Description
Marian McPartland was a musician, composer, and the host of Piano Jazz on NPR from 1978 to 2011. When State of the Arts was re-envisioned as a performance/interview program in the 1990s, McPartland composed a theme for our new series open, which went on to win a New York Emmy Award. In 1995, McPartland appeared as a guest on the program, improvising on the piano and talking to then-host Amber Edwards about her life, her career, and a new documentary based on the famous 1958 photograph of jazz musicians on a brownstone stoop in Harlem. She was there, one of only three women in the photo. Marian McPartland, born in 1918, died in 2013 at age 95.
