The death of the remarkable Marian McPartland on August 20 deprived the jazz world of one of its great musicians, and also deprived Eastman of a dear friend. She performed here many times, encouraged outstanding talent among jazz piano students, and rewarded it with the Marian McPartland jazz scholarship. (My one encounter with her was brief – a telephone call to check a few facts in a piece I was writing – but my impression of her was the same as everybody else’s: a personable, pleasant woman with an underlying tough-as-nails quality.)
She hosted NPR’s Piano Jazz for 30 years, with a completely undogmatic range of guests. Piano Jazz recently celebrated McPartland’s own compositions, and as an example of McPartland’s ease as an interviewer, here is a show with one of Eastman’s more famous alumni, the great jazz bassist Ron Carter.
Her typically elegant, understated performance of a great American standard gives this post its title.
