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.
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.
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.
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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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 ListonTrombone, 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 4:572 What’s My Line Theme 4:183 You Don’t Say 3:554 The Dark Before The Dawn 3:185 Pow! 4:016 Blues Melba 6:307 The Trolley Song 2:318 Wonder Why 3:589 Insomnia 3:2910 Very Syrian Business 4:2211 Never Do An Abadanian 5:0712 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."
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.
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
by
David Johnson
Posted June 15, 2015
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."
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.
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]
“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.
(Re)sources
[1] Sally Placksin, American Women in Jazz 1900 to the Present. (New York: Seaview Books, 1982).
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
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. 
