All that Piano Jazz

Aged beautifully. Not the chat, there was always too much of that with Marian McPartland--dead at 96--but eventually she would play. As in this 1991 show with Rosemary Clooney. At the 38 minute mark, after reminiscing about Bing Crosby, they do one of the best versions of Cole Porter's Don't Fence Me in ever.

As always, the Telegraph does justice;

With the outbreak of war she joined Ensa, under the stage name Marian Page. In 1944, during the build-up to D-Day, she switched to USO, Ensa’s American equivalent, and was eventually sent to France, equipped with an accordion. “We were given fatigues and helmets and mess kits,” she recalled. “We lived in tents and ate in orchards and jumped into hedgerows when the Germans came over.”

She was playing piano at a jam session in a tent on the Belgian border when she met her future husband, Jimmy McPartland, an American cornetist with an already considerable reputation. They married at Aachen in February 1945.

The McPartlands returned to America in 1946, settling in an attic flat in Jimmy’s home town, Chicago. “One of Mummy’s dire predictions was 'If you become a musician, Margaret, you’ll marry a musician and live in an attic’. And that’s exactly what happened,” she recalled.

RIP