Umlaut Big Band

Since 2011, the Umlaut Big Band has made a specialty of going back to the early decades of jazz to revive the music of the great bands of that era, while commissioning contemporary composers to write new works.

The Umlaut Big Band develops a series of portraits of forgotten composer-arrangers and focuses now on the work of Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981), a prolific musician whose career spanned 50 years of jazz history, constantly open by its transformations and constanly active and infuencial despite systemic racism and sexism.

Her original manuscripts, mostly unpublished, served as the source for the Umlaut Big Band's project and allow us to finally hear numerous compositions written between 1930 and 81. Here, for the first time, the work of Mary Lou Williams, composer and arranger, has been considered as a whole. A reading that will shed new light on her work.

"Mary's Ideas: Umlaut Big Band plays Mary Lou Williams" releases on September 17, 2021 on Umlaut Records Label.