NEW YORK DAY BY DAY

By Robin Herman and Laurie Johnston

Jan. 10, 1983

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A Jazz Pianist's Holiday

A way from the white wine and sociable buzz of Michael's Pub or the Hotel Carlyle's Bemelmans Bar, it was a busy weekend for the jazz pianist Marian McPartland. She took her trio Saturday to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women and yesterday to Fountain House, the center for formerly hospitalized psychiatric patients far west on 47th Street.

Miss McPartland has played in a lot of New York's prisons, rehabilitation centers and juvenile detention homes. Twice at Attica she had musician-inmates sitting in for a set, and she said she found a ''remarkable'' female singer on Rikers Island. This weekend she played to knowledgeable audiences - an especially quiet one at Fountain House that later erupted in cheers and a standing ovation.

She had looked forward to meeting ''a woman who told Bedford Hills staff members she used to come to hear me at the Carlyle.'' The woman, a former nightclub singer, is serving a life sentence for having plotted the murder of her husband. But she did not show. ''I think she was afraid I'd ask her to sing,'' said Miss McPartland. ''I wouldn't have.''

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