Jazz radio royalty visits Berklee.

By Jason Roeder
Berklee.edu Correspondent
February 1, 2005

Marian McPartland
Photo by Phil Farnsworth

"She and mother started talking away just like they were before," said McPartland, who recently visited the Berklee Performance Center as the keynote speaker for the 2005 Berklee Teachers on Teaching (BTOT) conference, "and they talked through the whole thing, and when it was done, my mother said, 'very nice, dear.'" And then, McPartland, who spoke to the audience from her piano bench on stage, exclaimed with tongue-in-cheek despair, "My God, I'm still doing this years later."

Hardly. McPartland's performance for her aunt and mother was long ago—the early 1920s—and no one's tuned her out since then. Precisely the opposite, actually. For the past 25 years, listeners of more than 200 stations in the United States alone have been dialing up McPartland as host of National Public Radio's Piano Jazz, the network's longest-running cultural program. By the time she took to the airwaves, McPartland had been for decades an accomplished performer, writer, educator, and recording artist (one who now has more than 60 albums to her name). So, not surprisingly, she had some stories for an audience that was more than ready to hear them.

When she was 15, McPartland's father told her that it was time to start planning her future. "You'd better think what you're going to do," McPartland remembered him saying one morning at breakfast. "You know, we can't keep you." By her own admission, McPartland wasn't exactly an overachieving student. She could play the piano, though, which is why she enrolled at London's Guildhall School of Music. She didn't know if she'd ever be good enough to be a classical concert pianist. But there was another concern.

"I was already so into jazz that it was pretty hard to turn around," McPartland said. She had had a boyfriend who owned two pianos, and they'd play together. They would listen to records all day, and then work out what they had heard on their own keyboards. When she was 18 she announced to her parents that she was joining a four-piano vaudeville act and touring Europe to entertain Allied troops fighting in World War II. Her father tried bribing her to reconsider. Her mother wrung her hands and predicted her daughter would marry a musician and live in an attic. "And I did, of course," McPartland said.

	Marian McPartland and faculty member Bob Winter, after their duet.
	Photo by Phil Farnsworth

"I said no, but then I started to get a little ambitious," McPartland said. "I had been listening to bebop groups in the South Side."

The couple moved to New York, where McPartland formed a trio with which she could explore some of her more modern musical interests. The trio landed a gig at a club called the Embers, but although McPartland was used to the stage, she wasn't quite prepared for center stage.

"I was so green and callow, I couldn't say a word," McPartland said. "I had to write on a piece of paper, 'Thank you ladies and gentlemen.'…We did no business because no one knew who I was."

The club's owner brought in some names—Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge, among others. McPartland couldn't believe it.

"I was just thrilled," she said. "They're going to play with me?"

McPartland's trio eventually landed an agent and a two-week gig at New York's Hickory House, which ultimately expanded into a 10-year residency there. The club became a regular gathering place for musicians such as Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Oscar Peterson. She and her trio also toured throughout the country.

"We'd go all over, and say, 'Oh, isn't this awful,'" McPartland said. "It'd be really nice to go back to the Hickory House. And then we'd go back and say, 'Oh, this place is awful. For God's sake, let's go out on the road.'"

She wasn't just gigging, though. McPartland began playing regularly in schools, even persuading Duke Ellington to perform for the kids in Washington, D.C. But it was a call from South Carolina that ensured that she'd be reaching thousands of ears without logging a single mile. An NPR station there was in search of a replacement for longtime host Alec Wilder, and McPartland thought it might be fun, a bit of a lark for a few months.

"Lo and behold, we kept going," she said.

	Marian McPartland accepts her doctorate from President Roger Brown.
	Photo by Phil Farnsworth

"I hate to mess up my hair," she said, as she briefly stepped off stage to don her academic regalia. While she changed, professor of piano Bob Winter, once himself a guest on Piano Jazz, played for the audience. Once McPartland returned and accepted her honorary doctorate of music from Berklee president Roger H. Brown, she and Winter sat down at face-to-face pianos. The night before, Winter had suggested that the two of them make a list of some tunes they might want to perform.

"She said, 'No, I'd rather wing it,'" Winter recalled.

"It's sort of like Piano Jazz, now, isn't it?" said McPartland. "We plot the tune together on the air sometimes. Have you decided what you think we should do?"

"No, it's your call."

McPartland went with Harold Arlen's "This Time the Dream's on Me," and for their next duet was thinking of something Ellington.

"How about 'C Jam Blues'?" Winter said. McPartland's reply was just the sort of thing that would have made her poor mother shake her head.

"Let's do it in B-flat."

Jason Roeder is Communications Editor/Writer in Berklee's Office of External Affairs.