Donegan’s Legacy: Music, Imagination

Dorothy Donegan hit the jazz world at a time when it was not quite sure what to make of female instrumentalists. There were a few, of course, Lil Hardin, Mary Lou Williams and Melba Liston among them. But women in jazz were generally expected to make their way with their voices, as singers.

Donegan, who died Tuesday in Los Angeles at the age of 76, had other ideas. She studied at the Chicago Conservatory, had other ideas and never hesitated to make the piano the center of her creative expression. And her love of the instrument, her ability to use its most expansive resources, made her one of jazz music’s truly special instrumentalists.

She was best known for her versatility, for her ability to move, without a moment’s hesitation from boogie-woogie, to stride, to a classical piece to straight-ahead contemporary jazz. And there’s no denying that she did it very well. In 1994, at the Playboy Jazz Festival, her last major venue appearance in the Southland, she brought a generally lackadaisical crowd to life with a program that bounced ebulliently from “Caravan” to “Gee, Baby Ain’t I Good to You,” with bits and pieces of Beethoven, Gershwin, folk song and boogie-woogie thrown in for good measure. Even Bill Cosby, the show’s master of ceremonies, was dancing by the time she was finished.

Energetic as Donegan’s live performances were, however, they tended--by their sheer, dynamic spontaneity--to blur the impact of her jazz improvising. For that reason, her few recordings (especially her ‘90s releases on Chiaroscuro and the superb “Piano Retrospective” on Rosetta) provide a somewhat more insightful view of what a fine jazz artist she really was.

Would Donegan have had a different career if she had been male rather than female? Perhaps so, especially if the difference meant that her multiplicity of styles would have had the opportunity to focus in upon a more direct, less effusive form of expression.

But what Donegan had to offer was even more valuable just as it was: A musical imagination that saw no limits, that found fascinating, unexpected linkages between seemingly unrelated musics. And a creative perspective that was as unique and individual as any in the century-long history of jazz.