Hesitation Boogie’s rollicking, driving feel motivated me to transcribe the complete recording as best I could after returning to California in 1980. This solo piano transcription melds elements of Mary Lou’s left-hand bass line with June Rotenberg’s bass in the recording.
Producing accurate notation in a transcription of the feel in a recording is difficult at best. In
Morning Glory, Linda Dahl’s biography of Mary Lou Williams, she quotes jazz editor Barry Ulanov “who knew Mary well [emphazing] another of her talents”:
One of the difficulties about jazz is that it’s very hard to notate it, but Duke Ellington could and so could Mary. Very few other people have been able to put on paper the feeling of jazz. There are always technical problems, and the rhythm is the most serious: you have to have such a tricky system of dots after notes in order to get the slight changes between values of ordinary eighth, quarter and sixteenth notes. She had discovered, because of her particular genius, a way to articulate on paper a jazz pattern—how to accent a measure. And that’s why her best stuff is among the best in jazz. (p. 99)
