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    21 Lives in 2013: Obituaries from The Washington Post
    21 Lives in 2013: Obituaries from The Washington Post
    21 Lives in 2013: Obituaries from The Washington Post
    Ebook140 pages2 hours

    21 Lives in 2013: Obituaries from The Washington Post

    By The Washington Post

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    About this ebook

    A decorated soldier. A pioneering scientist. A bestselling novelist. A beloved world leader.

    To remember a year is to remember those remarkable people the world lost, and to acknowledge their legacies.

    In 21 LIVES, ?the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post collects a selection of its most resonant obituaries from 2013 into one compilation. It commemorates lives of people both as globally renowned as Nelson Mandela and Chinua Achebe, as noteworthy in their fields as Esther Williams and Virginia Johnson, and as colorful as Gussie Moran and Josh Burdette. It acknowledges both the loved and the feared, spanning a lifetime of experiences and memories, and it precisely captures the human scale of how the world changed in 2013.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDiversion Books
    Release dateDec 10, 2013
    ISBN9781626812246
    21 Lives in 2013: Obituaries from The Washington Post
    Author

    The Washington Post

    The Washington Post has built an unparalleled reputation in its coverage of American politics and related topics. The paper’s circulation, prominence, and influence continue to grow.

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      Book preview

      21 Lives in 2013 - The Washington Post

      21 Lives in 2013: Obituaries from The Washington Post

      21 Lives in 2013

      Obituaries from The Washington Post

      The Washington Post

      Copyright

      Diversion Books

      A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

      443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004

      New York, New York 10016

      www.DiversionBooks.com

      Copyright © 2013 by The Washington Post

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

      For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

      First Diversion Books edition December 2013

      ISBN: 978-1-62681-224-6

      Introduction:

      The Story Is Our Escort

      By Marilyn Johnson

      These obituaries are not timeless, though I expect them to endure a good long while. They are the opposite of timeless: they capture our time precisely, 2013, the emphatic end point for 21 incomparable lives— bold women, dangerous men, chroniclers and witnesses and makers of history. From the Night Witch who flew air raids against the Nazis, to the tattooed giant who provided security for a storied club — Did he come out his mama lookin’ like that?! James Brown wondered — this collection contains the most resonant narratives of the year.

      These particular excellent obituaries make me feel possessive. When I finish reading them, I know the subjects deeply, in the context of our times. I bear witness to their lives. I learn something about the world, too; I know things about the White House that the White House usher didn’t even tell his wife. In the old days, I would have clipped these obits, smearing newsprint on my hands in an effort to stop time and save these moments, these lives. Now I gather them with a keystroke, a perfectly curated sliver of the world that stood in 2013. Novelist Chinua Achebe’s words end his obituary and frame this yearbook: The story is our escort; without it we are blind.

      Marilyn Johnson is the author of The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and The Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries

      MARIAN McPARTLAND

      An unlikely star achieved her biggest success in her 80s, teaching USA about jazz

      Jazz pianist Marian McPartland performs during a workshop at the Hawthorne School in the District in 1973. (Joe Heiberger/The Washington Post)

      After beginning her career in British music halls, Marian McPartland came to the United States and became a most unexpected jazz star. She forged a distinctive style on piano, made scores of albums and composed music that was recorded by superstars.

      But her greatest contribution to jazz came later in life, through her illuminating interviews and impromptu performances with musicians on her long-running NPR program, Piano Jazz.

      She was 61 when the first Piano Jazz episode — with pianist Billy Taylor — aired in 1979. By the time she stepped away from the series in 2011, Ms. McPartland had won a Peabody Award for broadcasting and a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement. She also helped a generation learn about jazz through her searching interviews, conducted in her dulcet-toned, sometimes irreverent, British-accented voice.

      Marian McPartland has done more for jazz pianists than anyone in the entire world, jazz impresario George Wein said in 1991.

      Ms. McPartland died Aug. 20 at her home in Port Washington, N.Y. She was 95.

      Her death was announced by NPR. The cause was not disclosed.

      Trained as a classical pianist at a conservatory in her native England, Ms. McPartland was drawn to the improvisational freedom of jazz, a world dominated by men and derived from African American culture.

      She succeeded in spite of three hopeless strikes against her, as countryman critic Leonard Feather put it 1951: She was British, white and a woman.

      Yet she managed to use her background as an outsider, without American social, racial and class baggage, to her musical advantage, Paul de Barros wrote in his 2012 biography of Ms. McPartland, Shall We Play That One Together?

      It allowed her to perceive jazz from the start as a high art, he wrote.

      During the 1950s, Ms. McPartland led a trio in New York nightclubs, most notably the Hickory House, and soon became one of the era’s few women to become established as jazz instrumentalists.

      She was one of only three women included in Art Kane’s renowned group portrait of jazz musicians on a Harlem street in 1958. She stood in the front row, next to Mary Lou Williams, in the photograph of 57 musicians that became the inspiration for Jean Bach’s Oscar-nominated 1994 documentary, A Great Day in Harlem.

      Ms. McPartland was a pioneering woman in jazz and often appeared at the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center. A teenaged Diana Krall called her for career advice, and Ms. McPartland often gave air time on Piano Jazz to female performers, from Carmen McRae to Norah Jones.

      Nonetheless, she was reluctant to identify herself as a feminist. Replying to a question from Ms. magazine co-founder Gloria Steinem at a college forum in 1974, Ms. McPartland shrugged off the idea that she had faced discrimination.

      It always seemed like an advantage to be a woman, she said.

      Margaret Marian Turner was born March 20, 1918, in Slough, England, outside London. Her father was an engineer with the British arsenal, and her mother followed the strict class rules of the times.

      She began playing piano by ear at age 3, mimicking Chopin compositions that her mother played, but she didn’t take formal lessons until she was 16. After attending girls’ schools, she went to the Guildhall School, a London conservatory, at 17.

      When her teachers heard her playing jazz, they warned her away from such rubbish. But after a couple of years, she left the conservatory to join a traveling piano-quartet act. Known as Margaret or Maggie to her family, she took the stage name of Marian Page.

      After touring England with a vaudeville group, she began entertaining troops in Britain during World War II. In 1943, she joined the USO, which allowed her to travel throughout western Europe, entertaining U.S. soldiers near the front.

      She worked alongside Fred Astaire and Dinah Shore, and in1944 met a raffish cornet player from Chicago named Jimmy McPartland. He was well-regarded in traditional Dixieland jazz circles, and had been friends with Bix Beiderbecke, the tortured jazz genius of the 1920s.

      After a quick courtship, they were married in Germany in February 1945.

      The war was on, Ms. McPartland told The Washington Post in 1991. It was a case of propinquity. . . . I’m sure it sounds awful, but the war was so … was so romantic.

      The couple came to the United States in 1946 and settled in Chicago, where Ms. McPartland began working with her husband. Before long, though, she became fascinated by the more challenging sounds of bebop. By the time she moved to New York in 1950, she was well on her way to becoming one of the few musicians adept in both traditional and modern styles of jazz.

      Longtime jazz critic Nat Hentoff, who has followed Ms. McPartland’s career since the 1950s, described her musical strengths in a 2008 Wall Street Journal article:

      Her music . . . portrays a fullness of piano mastery that gives her a secure scope for her improvising . . . she shows that the jazz pulse and luminous beauty are not antithetical.

      For several years in the 1950s, Ms. McPartland’s drummer was Joe Morello, who went on to a dynamic career with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Years later, Ms. McPartland acknowledged that she and Morello had a long, intense affair, though both were married to other people.

      It was an insane, besotted love, Ms. McPartland wrote in a personal journal quoted in de Barros’s biography, complete with clandestine meetings at airports, as well as vacations together. The affair lasted about seven years before she broke it off.

      She underwent years of psychotherapy and, in the late 1960s, divorced Jimmy McPartland. She and Morello, who died in 2011, never married but remained on friendly terms and had occasional musical reunions. The affair put me through some terrible changes, Ms. McPartland wrote, but it was all worth it.

      As early as 1949, she began writing reviews and essays for DownBeat and other musical journals. She collected her writings in All in Good Time in 1987 (it was republished in an expanded version in 2005).

      She composed songs that were recorded by Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee and Sarah Vaughan, among others, and established her own record label in the late 1960s, when major labels began to drop jazz.

      She also turned to broadcasting in the 1960s with a weekly show on WBAI-FM in New York. She played records, conducted interviews and discovered a rare talent for describing the elusive art of jazz, as well as for getting musicians to talk about their lives.

      Those were the skills she used to make Piano Jazz such a fresh and illuminating show. She and a guest — usually but not always

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