Remembering Dorothy Donegan

between the lines of photo criticism

Dorothy Donegan, one of the finest pianists of her generation, was performing at the Meridian alone, with an uninspired drummer. When the old gentleman couldn’t keep up, the virtuoso kept time with her stiletto heel louder and louder until she drowned the drums out. “Go see Dorothy,” Jimmy our bassist urged me after sitting in with her the previous evening. The impresario who booked the room was too cheap to pay for a trio, so Jimmy lugged his double bass in the subway to accompany the legendary performer. “She cries on every break. You gotta go see Dorothy.” When I saw her between sets, she appeared to be weeping as she blotted the perspiration from her face with a handkerchief. “You know Irv and Noble?” she asked when I told her I had come up in Minneapolis. Yes, I had worked with her old friends. Noble, an analphabetic shoeshine man by day and by night a bassist whose grooves were so deep you could swim across them, would tap his foot at the beginning of every song. Get him to stop tapping by the second measure was always the goal. When the rhythm was right Noble would dance with his bass on the balls of his feet. “How about the Mole,” Dorothy almost glared. No, Eddie the Mole had died before I could meet him, but I played in his funeral band and knew his signature shuffle. That convinced her. She invited her obliging drummer to sit the next set out and called me to the stage. Taking my place behind the foreign drums I looked to her for guidance. “Just swing me,” Dorothy commanded. “Play whatever you want, just make sure you swing me.” Rolling her powerful hands over the keyboard in a dazzling crescendo of Beethoven and blues brewed with Broadway boogie-woogie and stride, she launched us into ninety wild minutes of melodic fury.

Dorothy died in 1998 at age 76. Rather than publish a portrait of the musician when she was young and beautiful and full of promise, the Times printed a picture, snapped from a table below the stage five years before she died, of the artist as caricature, a bag lady at the piano. Apparently Dorothy’s “flamboyance” was “her downfall; her concerts were often criticized for having an excess of personality.” No doubt the photo editor chose that unflattering snapshot to illustrate the obituary’s infantilizing disrespect for one of the 20th century’s greatest jazz musicians.

When the set was over I asked to take her picture. “No pictures,” Dorothy laughed.

Portrait of Dorothy Donegan © agefotostock