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March 17, 2009 · 0 comments
Dorothy Donegan Revisited
More than a decade has passed since the death of pianist extraordinaire Dorothy Donegan. She never received the recognition she deserved during her career, and now after her passing, even fewer fans are aware of what this artist could do at the keyboard. Below Scott Albin, a regular contributor to these pages, looks back on at Donegan's fascinating and frustrating career. T.G.
Since her death in 1998 at age 76, the great virtuoso pianist Dorothy Donegan has been largely forgotten, except for the release last Fall of Pandemonium, a DVD containing so-so TV show performance footage and a bio. Donegan never achieved the fame and recognition that she and others thought she deserved in her lifetime, although she was indeed named an NEA Jazz Master in 1992. However, many jazz reference works lack an entry for her.
Donegan believed that her aspirations were hindered by racism in the classical field, and sexism in the world of jazz. Then again, some thought she was too tempermental, flamboyant, bawdy, and playful to be taken seriously. Even Donegan described herself in 1958 as "wild, but polished," stating that, "Instead of just sitting there playing, I've added personality." Leonard Feather wrote that "much of her appeal...is based on her visual antics."
Two sensational short videos portray Donegan's transformation and serve more or less as bookends to her career. From the Hollywood film Sensations of 1945, she is seen sharing a revolving circular platform with pianist Gene Rodgers, as Cab Calloway and his Orchestra look on. Dressed in a floor length gown, with a flower in her hair, she is physically reserved except for her stomping feet as she plays devastating stride piano after beginning with Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. In 1993, again opulently if more casually dressed, she performs on the White House lawn, moving from "I Can't Get Started" to "Tea for Two," before introducing some classical snippets, all the while indulging the audience with humorous facial expressions, groans, and, at one point, turning somewhat indolently to face the crowd while sustaining a dazzling left-hand riff. As usual, her performance generates a standing ovation, with then President Clinton observed shaking his head in disbelief while seeming to mouth the word "unbelievable!" (All of the Donegan videos available on YouTube are worth seeing; especially check out her mesmerizing no-nonsense blues workout on a video simply titled "Part 2 of 2.")
Donegan did not record prolifically, and most of her few early albums have never been available on CD, although a compilation CD, Dorothy Romps: A Piano Retrospective (1953-1979) presents a cross-section of her abundant abilities in stride, boogie-woogie, blues, bop, swing, and classical, among the styles she so often explored in the same piece or a medley combining standards and classical works. She was best appreciated live, in lengthy well-attended engagements at night clubs like the Embers in New York and the London House in Chicago, where she offered kaleidoscopic sets that mixed her singing, dancing, and off-color jokes (she once toured with Moms Mabley), with piano excursions technically comparable to those of an Art Tatum or a world-class classical pianist. In later years, her memorable appearances at jazz festivals and on jazz cruises brought her a relatively wider audience (her three CDs recorded live respectively at the 1990, 1991, and 1992 Floating Jazz Festivals are particularly recommended).
Many fellow musicians found her intimidating, hence she usually worked solo or with just bass and drums. She also enjoyed doing impressions of other pianists and singers, such as Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Keith Jarrett, Andre Watts, and Count Basie, although she frequently sounded much like Erroll Garner when playing it straight, as she and Garner maintained a mutual admiration society. She once told Ebony magazine, "I've snowed them [male jazz pianists] all except one (the late Art Tatum). Most of them play like women."
Speaking of women, even Marian McPartland was shaken up when Donegan appeared on McPartland's Piano Jazz radio program. In an interview not long after Donegan's death, McPartland recalled, "Anyway, she was known as this very strong, aggressive, outspoken, domineering kind of person. . . and it seemed like when we were playing a duet, every part of the piano I would try to play to get away from her, she would go there and I was really trying to make it sound as good as I could. We took a break and I went into the bathroom and said to myself to shape up. I think I took an aspirin. 'Don't let this woman take over the show,' I said to myself...then at the end I said to her 'Dorothy, it's O.K., you win.' She says: 'Oh, no contest.' So that was Dorothy. And she meant it. She really thought that I was a weakling and that she was better than me in every way."
Brash, flamboyant, and seriously talented. In 1942, she became the first African-American and first jazz pianist to appear in a much publicized concert at Chicago's Orchestra Hall, initially performing Grieg and Rachmaninoff, and then jazz after intermission. Art Tatum responded by visiting her home and taking her under his wing. The late long-time New York Times jazz critic John S. Wilson, never one prone to hyperbole, wrote of Donegan's first ever appearance at the Village Vanguard in October 1987, "Miss Donegan has never let her show-business surface interfere with her virtuosity or her sensitivity as a pianist. No one since Art Tatum has brought together a flow of running lines, breaks, changes of tempo and key, oblique references and rhythmic intensity as skillfully as Miss Donegan does."
Once again or for the first time, let us listen to (and watch) the life force that was Dorothy Donegan.
This blog article posted by Scott Albin.
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