged music for the bands of Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie.

The evening’s narrator, O’Brien, began with a description of his first encounter with Williams, “in early 1964, in the pages of Time magazine.” Two photographs in the article caught his attention, O’Brien told the Robsham audience of some 250. One showed Williams sitting on the raised band area in the middle of the circular bar at the Hickory House on West 52nd Street in Manhattan, a premier jazz club from the 1930s to the 1950s. The other image showed Williams kneeling at the communion rail in the Church of St. Francis Xavier on West 16th Street, the church where, following her conversion to Catholicism, she was baptized in May 1957, near her 47th birthday. Soon after reading the Time article, O’Brien introduced himself to Williams at a New York jazz club where she was playing. He was 23, a Jesuit seminarian, and she was 53, but they formed an immediate, enduring friendship.

The Robsham concert program mirrored the fusion of secular and sacred influences in Williams’s art, with swing and blues pieces dominating the first half. After what O’Brien applauded as “gorgeous” renditions by the two jazz ensembles of classic Williams compositions such as “Chief,” “Walkin’ and Swingin’,” and “Scratchin’ in the Gravel,” Geri Allen, a champion of Williams’s music who portrayed her in Robert Altman’s 1996 film Kansas City, took the piano to perform her 1953 piece “New Musical Express” with percussive precision, her black patent high-heels tapping out the tight, fast-paced rhythm.

Williams’s sophistication as a composer was evident in what MIT’s Harvey introduced as the “exotic and mysterious” “Scorpio” movement from her 12-part Zodiac Suite, written and first performed at New York’s Town Hall in 1945. The piece, played by Geri Allen and Aardvark, has the depth and harmonic complexity of symphonic music, the result, Harvey explained, of Williams’s close study of contemporary classical composers including Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

After a short intermission, the program’s focus shifted to works testifying to the centrality of religion in Williams’s later life and career. One effect of Williams’s conversion to Catholicism, said O’Brien, was that “everything creative inside of her became fused”—her spiritual life, her creative life, and her huge “natural, automatic outpouring of generosity.”

Her first major religious composition, Black Christ of the Andes (1964), was a cantata celebrating the canonization of the mixed race Martin de Porres, born in Peru in 1579. The haunting invocation is “as challenging as it is beautiful,” said JoJo David, director of the Mary Lou Williams Centennial Choir of Boston College, created for the occasion. For one performance only, David gathered nine student singers from BC bOp! and the BC Liturgical Arts group and added the mellow alto of professional jazz performer Cara Campanelli ’09. Campanelli also sang a solo in “Anima Christi,” Williams’s setting of the 14th-century prayer of praise and penitence that blends elements of gospel and blues into what O’Brien called “the funkiest long-meter waltz around.”

Toward the end of the evening came the only piece not composed by Williams: a contemplative solo piano tribute by Allen, entitled “Thank You, Madam.”

“Now we’re going to raise the roof,” announced O’Brien, as Allen, BC bOp! and the choir combined for the rollicking congregational anthem, “Praise the Lord,” followed by the 1937 boogie-woogie Williams classic “Roll ‘Em,” written for the Benny Goodman Band, belted out by all the musicians on stage.

Jane Whitehead is a Boston-based writer.

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