Library & Online Resources
Known for her adventurous, engaging music that heals the soul, pianist-composer-vocalist Deanna Witkowski moves with remarkable ease between Brazilian, jazz, classical, and sacred music. The award-winning bandleader releases her seventh recording, Force of Nature (MCG Jazz) in January 2022, a companion piece to her biography, Mary Lou Williams: Music For The Soul (Liturgical Press), published in September 2021. The two projects cap a twenty-year deep dive into the ground-breaking impact of Williams’ life and music, making Witkowski one of the few living authorities on the iconic pianist. As a sought after Williams expert, she has presented at the Kennedy Center, Duke University, Fordham University, and performed Williams’ compositions as a featured guest with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
Witkowski’s explosive performances combine virtuosity and heart, telling stories that reveal her innate curiosity of the human condition. She has recorded with Grammy nominees John Patitucci, Kate McGarry, and Donny McCaslin, and has performed and toured with renowned vocalists Lizz Wright, Nnenna Freelon, Erin Bode, Filó Machado, and Vanessa Rubin.
A prolific choral composer, Witkowski has won multiple competitions for her concert and sacred works. Commissions and new compositions have been funded by organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts (for her Afro-Brazilian project, the Nossa Senhora Suite) and the Choral Arts Initiative PREMIERE|Project Festival.
Witkowski is a second-year PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. Experience her work at deannajazz.com.
Select Bibliography
Most of the following books are not currently in the Barbour Library collection. The links below will take you to either Bookshop.org (which supports local bookstores), the author's online store, or Amazon.com, where you can purchase the book.
Kernoodle, Tammy. Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, 2004. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Witkowski, Deanna. Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul, 2021. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.
Books and Media in Barbour Library
Print books below may be checked out by PTS students, faculty, and staff, as well as local area patrons who have library accounts (requires an annual fee). Media items are indicated in parentheses. Ebooks are indicated by asterisks, and are available to current PTS students, faculty, and staff only.
*Free Jazz/Black Power by
In 1971, French jazz critics Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli co-wrote Free Jazz/Black Power, a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism. It remains a testimony to the long ignored encounter of radical African American music and French left-wing criticism. Carles and Comolli set out to defend a genre vilified by jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic by exposing the new sound's ties to African American culture, history, and the political struggle that was raging in the early 1970s. The two offered a political and cultural history of black presence in the United States to shed more light on the dubious role played by jazz criticism in racial oppression. This analysis of jazz criticism and its production is astutely self-aware. It critiques the critics, building a work of cultural studies in a time and place where the practice was virtually unknown. The authors reached radical conclusions--free jazz was a revolutionary reaction against white domination, was the musical counterpart to the Black Power movement, and was a music that demanded a similar political commitment. The impact of this book is difficult to overstate, as it made readers reconsider their response to African American music. In some cases it changed the way musicians thought about and played jazz. Free Jazz / Black Power remains indispensable to the study of the relation of American free jazz to European audiences, critics, and artists. This monumental critique caught the spirit of its time and also realigned that zeitgeist.
Call Number: ONLINEISBN: 9781626740846Publication Date: 2015-01-01
Jazz and Christianity (Music CD) by
Compact disc.
A lecture/concert tracing the relationship between the birth of jazz and the life of the church.
Call Number: M1366 .L68 1995Publication Date: 1995
Jazz: Myth and Religion
Why has jazz proved so troublesome to some and so fulfilling to others? Early on, "respectable" voices condemned jazz as profane, even diabolical, "the Devil's music," defiling received notions of art, sex and race, and threatening the very fabric of American life, to say nothing of that of Western civilization. Traces of these feelings remain in some influential quarters, both black and white. At the same time, some people discovered meanings in jazz more significant than those in any other music or art form. For them, jazz provided ecstatic experience not found in any concert hall or church--epiphanies and catharses carrying feelings of the sacred and magical. And these feelings, along with the charismas of jazz heroes--the Armstrongs, Parkers, and Coltranes--generated strong communal understandings and sect-like groupings with rituals and myths upholding and extending the jazz mystique. True believers genuinely felt their music could supernaturally alter their personal and social lives. Examining music and religion in the broad sense, Neil Leonard uses the work of Max Weber and his followers to consider how listeners have regarded jazz as sacred or magical and created myths and rituals to implement and sustain this belief. In a time when conventional religions are in flux or decline, jazz has provided a focus for spiritual impulses tempered by the anomie, anxieties, and alienations of the twentieth century, Leonard maintains. This book, then, tells us not only about music and society but also about religious behavior in a secular time. About the Author: Neil Leonard is Chairman of the Department of American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of Jazz and the White Americans.
Call Number: ML3506 .L44ISBN: 9780195042498Publication Date: 1987-04-09
The Jazz of Preaching : how to preach with great freedom and joy by
What if preachers were as contagiously joyful in their preaching as Louis Armstrong was in his playing and singing? As rich in their sermonic renderings as Sarah Vaughan was in her musical vocals? As honest about heartache as Billie Holiday was every time she sang about the blues of life? As alluringly clear as the angelic voice of Ella Fitzgerald? As tenaciously uninhibited in the action of creating as Duke Ellington? Of course, this is too much to ask of people, even those called by God. However, it is not too much to ask this question: Can preaching be enhanced through the metaphor of jazz? Can an understanding of the inner dynamics of jazz--its particular forms, rules, and styles--inform one's practice of preaching as well? Can jazz's simultaneous structure and spontaneity help preachers better understand their own art? The answer to these questions, says Jones, is an unqualified yes. He explains how one can dramatically improve one's preaching through understanding and applying key elements of the musical art form known as jazz. No musical background is necessary; all examples are well explained and tied in with preaching. The key elements include innovation (what one commentator refers to as "the experimental disposition of jazz"), improvisation, rhythm, call and response, honesty about heartaches, and delight. After discussing the reality and role of each of these elements in jazz, and how they can be important for preaching as well, each chapter concludes with five exercises for applying the jazz element to preaching preparation and performance. Drawing on a deep love of jazz and enlivening the discussion with insights drawn from the realities of African American preaching, Jones introduces readers to rich and rewarding possibilities for constructing and delivering the sermon.
Call Number: BV4211.3 .J66 2004ISBN: 9780687002528Publication Date: 2004-08-01Jazz psalms music from Jazz Vespers at Calvin College (Music CD) by Compact disc. Contents: 1. Psalm 100: Make a joyful noise -- 2. Psalm 139: You created my innermost being, O God -- 3. Psalm 63: My soul thirsts for God -- 4. Psalm 119: Your promise preserves my life -- 5. Psalm 79: Help us, O God our Savior, we are in great need -- 6. Psalm 27: The Lord is my light and my stronghold -- 7. Psalm 92: Though the wicked spring up like grass -- 8. Psalm 51: Wash me, O God -- 9. Psalm 85: He promises peace to his people -- 10. Psalm 146: Praise the Lord, O my soul -- 11. Psalm 25: Guide me in your truth, and teach me -- 12. Psalm 19: There is no speech or language -- 13. Psalm 107: Praise the name of the Lord -- 14. Psalm 98: Sing, sing a new song to the Lord God.
Call Number: M1366 .J39 2004Publication Date: 2004
Trombone Shorty by
The Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award-winning picture book biography from Grammy-nominated musician Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews and celebrated illustrator Bryan Collier "Who's that playing out there?" Bo Diddley asked the New Orleans crowd. It was a small child who'd been nicknamed "Trombone Shorty" because his trombone was twice as large as he was. Trombone Shorty was lifted in the air and carried through the audience until he reached the stage with Bo Diddley. He has been onstage ever since. Hailing from the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, where music always floated in the air, Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews didn't always have the money to buy an instrument, but he did have the dream to play music. This is the story of how he made his dream take flight. Today, Troy Andrews is a Grammy-nominated musician who tours the world with his band, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue. He continues to inspire hope for the next generation in New Orleans and for music lovers everywhere.
Call Number: ML ANDREWSISBN: 9781419714658Publication Date: 2015-04-14
More Barbour Library Resources by Subject
Click on the links below to perform subject searches in the library catalog:
Music -- Religious aspects -- Christianity
Select Bibliography
The articles below are not available in either the print or electronic Barbour Library journal collection. Please check your local library for interlibrary loan services in order to obtain copies.
McDonough, John. 2011. “Mary Lou Williams: Woman Of All Eras.” Downbeat 78 (4): 32
McPartland, Marian. 2010. “Gender Barriers? Observations Of A Working Pianist And Bandleader.” Downbeat 77 (3): 86
Sojourners. 2021. “Mary Lou Williams’ Jazz Is for the Masses. Deanna Witkowski Is Spreading the Word.” Sojourners Magazine 50 (8): 39–45.
Articles in Barbour Library
Articles that are available online have links, and are only available to current PTS students, faculty, and staff. Articles without links are in the print journal collection.
Alexander, Michael Scott. 2021. “The Conversion of Mary Lou Williams.” America 224 (2): 54–58.
Booker, Vaughn A. 2016. “Performing, Representing, and Archiving Belief: Religious Expressions among Jazz Musicians.” Religions 7 (8): 108.
Murchison, Gayle. 2002. “Mary Lou Williams’s Hymn ‘Black Christ of the Andes (St. Martin de Porres):’ Vatican II, Civil Rights, and Jazz as Sacred Music.” The Musical Quarterly 86, no. 4: 591–629.
Articles
- NPR.org: Mary Lou Williams, Missionary Of Jazz "Jazz helped Mary Lou Williams stay alive — but after several draining decades as a musician, she quit the scene. When she returned, she claimed her true power as one of jazz's fiercest advocates."
- Publisher's Weekly: Jazz Legend Mary Lou Williams’ Mass Appeal Interview with Deanna Witkowski
Other Links
- WZUM Jazz Pittsburgh Pittsburgh's Jazz Channel