Music: Post-Dixieland Piano

Like sidewalk superintendents, jazz fans like to watch and listen to a clicking combo even if they know little about what is actually going on. The least among the initiates can watch a hot lick go sailing from one performer to another like a hot rivet, and appreciate the way it gets deftly caught and driven home before it combo. When such a flurry of faster and faster tosses is completed without disaster, the jazz fan has a tendency to laugh his appreciation out loud.

There is a plenty of appreciative laughter this week at Manhattan’s Hickory House, where Pianist Marian McPartland and her trio toss their sizzling ideas back & forth on a raised platform in the center of a big oval bar. Thirty-five-year-old Marian, long, lean and suntanned, sits at the baby grand with an inward look in her eyes as her fingers ripple easily over the keyboard. Behind her are her solid sidemen, Bass Fiddler Bob Carter and Drummer Joe Morello, flicking out accompaniments. The result is some of the cleanest, most inventive “progressive” jazz to be heard anywhere.

Quartering the Apple. The music is soft, even in its occasional larruping climaxes, and modern in its distilled dissonances, and it always keeps the original tune in mind. It comes in three basic models: 1) slow and intimate, as in My Funny Valentine, when Marian seems to dissect the tune pensively, as if she were quartering an apple, then puts it all neatly together again better than new; 2) at breakneck tempo, as in Liza, where the tune dashes off in improbable directions and fetches up, quivering, back where it started; 3) production numbers, as in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, in which the pianist may start off in concert style, fall into a swinging beat, throw in a dash of counterpoint, and conclude with a sweeping finale full of big chords and scale runs.

Concert style comes easily to English-born Pianist McPartland. She studied harmony, counterpoint, violin and piano at London’s famed Guildhall School of Music in her teens. But all the while she was listening to records of Jazz Pianists Art

Tatum, Fats Waller, Earl Hines and Mel Powell, and taking a more than occasional fling at jazz herself “behind locked doors.”

A Feel for the Beat. Eventually, Marian toured as an entertainer for ENSA, the British version of the USO, and then switched to the USO itself. She landed in Normandy soon after the first troops, and a few months later in Belgium met Dixieland Cornettist Jimmy McPartland, a private in the 2nd Division. They were married in Aachen, and two years later had their own Dixieland band in Chicago (TIME. May 5, 1947).

Marian’s music has never been in the same style as Jimmy’s. Although she can sock out a solid Southern jump when she wants to, she prefers the subtler, post-Dixieland style which aims to “feel” the beat instead of landing on it with both feet. Two years ago she formed her own trio, has been touring and .recording (for Savoy) ever since. Pianist McPartland loves it as much as her doting sidewalk superintendents. Her contented sum-up: “It’s just not work.”