Adam Fairhall & Johnny Hunter

While some are accustomed, mainly out of laziness, to lumping UK jazz into the “funk substitutes and 90s revival” category, one might think the scene is monolithic. But, from Steve Noble to Matthew Bourne, we know otherwise. A new example presents itself with pianist Adam Fairhall, who proclaims his love of Mary Lou Williams (MLW) with a duet that doesn’t smell of sour grapes. With drummer Johnny Hunter, the ensemble is a far cry from what the Umlaut Chamber Orchestra proposed for MLW’s Zodiac Suite: a band reduced to its simplest expression, right down to the choice of apparatus, quite similar to what Marcin Masecki proposed for his exploration of ragtime. Fairhall is on the upright piano and Hunter on the simple snare drum, for an explosive and joyful result, as illustrated by “Fandangle,” where we find the wild rush of notes and strokes in a cheerful first section before the breaking point. Because the great discovery of this album devoted to MLW’s compositions is its ability to deconstruct them. For “Fandangle,” it’s a sideways step that leads to a slight dissonance, a break. It’s in “Roll’em,” built over a long period of time, that the duo reveals their recipe: taking control of the original score to play the blues with no other intention than to enjoy themselves, then a slight inflection. Here, a way of extending the piano bass notes as if to freeze time, giving a very repetitive character to the subject, well supported by the highly effective playing of the drummer, who plays with the skin as with the frame of his snare drum. Thus passed through filters worthy of microscopes, MLW’s music abandons all its vivacity to become disturbing, neurotic, then resumes like a sudden explosion that unravels everything. This album showcases a new facet of MLW’s writing and its remarkable modernity, particularly evident in the interpretation of “Gemini,” from the Zodiac Suite. Here, it’s Johnny Hunter who plays destruction through beautiful escapes born from a profound silence. Behind the simplicity sought by Adam Fairhall, to whom we owe similar work, again with Hunter, on the music of Winifred Atwell, there is a desire to extract a new essence from ancient but still youthful scores. – Franpi Barriaux, CITIZEN JAZZ https://www.citizenjazz.com/Adam-Fairhall-Johnny-Hunter.html

For the prolific Discus Music, the album bridges past and present, memory and invention, the physical-historical material of sound and its improvisational reinterpretation. In “Play Mary Lou Williams,” Fairhall (on piano) and Hunter (on snare drum) present a true declaration of intent: to honor the figure of Mary Lou Williams, an often-overlooked pioneer, by bringing her to life in the present of contemporary jazz. The operation—carried out affectionately and joyfully—reminded me of the closing concert of the 2025 Turin Jazz Festival, where American and Italian musicians, also dedicated to experimentation and free music, tackled pieces from the pioneering beginnings of jazz, demonstrating that the roots of jazz are still alive and well in the contemporary avant-garde. This album does something similar: it’s not just a philological homage, but a serious and enthusiastic creative reinterpretation. Spanning the diverse aspects of Mary Lou Williams’s music (from blues—the eponymous ” Mary Lou Blues” is a prime example —and boogie-woogie, to her more modern and experimental output), the duo demonstrates the American musician’s sonic foresight (if one may call it that). The album’s sound is clearly defined by the marriage of piano and percussion, but each track has its own identity. The opening track, ” Roll ‘Em,” is rooted in primordial blues, displaying a captivating rhythmic flow. ” Night Life” alternates dreamy and light-hearted tones, while the language of ” Gemini ,” though based on a blues riff, is structured with a more cerebral language, thanks primarily to the rhythmic (dis)articulation and the combination of sound blocks that can be delicately manipulated with bursts of swinging groove. “Nicole” is a moment of reflection, suspended, alternating moments of light and swinging relaxation with episodes of tension. A Fungus Amungus , more rarefied, leaves room for meditative listening, while Dirge beautifully articulates the funeral lament enunciated by the title. Beyond the warm tonal sound, which benefits from an aesthetic attention to the acoustics of the performance space, and the responsive understanding between the two musicians, a very interesting aspect of the work is, overall, the narrative approach: the pieces often open with a recognizable theme, then dissolve into improvisation and finally rejoin, thus establishing a continuous, yet spontaneous and unforced, tension between thematic recognition and improvisational freedom. All this makes the album an important contribution to listening, understanding the dynamics within the history of jazz: I highly recommend it. Rating: 9/10.  – A G Bertinetto, KATHODIK https://www.kathodik.org/2025/09/29/adam-fairhall-johnny-hunter-play-mary-lou-williams/

Adam Fairhall & Johnny Hunter Play Mary Lou Williams Discus CD/DL After hearing Adam Fairhall (piano) and Johnny Hunter (snare drum) perform a Mary Lou Williams piece, Discus proprietor Martin Archer suggested they record an album of her music. Williams was one of the great jazz pianists, who in a 50 year career worked with Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Cecil Taylor. Ragtimeto-free pianists such as Jaki Byard and Dave Burrell are from a later generation – she was a practitioner of these styles as they happened, from the 1920s onwards. On her duo album with Cecil Taylor, she offers the history of jazz against Taylor playing Taylor – an uphill struggle for her, critics have judged.

The opening “Roll ’Em” is a compendium of what follows, embracing episodes of rolling blues, boogie woogie and free. Fairhall enlivens the otherwise melancholic “Dirge” with shades of McCoy Tyner modality. “Fandangle” brings us back to the 20s with trenchant stride piano – the style associated with Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith and Fats Waller – but as with other tracks, there are free interpolations. The plangent “Night Life” is gently swinging stride, while “Mary Lou Blues” is boppish boogie-woogie. “Nicole” is a haunting minor/major blues that moves into free-floating improvisation.

One standard, “Lady Be Good”, is energetic stride with rapid tempo shifts. The duo play Williams’s contrafact – a theme recorded by Coleman Hawkins as “Rifftide” and by Thelonious Monk as “Hackensack”. The song is repeated at the end of the album, in an affecting, very slow and dreamy reprise. The Fairhall/Hunter duo move into freer territory than Mary Lou Williams generally explored, with rapidly changing tempos and textures. “A Fungus Amungus” is one of her furthest out compositions, which Fairhall plays solo, using what he calls free motivic development. He rightly comments on how amazing it is that a player whose career began in the 20s could even countenance playing free.

Johnny Hunter conjures ingenious and imaginative sonorities just from snare drum; Fairhall plays Discus founder Martin Archer’s characterful old upright. A wonderfully evocative and enjoyable tribute to a jazz master, by two highly reflective and creative musicians. – Andy Hamilton, THE WIRE

There have been a few album length reappraisals of the work of the late Mary Lou Williams in recent years, but this terrific set from the Manchester UK-based pairing of pianist Adam Fairhall and drummer Johnny Hunter manages to be both one of the most traditional and the most adventurous. Williams (1910-1981) was a pianist, composer and arranger who worked with all the big names, but never quite received her due. Trio 3 celebrated her tunes with Geri Allen at the keyboard in 2010, then the Paris-located Umlaut Big Band tackled a number of Williams’ less covered charts in 2021, while Aaron Diehl and the Knights Orchestra revisited her Zodiac Suite in 2023. Like Fairhall and Hunter, both the first two cited programs include “Roll ‘Em”, a blues composed for Benny Goodman’s band in 1937. The duo’s version begins straightforwardly enough with rollicking boogie woogie piano shadowed by crisp drum figures, but gradually loosens its moorings, only to briefly regain equilibrium before completely relinquishing the beat in a series of darting conversational exchanges and flurries of ivory, wood and skin. Other cuts similarly weave in and out of time and tune, subject to a range of inventive approaches which manage to sound natural rather than forced. That’s not to say that they don’t play off the themes on occasion, extrapolating on particular motifs or moods. “Lady Be Good”, purloined by Thelonious Monk under the title “Hackensack”, offers a case in point, taken on a far reaching excursion, which nonetheless retains familial resemblance to the original. Even more so in the poignant valedictory reprise which closes the disc.
Fairhall has noted that the piano/drums format is one favored in both stride and free music. In these hands it serves more than adequately for both styles. Fairhall enhances the period feel by his use of upright piano, while Hunter’s restricts himself solely to snare drum. However that decision in no way limiting his expressiveness, as can be heard from his tappy, scratchy improv textures on an otherwise stealthy interpretation of “Nicole”. The joyous renditions of Williams’ material are clearly full of affection, even as the pair deconstruct, fragment and even totally abandon them. Ultimately, the merry confluence of jaunty swinging grooves and spirited digressions into the weeds enriches both. – John Sharpe, NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD

On the face of it this should be an easy album to review. It isn’t. Ian Maund from Sandy Brown Jazz put me onto Johnny Hunter years ago, since then the drummer’s remained one of my favourite percussionists on the UK scene. Inventive, great technique, he puts sparks into any session he’s part of and this one is certainly no exception. Adam Fairhall & Johnny Hunter Play Mary Lou Williams is a fab album I’ll be playing into the future. From the first moment the opener hits the deck, Roll ‘Em kicks and swings like a playground – fast, riddled with tasty tricky bits that give the boogie a run for its money. And as these things go, it’s done cheap enough too. Martin Archer’s upright piano and a single snare drum – cunningly sparse in intention, the playing by both parties, executed with flair and passion. What’s more this approach flows through other wonderful tracks too – Night Life, Fandangle, Lady Be Good. Personally I think Johnny could have given himself the luxury of a hi-hat to go with the snare but, hey-ho, it’s his call, I wasn’t there, and there’s no denying The Hunter makes that single snare rattle and roll with impeccable timing, turning it into a genuine art class. So, there’s the review; simply said and positive.

But it’s like this. My introduction to Mary Lou Williams was a summertime around 1980. I was flicking through a bargain bin and found an album entitled Black Christ Of The Andes by Mary Lou Williams. At the time I’d never heard of her but the unusual title and the superb monochrome photograph on the cover, plus the sheer weight of the American vinyl, was enough to make me to part with a couple of quid. What I listened to was an extraordinary session. I distinctly remember a version of Walter Donaldson’s My Blue Heaven, richly arranged, included in Black Christ for very different reasons than the song’s original inclusion in the musical, Ziegfeld Follies (now almost hundred years old.) For some inexplicable reason Mary Lou had converted to Catholicism. She attempted to translate that decision into music. Black Christ Of The Andes carried all that mysticism of faith and stretched it out everywhichway. Sadly all my vinyl was sold off to a rare records shop several years ago. On the Fairhall and Hunter session there’s two tracks from Black Christ, one being A Fungus Amungus. It’s the only cut I’d take issue with. Adam Fairhall plays solo. Disappointingly, in my opinion he doesn’t get to the heart of the thing. He improvises but, in under 3 minutes, doesn’t get it off the ground. Perhaps in this case you really do have to be a 1950’s Black American woman recently converted to Catholicism. True, Mary Lou Williams’ own reading is only slightly longer, but it is infused with a ‘heart and soul’ meaning that goes deep into an internal eternity. And that’s impossibly damn difficult to get close to for a white guy in Sheffield, UK, in 2024. Interestingly Nicole, the other Black Christ track covered by Adam and Johnny, is a nuanced peach; piano and snare drum simpatico to the common bond. And there it is, in those two tracks. By honouring an (almost) forgotten important figure you have to make that music your own. Which, taken as a whole is what happens here, no fuss other than the joy of making music. Thank you, Roll’Em, wake up and jitterbug. – Steve Day, March 2025 www.wyldepublications.com

This a brand new release on Discus Music from Adam Fairhall and Johnny Hunter, interpreting ten compositions by the great Mary Lou Williams. I’ve been looking forward to listening to this very much, but listening today I can say it’s exceeding my already high expectations. Adam’s deep understanding of what I guess you could call pre bop jazz piano is something I’ve long admired. It makes him a special and unique voice on the scene. It reveals itself in his playing in such a natural way – it feels born out of love rather than research! The explorations of these beautiful pieces by Williams reveal the tremendous potential that lies there, and seamlessly show us the connections between music from the first half of the last century and the approach of creative jazz musicians today. All those false dividing lines that sometimes seem to exist in the greater jazz world just melt away when listening to this glorious album. Lets take just one piece as an example, the second track, Night Life. There’s a subtle sort of stop start thing going on here. Gorgeous sinuous swing casually drifting in out of reflective free tempo moments. It becomes an extraordinarily rich three and a half minute tone poem that actuallly put me in mind of Charles Ives. And yet the album is never cerebral – it is joyful, playful,constantly inventive. – Nicole is heart breakingly tender, and the music swings like crazy. A quick word about Johnny’s playing. Heis one of the most engaging inventive percussionists in the UK that I know of. Here he just plays snare drum, a great decision in this context. He gets so much out of the single drum, for me it’s humbling and inspiring. Simply wonderful playing. Check out Fandangle. I hear the spirit of one of my favourite drummers, Jo Jones, reborn for the 21st Century. Musical joy like this is just what I need right now. Once again I’m saying honour is due to Discus boss Martin Archer for suggesting this album and getting it out to us lucky listeners. I can’t recommend it enough. Snap up a copy and make your world a little better. – Martin Pyne, Bandcamp UK Jazz & Improvised Music (FB)

I must confess; I wasn’t familiar at all with the work of Mary Lou Williams, but looking back, there can’t have been many female jazz pianists working in the forties and fifties, let alone any who followed the progression of the genre right from barrel house and boogie-woogie through to the more adventurous and genre splicing times of the ’70s and ’80s. Pianist Adam Fairhall has had an interest in her career since he was a youngster, and after performing one of her pieces at a show was approached by Martin Archer to record and album’s worth of pieces spanning her oeuvre. With the accompaniment of Johnny Hunter on snare drum, he has handpicked a selection of ten numbers that shed light on the career of a unique player who was clearly happy in any jazz style. The pair obviously work in perfect synchronicity and also seem to have form in this area as a couple of years ago, EFPI put out an album of them covering Winifred Atwell. So that love of early blues piano style is obviously ingrained and comes out in the sheer effervescent joy of the playing. The rolling early blues style of opener “Roll ‘Em” is infectious and each little break in the pattern is punctuated by Johnny’s easy drumming style, but it eventually descends into a morass of notes accompanied by a scuffling shuffle. This seems to be part of the show where a song starts out as one thing, dips in to the equivalent of a car wash with everything halting and shivery, and then reappears shining and slightly altered. There are avant-garde piano attacks that turn into a tumult of disparate notes and then the melody reappears, sweet and clear. There is a romantic swing to “Night Life” with great playfulness in the note selection as he picks his way through, some notes sticking but waiting for the refrain to pop out; while “Gemini” is more mathematical in its approach, building from blocks that extend with each moment. The boogie-woogie hints are a starting point that are then disassembled, and the disparity between left and right hand is marked. At some points the breakdowns are like pigeons scuffling in the trees, and all the while Johnny is matching him in the order and mayhem. Each track inhabits its own world which, considering her career covered over fifty years and included playing with the likes of Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman as well as Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, is no great surprise. Thankfully Adam covers all this with great sympathy and a lot of affection, so the melancholic shimmer of “Nicole”, with its evening shadow tones and explosive interludes, sits alongside the personal stop-start trilling of “Mary Lou Blues” and the utterly irresistible boogie-woogie energy of “Lady Be Good”. The way the songs halt part way through and sneak down litter-strewn back alleys and across lumpy railroad tracks before arriving back at the main motif is just as lovely as it is unexpected. It just sounds as though they are having the best of times, with echoes of Scott Joplin and Fats Waller inhabiting “Fandangle”, while “Dirge” is stuck in the swamps of New Orleans, the dramatic tone of Martin’s old upright imbuing the piece with a real soundtrack quality. The drum-free subconscious journey of “A Fungus Amungus” gives Johnny a well-earned break and the album bows out with a sparse, dreamy reprise of “Lady Be Good” which inches past us, slow and sedate. It is a nice way to go out as it allows the listener to draw breath and ruminate on what has come before. As a love letter to an important part of jazz history and overview of her sprawling career the album is well judged and delightfully delivered and will send most people who are not familiar with her work on a voyage of discovery. – Mr Olivetti, FREQ https://freq.org.uk/reviews/fairhall-hunter-williams/

How long was Mary Lou Williams around? From the beginning! As Adam Fairhall says in the sleeevenotes, she predated the ‘ragtime to free’ pianists, mentioning some personal favourites – Jaki Byard, Muhal Richard Abrams. Can I add some more? Tete Montoliu (‘Catalan folk song to free’), and Sammy Price (‘Texas blues piano to Texas blues piano’; a recent enthusiasm) and Adam Fairhall himself, who routinely dissolves time with feats of musical prestidigitation. He did it once before and ‘Mary Lou Williams’ proves that The Imaginary Delta was no flash in the pan: it’s The Imaginary Delta in miniature, kind of. Mary Lou Williams is ideal for this treatment. Her contributions to jazz history and feminist history are only just beginning to be understood. Andy Kirk was only a front for Andy Kirk & His Clouds of Joy. The real organising force was the composer and arranger on the piano chair. She took boogie-woogie piano and infused it with a radical beauty that reflected her own stature as a spiritual being. Mary Lou was a very strong woman.
A duo is all you need really. Adam Fairhall solo is not unattractive, but Johnny Hunter’s drums give him something to bounce off and the interaction is galvanising. The dynamic varies from robust propulsion to floating elegance and skittering stride and Fairhall and Hunter keep it together pretty well, considering the medium is speed of thought free-form. ‘Roll ‘Em’ is boogie-woogie with spooky side-excursions. There’s a suspense about where the snare rolls will land on ‘Dirge’, but they always fall in the right place. If Adam is channelling the essence of Mary Lou, Johnny Hunter shimmies and rolls with the nervebeats of Baby Dodds. Let’s get this straight. ‘Lady Be Good’ isn’t the Gershwin standard but an original by Mary Lou Williams, and the quote from ‘A Night in Tunisia’ is there to illustrate the continuity of the jazz tradition. (I came across this quote in Eureka, the magazine of New Orleans jazz; issue #1 from January 1960. The writer is Noel Langley: “Art doesn’t change, you understand, only fashions change. That’s why you have tradition. Tradition is the greatest thing in the world. One would be quite lost without it.”) ‘Fandangle’ is such knockabout fun it makes you question your assumptions. I mean, isn’t free jazz supposed to be a hairshirt for the listener and austere and doesn’t it resist all efforts at being boxed in a CD-shaped objet d’art? Think again. There is nothing difficult about Adam Fairhall’s playing. One note flows naturally from the other and each vibrates with iridescence and feeling and NOSTALGIA. It’s his gift of clairvoyance that lifts his playing to another realm. – Mike Taylor, FB commentator

Just as Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981) inscribed herself in jazz piano history as a personality with her own signature, sophistication and grooviness from Boogie Woogie, Swing and Bop to Free, [the music here is] not as a pastiche, but as an admiring expression of respect, because of course the two cannot leave it at mere imitation. Your own playfulness must definitely be included, otherwise it wouldn’t be jazz, but handicraft copying of what has been preserved in a museum. So the originals get a moustache painted on and given new nuances, and they even deliver a second version of ‘Lady Be Good’ in the saddest downtempo. – Rigobert Dittmann, BAD ALCHEMY

The 21st Century’s roaring Twenties seems to have reawakened interest in the music of Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981), whose career stretched from composing and arranging for Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds of Joy in the late 1920s, trading ideas with Beboppers like Thelonious Monk in the 1940s and 1950s to a duet concert with Cecil Taylor in the late 1970s. Willams oeuvre encompassed many styles, slices of which two UK improvisers incorporate in their interpretations of 10 of her tunes. Drummer Johnny Hunter has played with the likes of Mick Beck and Olice Brice, while pianist Adam Fairhall, works in Nat Birchall’s band, with his solo styling ranging from Ragtime to Free Jazz. These chameleon-like qualities are conspicuous on Play Mary Lou Williams. For no matter what stage of Williams’ career the tunes come from the duo’s interpretations add another dimension. This is obvious as early as track one. “Roll ‘Em” is classic Kansas City blues. But while the tune begins with pile-driver keyboard pressure and percussion shuffles it soon fragments into restrained drum clanks and clatters and reflective piano stops and starts before evolving into a Jerry Lee Lewis-style rockabilly keyboard rave, slides down to Hunter’s narrow tap-dance-like rim emphasis and lifts into an adagio piano tour de force. These modifications continue throughout. “Fandangle” for instance blends raggy swing with emphasized accents until the pianist’s asides and drum nerve beats move it into a moderated exposition only to revert back to near Hot Jazz at the end. The slides and scuffles that intersect with percussion sizzles on “Mary Lou Blues” subvert the standard Blues form, so that ringing honky-tonk emphasis gives way to slow drags which ascend in pitch and tempo as the piece evolves. Exploring a counter theme for while, the duo then replicates the speed of the initial exposition. With such pivots as matching percussion rat tat tats and modernist piano key substitutions worked into the mix, the most telling tracks are two versions of “Lady Be Good”. The first begins with what sounds like a Monk head before revealing the melody that soon melts into variation of both Monk and Gershwin. It’s simultaneously Swing and Bop. The lengthier version of the same tune slinks along at such a slow pace that over drum rattles every piano note and its extensions is isolated and examined until the melody finally peeks through. This way the CD stands as both a testament to Williams’s enduring music and the skill of the two players. – Ken Waxman, JAZZWORD https://www.jazzword.com/reviews/adam-fairhall-johnny-hunter/

Considérée comme la première pianiste de jazz, l’Américaine Mary Lou Williams (1910 / 1981) a connu une carrière étonnante. Elle a joué du boogie woogie, du swing, du be-bop, du jazz tout en s’essayant aussi à l’improvisation. Après sa conversion au catholicisme, elle s’est concentrée plus sur le gospel pour atteindre un sommet en 1969 quand elle a composé sa troisième messe. Rien de particulier me direz-vous, sauf que celle-là était destinée au Vatican ! Auparavant, elle avait composé, entre autres, pour Benny Goodman, Count Basie ou Louis Armstrong et avait joué dans les groupes d’Andy Kirk, de Charlie Parker, de Duke Ellington, de Cecil Taylor et j’en passe ! Sur cet album, ce sont deux musiciens anglais qui rendent hommage à son talent et à la diversité de sa musique : le pianiste Adam Fairhall, qui joue sur un vieux piano droit, et le batteur Johnny Hunter qui ne joue ici que de la caisse claire ! Se succèdent, sur cet album, dix compositions revisitées par le duo et on y écoute et découvre cette diversité innée à l’univers de Mary Lou : du blues, du boogie, du rock’n roll, du bop, du swing, du ragtime, du jazz et du free jazz. Les sonorités lumineuses et sereines du piano, souvent rapides et aérées, et de la caisse claire, sont à la fois conformes au passé, mais le duo n’hésite pas à imprimer sa marque sur certains titres. L’association des deux instruments est efficace et établit un pont entre des sons issus du jadis et le jazz contemporain relativement improvisé. Nous pouvons entendre ces incursions particulières au sein de certaines plages. Et pour preuve de cet ancrage dans la diversité, il y a cette plage finale qui nous propose une seconde version de « Lady Be Good » qui nous immerge cette fois, dans le classique contemporain. Mais auparavant, vous aurez souvent l’envie de taper dans les mains ou du pied pour marquer le rythme et accompagner Adam et Johnny dans leur bel hommage à une artiste qui méritait bien d’être remise un peu dans l’actualité. Ou d’être découverte pour d’autres. Un efficace album, nostalgique mais aussi communicatif. – Claudy Jalet, JAZZ MANIA https://jazzmania.be/adam-fairhall-johnny-hunter-play-mary-lou-williams/

In turn, pianist Adam Fairhall and drummer Johnny Hunter honor “grande dame” Mary Lou Williams. They selected nine compositions from the groundbreaking pianist’s repertoire. As an introduction, they chose “Roll ‘Em,” which they then reinterpret with a cubist boogie-woogie twist! Next, they embark on a pub crawl in New Orleans, far from the tourist traps. Blues is naturally on the agenda, albeit with exuberant nuances. Their respective performances on upright piano and snare drum add a special touch. An ear-opener, with experimentation and tradition as each other’s yin and yang. – Georges Tonla Briquet, JAZZHALO https://www.jazzhalo.be/reviews/cdlpk7-reviews/various/discus-a-grande-fam%C3%ADlia/

Apparently, it is rare for Discus Music to suggest the musical content of a new release, but label owner Martin Archer enjoyed a live gig by this duo so much, which had included one Mary Lou piece, that he suggested to Adam and Johnny they put together an entire programme of her music. Here is the result, and it has been for me a wonderful education, as for my sins I had not previously come across this icon before now. One of only three women included in the famous Harlem photograph of jazz greats, she wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and was friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie, which is an incredible list in anyone’s book.

In the digipak there is a wonderful essay on Mary Lou by Adam, and why they chose the pieces they did, which were all recorded in a single day in November last year. Adam is on an upright piano, Johnny on snare drum, and together they are capturing the magic of a time gone by. I first listened to this in an airport, and the world seemed a much better place for this going through my ears as I was transported away from the hubbub to a different time altogether. Here we have a homage to a woman who was supporting her 10 brothers and sisters by playing piano at parties by the age of six, playing with Duke Ellington when just 13, and there is no doubt that Adam and Johnny have immersed themselves in her music.

Adam writes in his sleeve notes: “This album draws upon the range of Williams’ compositional work, from early boogie woogie hits (“Roll ‘Em”) and seminal early examples of Swing piano (“Night Life”) to barely known bop-era small-group heads (“Mary Lou Blues”) and her appraisal of free playing (“A Fungus Amungus”)… We also include (with one altered note) Williams’ contrafact on “Lady Be Good”, which was subsequently recorded as “Rifftide” by Coleman Hawkins and “Hackensack” by Thelonious Monk.” Adam and Johnny have produced a work which is simply incredible, a time machine which allows us to hear the inspiration behind so many jazz greats. This is already an album to which I find myself often returning, and while I can see me seeking out original music by Mary Lou in the future, I can only hope that Adam and Johnny will see fit to revisit her music and release another album in this series and their love of her style, their own connection to each other, and their musicianship, has made this an absolute delight. – Kev Rowland HOUSE OF PROG https://houseofprog.com/adam-fairhall-johnny-hunter-play-mary-lou-williams-2025/

Not long ago I wrote about Aaron Diehl’s Zodiac Suite, an album featuring music composed by Mary Lou Williams in the 40s. Pianist Adam Fairhall and drummer Johnny Hunter take on more of Williams’ oeuvre on Play Mary Lou Williams. Being a piano and drums duo, the result is of course quite different in sound than Diehl’s piano trio with lots of guests. And it’s on Discus Music, so you can expect an element of the avant-garde. Fairhall’s take on these pieces, some of which date from even before Zodiac Suite while some came later in her life, is an interesting blend of period-appropriate stride piano and more modern touches, up to and including free jazz. At one moment you might be thinking of Art Tatum, and then the next it’s Cecil Taylor. Hunter likewise incorporates some of the earliest sounds from jazz drumming along with unpredictable freedom, though he seems to be using the kind of kit that would have been available at the time. “Night Life” is a little gem that illustrates their breadth, taking the opening slower than Williams’ original 1930 recording, but very much showing a flair similar to hers, though Hunter’s part certainly takes it to different places. There are times when it almost sounds like the two musicians are playing different songs, but they hold it all together to hit landmarks in unison. A track like “A Fungus Amungus,” which was originally recorded in the early 60s, shows Williams moving well beyond the kinds of rhythms and harmonies that served as her roots. It’s almost like stride piano on an acid trip. – Jon Davis https://www.onemansjazz.ca/august-7-2025-1423/