Worcester’s First Lady of Jazz Radio
Mary Mardirosian came to WCUW in Worcester, Massachusetts, on a Tuesday morning in 1979 after hearing me make a plug for volunteers at the station. She called and spoke with the station’s General Manager, Alan West, who invited her to come over to the station, which was then in a dormitory basement at Clark University. She insisted that Al come out to the street to escort her into our lair, and told him she’d be driving a red Cadillac. That immediately signaled someone more secure in life than most of us ‘CUW staffers were.
Once she arrived, beautifully coiffed and attired, she told us that hearing “Bill” Basie on my show that morning had caught her ear. I’d never heard anyone call him anything but Count, and moments later when Duke Ellington’s name came up, she said she’d known “Edward” too. (Apropos of what’s now commonly known of Ellington’s powerful charm, she later told me, “Duke always made me feel like I was the only woman in the room, but I knew he made every other woman feel the same way.”)
Mary came to inquire about answering pledge drive phones or shipping premiums or doing anything else but hosting a radio show. But in the hour or two that she spent regaling us with stories of Basie and Ellington and other jazz greats whom she knew and loved, I became determined to hear her voice on the air. It took weeks of persuasion as she kept insisting that “broadcasting” (I can hear her Eastern Mass accent as plain as day saying those three syllables) was not for her. Still, I persisted, and proposed that she join me for a Basie 75th birthday tribute on August 21, 1979. I reassured her that I’d do most of the talking and man the control board, and convinced her that her stories and her passion for Basie needed to be heard.
The show went well, even though it was clear that the super ego in the room was the kid from Red Bank, as Mary kept asking, “What if Basie knew I was doing this?” It took another period of arm-twisting to get her to agree to hosting a show of her own. She eventually said she would as long as she didn’t have to operate the board, an indulgence that was made for her alone.
For the next few years, Mary was a big hit on WCUW, hosting the weekly “Jazz With Mary Mardirosian,” with Basie’s 1940 recording, “9:20 Special,” as her theme song. It wasn’t long after she became the talk of the town that I left WCUW to return to college in Amherst, and my contact with her became less frequent, an occasional phone call on a Sunday afternoon. After awhile, she became disgruntled with something at the station, and decided to take her show across town to Worcester’s public radio station, WICN. By the time she called me to hash out details of the conflict, she’d already made the move.
During the two or three years that I knew Mary well, she treated me and a friend to nights with the Basie band in Providence, Boston, Portsmouth, and other New England stops. She and her beloved husband Mardy, whom she’d lost a couple of years before she came to WCUW, were devoted fans of Basie and Ellington, and through them they knew everyone in the world of mainstream jazz. Mary and Mardy took vacations that coincided with East Coast tours by Basie and Ellington; attended jazz parties with Al and Zoot, “Jaws” and “Sweets,” Scott Hamilton and Warren Vache, Illinois Jacquet, Joe Williams, and dozens of other jazz greats; and every Monday, when big name players came to Worcester to play the El Morocco, Mary was their genial, first class host.
I met Basie, Mel Torme, Tony Bennett, and many others through Mary, and one of the first interviews I ever conducted was with her friend Art Farmer when he was visiting from Vienna. After concerts, Mary liked hanging in the common area backstage with band members who respected her as the lady who loved the music. Some of the players traveled with their wives, and Mary was family to them all. She’d hinted at it with me, but they made it clear that she’d been devastated by her husband’s death, and that the only relief she knew, albeit temporarily, was the music. I was incredibly moved when two of Basie’s trumpeters, Sonny Cohn and Willie Cook, told me that getting Mary behind the mic was a healing experience that had given her life a focus beyond grief, and that they’d seen her transformed by the new adventure.
So it saddens me today to learn that Mary Mardirosian died on Sunday at the age of 93. The picture of her that WICN’s Chet Williamson posted on Facebook this morning brought me up short. I have only a vague idea of how Mary spent the last two decades of her life, but it strikes me as terribly ironic to read in the obituary published in today’s Worcester Telegram & Gazette that she’d lost her hearing in recent years. Most of the cats she was close with have passed on, and I don’t know if she was in a condition to have stayed in touch with her old friend Clark Terry before his death last month. What is certain is that for a period of years in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Mary was as true a voice as jazz has ever known on the radio in Worcester, and she was a lady.