Mary Lou Williams was a Pittsburgh-raised jazz pianist and composer who would go on to become one of the most influential jazz musicians of all time, writing music for Andy Kirk in Kansas City and later Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, as well as informally instructing jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. Williams' harmonic and rhythmic ideas, while chronologically rooted deep in the swing era, were the foundation on which much of the bebop movement was built.

Williams is a local jazz hero in Pittsburgh, but her music is still somewhat underrepresented in the sonic landscape of the city and the world. This project serves to bring her music to life and light and make her name as recognizable to jazz audiences as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis, and more.

Much of her later work has been preserved and presented because of the existence and preservation of the sheet music, but her earlier works have had to be carefully reconstructed through rigorous "cultural archaeology." I have been reconstructing her big band writings from her handwritten notes supplemented by transcription and musical analysis of her writing style where the handwritten manuscripts are lacking. This project serves as a presentation of that work, supplemented with charts published previously. This represents mostly material she wrote for Andy Kirk, but also includes some of the composing and arranging material she did for Ellington, Goodman, and others.

Adam Lee-Morgan is a Ph.D. candidate in Jazz Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and holds a Master's degree in Music Education from New York University. He is the band director at Chatham University and teaches wind instruments at the Afro-American Music Institute in Pittsburgh. Previously he was a high school band director in Los Angeles and New York. As a performer he leads the Adam Lee-Morgan Jazz Orchestra, a big band; and Adam's Aces, a smaller group. He previously was the founder and leader of the LA Swing Barons, a big band based in Los Angeles that focused on the Kansas City style of big band jazz; he also founded and led the Beijing Big Band in Beijing, China, the first of its kind in China since the 1930s. He is also an avid Lindy Hopper and is involved deeply in the swing dance community both locally, nationally, and internationally.

This incarnation of the Adam Lee-Morgan Jazz Orchestra draws on the considerable talent of the west coast jazz community from Seattle to San Diego and we are very honored to present this historic material for your listening and dancing enjoyment!