This series builds on Yoko Suzuki’s ongoing projects to showcase the music of influential female jazz composers and leaders. These women are rarely heard live in Pittsburgh because of the intricacy of their work or their unique approach to jazz music, but Yoko welcomes these intricacies as a challenge, and a way to expand her creative vehicle. Commemorating the tenth year since the passing of Marian McPartland, this concert will feature the arrangements of her original compositions and the songs she frequently played. This concert is funded by the Heinz Endowments Small Arts Initiative grant.

Marian McPartland was born and raised in Windsor, England in 1918, McPartland first studied classical piano but became interested in jazz and joined a vaudeville act. After marrying the American trumpeter Jimmy McPartland, she moved to the United States in 1946. She performed with her husband and many other notable musicians including Roy Eldridge and Helen Merrill, establishing her national reputation in the 1950s. During more than 60 years of her professional career, she made over 150 recordings with many different groups of various sizes from solo to big band. She was also successful as a host of National Public Radio’s “Piano Jazz,” which aired from 1978 to 2011. Her vast repertoire ranged from jazz standards, jazz arrangements of compositions by Leonard Bernstein and Alec Wilder to her own works.

Dr. Yoko Suzuki is a jazz saxophonist and ethnomusicologist who worked as a musician in Osaka, Japan and New York City before moving to Pittsburgh in 2006. She received an MA in musicology at Rutgers University in 2005 and Ph.D. in ethnomusicology and women’s studies at the University of Pittsburgh in 2011. She has taught a variety of courses including “History of Jazz,” “Introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies,” “Introduction to Feminist Theory,” and “Gender and Sexuality in Black Popular Music” at the University of Pittsburgh.

The Music of Marian McPartland with Strings with Yoko Suzuki