Saturday, November 30, 2019

Melba Liston (1926-1999): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher

SOUND PROJECTIONS



AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE



EDITOR:  KOFI NATAMBU



WINTER, 2019



VOLUME EIGHT    NUMBER ONE

 
HERBIE HANCOCK

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:


MELBA LISTON
(November 30-December 6)

KENNY CLARKE
(December 7-13)

LEONTYNE PRICE
(December 14-20)

JIMMY LYONS
(December 21-27)

PATRICE RUSHEN
(December 28-January 3)

ELVIN JONES
(January 4-10)

GARY BARTZ
(January 11-17)

HALE SMITH
(January 18-24)

BENNY CARTER
(January 25-31)

BENNY GOLSON
(February 1-7)

BENNY BAILEY
(February 8-14)

SKIP JAMES
(February 15-21)



https://www.allmusic.com/artist/melba-liston-mn0000404399/biography 







Melba Liston 

(1926-1999)

Artist Biography by

A fine section trombonist, Melba Liston achieved her greatest fame as an arranger, particularly for her projects with Randy Weston. She grew up in California and played with Gerald Wilson's Orchestra starting in 1943. Her most notable recording as a soloist was with Dexter Gordon in 1947. Liston worked with Count Basie (1948-1949), Dizzy Gillespie's big band (1949-1950), and backed Billie Holiday, but then spent a few years outside of music. She toured with and wrote for Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra (1956-1957) and visited Europe with Quincy Jones' big band (1959), staying with that orchestra into 1961. Liston then became a freelance arranger, working on sessions led by Weston, Johnny Griffin, and Milt Jackson, writing for the studios, teaching, and occasionally playing. A serious stroke confined her to a wheelchair from 1985 onward, but Liston still wrote for several latter-day Randy Weston projects in the years prior to her death on April 23, 1999. 


http://www.theheroinecollective.com/melba-liston/ 



BIOGRAPHY: Melba Liston – Jazz Trombonist

MELBA LISTON

Melba Liston was an African-American musician who became a brilliant star of the jazz world. Though best known as a composer and arranger, her incredible skill as a trombonist meant she also achieved fame as an instrumentalist, and she worked alongside some of the biggest names in music. Her unprecedented and varied career spanned five decades, seeing her become one of the industry’s extreme rarities; a successful female trombonist.
Melba was born in Kansas City in 1926, and when she was seven years old she was offered a choice of instruments to learn as part of her elementary school’s music programme. She chose a trombone because she found it beautiful. Only a year later she played it well enough to perform solo on local radio. In 1937, Melba and her mother moved to California where, at the age of sixteen, she took up her first professional engagement with the pit band of the Los Angeles Lincoln Theatre. Not only did she play there, but she also wrote and arranged musical scores for other performers.

Melba then joined composer and trumpeter, Gerald Wilson, both as a musician and as his assistant arranger, in his newly-formed big band. She also worked with tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon at this time, and the pair recorded a track called Mischievous Lady which Gordon had written especially as a tribute for her. Melba was starting to excel as a soloist and Dizzie Gillespie was so impressed with her skill that, when Gerald Wilson’s orchestra disbanded in 1948, he asked her to join his ensemble.

Melba played with Gillespie and his band in New York alongside musical luminaries such as John Coltrane and John Lewis. She loved working with such a progressive and exciting band but, due to financial constraints, the orchestra broke up only a year later.
After a short time touring with Count Basie, Melba joined the band hired to accompany Billie Holiday for a tour of America’s South. This was an extremely unhappy and difficult time in Melba’s career. The audiences were mostly small and indifferent, and she faced a great deal of hardship whilst on the road. Later in life, Melba would also speak of the profound difficulties she experienced being a woman in the music industry during this era. She not only found herself disregarded and ignored, but also suffered abuse, discrimination and even sexual assault.

When the tour with Billie Holiday came to an end, Melba was so disillusioned with the music industry that she temporarily turned her back on it. She returned to Los Angeles to take a clerical job at the Board of Education and also supplemented her income by taking small acting roles in several Hollywood movies.

Happily, during the late 1950s, Melba was lured back to music and joined Dizzie Gillespie’s latest big bebop band for tours to the Middle East, Asia and South America. She was both a writer and an arranger for the band and most commentators agree that she produced some of her finest work at this time.

In 1958, Melba formed her own all-female quintet and also recorded her only album as a band leader, Melba Liston & Her Bones – widely regarded as a jazz classic. She then went on to work with trumpeter Quincy Jones, who had formed a band to tour Europe with his Free and Easy show. She wrote consistently for this band, particularly standards and ballads, and continued to work with Jones when the ensemble returned to New York.
Across the following decade, Melba lived in New York, working as a freelance arranger and composer with various recording companies and for many prestigious artists, including Tony Bennett and Diana Ross. She also embarked on a wonderfully creative collaboration with pianist Randy Weston. The pair would work together for many years to come, producing a number of highly regarded and innovative recordings.

In 1973, Melba’s career took a different direction. She moved to Jamaica for six years and served as the Director of Popular Music Studies at the Jamaica Institute of Music. In 1975, she wrote and arranged the score for a film called Smile Orange, a sortie into Reggae music. On returning to the USA in 1979, Melba formed an all-female jazz band called the Melba Liston Company which headlined at the Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival.

Throughout the 1980s Melba continued to be actively involved in the jazz music scene as an arranger and composer, and in 1987 was awarded the Jazz Masters Fellowship of the National Endowment for the Arts. Sadly, her health began to decline in 1986 with the first of several strokes. She died in 1999 having made a unique and remarkable contribution to the music of the 20th Century.

References include All About Jazz, Arts.gov, The Guardian, The Independent, Indiana Public Media. ©The Heroine Collective 2015 – Present, All Rights Reserved.

https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/melbalist 




Melba Liston

Melba Liston is an NEA Jazz Master 
Born in Kansas City, Melba moved to Los Angeles as a child, and became a working musician at age sixteen. She learned to arrange and write, as well as play, and quickly found herself snapped up by Gerald Wilson, who hired her as a copyist, arranger, and trombonist during the War. When Wilson's band broke up in 1948, she joined Count Basie, and in 1949, Dizzy Gillespie. Her writing and arranging were formidable, and after Dizzy's big band folded in 1957, she stayed busy in New York with writing and playing. She returned to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, and moved to Jamaica in 1974, to teach at the Institute of Music there. She returned in 1979, settling in New York to lead her own group. She suffered a stroke in 1986 that ended her playing career, but continued to compose and arrange until her death in 1999.Melba appears on numerous big band sessions from 1945-57, and recorded one album as a leader. She occasionally returned to playing in her later years, and can be found on a handful of records, with luminaries like Quincy Jones, Randy Weston, Clark Terry, and Oliver Nelson, from the 1960s.


https://www.npr.org/2008/07/09/92349036/melba-liston-bones-of-an-arranger










Melba Liston: Bones Of An Arranger




Melba Liston: Bones Of An Arranger






Melba Liston performs on Art Ford's Jazz Party, a television program broadcast from Newark, N.J., in 1958.  Nancy Miller-Elliott/Courtesy of the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University 

One of the few women to succeed as both a jazz instrumentalist and an arranger, Melba Liston was a true jazz pioneer. In the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, she played trombone in the big bands of Gerald Wilson, Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones, and Clark Terry. As an accomplished arranger, Liston brought musical life to the songs of numerous great artists, ranging from Billie Holiday to Marvin Gaye, and including a lengthy collaboration with pianist and composer Randy Weston.

Born in 1926, Liston first laid eyes on the trombone in grade school; immediately, she said, she knew she wanted one. With encouragement from her family and music teachers, she began to develop her talent in school and local ensembles. One of her high-school friends, alto saxophonist Vi Redd, says that Liston was always musically ahead of her peers. "Melba's just always been an advanced musician," she says. "We had to struggle to keep up with her."

While in high school, Liston landed her first professional job at the Lincoln Theater pit band in Los Angeles. After a year of work, she worked as an assistant to arranger and composer Gerald Wilson, who was forming his first big band.

AUDIO:  <iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/92349036/92363021" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"></iframe>

https://www.wijsf.com/jazzwomen/melbaliston.html

"Melba Liston is one of the best jazz musicians, not just one of the best women in jazz." -- Junior Mance
 

Melba Liston was born on January 13, 1926, in Kansas City, MO. She made a reputation as an important jazz arranger, no small achievement in a field generally dominated by men. Much of her most important work was written for the pianist Randy Weston, with whom she worked for four decades from the early 60s.

Weston valued Liston's contributions to his recordings and concerts immensely, both for what he described as "the beauty, depth and sensitivity of her arrangements" and for her ability "to adapt to any situation, whether it's a chorus, or strings, or horns, or Africa."

She added creative layers of harmonic color and texture to Weston's memorable themes, a combination which proved highly effective from his great 60s albums like High Life and Uhuru Afrika through to recent recordings like Earth Birth (with Liston's string arrangements) and last year's Khepera.
She was born Melba Doretta Liston in Kansas City, but moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1937, where she played in a youth bands in high school before beginning her professional career working as a trombonist in a pit band in 1942. She began to write arrangements from that time, and joined the big band led by Gerald Wilson the following year.

She began to work with the emerging major names of the bebop scene in mid-decade. She recorded with saxophonist Dexter Gordon in 1947, and was the dedicatee of his tune "Mischievous Lady", and joined Dizzy Gillespie's big band in New York for a time, when Wilson disbanded his orchestra on the east coast after a tour.

She also toured with Billie Holiday in 1949, but decided in the early 50s that the rigors and privations of the touring circuit were not for her. She took a clerical job for some years, and supplemented her income by taking work as an extra in Hollywood, including appearances in The Prodigal and The Ten Commandments.

Gillespie invited her to re-join his big band when the State Department funded tours to Europe, the Middle East and Latin America in 1956 and 1957, and took what is her best known recorded trombone solo on Gillespie's tune "Cool Breeze" on the album Dizzy Gillespie at Newport, recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957.


She formed her own all-women quintet in 1958. She toured Europe with the theatre production Free and Easy in 1959, then worked for a time in the band led by the show's musical director, Quincy Jones. She worked with a variety of leaders in the 60s, including vibraphonist Milt Jackson and saxophonist Johnny Griffin, and began her long association with Weston. In 1973, she began a six-year teaching appointment at the Jamaica School of Music, and formed her own mixed band, Melba Liston and Company, after her return to the USA in 1979.


She was forced to give up playing in 1985 after a stroke left her partially paralyzed, but she continued to arrange music with Weston, contributing her imaginative, often strikingly dramatic arrangements to a succession of his albums in the 90s. She was afflicted by a further series of strokes in recent years, which eventually proved fatal.

 

https://jazzleadsheets.com/composers/melba-liston.html

Melba Liston


January 31, 1926 – April 23, 1999

Instrument trombone
Birthplace Kansas City, MO

Available Leadsheets


A prodigious musical talent, Melba Liston learned piano at age six in her hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. By eight, she had already taken up trombone and was talented enough at it to play solos on the local radio. When her family moved cross-country to Los Angeles, she began studying with Alma Hightower and playing in local youth bands. Melba soon outgrew children's music programs; at the age of 16, she parted ways with her musical mentor and joined the musicians' union to become a professional. Though she was young, she quickly secured a regular gig at the Los Angeles Lincoln Theater, an opportunity that allowed her to begin composing and arranging for some of the local talent.

In 1943, Melba joined Gerald Wilson's big band, a major turning point in her career. Her tours with Gerald brought her to New York, where the band replaced Duke Ellington in residency at the Apollo Theatre. She settled in NY and developed a career in her own right after the group disbanded in 1948; following her tenure with Mr. Wilson, she recorded with a small group led by Dexter Gordon, which included the composition Mischievous Lady, dedicated to Melba. She then went on to join Dizzy Gillespie's big band along with Gerald, John Coltrane, Paul Gonsalves and John Lewis. Just one year later, in 1949, Dizzy disbanded the group.

Next, Melba got the chance of a lifetime: to back Billie Holliday on a tour of the South. The experience was not all pleasant—the pre-Civil Rights era South was not ready for Billie's tour, and Melba reported that "The farther we got, the smaller the audience became and by the time we reached South Carolina there was just nobody." She was so disillusioned by the experience, and by the treatment she received from male musicians, that she gave up the trombone entirely, taking a clerical job and supplementing her income as an extra in Hollywood with appearances in The Prodigal (1955) and The Ten Commandments (1956).

Melba never gave up composing and arranging, thankfully, and her break from the trombone was not permanent. In 1956, the State Department invited Dizzy Gillespie to form a band to tour the Middle East and Asia, and Melba was one of his first picks. This time, the group played several of Melba's arrangements, considered to be some of the best of her writing —Annie's Dance, My Reverie, Stella By Starlight, and The Gypsy, all of which were recorded. After that, she began working with fellow Gillespie alum Quincy Jones and his orchestra as both a player and a writer until 1961, including a tour of Europe. During this time, Melba also recorded her only album as a leader, 1958's "Melba Liston and Her 'Bones."

Throughout the 1960s, Melba worked as a freelance writer and arranger in New York. She became the in-house arranger and conductor for the Riverside label, which led her to score the music for albums by Milt Jackson, Randy Weston, Gloria Lynne and Johnny Griffin, as well as arrange albums for Marvin Gaye, Bill Eckstine, and The Supremes. Melba had her most important collaboration: her work with Randy Weston. This long-term musical partnership began in 1959 and continued through 1998 with on-and-off arranging collaborations, yielding ten albums. Melba helped shape and embellish many of Randy's compositions and contributed greatly to his oeuvre. During this time, she also worked as an arranger for Motown and Stax Records, co-led a band with Clark Terry, and wrote for Duke Ellington, Tony Bennett and Abbey Lincoln. In 1973, Melba moved to Jamaica to teach for six years; upon returning, she formed an all-women's septet titled Melba Liston And Company.

Although a stroke in 1985 confined Melba to a wheelchair, she continued to compose and arrange, even learning computer music notation, until her death in 1999.

https://www.arts.gov/honors/jazz/melba-liston



NEA Jazz Masters



















Although a formidable trombone player, Melba Liston was primarily known for her arrangements, especially working with Randy Weston, and compositions. Growing up mostly in Los Angeles, some of her first work came during the 1940s with two West Coast masters: bandleader Gerald Wilson and tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon. In Gordon's small combos, she began to blossom as a trombone soloist, and Gordon wrote a song as a tribute to her, "Mischievous Lady." Despite her obvious talent as a soloist, Liston became an in-demand big band section player, which likely fueled her later work as an arranger. During the 1940s, Liston also worked with the Count Basie band and with Billie Holiday.

Following a brief hiatus from music, she joined Dizzy Gillespie's bebop big band in 1950, and again for two of Gillespie's State Department tours in 1956 and 1957, which included her arrangements of "Annie's Dance" and "Stella by Starlight" in performances. She started her own all-woman quintet in 1958, working in New York and Bermuda, before joining Quincy Jones' band in 1959 to play the musical Free and Easy. She stayed in Jones' touring band as one of two woman members until 1961.

In the 1950s, Liston began a partnership that she would return to on and off for more than 40 years. From the seminal 1959 recording Little Niles through 1998's Khepera, Liston was the arranger on many of Randy Weston's albums. Her arrangements, with a powerful base of brass and percussion and expressive solo performances, helped shape and embellish Weston's compositions.

Other affiliations during the 1960s included co-leading a band with trumpeter Clark Terry, and writing for the Duke Ellington orchestra, singers Tony Bennett and Eddie Fisher, and the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra. During the 1970s, she worked with youth orchestras in Los Angeles, continuing to write for Basie, Ellington, and singer Abbey Lincoln. Liston also became a staff arranger for the Motown label. Later that decade she took up residence in Jamaica, where she taught at the University of the West Indies and was director of Popular Music Studies at the Jamaica Institute of Music.

Slowed by a stroke in 1985, which effectively ended her playing career, she was able to resume work as a composer and arranger in the 1990s through the aid of computer technology. Liston's career helped pave the way for women in jazz in roles other than as vocalists.

Selected Discography:

Dizzy Gillespie, Dizzy In South America, Vol. 1 & 2, CAP, 1956 And Her 'Bones, Fresh Sounds Records, 1956-58
Quincy Jones, Q Live in Paris, Warner Brothers, 1960
Randy Weston, Tanjah, Verve, 1973
Randy Weston/Melba Liston, Volcano Blues, Verve, 1993

Obituary: Melba Liston


THE CODE of behaviour at ladies' finishing schools never recommended taking up the trombone. The instrument didn't rival the piano or the cello in drawing room decorum. And yet the only two well-known women trombonists were both glamorous to look at. Melba Liston was one of them and the English Annie Whitehead, assured enough to appear naked with her horn on the sleeve of her last CD, was the other.
Melba Liston certainly saw every side of show business. On one occasion she was stranded with Billie Holiday, both of them broke, in a hostile South Carolina, and on another she walked about playing a harp in the film The Ten Commandments (1956). She suffered the perils of being the only woman in travelling big bands. "Rapes and everything. I've been going through that stuff for all my life. `Yeah, well, you know, it's a broad and she's by herself.' I'd just go to the doctor and tell him, and that was that. But the older I got, the less it happened. I don't know how old I was," she laughed, "but it stopped all together."


It was her talents as a composer and arranger that distinguished her, rather than her work as an instrumentalist. She wrote scores for innumerable big bands including those of Quincy Jones, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie. Her long association with her mentor, the pianist and composer Randy Weston, took her to the forefront of modern jazz and Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday, Abbey Lincoln and Diana Ross were among the vocalists that commissioned work from her. She recalled,
I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, but I was raised between there and Kansas City, Kansas, where my grandparents were. I got my trombone when I was seven. They decided to form a music class at my elementary school and a travelling music store came with a variety of instruments. When I saw the trombone I thought how beautiful it looked and knew I just had to have one. No one told me that it was difficult to master. All I knew was that it was pretty and I wanted one.

She had problems using the slide: "I was tall then, but I didn't reach to sixth and seventh position. I used to have to turn my head sideways." By the time she was eight, Liston was good enough to play solo trombone on the local radio. Her mother had found a trombone teacher for her. "He wasn't right. I don't know how, but I knew. So I said no, cancelled, and went on my own. I was always good in my ears, so I could play by ear."

The family moved to Los Angeles in 1937. Liston was bright enough to join high school there in the eighth grade, although she had only been in the sixth in Kansas. "My music teacher at the school was real nice. He rode home with me and asked my mother could he adopt me. He said he wanted to further my music and he wanted to send me off to some teachers. But I didn't go, I just wanted to stay home with my mom." Some of her schoolfriends introduced Liston to Alma Hightower, a music teacher who ran a big band made up of children from the neighbourhood. But the two fell out after four years when, at 16, Liston joined the musicians' union. Her teacher thought that she wasn't ready for such a step.

Liston joined the pit band at the Lincoln Theatre in Los Angeles:
They would have a movie and then the show would take over. The all-girl Sweethearts of Rhythm band played at the Lincoln and they wanted to take me with them when they finished. I was riding with two of them and they got to carrying on - I mean not carrying on with each other. And I said, "I'll be back", and I went and hid. Then I went and told my mother. I went on back with the band at the Lincoln. I was writing music by this time for this time for different acts who would come in and didn't have their music. I was at the Lincoln for about a year, I guess.
In 1943 the theatre stopped having shows and Liston joined a new big band being formed by the trumpeter Gerald Wilson, who had just left the Jimmy Lunceford band. Wilson's band was good enough to go out on tour and when it reached New York took over from Duke Ellington at the Apollo Theatre. It made records back in Los Angeles, and Liston also recorded in a small group with the tenorist Dexter Gordon, an old schoolfriend. Gordon had composed "Mischievous Lady", one of the numbers they recorded, as a tribute to Liston. "My big influences were Tommy Dorsey and Lawrence Brown, but I didn't work towards being a front-line soloist," she said. "I was a slow player, a ballads and blues player. My ear was all right but I was involved in arranging all the time and didn't go jamming and stuff like that."
Liston stayed with Gerald Wilson until in 1948 the band broke up in New York. She and Wilson joined Dizzy Gillespie's progressive big band that at that time included the saxophonists John Coltrane and Paul Gonsalves and the pianist John Lewis. "That was a fantastic band and so different to anything that had ever happened in California," said Liston. "The music, the whole attitude and personality of the band was so exciting, I just couldn't believe it."
When Gillespie broke the band up in 1949, Liston went again with Gerald Wilson, who had been hired to form a band to accompany Billie Holiday on a tour of the South. "It was a little ahead for people down there. They weren't ready for Billie Holiday and this Bebop band, what they really wanted was dance music. The farther we got, the smaller the audience became and by the time we reached South Carolina there was just nobody. We finally made it to Kansas City and then sent for money from Los Angeles. It was two days getting to us. So we had a lot of oatmeal."
Liston was so disillusioned that she left the band and gave up music. She returned to Los Angeles where, for three years, she took a job as an administrator for the Board of Education. She temporarily gave up the trombone, but continued to compose and arrange. "The job was good experience and brought me out a little. I used to be very shy and hardly ever spoke to strangers, so it kind of freed me up." At this point she had a brief subsidiary career as a film actress. She said of this experience:

I had a long thing with Lana Turner and walked around behind her playing a harp in The Prodigal (1955) and was a member of the palace orchestra in The Ten Commandments. I was tall and skinny then and they said that had they known about me sooner they could have used me in several of those Egyptian movies. I never really took acting seriously. It was nice doing those movies but they're all crazy out there in Hollywood.
In 1956 Gillespie was invited to form a big band to tour the Middle East and Asia on behalf of the State Department. Liston gave up the administrative job and rejoined the band. She returned to it the following year when the State Department sent Gillespie to South America. This was a historic band and it had some of Liston's best writing at the heart of its library. Her best arrangements for it included "Annie's Dance", "My Reverie" , "Stella By Starlight" and "The Gypsy", all of which were recorded. Fellow musicians abused her at this time: "When I started going with Gerald Wilson I was okay because I had his support so I didn't have to worry. But when I went back into Dizzy's band, it was the same thing all over again." She appeared with Gillespie's band at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957, and the subsequent recording survives as one of the most exciting of all big-band albums. Liston played a powerful solo on the piece "Cool Breeze".
Quincy Jones had been a trumpeter in Gillespie's band and when he formed a band to tour in Europe with the show "Free and Easy" with music by Harold Arlen he asked Liston to join. "Several of us who were in Dizzy's band went with Quincy's orchestra. I was writing all the time for that band and Quincy would write the light tunes. They were his kind of thing. Ernie Wilkins wrote the hard-swinging Basie-type numbers and I did the ballads and standards. We had a nice little family circle going." Despite its popularity the package hit financial problems, and the musicians had great difficulty getting back to New York where, loyal to Jones, they rejoined his band when he put it together again.

Liston spent most of the Sixties working in New York freelancing as an arranger and playing on studio sessions. She was house arranger and conductor for the Riverside record label. She scored the music for albums by Milt Jackson, Randy Weston, Gloria Lynne and Johnny Griffin. She also arranged albums for Marvin Gaye, Billy Eckstine and the Supremes. She worked often with the trumpeter Clark Terry and they briefly co-led a big band. She also played for Charlie Mingus, appearing at his infamous New York Town Hall concert of 1962.
But the most important event of the period was the establishment of her long-term musical partnership with Randy Weston who was also working for Riverside. Initially he employed her to put flesh onto his compositions. "Melba is incredible; she hears what I do and then expands it," said the composer. "She will create a melody that sounds like I created it. She's just a great, great arranger."
Returning to Los Angeles in the late Sixties she worked with youth orchestras. She moved to Jamaica in 1973, staying there until 1979. She taught at the University of the West Indies and the Jamaica Institute of Music in Kingston. On her return to Los Angeles she formed an all-girl septet called Melba Liston and Company. The group was the main attraction at the 1979 Kansas City Women's Jazz Festival. Although she dropped the all-girl line up, the band survived until 1983.

The partnership with Weston flourished and in all the two made many albums together, including Blues to Africa, High Life, Little Niles, Spirits of Our Ancestors, Tanjah, Music of the New African Nations, Volcano Blues and Music of the New African Nations. "We never said it directly," said Weston, explaining the philosophy of their composing,
but we both knew that to do a recording we would want to have the older musicians to give us that foundation, and then we would get the younger musicians on top. The older musicians have the know-how, they know all the secret things that we don't know about music. Melba always made sure that we would have that kind of base.
Liston was due to appear at the Camden Jazz Festival in 1986 but was prevented from doing so by the first of several strokes, and from then on was confined to a wheelchair. Subsequent strokes forced her to give up playing, but she continued to compose and arrange. Last week a concert was given in her and Randy Weston's honour at Harvard University.

Melba Doretta Liston, trombonist, composer and arranger: born Kansas City, Missouri 13 January 1926; married; died Los Angeles 23 April 1999.

https://thegirlsintheband.com/2013/11/melba-liston/

Melba Liston


by Nicole Williams Sitaraman

Melba Liston was a trombone player who was nothing less than a force of nature. In addition to being sought after for her second-to-none slide playing, she became widely revered for her jazz arrangements and compositions. She is, without question, one of the unsung heroes of the jazz genre.
 
She was born in Kansas City, MO on January 13, 1926. When she was seven years old, Melba selected the trombone as her instrument of choice as part of her elementary school’s new music program. She later reflected that as a little girl, she chose the trombone because she thought it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. As a youngster learning to play the slide, she quickly learned how difficult playing the trombone was but she stuck with it. Only a year later, she was good enough to play a solo on a local radio station.

In 1937, her family moved to Los Angeles and Melba’s mother matched her with a music teacher named Alma Hightower. Melba studied with Hightower for a few years but by the time Melba reached the age of sixteen, she decided to become a professional musician and joined the musicians union. She became a member of the band of the Los Angeles Lincoln Theater. During her period with the Lincoln Theater band, she interfaced with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and also began composing and arranging for other acts performing at Lincoln Theater. This spirit of musical entrepreneurship and creativity would carry Melba throughout her illustrious career as a trombone player, composer and arranger (roles rarely given or attributed to women in jazz during this era).
 
After her stint at the Lincoln Theater, she joined a band newly-formed by trumpeter Gerald Wilson and also recorded with Dexter Gordon. Melba stayed with Wilson’s band through 1948 when the band broke up. She then joined Dizzy Gillespie’s big band which, at the time, included musicians such as John Coltrane and John Lewis. Melba enjoyed working in this exciting band full of talented artists but Gillespie disbanded the group only a year later. She (and her former bandleader Gerald Wilson) then joined a band backing Billie Holiday on tour. The experience of touring throughout the south with Holiday’s band, coping with the strains of limited income and even more limited audiences, was strenuous, disheartening and exhausting for Melba. In later years, Melba spoke candidly about the extreme difficulties of being a female jazz musician during this era. More than being shunned or overlooked, she, and likely many other women musicians trying to make their way, were abused. However, despite consistent abuse by male musicians, Melba found strength and motivation in her music.

She later left Billie Holiday’s band, stopped playing the trombone and moved back to Los Angeles where she worked in a clerical position in the city’s Board of Education. She stopped playing the slide but her creativity and love of music prevented her from abandoning arranging and composing altogether. Melba quickly became known and respected in music as a savvy and remarkable bebop jazz arranger. Her later work would demonstrate her stellar ability to transcend categories and embrace post-bop, Afrobeat and Motown sounds in her compositions.


During the 1950’s, Melba tried her hand at small roles in film, including bit background parts in The Prodigal and the Ten Commandments. However, in 1956, she returned to playing her trombone in Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra commissioned by the U.S. State Department as a musical ambassador of the U.S. in South America. She wrote and arranged many of her most memorable tunes during her work with Dizzy’s ambassador orchestra including “Stella By Starlight,” “My Reverie,” and “The Gypsy.” She later transitioned into working with Quincy Jones (a fellow alum of Dizzy Gillespie’s band) and his orchestra as both a player and writer until that group fell on difficult financial times. In 1958, Melba Liston recorded her only album as a leader, Melba Liston and Her ‘Bones – a true gem in jazz history.

She later settled in New York and worked as a freelance arranger and composer for studio sessions of various artists including Marvin Gaye, Milt Jackson, Randy Weston, Gloria Lynne and the Supremes. During the 1960’s is when Melba’s best collaborative relationship – partnering with Randy Weston – flourished. Randy Weston simply adored her expert musical abilities and they worked together on a number of projects for many years to come. In fact, their collaborations produced several notable albums including the critically acclaimed albums Uhuru Afrika (1960) and Highlife (1963). I would venture to say that Melba was a pioneer in the explicit melding of contemporary African rhythms and intonations with American jazz. I am sure Fela Kuti took a listen to these albums on occasion.

During the 1970’s, Melba Liston spent six years in Jamaica on a music education appointment at the University of Jamaica and served as director of popular music studies at the Jamaica Institute of Music. When she returned to the US, she formed an all-female jazz band called the Melba Liston Company which headlined at the Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival. The band was discontinued in 1983.

Melba continued to be actively involved in the jazz scene as an arranger and composer including critically acclaimed projects with Randy Weston through the 1990’s. Unfortunately, her health declined with the first of several strokes in 1986. Melba Liston passed away in 1999 but left a phenomenal legacy as a jazz trailblazer.

Sources:

http://elvispelvis.com/melbaliston.htm
http://www.fyicomminc.com/jazzwomen/melbaliston.htm
http://www.randyweston.info/randy-weston-sidemen-pages/melba-liston.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3812/is_200003/ai_n8890639/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melba_Liston
http://curtjazz.wordpress.com/tag/jazz-trombone/

https://vimeo.com/214875954 

Make No Bones About Melba Liston



It’s a cliché born from a kernel of truth that jazz is considered a man’s game. But throughout the history of this distinctly American innovation, women have played pioneering — if sometimes unsung — roles. Gifted trombonist and arranger Melba Liston was prime among them.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, Liston played in the big bands of luminaries like Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Quincy Jones. Later, she led her own groups and created challenging arrangements with the likes of Billie Holiday and Marvin Gaye. “Melba was one of the greatest jazz musicians of her era,” says Marshall Lamm, of San Francisco’s SFJazz Center. “She broke down so many barriers.”

This month,  the up and coming jazz trombonist and vocalist Natalie Cressman and her quintet celebrated Liston as part of the center’s monthlong celebration focused on women and jazz. Cressman comes with her own sterling musical heritage. Her father, Santana sideman Jeff Cressman, also plays trombone; her mother is jazz vocalist Sandy Cressman; and Natalie “does both with aplomb,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle. A former member of the SFJazz High School All-Stars, Cressman, 24, has already shared the stage with jazz luminaries such as Miguel Zenón, Wycliffe Gordon, Joe Lovano and Carlos Santana.

Her latest album, Turn the Sea, mixes jazz and pop hooks with a world beat into an eclectic mix that displays influences from her time touring with Phish front man Trey Anastasio’s seven-piece rock band. She says it’s all about “cross-pollination” in her selections. “I try to get across my point of view with the genres I include.”

http://somejazzandswing.blogspot.com/2018/12/melba-liston.html

MELBA LISTON 

Melba Liston, Jazz musician (1926-1999) American jazz trombonist, musical arranger, and composer
MELBA LISTON


Trombone – Al Grey (# 3, 6, 7), Bennie Green (# 3, 6, 7), Benny Powell (# 3, 6, 7), Frank Rehak (# 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9 to 12), Jimmy Cleveland (# 1, 2, 4, 5, 8), Melba Liston Trombone, Tuba – Slide Hampton (# 1, 2, 4, 5, 8) Baritone Saxophone – Marty Flax (# 9 to 12) Bass – George Joyner (# 3, 6, 7), Nelson Boyd (#9 to 12) Drums – Charlie Persip (# 3, 6, 7, 9 to 12), Frank Dunlop (# 1, 2, 4, 5, 8) Guitar – Kenny Burrell (# 3, 6, 7) Piano – Ray Bryant (# 1, 2, 4, 5, 8), Walter Davis Jr. (# 9 to 12) ........................................................ 1 Christmas Eve 4:57 2 What’s My Line Theme 4:18 3 You Don’t Say 3:55 4 The Dark Before The Dawn 3:18 5 Pow! 4:01 6 Blues Melba 6:30 7 The Trolley Song 2:31 8 Wonder Why 3:58 9 Insomnia 3:29 10 Very Syrian Business 4:22 11 Never Do An Abadanian 5:07 12 Zagred This 4:41 ........................................................ Recorded -  #3,6,7: New York City, December 22, 1958  #1,2,4,5,8: New York City, December 24, 1958 
#9-12: New York City, June, 1956 

All That Jazz Don Kaart 

Melba Doretta Liston (January 13, 1926 – April 23, 1999) was an American jazz trombonist, arranger, and composer. She was the first woman trombonist to play in big bands during the 1940s and 1960s, but as her career progressed became better known as an arranger particularly in partnership with pianist Randy Weston.


Liston was born in Kansas City, Missouri. At the age of seven, Melba's mother purchased her a trombone. Her family was very encouraging of her musical pursuits, as they were all music lovers. Melba Liston was primarily self-taught, but "encouraged by her guitar-playing grandfather," who she spent significant time with learning to play spirituals and folk songs.At the age of eight, she was already good enough to be soloing on the local radio station. At the age of ten, she moved to Los Angeles, California. She was classmates with Dexter Gordon, and friends with Eric Dolphy. After playing in youth bands and studying with Alma Hightower and others, she joined the big band led by Gerald Wilson in 1944. She began to work with the emerging major names of the bebop scene in the mid-1940s. She recorded with saxophonist Dexter Gordon in 1947, and joined Dizzy Gillespie's big band (which included saxophonists John Coltrane, Paul Gonsalves, and pianist John Lewis) in New York for a time, when Wilson disbanded his orchestra in 1948. Liston initially performed in a supporting role and was nervous when asked to take solos, but with encouragement she became more comfortable as a featured voice in the bands.She toured with Count Basie for a time, and then with Billie Holiday (1949) but was so profoundly affected by the indifference of the audiences and the rigors of the road that she gave up playing and turned to education instead. Liston taught for about three years.


She took a clerical job for some years, and supplemented her income by taking work as an extra in Hollywood, including appearances in The Prodigal (1955) and The Ten Commandments (1956). She re-joined Gillespie for tours sponsored by the US State Department in 1956 and 1957, recorded with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (1957), and formed her own all-women quintet in 1958. In 1959, she visited Europe with the show Free and Easy, for which Quincy Jones was music director. She accompanied Billy Eckstine with the Quincy Jones Orchestra on At Basin Street East (originally released October 1, 1961, for Verve Records).


In the 1960s she began collaborating with pianist Randy Weston, arranging compositions (primarily his own) for mid-size to large ensembles. This association, especially strong in the 1960s, would be rekindled in the late 1980s and 1990s until her death. In addition, she worked for a variety of leaders including Milt Jackson, Clark Terry, and Johnny Griffin, as well as working as an arranger for various Motown records, even appearing on albums by Ray Charles and others. In 1964, she helped establish the Pittsburgh Jazz Orchestra. In 1971 she was chosen as Musical Arranger for a Stax Records recording artist named Calvin Scott whose album was being produced by Stevie Wonder's first producer Clarence Paul. On this project she worked with Joe Sample and Wilton Felder of the Jazz Crusaders, blues guitarist Arthur Adams, and jazz drummer Paul Humphrey. Due to the financial issues at Stax Records when this album was released in 1972 it did not chart, but Melba's arrangements on the album are some of her finest work. In 1973, however, she once again took a break from her US-based musical projects, moving to Jamaica to teach at the Jamaica School of Music for six years (1973–79), before returning to the USA to lead her own bands.


During her time in Jamaica, she composed and arranged the music for the classic 1975 comedy film Smile Orange (starring Carl Bradshaw, who three years earlier starred in the very first Jamaican film, The Harder They Come). The Smile Orange experience was probably her only known venture into composing reggae music (on which, in this case, she collaborated with playwright Trevor Rhone for the lyrics). The soundtrack of Smile Orange was given a very limited release in Jamaica on the Knuts label.


She was forced to give up playing in 1985 after a stroke left her partially paralyzed, but she continued to arrange music with Randy Weston. In 1987, she was awarded the “Jazz Masters Fellowship” of the National Endowment for the Arts. After suffering from repeated strokes, she died in Los Angeles, California, in 1999, a few days after a major tribute to her and Randy Weston’s music at Harvard University. Her funeral, held at St. Peter’s in Manhattan, featured extensive musical performances by Weston with Jann Parker (performing Liston’s composition “African Lady”), as well as by Chico O’Farrill’s Afro-Cuban ensemble and by Lorenzo Shihab (vocals).



Composing and arranging


Melba Liston made a reputation as an important jazz arranger, no small achievement in a field generally dominated by men. Her early work with the high-profile bands of Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie shows a strong command of the big-band and bop idioms. However, perhaps her most important work was written for Randy Weston, with whom she worked for four decades from the early 1960s. The critically acclaimed albums Uhuru Afrika (1960) and Highlife (1963), both of which feature exclusively Weston’s compositions with Liston’s arrangements for large ensemble, are considered jazz masterpieces. Uhuru Afrika, as described in the liner notes by Langston Hughes (who penned lyrics for the second movement), is “a composed composition...and an ordered and arranged composition”; the work, broken into four long movements, demonstrates Liston’s abilities to blend African-oriented rhythms and percussion with jazz horn-playing and orchestration in a large-scale form. In many respects, this album and Highlife, three years later, can be seen as comparable works to those of Miles Davis and Gil Evans of roughly the same period, but oriented toward Africa and African musics instead of the European-influenced harmonies and melodies in the Davis/Evans works. These two Weston-Liston albums also presage the rising awareness of and explicit prominence given to African music in the 1960s, especially as part of the free jazz/”New Thing” movement.


Liston also worked as a "ghost writer" during her career, meaning that she was paid under the table to complete arrangements for other composers, to whom the work would be attributed. This was not an uncommon practice, but considering the gender dynamics of the industry, the lack of acknowledgement of her ghostwriting places her compositions into further obscurity. According to scholars, "Many of the arrangements found in the Gillespie, Jones, and Weston repertoires were accomplished by Liston. In fact, there is much speculation that many of the television and motion-picture theme songs attributed to Quincy Jones during the late 1950s and 1960s were assisted or completed by Liston in her capacity as a ghost writer."

Resultado de imagen de melba liston


Social meaning

Liston was a female in a profession of mostly males. Although some consider her an unsung hero,[9] she is highly regarded in the jazz community. Liston was a trailblazer in her own right, as a trombonist and a woman. She articulated difficulties of being a woman on the road. "There's those natural problems on the road, the female problems, the lodging problems, the laundry, and all those kinda things to try to keep yourself together, problems that somehow or other the guys don't seem to have to go through."She goes on to recount the struggles she experienced as an African American woman, which affected her musical career.However, she generally spoke positively about the camaraderie with, and support from male musicians. In addition to dynamics with fellow musicians, Liston also dealt with larger issues of inequity in the music industry. Scholars note, "It was clear that she had to continually prove her credentials in order to gain suitable employment as a musician, composer, and arranger. She was not paid equitable scale and was often denied access to the larger opportunities as a composer and arranger." Although she dealt with misogyny and sexism throughout her career, she did have a few favorites with whom she played, one of them being Dizzy Gillespie. From the 1940s through the 1960s, she was the first woman trombonist to work in the big bands of Gillespie, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones, Gerald Wilson, and Clark Terry.
Liston's musical style reflects bebop and post-bop sensibilities learned from major bop figures such as Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, and Art Blakey. Even in her earliest recorded work—such as Gordon's "Mischievous Lady" a tribute to her—her solos show a blend of motivic and linear improvisation, though they seem to make less use of extended harmonies and alterations.
Her arrangements, especially those with Weston, show a flexibility that transcends her musical upbringing in the bebop 1940s, whether working in the styles of swing, post-bop, African musics, or even Motown.[citation needed] Her command of rhythmic gestures, grooves, and polyrhythms is particularly notable (as illustrated in Uhuru Afrika and Highlife). Her instrumental parts demonstrate an active use of harmonic possibilities; although her arrangements suggest relatively subdued interest in the explorations of free jazz ensembles, they use an extended tonal vocabulary, rich with altered harmonic voicings, thick layering, and dissonance. Her work throughout her career has been well received by both critics and audiences alike.

Melba Liston, a marvelous trombonist, composer and arranger

by Herb Boyd 
November 10, 2019
Amsterdam News
NYC
The esteemed pianist and bandleader Randy Weston wrote a song in tribute to her musical genius.

Coming of age in Los Angeles, Melba Liston, the noted jazz trombonist and composer, attended high school with the famed saxophonist Dexter Gordon. She spent many hours in the company of the great multireedist Eric Dolphy. The esteemed pianist and bandleader Randy Weston wrote a song in tribute to her musical genius.

Quite apart from the significant others cited here, the operative word is “genius,” and she was still a child when evidence of it began to flower. Born Jan. 13, 1926, in Kansas City, Mo., Melba Doretta Liston was 7 years old when her parents bought her a trombone. She had seen the instrument when a traveling music store came to her elementary school. “When I saw the trombone,” she said, “I thought how beautiful it looked, and I knew I just had to have one. No one told me that it was difficult to master.”
Despite the challenge of learning the slide and having to turn her head sideways to reach certain notes in the slide positions, in the matter of a year Liston was proficient enough on the horn to begin performing on a local radio show. After a disappointing experience with a teacher, she began teaching herself to play by ear. The family relocated to Los Angeles in 1937, and almost immediately she was promoted to high school, although she had only been in the sixth grade in Kansas City.

Liston had better success with another teacher, Alma Hightower, but by the time she was 16 she was a member of the musicians’ union and ready to embark on a professional career. One of her first gigs was with the band of the Lincoln Theater in Los Angeles. Working there provided her an opportunity to engage members of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, occasionally writing arrangements for them and other groups at the theater.

When trumpeter Gerald Wilson formed his new band, Liston joined and she remained there until 1948. Her next stop was with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band, and that put her in close proximity on the bandstand with such luminaries as John Coltrane and John Lewis. But the stint here, although instructive, lasted only a year. she was soon back with Wilson in a band that traveled with Billie Holiday. Their tour dates in the South, as it was for many African-American musicians then, was stress-filled, mainly because of the inconvenience of racism and segregation.

According to Weston, “On one occasion, she was stranded with Billie Holiday, both of them broke, in a hostile South Carolina, and on another, she walked about playing a harp in the film ‘The Ten Commandments.’”

Liston offers a different version of this experience. “I had a long thing with Lana Turner and walked around behind her playing a harp in ‘The Prodigal’ [1955] and was a member of the palace orchestra in ‘The Ten Commandments,’” she recalled. “I was tall and skinny then, and they said that had they known about me sooner, they could have used me in several of those Egyptian movies. I never really took acting seriously. It was nice doing those movies, but they’re all crazy out there in Hollywood.”

Proving Herself: Melba Liston, Arranger And First Lady Of Trombone

Melba Liston playing trombone

When Melba Liston came of musical age in 1940s California, the path for a woman wanting to become an arranger/composer and an instrumentalist in the jazz world was not only easy, it was almost non-existent. Liston persevered through a long lifetime of achievement, becoming the first major female soloist on trombone, and a first-rank arranger and composer who worked with Gerald Wilson, Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, Randy Weston, Quincy Jones, and other notable jazz colleagues.

"Like Jackie Robinson"


In a 2014 special issue of Black Music Research journal devoted to Liston, she was described as a "Renaissance woman." The description invoked the ideals that emerged for black identity during the Harlem Renaissance in the early 20th century; but for Liston, as a woman, the challenge was twofold, as she entered a mid-20th-century cultural landscape that treated women with disdain, exclusion, and often sexual abuse. "I had to prove myself, like Jackie Robinson," Liston said decades later, and she did, mastering her instrument, soloing with some of the most significant orchestras of her time, crafting numerous advanced and creative charts for the bands in which she performed, collaborating for several decades with Weston, and leaving behind an artistic and social legacy that continues to invite exploration and discussion today.

Liston was born in Kansas City in 1926, spending her first years in the city that was playing host to a future jazz giant, pianist and arranger/composer Mary Lou Williams. When Liston was six or seven she said she saw a trombone, "just beautiful, standing up in the shop window like a mannequin, and I was just mesmerized by it… it just did something to me." Her mother bought it for her. In 1936 her family moved to Los Angeles, where Liston studied with a woman named Alma Hightower, an early advocate for black culture, through a WPA musical instruction program that played a crucial role in building Liston's musical foundation.

By the early and mid-1940s Liston was getting some of her earliest chances to prove herself in Los Angeles' thriving jazz scene , playing with and writing for Gerald Wilson's progressive big-band, and being invited to make a recording with an up-and-coming bebop musician who was also a former classmate-Dexter Gordon. She soloed on a tune that Dexter dedicated to her called "Mischievous Lady," Gordon saying years later that the title meant to evoke a certain magical quality that Liston had. She also recorded one of her her early compositions, "Warm Mood," with Gerald Wilson's orchestra.

Liston In The 1950s


Liston's next big break in the music world came at the end of the 1940s when Dizzy Gillespie summoned her to the East Coast to do arrangements for his progressive big-band. Liston and Gillespie both recounted his bandmembers' stunned, muttering reaction when Liston showed up, and their equally stunned reaction when they tried to play her difficult charts. Ultimately they accepted her, although she inevitably ended up helping with traditionally feminine caretaking tasks such as sewing and cutting hair during her stay with the band. Liston also worked with Count Basie and struck up a friendship with Billie Holiday when Holiday took her on tour in the South in 1950.

But in the first of several timeouts from the music scene, Liston took up teaching for several years in the early 1950s, and even appeared as an extra in Hollywood films such as The Prodigal and The Ten Commandments. In 1956 she joined a new incarnation of Gillespie's orchestra, traveling around the world as part of the band's U.S. State Department-sponsored tours, writing arrangements and soloing as well.

In the late 1950s Liston got the opportunity to record an album under her own name, and to arrange an entire album of music for the up-and-coming singer Gloria Lynne. Lynne's first album had done well, and she was allowed to choose her own arranger for her next project; she chose Liston. Decades later Lynne singled out a song that Liston wrote for the album, "We Never Kissed," as a particular favorite. "It takes you places," she said. "It's a song that moves you. It has a flow that moves you…. Lyrics and music go together, that's a good marriage."

"Uh-Oh, There's Melba With Her Horn"


Liston's years on the road with bands in the 1940s and 1950s were not easy. She had to accustom herself to a lifestyle that gave little thought to the needs of women, and she also had to endure a culture that had a high tolerance for sexual assault. "The only way I could survive was that I was young and strong then," she said years later, "and I was self-sufficient."

At the end of the 1950s, Liston joined up with Quincy Jones' big band as it headed over to Europe. Jones was a friend who had helped Liston with Gloria Lynne's album when Liston was ill, and he, like every other male musician and bandleader who worked with Liston, spoke highly of her many years later. Liston played trombone, soloed, and contributed both charts and original compositions to Jones' orchestra. Like nearly every such ensemble in which she played, it seems likely that she did even more arranging than the historical record indicates.
Not long after the tour Liston gave an interview to DownBeat in which she said, "I guess I'll have to settle down one of these days. I'm really having a ball doing what I'm doing, but I guess I can't spend the rest of my life running around out here with this trombone." But every time Liston tried to leave the music scene, she inevitably came back. She married three times, and each time as the marriage fell apart she'd begin to show up at weekend jam sessions:
The guys said, ‘Uh-oh, there's Melba with her horn. She's single again.' Every time I tried marriage, I would put the horn down and just be WIFE. Then the next time they'd see me with the horn, they'd say, ‘Uh-oh, there goes number two.'

When Liston Met Weston


It was a very different story when it came to professional relationships. At the beginning of the 1960s Liston forged what would prove to be one of the most significant musical partnerships of her life, with pianist Randy Weston. The two would work together, off and on, for the next several decades, with Liston "becoming absolutely essential to my work," Weston wrote in his 2010 autobiography. Weston had written something he called African Suite, setting Liston up for the challenge of incorporating African rhythms and percussion into modern jazz orchestral settings. The poet Langston Hughes also contributed lyrics to the project. The results, issued on the album Uhuru Afrika, were a landmark in innovative jazz that called attention to the social and cultural changes occurring in both Africa and America.

Liston collaborated with Weston on a followup album, 1963's Highlife, and in these years she was teaming up on projects with pianist and arranger/composer Mary Lou Williams as well. As the 1960s progressed Liston also took on work for other jazz artists such as Milt Jackson and Johnny Griffin, in addition to a number of jobs for the Motown label. She appeared on a Ray Charles album, did a record of arrangements for the soul label Stax, and in the early 1970s joined forces with Weston again for his album Tanjah.

"Simply A Genius"


Not long after Tanjah Liston traveled to Jamaica, teaching at the Jamaica School of Music for six years. She returned to the U.S. at the end of the decade for the Women's Jazz Festival in Kansas City and ended up staying stateside, leading an all-women band that eventually became a mixed-gender ensemble, and beginning to collaborate again with Randy Weston. She also began to be the subject of interviews by pioneering women-in-jazz historians such as Linda Dahl and Sally Placksin, as well as oral historians and jazz scholars such as Steve Isoardi and Paul Berliner. A stroke in 1985 left her partially paralyzed and no longer able to play the trombone, but she continued to compose and arrange. She died in 1999 at the age of 73.

"She was simply a genius who had a very original way of writing arrangements," Randy Weston said. Although it's impossible, and not even desirable, to separate the challenges Liston faced as a skilled instrumentalist and innovative arranger who happened to be a woman from the music she created, it is that wealth of music that she bequeathed to us that serves as her ultimate legacy. "The horn has always saved me from sadness," Liston once said, and on another occasion, "If you take care of your music, the music will take care of you."

More Melba

Read Linda Dahl's description of Liston in her book Stormy Weather:
Onstage Liston has that hard-to-define magnetism or charisma that draws empathy from the audience; it is there in her presence, in her physical bearing as she approaches the bandstand. She is lithe and tall, dresses in long, flowing, colorful dresses. A classic African beauty with hair cropped close to a finely shaped head, she has warm brown skin and Chinese eyes. When she turns to her audience ready to play, her face lights up; energy seems to surge up from within, and she is rendered ageless. She picks up her trombone and steadies it: the lowdown shiny brass instrument becomes an extension of herself, a delicate thing fitted to her graceful arms and long, tapering fingers. She begins to play, and her tone is warm, yet light and delicate; she brings forth a souffle of sound. No pyrotechnics, no dazzle, but she swings...

Offstage, after a performance, there is the same sense of charisma, now at rest, and a kind of fragility. Her hands often fly upwards in a gesture artless as a child's, as if to ward off effusive praise from friends and fans... Her voice clips words strictly, rather like an oldtime schoolmarm, and her accent is a curious mixture of black jazz musician and Jamaican lilt. She leans over as someone lights her cigarette for her, crushing a bunch of red roses in the lap of her ice-blue gown. She smiles and a glow comes over her, but in her eyes there is a certain saddened hauteur. She is not an easy person to describe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melba_Liston

Melba Liston


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Melba Doretta Liston (January 13, 1926 – April 23, 1999) was an American jazz trombonist, arranger, and composer. She was the first woman trombonist to play in big bands during the 1940s and 1960s, but as her career progressed she became better known as an arranger particularly in partnership with pianist Randy Weston.[1]

Life and career

Liston was born in Kansas City, Missouri. At the age of seven, Melba's mother purchased her a trombone. Her family encouraged her musical pursuits, as they were all music lovers.[2] Liston was primarily self-taught, but she was "encouraged by her guitar-playing grandfather" who she spent significant time with learning to play spirituals and folk songs.[3] At the age of eight, she was good enough to be a solo act on a local radio station.[4] At the age of ten, she moved to Los Angeles, California. She was classmates with Dexter Gordon, and friends with Eric Dolphy.[3] After playing in youth bands and studying with Alma Hightower, she joined the big band led by Gerald Wilson in 1944.[5]

She recorded with saxophonist Dexter Gordon in 1947 and joined Dizzy Gillespie's big band, which included saxophonists John Coltrane, Paul Gonsalves, and pianist John Lewis) in New York for a time[5] when Wilson disbanded his orchestra in 1948. Liston performed in a supporting role and was nervous when asked to take solos, but with encouragement she became more comfortable as a featured voice in bands.[1] She toured with Count Basie, then with Billie Holiday (1949) but was so profoundly affected by the indifference of the audiences and the rigors of the road that she gave up playing and turned to education. Liston taught for about three years.

She took a clerical job for some years and supplemented her income by taking work as an extra in Hollywood, appearing in The Prodigal (1955) and The Ten Commandments (1956). She returned to Gillespie for tours sponsored by the U.S. State Department in 1956 and 1957, recorded with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (1957), and formed an all-women quintet in 1958. In 1959, she visited Europe with the show Free and Easy, for which Quincy Jones was music director. She accompanied Billy Eckstine with the Quincy Jones Orchestra on At Basin Street East, released on October 1, 1961, by Verve.

In the 1960s she began collaborating with pianist Randy Weston,[6] arranging compositions (primarily his own) for mid-size to large ensembles. This association, especially strong in the 1960s, would be rekindled in the late 1980s and 1990s until her death. In addition, she worked with Milt Jackson, Clark Terry, and Johnny Griffin, as well as working as an arranger for Motown, appearing on albums by Ray Charles. In 1964, she helped establish the Pittsburgh Jazz Orchestra.[7] In 1971 she was chosen as musical arranger for a Stax recording artist Calvin Scott whose album was being produced by Stevie Wonder's first producer, Clarence Paul. On this album she worked with Joe Sample and Wilton Felder of the Jazz Crusaders, blues guitarist Arthur Adams, and jazz drummer Paul Humphrey. In 1973, she moved to Jamaica to teach at the Jamaica School of Music for six years before returning to the U.S. to lead her own bands.

During her time in Jamaica, she composed and arranged music for the 1975 comedy film Smile Orange[8] starring Carl Bradshaw, who three years earlier starred in the first Jamaican film, The Harder They Come.
She was forced to give up playing in 1985 after a stroke left her partially paralyzed,[5] but she continued to arrange music with Randy Weston. In 1987, she was awarded the Jazz Masters Fellowship of the National Endowment for the Arts. After suffering repeated strokes, she died in Los Angeles, California in 1999 a few days after a tribute to her and Randy Weston's music at Harvard University. Her funeral at St. Peter's in Manhattan featured performances by Weston with Jann Parker as well as by Chico O'Farrill's Afro-Cuban ensemble and by Lorenzo Shihab (vocals). 


Composing and arranging

 

Her early work with the high-profile bands of Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie shows a strong command of the big-band and bop idioms. However, perhaps her most important work was written for Randy Weston, with whom she worked for four decades from the early 1960s.[2]
Liston worked as a "ghost writer" during her career. According to one writer, "Many of the arrangements found in the Gillespie, Jones, and Weston repertoires were accomplished by Liston."[9]
 

Social meaning

 

Liston was a female in a profession of mostly males. Although some[10] consider her an unsung hero,[11] she is highly regarded in the jazz community. Liston was a trailblazer as a trombonist and a woman. She articulated difficulties of being a woman on the road.
"There's those natural problems on the road, the female problems, the lodging problems, the laundry, and all those kinda things to try to keep yourself together, problems that somehow or other the guys don't seem to have to go through."[12]
She goes on to recount the struggles she experienced as an African American woman, which affected her musical career.[12] However, she generally spoke positively about the camaraderie with and support from male musicians.[1] Liston also dealt with larger issues of inequity in the music industry. One writer has said, "It was clear that she had to continually prove her credentials in order to gain suitable employment as a musician, composer, and arranger. She was not paid equitable scale and was often denied access to the larger opportunities as a composer and arranger."[12]
 

Musical style

 

Liston's musical style reflects bebop and post-bop sensibilities learned from Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, and Art Blakey. Her earliest recorded work—such as Gordon's "Mischievous Lady" a tribute to her—her solos show a blend of motivic and linear improvisation, though they seem to make less use of extended harmonies and alterations.[2]

Her arrangements, especially those with Weston, show a flexibility that transcends her musical upbringing in the bebop 1940s, whether working in the styles of swing, post-bop, African musics, or Motown.[2] Her command of rhythmic gestures, grooves, and polyrhythms is particularly notable (as illustrated in Uhuru Afrika and Highlife). Her instrumental parts demonstrate an active use of harmonic possibilities; although her arrangements suggest relatively subdued interest in the explorations of free jazz ensembles, they use an extended tonal vocabulary, rich with altered harmonic voicings, thick layering, and dissonance. Her work throughout her career has been well received by both critics and audiences alike.[2]
 

Discography

As leader


As sidewoman or guest

With Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers

With Betty Carter

With Ray Charles

  • 1959 The Genius of Ray Charles
  • 1962 The Ray Charles Story, Vol. 2
With Dizzy Gillespie

With Quincy Jones

With Jimmy Smith

  • 1963 Any Number Can Win
  • 1966 Jimmy & Wes
  • 1966 The Further Adventures of Jimmy and Wes
  • 1966 Hoochie Coochie Man
  • 1969 Jimmy Smith Plays the Blues
With Dinah Washington

  • 1957 Dinah Washington Sings Fats Waller
  • 1958 Dinah Washington Sings Bessie Smith
With Randy Weston

With others


 

Further reading

 

  • Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring 2014). Special issue devoted to Melba Liston.
  • Ammer, Christine. 2001. Unsung: A History of Women in American Music, 2nd edn. Portland, OR: Amadeus.
  • Dahl, Linda. 1984. Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen. New York: Pantheon.
  • Hughes, Langston. 1960. Liner notes, Uhuru Afrika. (See discography.)
  • Voce, Steve. 1999, April 27. Obituary, in The Independent, London.
  • Watrous, Peter. 1999, April 30. "Melba Liston, 73, Trombonist And Prominent Jazz Arranger", The New York Times, C21.
  • Miller, S.L. (1992). "Randy Weston & Melba Liston: Together Again, Miraculously". Jazz Times. 22 (1): 24.

External links

Melba Liston



“The horn has always saved me from any sadness. Anytime I need a lift, the trombone takes care of me. I’m not so good to it as it is to me. The trombone set me up for an arranger, and then when I’m writing, I forget the trombone. But then when things get dull, I go back to the trombone, and it saves me again.”
-Melba Liston [1]

Where do I begin to capture the genius of Melba Liston? Her playing is sensitive and rich, both relaxed and buoyant. Her compositions and arrangements are creative, beautiful, and interesting, but above all — she swings like crazy!


Jazz composer, arranger, and trombonist extraordinaire, Melba Liston was the first female trombonist to play in leading big bands of the ’40s-’60s. She started learning trombone at age 7, choosing the instrument because she thought “it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen,” and by age 16 she decided to become a professional musician and joined the union. [2] Incidentally, her junior high school bandmates included saxophonists Vi Redd and Dexter Gordon [1], the latter with whom she would collaborate on one of her “most notable recordings as a soloist” in 1947. [3]


By all accounts, Liston was an excellent collaborator and a poised and graceful performer. Linda Dahl’s description of her stage presence paints this picture poetically:


Onstage, Liston has that hard-to-define magnetism or charisma that draws empathy from the audience; it is there in her presence, in her physical bearing as she approaches the bandstand … When she turns to her audience ready to play, her face lights up; energy seems to surge from within, and she is rendered ageless. She picks up her trombone and steadies it: the lowdown shiny brass instrument becomes an extension of herself, a delicate thing fitted to her graceful arms and long, tapering fingers. She begins to play, and her tone is warm, yet light and delicate; she brings forth a soufflé of sound. No pyrotechnics, no dazzle — but she swings. Better, she sings with her trombone (and on rare occasions with her voice, in a manner evocative, I think, of Billie Holiday — as if something were being broken, then put together in a new way). [4]

She was highly a highly sought-after arranger, earning the respect of anyone who played her charts. Long-time collaborator, Randy Weston spoke with gratitude about Liston’s skills: “Melba is incredible; she hears what I do and then expands it … She will create a melody that sounds like I created it.
She’s just a great, great arranger.” [5] Even so, due to gender dynamics of the time, she sometimes worked as a ghost-writer so many of her compositions and arrangements are attributed to other composers. [6] Liston played with and composed for many of the greats of the ’40s-’60s including Count Basie, Billie Holliday, Dizzy Gillespie, and Quincy Jones, Clark Terry, and Charles Mingus among others. Her album, “Melba and her Bones” is an absolute gem:

Liston spent several years in Jamaica teaching music during her later career before being coaxed back to the states to put a band together for the Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival. She kept performing until 1985 when a stroke left her partially paralyzed, but she continued to write and arrange for the remainder of her life. [7]


It has been such a powerful experience thus far to discover so many incredible women in jazz history that were previously unknown to me. I feel simultaneously overjoyed to learn about them and terribly guilty that I didn’t know about them already. Better late than never, I suppose.






Melba Liston 2

(Re)sources


[1] Sally Placksin, American Women in Jazz 1900 to the Present. (New York: Seaview Books, 1982). 

[2] Nicole Williams Sitaraman. “Melba Liston.” The Girls in the Band. http://thegirlsintheband.com/2013/11/melba-liston/

[3] Scott Yanow. “Biography.” All-Music Guide. http://elvispelvis.com/melbaliston.htm

[4] Linda Dahl, Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). p. 251

[5] Steve Voce. “Melba Doretta Liston, Trombonist, Composer, Arranger.” (Randy Weston. 2006. http://www.randyweston.info/randy-weston-sidemen-pages/melba-liston.html).

[6] Wikipedia contributors, “Melba Liston,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Melba_Liston&oldid=873256180 (accessed January 9, 2019).

[7] “Melba Liston.” Women in Jazz. (http://www.fyicomminc.com/jazzwomen/melbaliston.htm)

THE MUSIC OF MELBA LISTON: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MELBA LISTON:




 

 

 

 

Melba Liston: My Reverie.The Quincy Jones Big Band - RTS TV Play. 

1960, Lausanne

 





Melba Liston - Melba And Her Bones (Full Album)

 






MELBA LISTON - Insomnia

 





Everybody's Blues.The Quincy Jones Big Band. Soloists: Melba Liston, Julius Watkins.





Melba Liston & Company - Shafi. 1981

 




MELBA LISTON - "Start Swingin" (1945)

 






MELBA LISTON - Blues Melba






My Reverie - Dizzy Gillespie / Melba Liston - State Department Tour 1956.





MELBA LISTON - You Don't Say








Melba Liston solo, videotaped at The Bottom Line, NYC, 1981.





Stella By Starlight, arranged by Melba Liston - 

Dizzy Gillespie South America tour - 1956.





Randy Weston - Earth Birth, String Arrangements by Melba Liston

 





Blue Mitchell - Len Sirrah, composed by Melba Liston.

 





Lambert, Hendricks & Bavan - Melba's Blues (Melba Liston, 

Jon Hendicks).Jazz Casual, 1963.







The Story of Amazing Musicwomen - Melba Liston







Randy Weston, Melba Liston - Volcano Blues (full album).






Melba Liston Symposium at Manhattan School of Music 2014





Melba Liston And Her 'Bones.1959







Sahib Shihab Sextet - The Moors, composed by Melba Liston.








Melba Liston, "Rainbow" (words by Abbey Lincoln)






Melba Listen and her Trombones-"Pow"





Just Waiting - Melba Liston







MELBA LISTON






Top Tracks - Melba Liston






Hommage à Melba Liston