Down at 18th and Vine, where it all started, she’s honored with an archway and historic marker at the corner of the old Attucks School and a medallion on the American Jazz Museum’s Jazz Walk of Fame. Taylor died in 2011, performing her last show at the age of 94 - the culmination of an 80 year career.

The group was featured on NPR’s “ Day to Day” program in 2007. Soon after moving back to Kansas City in 1994, she founded a jazz quartet - the Wild Women of Kansas City - with Geneva Price, Millie Edwards and Lori Tucker. Her adventure-filled life inspired the musical “ All For A Song.” She was an entertainer to her core, touring North America, Europe and Asia and settling in Frankfurt, Germany, where she owned a club during the 1970s. Compared to Ella Fitzgerald, she learned to forge her own path and carried the Kansas City style all over the world, with hits like “ Dig It” featuring Harlan Leonard’s Rockets (remixed here by French artist Minimatic) and “ Spider and the Fly” - though she was often cheated out of royalties. She started out as a dancer, but made her career as a singer. Though she traveled the world, she spent her golden years back in Kansas City. The Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City Often compared to Ella Fitzgerald, singer Myra Taylor learned to forge her own path and carried the Kansas City style all over the world.īorn in Bonner Springs, Kansas, but raised in the 18th and Vine district, Myra Taylor started performing when she was a teenager. In her honor, Mary Lou Williams Lane runs between the Paseo and Woodlawn Avenue, along 10th Street in Kansas City, Missouri. An example of her creative, complex style can be heard in the track “ A Fungus A Mungus,” recorded on the album “Black Christ of the Andes.” Williams evolved throughout her career, incorporating musical styles from blues and ragtime to the atonal avant garde works of Igor Stravinsky and Krysztof Penderecki. The Kansas City Jazz Orchestra performed a tribute to Williams in 2018, with big band arrangements of her Zodiac Suite, each sign linked to a jazz luminary. She was one of the inaugural inductees in the American Jazz Museum’s Jazz Walk of Fame in 2014. The greatest era of them all was Kansas City in the '30s,” Williams said at the time. “I’ve lived through four eras of jazz and I’ve played the styles of all of them. Choreography on “Mary Lou’s Mass” became part of the repertoire for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Williams came back to Kansas City in 1978 as a headliner with the nascent Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival, when her 'Mass' was performed (later in life, Williams became deeply religious and converted to Catholicism). Though born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when Mary Lou Williams arrived in Kansas City, she absorbed and transformed that essential swing style, taking it for the rest of her life as she traveled the world. The greatest era of them all was Kansas City in the thirties.' Library of Congress “I’ve lived through four eras of jazz and I’ve played the styles of all of them.

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