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PHOTO: CLORA BRYANT (1927-2019)
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/clora-bryant-mn0001179578
Clora Bryant
(1927-2019)
Biography by Jason Ankeny
Clora Bryant remains a sadly under-recognized musical pioneer. The lone female trumpeter to collaborate with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, she played a critical role in carving a place for women instrumentalists in the male-dominated world of jazz, over the course of her decades-long career proving herself not merely a novelty but a truly gifted player regardless of gender.
Born May 30, 1927, in Denison, TX, Bryant grew up singing in her Baptist church choir. In high school, she picked up the trumpet her older brother Fred left behind upon entering the military, joining the school marching band. She proved so proficient that she won music scholarships to Bennett College and Oberlin, instead opting to attend the Houston-area Prairie View College, joining its all-female swing band, the Prairie View Coeds. The group toured across Texas, in the summer of 1944 mounting a series of national dates that culminated at New York City's legendary Apollo Theater. Although one of the band's lead soloists, Bryant nevertheless transferred to UCLA in late 1945 after her father landed a job in Los Angeles; there she first encountered the fledgling bebop sound, and began jamming with a series of small groups in the Central Avenue area.
In the summer of 1946 Bryant joined the all-female Sweethearts of Rhythm, earning her union card and quitting school soon after. Around this time she befriended Gillespie, who not only offered her opportunities to perform with his band but also served as Bryant's mentor for the remainder of his life. When the Queens of Swing lost their drummer, Bryant rented a drum kit and won the job, touring with the group until 1951, at which time she returned to L.A. and to the trumpet, backing Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker during their respective performances at the Club Alabam. She relocated to New York City in 1953, gigging at the Metropole and appearing on several television variety shows.
She even toured Canada, but ultimately returned to southern California in 1955, two years later cutting her sole headlining LP, Gal With a Horn, issued on the tiny Mode label. Bryant spent the remainder of the decade on the road, with long engagements at clubs in Canada, Chicago, and Denver. She also played Las Vegas opposite Louis Armstrong and Harry James. While performing with James, Bryant caught the attention of singer Billy Williams, joining his touring revue and backing him during a showcase on The Ed Sullivan Show. In 1960, she also appeared in the Sammy Davis, Jr. motion picture Pepe.
After quitting Williams' band in 1962, Bryant again returned to Los Angeles, teaming with vocalist brother Mel to put together a song-and-dance act. The duo toured the globe for well over a decade, even hosting their own television show during a lengthy engagement in Melbourne, Australia. In the late '70s, Bryant replaced the late Blue Mitchell in Bill Berry's big band, but after several years out of sight she made international headlines in 1989 after accepting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's invitation to play five dates in the U.S.S.R., becoming the first female jazz musician to tour the Communist nation.
A 1996 heart attack and subsequent quadruple bypass surgery rendered Bryant unable to continue her career as a trumpeter, but she continued to sing, at the same time beginning a new career on the lecture circuit, discussing the history of jazz on college campuses across the U.S. Honored by Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with its 2002 Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival Award, Bryant was again celebrated with the 2004 release of Trumpetistically, a documentary profile that took filmmaker Zeinabu Irene Davis some 17 years to complete.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/clora-bryant
CLORA BRYANT
One of the last living musicians of the Be-Bop jazz era is a exceptional woman who mentors the next generation of jazz players. Clora Bryant toured with Billie Holiday, and she is the only woman trumpet player who ever recorded with Dizzy Gillespie and played with Charlie Parker. Though she had a long and remarkable career, she never became well known to the general public.
Bryant's love affair with the trumpet started when she was a high school junior in 1941 in Denison, Texas. After her brother was drafted into the army, Clora Bryant picked up the trumpet he left behind and started playing day and night. Since then, her 59-year career has been full of firsts. In the 1940s, most women in jazz either sang or played piano and avoided the male-dominated horn section. Bryant was the first woman to play with Charlie Parker. She recorded with Dizzy Gillespie and played with other greats like Louis Armstrong, Carl Perkins, Dexter Gordon and others. Later, in 1989, Bryant was the first woman to travel to the Soviet Union to perform jazz, on the invitation of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Despite a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery in 1996 that left her unable to play her trumpet, Bryant continues to exert her influence on the world of jazz. She still sings and lectures on jazz history at several Los Angeles-area colleges. She also mentors several young female jazz musicians, encouraging, inspiring and teaching them. Honored with the 2002 Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival Award, Bryant was again celebrated with the 2004 release of Trumpetistically, a documentary profile by filmmaker Zeinabu Irene Davis.
Bryant says the younger generation needs to learn from older players, as she did from greats like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong. "When I grew up there were legends everywhere, and now the legends don't make themselves available to young people anymore…these days people just get in their limos and away they go, and it hurts my heart."
Part of Bryant's ability to break through gender barriers came from the strength she got from her father, whom she calls her "knight in shining armor." She clearly remembers, as a little girl, her father telling her that she could do anything she set her mind to, and that he was behind her all the way. Bryant does the same for other young ladies searching for their own place in the mostly male world of jazz.
Clora Bryant
Clora Bryant Blew Doors Open
“Trumpetiste” Clora Bryant embodied the fireball energy of Central Avenue’s jazz scene.Alta Online
I couldn’t help but to look, though I knew what I would find. From a high shelf, I pulled down my decades-old edition of Leonard Feather’s Encyclopedia of Jazz. Though Feather was for many years the jazz critic of record for the Los Angeles Times, hometown folks were often afterthoughts. I thumbed to the Bs and scanned. I landed on “Bryan, Mike, guitar; b. Byhalia, Miss., 1916. Self taught” and “Bryant, Raphael (Ray), piano; b. Philadelphia, Pa., 12/24/31.” In the space between the listings for these men, I pressed down hard with my index finger. As expected, I found no entry for Clora Bryant. While her name has often been associated with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm—with whom she played a brief one-week stint in L.A.—her career, in fact, had a much more rich and complex path.
So, then and there, I began to craft a new passage.
Bryant, Clora Larea, trumpet; b. Dennison, Tex., 5/30/27, d. Los Angeles, Calif., 8/25/19
Started on piano at 5 or 6, switched to trumpet at 13 or 14, taking up her older brother’s horn when he was drafted. It changed her life, and with it, she blew open doors…
Refreshingly, a mix of newspapers and music journals didn’t overlook her last summer, acknowledging her passing. Yet I’d begun a similar routine while skimming pieces that lingered on anecdotes about the “surprise” of a woman playing the trumpet or retold stories about musicians who praised her for “sounding like a man.” I wanted to reorganize these articles to focus on her fearlessness, her cleverness, her spirit—her playing, not her gender.
“I wouldn’t have that stigma on me.… When you play the trumpet, you had to be a man,” she told jazz historian Steven Isoardi in 1990 during one of multiple interviews for an oral history project later excerpted in the compendium Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles. And while she dubbed herself a “trumpetiste,” she defined the role with skill and authority: “I didn’t want them to feel like I was a mamby-pamby little tippy-toe female.”
As a woman writing about jazz, I’ve experienced variations on this. There were afternoons when I would arrive backstage pre-soundcheck, reporter’s notebook in hand, and inevitably someone from the venue or the crew would inquire, “Oh, you must be the singer?”
Within the constellations of that particular universe, that was all you could be—if you accepted that. There were too few of us—women operating in unexpected roles. This is why Bryant’s stories of jazz life dazzled on the page and in the anecdotes of friends with whom she shared the fantastic details of her life. These tales centered on her mad affair with music and her deep love of Los Angeles, the city that made her dream come true. She wasn’t the girlfriend in tow; she was doing the job, in the glow of the spotlight. “That’s where I found out who Clora was and what Clora wanted to be,” she told Isoardi. “Central Avenue was [big]. I knew it the minute I walked onto the avenue.… There was an aura. There was a feeling.”
Bryant possessed something indispensable—both for jazz and for life: she knew precisely when and how to confidently leap in. She picked up a trumpet though there wasn’t a mirror role model. She gave up scholarships to Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Bennett College to travel up and down the East Coast with an “all-girl” ensemble while attending Prairie View University. She boasted about climbing onstage, grabbing Dizzy Gillespie’s horn, and just letting loose. She accompanied saxophonists Eric Dolphy and Don Wilkerson, friends of hers, to an infamous anything-goes bacchanal at artist Jirayr Zorthian’s Altadena ranch featuring Charlie Parker on the bandstand. (“I didn’t take my clothes off. But Don did.”) She wrote a letter to Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev, hoping to become “the first lady horn player” invited to perform in Russia; the suggestion inspired a formal state invitation. And though she would refer to herself as naive or sheltered, she made herself at home in the lively network of clubs—among them Club Alabam, the Downbeat, Cafe Intime, and Jack’s Basket Room—that lined Central Avenue at its apex.
The reframing that Bryant herself did in her stories—focusing on the adventures, the woodshedding, the achievements—was also necessary, because, it seems, she didn’t want to linger on what didn’t happen. “Music outweighs the bad part of me not having things. I never had a bicycle when I was a little girl. I never had roller skates…there are so many things I never had, you know, but I didn’t really miss them,” she recalls in Central Avenue Sounds.
Journalist and filmmaker Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn concurs: “She knew the barriers, but I don’t think she cared about them. She just kept going. It wasn’t out of naivete. She had confidence in her craft. She radiated joy. She was a fireball of optimism. Even after she had her heart attack [in 1996] and couldn’t play her trumpet, she was focused on music. She was still performing. Singing with her band. Going to concerts. Supporting other artists. Always spreading the word of jazz.” Bryant’s enthusiasm was contagious, so much so that meeting her on assignment for a newspaper article on the history of Central Avenue changed the course of Littlejohn’s own life. The writer went on to adopt a new storytelling platform, filmmaking, and is at work on the documentary …but can she play?, which showcases often-sidelined female jazz musicians—like Bryant—past and present.
This was Bryant’s hope: to inspire. She knew the power of captivation. She’d taken to music early, listening on a crystal set with one of her brothers in the evenings, sharing the earphones. She used her imagination to see Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy, Duke Ellington, and the Basie band. But it was Cat Anderson, Ellington’s trumpeter, who caught her ear—or as she put it, made her “wet my pants!”
Bryant’s time at university, touring with the Prairie View Co-eds and playing big stages like the Apollo, would be interrupted by her father’s decision to move the family from Texas to Los Angeles (her mother, Eulela, died when she was two). He charmed her with descriptions of palm trees, oranges, and perfect weather. An unflagging supporter of her dreams, he seemed to have a premonition: “He always told us he was going to bring us to California so that we could be discovered.”
They crossed into the city, in 1945, via Los Angeles’s elegant and teeming Union Station, as part of the Great Migration. Through the train windows, the Bryants had had a firsthand view of the multitudes of uniformed enlisted men and military vehicles moving across the country—another migration, one that would aid Bryant in finding work as a musician on bandstands in the big city. With the men gone, there were chairs and traveling opportunities opening up.
She enrolled at UCLA, but her real lessons began after she got off the U Line streetcar on Central Avenue. “It was a hothouse,” says Isoardi when we sit down for a chat about Bryant. In no time, he says, “she knew all the clubs and hung out in them. Got to know everyone. From day one, she had this drive.” And just as crucially, he underscores, “she had this perspective,” about the music but also about the world she was now a part of. It was as broad as it was detailed. “She didn’t miss anything.”
As her father promised, L.A. brimmed with potential. Bryant wasn’t “the only one” on the scene there, says Isoardi. She would join trombonist Melba Liston and alto saxophonist Vi Redd and would get to know the influential music teacher Alma Hightower. Bryant married, had children, divorced, but kept music at the forefront of it all. “She had an inner sense about who she was,” says Isoardi. “And in music, she was self-defining.” She went where she was pulled—for work or pure curiosity, crafting her own style and signature solos.
As the Central Avenue clubs began to shutter, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bryant would grab her horn and hop into her car for gigs scattered across the L.A. Basin: The Central Avenue scene itself had drifted over to Western Avenue, then out to Crenshaw. To pick up “singles” work, she’d sometimes make long treks to Glendale, despite the fact that it was a notorious sundown town and thus dangerous for African American musicians. There, at jam sessions or dates, she’d find herself at the center of a different mix—with Poison Gardner (Al Capone’s piano player) or R&B; honker Big Jay McNeely—and, once more, she’d jockey for a place, then leap.
“Clora was a transition figure in many ways,” says Matthew Duersten, a journalist who is working on a book about L.A. jazz during the years following the Watts Rebellion and up to the early 1970s. She had one foot planted firmly in the city’s jazz heyday, but also, “she was there as the scene began to atomize.” Bryant brought the feeling of Central Avenue with her to each gig, jam session, party, and conversation. “You would see Clora around at gigs all over the place. She’d sit right in the first row and shout, ‘Blow! Blow! Blow!’ She was always there encouraging, fully engaging with the musicians,” Duersten remembers. “That mile-and-a-half stretch consolidated so much talent.” Bryant brought that same energy and camaraderie with her wherever she went.
If the later generations couldn’t experience Central Avenue proper, Bryant sought to conjure its magic through her trumpet, her optimism, and her sheer presence. As she would say about life as well as the avenue, “the only way you’re going to learn it is to be a part of it.” For her, from the very beginning, it was more than a street. “It was a spirit. It was your goal. It was my life.… That’s how deep it is with me. It’s me. Central Avenue, to me, is me.”
For my part, I would see Bryant around, mingling, her hair in a sleek upsweep, flashing that money smile that told you you had found the right time, right place. I longed to interview her, to write about her, to sit in her glow, but was never able to secure an assignment to do so. Until now.
Lynell George’s latest book is After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame. She wrote about Charlie Parker and the Central Avenue jazz club Jack’s Basket Room for Alta, Summer 2019.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
https://downbeat.com/news/detail/in-memoriam-clora-bryant-1927-2019
In Memoriam: Clora Bryant (1927-2019)
PHOTO: Before she staked her claim on the Central Avenue jazz scene in Los Angeles, trumpeter Clora Bryant was a featured soloist in the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. (Photo: LaBudde Special Collections, UMKC University Libraries)
Clora Bryant, a fiery trumpet player who broke gender barriers with her horn, swung with the Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, and led her own bands for decades, died Aug. 25 at the age of at 92 in Los Angeles, where she had became a mainstay of the storied Central Avenue jazz scene.
Hailed as a “one-of-a-kind trailblazer, super-swinging, joyful, gifted, creative musical force” by drummer and DIVA Jazz Orchestra leader Sherrie Maricle, who posted a heartfelt Facebook tribute after her death, Bryant inspired countless female jazz players to follow her lead.
“When I came out here, there weren’t any girls playing in jam sessions on Central Avenue,” Bryant recalled in an interview conducted at the 2011 NAMM Show. “Hey, I had nerve! I’d get my horn and just walk up there and start playing. And I was the only female who did that. I had antennae like you wouldn’t believe.”
Before she staked her claim on Central Avenue, Bryant was a featured soloist in the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and other all-female swing ensembles popular in the 1940s. But she really came into her own in the 1950s at Central Avenue hotspots like The Downbeat, Club Alabam and the Dunbar Hotel, where she played with Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, and dazzled Gillespie, who mentored Bryant.
“Dizzy always gave me my props,” Bryant recalled, during a 2010 interview at the Central Avenue Jazz Festival. As Gillespie himself put it in Trumpetistically, Clora Bryant, a documentary by Zainabu Davis: “She has the feeling of the trumpet. The feeling, not just the notes.”
Armed with the trumpet mouthpiece Gillespie gave her, Bryant recorded her first and only album as a leader, 1957’s Gal With A Horn. As Mode Records demanded, Bryant also sang on all the tracks. But it’s the bold bebop voice of her trumpet, which explodes with piercing runs, that established her as a serious player. Still, without an agent or a label contract behind her, Bryant continued to face hurdles as a gal with a horn.
“Those male trumpet players guard those positions like a bulldog on a bone,” Bryant told fellow trumpeter and music historian Susan Fleet in 1993, recalling the boys-club mindset of the 1950s. “We got a tough row to hoe with the trumpet.”
To get more gigs, Bryant started singing more onstage and became adept at emulating Armstrong’s gravelly voice. “And I was a hit, honey,” Bryant said in the award-winning documentary Girls in the Band. “They loved me!”
So did Armstrong, who caught Bryant’s impression of him when they both played Las Vegas in 1960.
“He was in the big room and I was in the lounge, where he’d been catching my act in the back,” Bryant said during her Central Avenue Festival interview. “And one day, here comes Louis with his whole band, coming from the big room, walking through the entire casino and coming up on stage and singing and playing with me!”
Bryant couldn’t have imagined that moment when she was growing up in Denison, Texas, where she and two siblings were raised by their widowed father on a day-laborer’s salary. But the ambition that drove her was forged at an early age. “My dad taught me that if you wanna do something badly enough, you just do it,” Bryant recalled during the NAMM interview. “You gotta have balls, so to speak. I never would have gotten to Russia if I hadn’t said hey, I’m gonna write to Gorbachev and tell him I want to come.”
General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev took her up on the offer, and in 1988, Bryant became the first female horn player to tour the Soviet Union.
When Bryant retired her trumpet on doctor’s orders in the mid-1990s following quadruple bypass surgery, she became passionate about preserving the legacy of jazz as a teacher and historian. She also performed periodically as a dynamic vocalist, sporting her trademark floral crown, and sang several of her own compositions when she received a lifetime achievement award at the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center in 2002.
Among her numerous achievements, Bryant successfully campaigned for Gillespie to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1991, and officially was proclaimed a Jazz Legend and Goodwill Ambassador by the Los Angeles City Council in 2018. But perhaps her greatest legacy is the gumption she bequeathed to today’s young female jazz players.
“Clora Bryant was an unforgettable and powerful role model,” said Canadian trumpeter, composer and bandleader Rachel Therrien. “She’s inspired me to push forward as a jazz trumpeter and a bandleader. While I never got the opportunity to meet her personally, I am forever grateful for all her hard work, which opened the path for future generations of women like myself.” DB
Clora Bryant, An Iconic American Trumpeter’s & Pillar of LA Jazz Scene
by EP McKnight, MEd
December 18, 2020
Medium
Through thick and thin on a rock path will lead to a higher ground over time
When you have a talent and in your heart you know this is your gift to share with the world nothing should stop you or get in our way. Every one is born with at least one gift and must share that gift with the world for their wholeness and humanity’s wholeness. One person’s struggle encourages the next person’s struggle to be the best they can under any and all circumstances.
Clora Bryant, a trumpet player who broke barriers in jazz. Born May 30, 1927 and transitioned August 25, 2019. Ms. Bryant played the trumpet while attention and recognition was slow in coming, if it came at all being in a male dominated arena and during a time when she was considered a novelty.
Ms. Bryant stated, “When you put that iron in your mouth, you run into problems, the other horn players gave me respect, but the men who ran the clubs considered me a novelty, “ per the Los Angeles Times from an interview in 1998.
She was a barrier breaker who stood steadfast and firm in her resolve to be respected as a jazz trumpet player despite the open sexism and racism that shadowed her career. When you are the first or one of the first, that door of opportunity is like a brick wall and must be chipped away for those that follow to enter.
She lived a life as a jazz trumpeter and it was an uphill battle per her son. The sad part about this story, if she was white and a female, the story would have had a totally different and more successful ending. Shame on America the Beautiful, denying one’s talent it’s rightful place in society. Yes, it was a man’s world and it made it hard for her but she had a dream to be and she was a trumpet player, undeniably. She proclaimed all her rejection made her more determined.
Her spirit has ignited a fire in me that needed to be relighted. As an actress, there is much rejection for various reasons and all can be very daunting. While yes, synonymous to Ms. Bryant, I have had some measure of success and been blessed but the windows of opportunity is smaller due to my ethnicity, not talent, but I am encouraged more by her legacy.
Her talent made room for her. She was a constant on the jazz scene along Central Avenue and Las Vegas in the 1940s along with the greats and was highly revered by Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong just too name a few. Her associations speak volume attesting to her talent.
While work was hard to come by, she pursued her dream. Even to this very day there are few female horn players and probably even less African American ones.
Ms. Bryant was born May 30, 1927 in Denison, Texas, her mother died when she was three years old and her father raised her and her brothers and he encouraged them to think big. Reminds me of my mother and father, coming from Mississippi, they all ways pushed their children to exceed at all cost.
Ms. Bryant discovered her brother’s trumpet after he went off to the war, and joined the school marching band. Her father warned her that she’d face a lot of resistance, and that he supported her all the way in what ever she wanted to do. His famous words, Charles Bryant, after he advised she’d face a lot of opposition was “But anything you want to do, I’m behind you, You keep playing.”
Being raised a Baptist and was taught that anything with a backbeat was probably, “the devil’s music” , she didn’t find jazz but it found her. Early she was privy to the likes of Earl Hines, Cotton Club, Cab Calloway on the radio in the wee hours of the night. During the day, only white bands played on the radio.
When their is a passion, the doors will open perhaps not as wide and as quick as the pursuer would like but at the end of the day, one should follow their heart and dreams to live a fulfill life.
After she attended Prairie View A&M University, a historically black college, she moved to Los Angeles and found her place on the jazz scene in jazz clubs along Central Avenue — the Downbeat, the Last Word, Club Alabama and the Dunbar Hotel.
Against all barriers and along side the greats like Miles Davis, Teddy Edwards, Sonny Criss, Ms. Bryant held her own. Mind you these guys were sizzling and she sizzled with them. She also played with Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and Scatman Crothers. Gillespie was a life long fan and a regular at the Lighthouse and the High Seas in Hermosa Beach. She also performed with the Sweethearts of Rhythm and the Sepia Tones. She even appeared on the Ed Sullivan show after she cut her lone album, “Clora Bryant-Gal With a Horn”, in 1957.
When a door or window closes, create your own window or door and that’s all that matter is the journey you make and take for yourself with all the tenacity that is within.
Ms. Bryant was innovative when she wrote a letter directly to Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev and asked to be the first female horn player to visit Moscow to perform. She got the idea from Dave Brubeck’s decision to take his music to Moscow. In 1988, she arrived in Moscow and played at a jazz festival and the city’s marquee jazz club. Her travel was documented by a UCLA film crew.
In 2002, Ms. Bryant was awarded the Mary Lou Williams Women In Jazz Award at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Also, a documentary entitled, “Trumpetistically Clora Bryant”, which captures this trailblazer’s distinguished journey as a trumpeter in it’s entirety and expounds on all the racism and gender bias that held back women with ambition.
Her most recent words pertaining to her long career of fighting barriers, “I would like them to give me my props, not because I think I’m so great, but because I endured. I stuck with it.”
In conclusion, my accolades to her is that, “unbeknownst to her she is an indelible part of not only musicians history but world history and women’s history for she was the ultimate fighter for her God given talent and she paved the way for many to follow regardless of their pursuit. She came, she did and she went!! The Trumpeter who defied barriers!!!
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/arts/music/clora-bryant-dead.html
Clora Bryant, Trumpeter and Pillar of L.A. Jazz Scene, Dies at 92
Dizzy Gillespie called her his protégé. But faced with sexist discrimination, she did not establish herself as a bandleader until middle age.
Clora Bryant, a trumpeter who was widely considered one of the finest jazz musicians on the West Coast — but who ran into gender-based limitations on how famous she could become — died on Aug. 25 in Los Angeles. She was 92.
Her son Darrin Milton said she died at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after suffering a heart attack at home.
A self-described “trumpetiste,” Ms. Bryant came of age in the 1940s, aligning herself with the emerging bebop movement. But she never lost the brawny elocution and gregarious air of a classic big-band player, even as she became a fixture of Los Angeles’s modern jazz scene.
Often faced with sexist discrimination, without support from a major record label or an agent, Ms. Bryant did not come forth as a bandleader until middle age. By that point the jazz mainstream had moved on to fusion, a style she never embraced.
And even when jazz history became a subject of major academic concern in the late 1970s and ’80s, she was rarely celebrated at the level of her male counterparts, who had enjoyed greater support throughout their careers.
But among themselves, those same musicians often recognized her virtuosity, and she played with many of them. Dizzy Gillespie, an inventor of bebop, found himself dazzled upon first hearing her in the mid-1950s, and took to calling her his protégé.
“If you close your eyes, you’ll say it’s a man playing,” Gillespie said in an interview for “Trumpetistically, Clora Bryant,” a documentary directed by Zeinabu Davis. (He apparently intended it as a compliment.) “She has the feeling of the trumpet. The feeling, not just the notes.”
Writing in The Los Angeles Times in 1992, when Ms. Bryant was in her mid-60s, Dick Wagner noted that she retained her beguiling powers. “When Bryant plays the blues, the sound is low, almost guttural, a smoldering fire,” he wrote. “When she plays a fast tune, the sound is piercing — the fire erupts.”
Clora Larea Bryant was born on May 30, 1927, in Denison, Tex., the youngest of three children of Charles and Eulila Bryant. Her father was a day laborer. Her mother was a homemaker who died when Clora was 3, leaving him to raise his children alone on a salary of $7 a week.
Ms. Bryant credited her success as a trumpeter to her father’s tireless support. “Nobody ever told me, ‘You can’t play the trumpet, you’re a girl,’” she said in a 2007 interview with JazzTimes magazine. “My father told me, ‘It’s going to be a challenge, but if you’re going to do it, I’m behind you all the way.’ And he was.”
She started out on the piano but took up the trumpet after her high school established an orchestra and marching band. Showing preternatural talent, she often woke up at dawn to take private lessons before the school day began.
In 1943 she declined scholarships to the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio and Bennett College in North Carolina to attend Prairie View A&M University — a historically black school outside Houston — because it had an all-female 16-piece jazz band. “When I found out they had an all-girl band there, that’s where I was going,” she said in a wide-ranging six-hour interview with Steven Isoardi for the University of California, Los Angeles’s oral history program.
But in 1945, after two years at Prairie View, Ms. Bryant moved with her family to Los Angeles and transferred to U.C.L.A. (Her father had been run out of Texas by a group of white people who accused him of stealing paint.) She immediately found her way to Central Avenue, the bustling nucleus of black life in the city, where jazz clubs abounded.
After hearing the trumpeter Howard McGhee at the Downbeat, she fell in love with bebop. She was underage, so she stood just outside the door, transfixed. But she soon found her way inside.
“I would not go without my horn,” she told Dr. Isoardi, remembering attending nightclubs like the Downbeat and the Club Alabam. “If I knew there was going to be somebody there, I’d have my horn with me, because I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to try to learn something.”
In 1946 Ms. Bryant joined the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, the country’s leading all-female swing ensemble, where she was a featured soloist. (Jazz bands led by women had become popular during World War II, and many of these ensembles continued to thrive for years afterward.)
Soon after, she joined the Queens of Rhythm, another large group. When its drummer left, she learned drums to fill the role. A crowd-pleaser, she sometimes played trumpet with one hand while drumming with the other.
Ms. Bryant married the bassist Joe Stone in the late 1940s, and the couple had two children. In one publicity photo with the Queens of Rhythm, she subtly conceals an eight-month pregnancy. She and Mr. Stone eventually divorced, and she raised their children as a single parent, continuing to perform all the while.
Ms. Bryant is survived by her four children — April and Charles Stone, from her marriage to Mr. Stone, and Kevin and Darrin Milton, from her relationship with the drummer Leslie Milton — as well as nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Her brothers, Frederick and Melvin, died before her.
Throughout much of the 1950s she regularly led jam sessions around Los Angeles. She also played in the house band at the Alabam, where she backed up visiting stars like Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker. She moved to New York for a brief time but soon returned to Los Angeles, where she would stay for the rest of her life, remaining a well-known performer and a mentor to younger musicians.
In 1956, the trombonist Melba Liston arranged for Ms. Bryant to meet Gillespie when he toured Los Angeles. He took her under his wing and gave her a trumpet mouthpiece that she would use for decades. Ms. Bryant later returned the favor, leading the charge to get Gillespie his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
She recorded her sole album as a leader, “Gal With a Horn,” for Mode Records in 1957. To satisfy audiences, Ms. Bryant had taken up singing onstage, and the label’s executives demanded — against her wishes — that she sing on the album’s eight tunes. But it is her trumpet solos that stand out: She often leaps out of the gate with a stoutly articulated melody before spiraling into coiled runs, her bold delivery reflecting the influence of Louis Armstrong as much as first-wave bebop pioneers like Gillespie and Fats Navarro.
Clora Bryant - "This Can't Be Love"
Jazz "trumpetiste" Clora Bryant plays and sings; from her lone album "...gal with a horn".
Musicians:
Clora Bryant - trumpet and vocals
Roger Fleming - piano
Ben Tucker - bass
Bruz Freemwn - drums
Recorded in 1957
Orignally released on Mode Records
Now available on VSOP
By the mid-1950s, Ms. Bryant was performing around the country with various groups and accompanying the vocalist Billy Williams in his popular Las Vegas revue. They appeared together on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and Ms. Bryant contributed a track to Williams’s album “The Billy Williams Revue.”
In the 1970s and ’80s Ms. Bryant stepped forward more as a leader, fronting a combo she called Swi-Bop. She toured internationally and often performed with her brother Melvin, a singer. In the late 1980s and ’90s, her son Kevin was Swi-Bop’s regular drummer.
In 1988, with tensions easing between the United States and Russia, Ms. Bryant wrote a letter to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, saying she hoped to become “the first lady horn player to be invited to your country to perform.” His cultural ministry invited her to the Soviet Union, where she toured the next year.
Ms. Bryant retired from playing trumpet in the 1990s after suffering a heart attack and undergoing quadruple bypass surgery. She committed herself to preserving and passing on jazz’s legacy, giving lectures at colleges and universities, working with children in grade schools around Los Angeles and coediting a book on Los Angeles jazz history.
In 2002 the Kennedy Center presented Ms. Bryant with a lifetime achievement award at its Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival. She sang some of her own compositions at the event, flanked by younger musicians.
At the conclusion of Ms. Davis’s documentary, Ms. Bryant acknowledges the frustration of having been passed over while watching her male counterparts rise to stardom, but she expresses a dauntless pride nonetheless.
“I’m sitting here broke as the Ten Commandments, but I’m still rich,” she says. “With love and friendship and music. And I’m rich in life.”
An earlier version of this obituary, using information from Ms. Bryant's family, misstated the date of her death. It was Aug. 25, not Aug. 23.
https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2019-09-05/clora-bryant-jazz-trumpet-player-dead
Clora Bryant, who broke barriers as a jazz trumpet player, dies at 92
Had she been a singer, she might have been an American star. Had she been a piano player, record labels might have lined up to sign her.
But Clora Bryant played the trumpet and attention came slowly, when it came it all.
“When you put that iron in your mouth, you run into problems,” Bryant told The Times in a 1998 interview. “The other horn players gave me respect, but the men who ran the clubs considered me a novelty.”
A barrier breaker who stood firm in her resolve to be a respected jazz trumpet player despite the open sexism that shadowed her, Bryant died Aug. 25 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was 92.
Life as a jazz trumpeter was an uphill battle, said her son Darrin, who confirmed her death. “It was a man’s world and that made it hard for her. But that only fueled her fire, made her more determined.”
Bryant played the trumpet with such passion and fury that she became a mainstay in the growing jazz scene along Central Avenue in the 1940s. Dizzy Gillespie once told Los Angeles Times jazz critic Leonard Feather that Bryant was the most underrated trumpet player in L.A. And when she played the Riviera in Las Vegas, Louis Armstrong was so impressed that he hustled up his band and joined her onstage.
“We did ‘Basin Street Blues’ together,” she said, smiling at the memory.
But by 1992 she was living on Social Security, staying at a son’s Long Beach apartment and two of her horns were in the pawnshop. Much of her memorabilia — photos of her with Count Basie’s trumpet section, pictures with Duke Ellington, a baby grand piano she composed on — burned in the 1992 riots following the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King.
Work was hard to come by.
“A lot of clubs have closed, and there are so many more musicians,” she told The Times. “And how many female horn players do you see working? Zip.”
Bryant was born May 30, 1927, in Denison, Texas, near the Oklahoma border. Her mother died when she was 3 and she and her brothers were raised by their father, a patient man who encouraged his children to think big.
When her older brother was drafted, she found a trumpet in his room that he had never truly learned to play. She wanted to be in the high school marching band, and this would be her instrument.
Charles Bryant warned his daughter she’d likely face resistance.
“But anything you want to do, I’m behind you,” she recalled her father telling her. “You keep playing.”
She was raised a Baptist and taught that anything with a backbeat was likely “the devil’s music,” But even on the North Texas prairie where she grew up, the siren sounds of jazz found her.
“In the daytime and early evening, all you could get on the radio were the white bands,” she recalled. “But late at night, we’d get Chicago and Earl Hines or the Cotton Club in New York and cats like Cab Calloway.”
After turning down a scholarship to Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio and instead attending Prairie View A&M University, a historically black college outside Houston, Bryant arrived in L.A. and found a home in the jazz clubs along Central Avenue — the Downbeat, the Last Word, Club Alabam and the Dunbar Hotel. Though she jammed with the best, there were always detractors.
“She’s a woman and during that time the guys — Miles Davis, Teddy Edwards, Sonny Criss — were burning,” said veteran drummer Roy Porter. “How the hell is she going to keep up with that category?”
But she did.
She played with Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday and Scatman Crothers. She won over Gillespie, who became a lifelong fan, was a regular at the Lighthouse and the High Seas in Hermosa Beach and performed with groups such as the Sweethearts of Rhythm and the Sepia Tones. She cut her lone album, “Clora Bryant — Gal With a Horn” in 1957 and later appeared on the “Ed Sullivan Show.”
Inspired by Dave Brubeck’s decision to take his music to Moscow, Bryant wrote a letter directly to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and asked him to use his authority to let her become “the first female horn player to be invited to your country to perform.” In 1988, she arrived in Moscow and played at a jazz festival, and later the city’s marquee jazz club. She was accompanied by a film crew from UCLA, where she — late in life — decided to study music history.
In 2002, Bryant was awarded the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
Two years later, filmmaker Zeinabu Irene Davis, a fellow student at UCLA, released “Trumpetistically Clora Bryant,” a documentary that captures the musician in full force, using her as a metaphor for the racism and gender bias that held back women with ambition.
“I would like them to give me my props,” she told The Times after the film’s release. “Not because I think I’m so great, but because I endured. I stuck with it.”
Bryant is survived by four children, April, Charles, Kevin and Darrin; nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildrennbClora Bryant
Today I’m learning about the great trumpetiste, Clora Bryant. She is a wonderful musician (she just turned 91 years young!) originally from Denison, TX, but who worked in LA and New York among other places. In his book, “The World of Jazz Trumpet…” Scotty Barnhart calls her “the grand dame of jazz trumpet” and writes “Bryant… possessed all the necessary tools of being a professional jazz musician – flawless technique, a personal sound, daring, continuity of ideas, and inherent optimism that allows for endless creativity.” [1]
She says she originally started playing the trumpet because her brother played, but he left his horn at home when he joined the army. So she picked it up and taught herself “scales and everything” because she was “determined to get in the marching band.” She says “My dad wanted me to play the harp, but I knew the trumpet was it.” So, her father took her to the dance halls where the likes of Duke, Basie, and Lunceford were playing and stood outside the window with her on his shoulders so she could hear the music. [2]
She was offered scholarships to attend Oberlin and Bennett but chose to go to Prairie View College in Houston because they had an all-girl orchestra she could join. So, she played with the Prairie View Co-Eds in Texas for a few years before transferring to UCLA when her father moved to California. She spent time working with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and the Darlings of Rhythm and doubled on drums for the “Queens of Swing.” She was one of the first women of color to appear on television along with Ginger Smock and company and she was the first woman horn player to tour the Soviet Union.
Hearing Dizzy Gillespie for the first time was a turning point in her life and he would eventually become her good friend and mentor. Don Heckman recounts her story from an interview in 2007: “I was playing a gig up in Caldwell, Idaho,” she says. “I had a shortwave radio and I heard this radio station from San Francisco. The deejay played Diz’s ‘Things to Come’ and sat there with my mouth open, trying to find one, the first beat in the bar. And when I told Dizzy about it later, he said, ‘Well, Clora, a lot of people couldn’t find one.’ And I wasn’t used to that. The music just came crashing out. It just blew me away!”
Bryant had a deep devotion to the music and her instrument and was one of the few women to frequent the jam session with the be-bop “heavies.” In fact, she was the only woman to jam on stage with Charlie Parker. Again from her interview with Heckman:
‘It was a Sunday afternoon, and it was always wild at the beach on a Sunday,’ recalls Bryant. They were trying to get Charlie to play at the club next door, the Lighthouse, but no one could get him to sit in. Then he came over to where I was playing, borrowed a new Selmer tenor from somebody, and said, ‘Well, what do you want to play Clora?’ And I said, ‘Now’s the Time.’ So I set the tempo like [she beats off a fast tempo] and everybody got really swinging.
‘When we finished it, the piano player played the old Basie lick on the end. So Charlie said, ‘Hey, how about some ‘Tickle Toes’? I said, ‘Yeah, ‘Tickle Toes!?’ And Charlie counted it off like [beats off a much faster tempo], and he was flying. So when I started playing, I tried to double up the tempo like he was doing. And when we finished, he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me in the back. ‘Clora,’ he said. ‘You know I love you and I love the way you play. But don’t try to double up like that when you can’t do it!’ And then he gave me a big fat hug. But I never tried it anymore. That was my lesson right there. Stick to what you can do. And know what you can do. [3]It is refreshing to hear her discuss the feel of the music community at that time: “A lot of the good musicians were still around, and there was a different kind of feeling among musicians. They don’t have it now. They tried to help you. You’d woodshed together, and you’d sit down and listen to records. Like Lee Morgan, when he was with Dizzy, he and a lot of the guys, we’d hang out together. They’d come over to my house, I’d fix breakfast, we’d sit up and listen to Dizzy records or Clifford Brown records, and we’d analyze things, what he’s doing here, man, you know. We were listening. It takes talent to listen.” [2] I’d argue that there are still elements of that community alive today and am grateful to have benefitted from the mentorship of my community as well.
In 1957, she put out her one and only solo record, “Gal With a Horn.” Her playing and singing are filled with life and joy, not to mention virtuosity. Listen for yourself:
She says “Nobody ever told me, ‘You can’t play the trumpet, you’re a girl.’ Not when I got started in high school and not when I came out to L.A. My father told me, ‘It’s going to be a challenge, but if you’re going to do it, I’m behind you all the way.’ And he was.” [3] Clora Bryant is a vivacious woman, full of moxie and positivity and music and I’m so grateful to learn about her.
CLORA BRYANT
(Re)Sources
[1] Scotty Barnhart. The world of jazz trumpet: a comprehensive history & practical philosophy. (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2005).
[2] Sally Placksin. American Women in Jazz 1900 to the Present. (New York: Seaview Books, 1982).
[3] Heckman, Don.
“Clora Bryant: Trumpetiste Extraordinaire.” (Jazz Times. May 1, 2007. https://jazztimes.com/departments/overdue-ovation/clora-bryant-trumpetiste-extraordinaire/).
Dahl, Linda. Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
https://njjs.org/2019/09/23/clora-bryant-92/
In the early 1950s, Bryant was playing trumpet and leading a combo in a Hermosa Beach, CA, club when she noticed Charlie Parker in the audience. “He went up to the bandstand and asked if he could borrow a tenor [saxophone],” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2002. “I almost wet my pants.” Then, they played a duet of Parker’s “Now’s the Time”. Parker, Bryant said, “took that tenor and played the rim off of it. My knees were weak all while we were playing.”
While working in Las Vegas in the 1950s and ’60s, Bryant would often do a vocal imitation of Louis Armstrong. “One night,” she told JazzTimes in 2007, “I heard this sound coming from the casino. And here comes Louis with his whole band, all of them . . . They marched right up onstage and did my whole act, but for real. It was great.”
In 1956, trombonist Melba Liston arranged for Bryant to meet Dizzy Gillespie, and, according to Giovanni Russonello, writing in The New York Times (September 2, 2019), “He took her under his wing and gave her a trumpet mouthpiece that she would use for decades.”
Often faced with sexist discrimination, Bryant said her father encouraged her to persevere in her desire to be a jazz trumpeter. In the JazzTimes interview, she said, “My father told me, ‘It’s going to be a challenge, but if you’re going to do it, I’m behind you all the way.’ And, he was.”
In 1943, Bryant attended Prairie View A&M, a black school outside of Houston, because it had an all-female 16-piece jazz band. When her family moved to Los Angeles two years later, she transferred to UCLA. She joined the International Sweethearts of Rhythm in 1946, later moving on to another all-female group, the Queens of Rhythm. Her only album as a leader was Gal With a Horn, recorded on the Mode Records label in 1957. Against her wishes, the record producer insisted she sing in addition to playing trumpet.
Bryant led a combo called Swi-Bop in the ’70s and ’80s that included her brother Melvin and son Darrin as vocalists and son Kevin as drummer. In 1988, motivated by a Dave Brubeck performance in Moscow, she wrote to Mikhail Gorbachev, then leader of the Soviet Union, asking if she could become “the first lady horn player to be invited to your country to perform . . .” In 1989, she was invited to play there and did a two-week tour, accompanied by her sons and a film crew.
In 1996, Bryant retired as a trumpet player, due to heart surgery, but continued to lecture and occasionally sing. In 2002, she received the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award from the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. “Jazz to me is a lifelong quest,” she said in the Los Angeles Times interview, “because you never finish searching for that high you can reach when everything’s clickin’, and the audience is right there with you. I get goose bumps thinking about it.”
In addition to Darrin and Kevin, she is survived by two other children: April and Charles Stone, from her marriage to bassist Joe Stone;
Jersey Jazz
The New Jersey Jazz Society (NJJS) is a non-profit organization of business and professional people, musicians, teachers, students and listeners working together for the purpose of advancing jazz music.
Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles
University of California Press, 1999
About the Book
The musical and social history of Los Angeles's black community from
the 1920s through the early 1950s comes to life in this exceptional oral
history collection. Through the voices of musicians who performed on
L.A.'s Central Avenue during those years, a vivid picture of the
Avenue's place in American musical history emerges.
By day,
Central Avenue was the economic and social center for black Angelenos.
By night, it was a magnet for Southern Californians, black and white,
who wanted to hear the very latest in jazz. The oral histories in this
book provide firsthand reminiscences by and about some of our great jazz
legends: Art Farmer recalls the first time Charlie Parker and Dizzy
Gillespie played bebop on the West Coast; Britt Woodman tells of a
teenaged Charles Mingus switching from cello to bass; Clora Bryant
recalls hard times on the road with Billie Holiday. Here, too, are
recollections of Hollywood's effects on local culture, the
precedent-setting merger of the black and white musicians' unions, and
the repercussions from the racism in the Los Angeles Police Department
in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Central Avenue Sounds
fills a major gap in California's cultural history, and it shows the
influence of a community whose role became as significant in the jazz
world as that of Harlem and New Orleans. The voices in this book also
testify to the power and satisfaction that can come from making music.
About the Authors and Editors:
The authors are members of the Central Avenue Sounds Editorial Committee, which includes seven musicians represented in the book: Clora Bryant,Buddy Collette,William Green, Jack Kelson, Horace Tapscott, Gerald Wilson, and Marl Young. Steven Isoardi is researcher/interviewer for the "Central Avenue Sounds" project of the UCLA Oral History Program.
Reviews
"From Buddy Collette's brilliant ruminations on Paul Robeson to Horace Tapscott's extraordinary insights about artistic production and community life . . . this collection of oral testimony presents a unique and memorable portrait of the 'Avenue' and of the artists whose creativity nurtured and sustained its golden age."—George Lipsitz, author of Dangerous Crossroads"If ever the West Coast enjoyed its own equivalent of the Harlem Renaissance, it was here on Central Avenue. This too-often forgotten setting was nothing less than a center of cultural ferment and a showplace for artistic achievement. Finally its story has been told, with a richness of detail and vitality of expression, by those who helped make it happen."—Ted Gioia, author of West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California
"What a wonderful, comprehensive volume, full of knowledge and insight about an important time and place in jazz history. This book is a needed and welcomed addition on the rich African-American musical heritage of Los Angeles. It is well written and edited by people who were actually involved in the creation of the music, along with others who have a deep concern for preserving that legacy. This work gives the reader a truly in-depth look at the musicians, the music, and the social and political climate during that important development in American culture."—Kenny Burrell, jazz guitarist and Director of the Jazz Studies Program and Professor of Music and Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles
Table of Contents:
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Steven Isoardi
Maps of Central Avenue area
Introduction: The Formation of
Los Angeles's Black Community
Part One: The Emergence of Central Avenue
Marshal Royal
Lee Young
Fletcher Smith
Part Two: The Watts Scene
Coney Woodman
William "Brother" Woodman, Jr.
Britt Woodman
Buddy Collette
David Bryant
Cecil "Big Jay" McNeely
Part Three: The Eastside at High Tide
Jack Kelson
William Douglass
Melba Liston
Art Farmer
Horace Tapscott
Part Four: Drawn by Central's Magic- New Faces
Gerald Wiggins
Gerald Wilson
Clora Bryant
William Green
Marl Young
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Awards
- 1999 Book Award for outstanding use of oral history, Oral History Assocaition
https://oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb6489p54g&brand=oac4&doc.view=entire_text
Central Avenue Sounds: Clora Bryant
Interviewed by Stephen L. Isoardi
Department of Special Collections
University of California, Los Angeles
Biographical Summary
Personal History:
Born: May 30, 1927, Denison, Texas.
Education: Prairie View Agricultural and Mechanical University, 1943-45; UCLA, 1945, 1979-81.
Spouses: Joseph Stone, two children; Everett Edwards; Leslie Milton, two children.
Career History:
Played trumpet with the following:
Louis Armstrong
Count Basie
Jeannie and Jimmy Cheatham
Scatman Crothers
Darlings of Rhythm
Eric Dolphy
Duke Ellington
Dizzy Gillespie
Wardell Gray
Hollywood Sepia Tones
Frank Morgan
Hubert "Bumps" Myers
Charlie Parker
Queens of Swing
Sweethearts of Rhythm
Recordings:
The Gal with the Horn (with Norman Faye, Walter Benton, Roger Fleming, Ben Tucker, Bruz Freeman), Mode, 1957.
Interview History
Interviewer:
Steven L. Isoardi, Interviewer, UCLA Oral History Program. B.A., M.A., Government, University of San Francisco; M.A., Ph.D., Political Science, UCLA.
Time and Setting of Interview:
Place: Bryant's residence, Los Angeles, California.
Dates, length of sessions: March 29, 1990 (120 minutes); April 4, 1990 (104); April 18, 1990 (133).
Total number of recorded hours: 6.0
Persons present during interview: Bryant and Isoardi.
Conduct of Interview:
This interview is one in a series designed to preserve the spoken memories of individuals, primarily musicians, who were raised near and/or performed on Los Angleles's Central Avenue, especially from the late 1920s to the mid-1950s. Musician and teacher William Green, his student Steven Isoardi, and early project interviewee Buddy Collette provided major inspiration for the UCLA Oral History Program's inaugurating the Central Avenue Sounds Oral History Project.
In preparing for the interview, Isoardi consulted jazz histories, autobiographies, oral histories, relevant jazz periodicals, documentary films, and back issues of the California Eagle and the Los Angeles Sentinel.
The interview is organized chronologically, beginning with Bryant's childhood in Denison, Texas, and continuing on through her education, her move to Los Angeles, and her career as a musician. Major topics discussed include musicians who played Central Avenue, clubs on Central Avenue and elsewhere in Los Angeles, prejudice against women in the jazz world, women's jazz groups, race relations, and Locals 767 and 47 of the American Federation of Musicians.
Editing:
Alex Cline, editor, edited the interview. He checked the verbatim transcript of the interview against the original tape recordings, edited for punctuation, paragraphing, and spelling, and verified proper names. Wherever possible, Cline checked the proper names of nightclubs against articles and advertisements in back issues of the California Eagle. Words and phrases inserted by the editor have been bracketed.
Bryant reviewed the transcript. She verified proper names, made a number of corrections and additions, and drafted an extensive response to the interviewer's question about the overall importance of Central Avenue.
Steven J. Novak, editor, prepared the table of contents, biographical summary, and interview history. Lisa Magee, editorial assistant, compiled the index.
Supporting Documents:
The original tape recordings of the interview are in the university archives and are available under the regulations governing the use of permanent noncurrent records of the university. Records relating to the interview are located in the office of the UCLA Oral History Program.
Table of Contents
-
TAPE NUMBER: I, Side One(March 29, 1990)
-
Childhood in Denison, Texas -- Captivated by black film musicals and touring big bands -- Small-town cultural life -- Raised by father, Charles Celeste Bryant -- Learns to play piano -- Sings in the church choir -- Children's songs and games -- Listening to radio shows -- Playing trumpet in the high school marching band -- Joining the municipal band.
-
TAPE NUMBER: I, Side Two (March 29, 1990
-
Limited educational opportunities for blacks in the South -- Racial segregation -- Studies trumpet with Conrad Johnson -- Enters Prairie View Agricultural and Mechanical University -- Plays first trumpet in the Prairie View Coeds all-girl band -- Touring with the Prairie View Coeds -- World War II creates a demand for female musicians -- Memorizes popular trumpet solos -- Early trumpet heroes -- The thirties origins of eighties styles -- Playing with the Billy Williams Revue -- Playing in New Orleans -- Reasons for moving to California.
-
TAPE NUMBER: II, Side One (March 29, 1990
-
Academic excellence of Bryant's elementary school and high school in Denison -- Attending UCLA in the late seventies -- Arrives in Los Angeles -- Rents rooms in the West Adams district -- Party at Benny Carter's home on Sugar Hill -- Small number of African Americans at UCLA in 1945 -- Transfers American Federation of Musicians membership to Local 767 -- The union hall -- Introduction to Central Avenue.
-
TAPE NUMBER: II, Side Two (March 29, 1990)
-
Discovers bebop while listening to Howard McGhee's band at the Downbeat Club -- Follows bebop on Los Angeles radio broadcasts -- Los Angeles nightclubs.
-
TAPE NUMBER: III, Side One (April 4, 1990)
-
Impressions of UCLA in 1945 -- More on Bryant's introduction to Central Avenue -- Reasons for the decline of Central Avenue -- Brother's -- More on clubs and musicians -- Difficulties of being a female musician -- The nightclub crowd -- Benny Carter -- Drug addiction on Central Avenue -- Hotels where black musicians stayed in Los Angeles.
-
TAPE NUMBER: III, Side Two (April 4, 1990)
-
More on Central Avenue clubs -- Jam sessions at the Downbeat Club -- Teddy Edwards -- More on Downbeat musicians -- Bryant learns to play drums and trumpet simultaneously -- The Queens of Swing -- Curtis Mosby and the Club Alabam -- Billie Holiday -- Playing with the house band at the Alabam -- Headliners at the Alabam -- Central Avenue parades -- The death of Esvan Mosby -- The murder of Charles Williams.
-
TAPE NUMBER: IV, Side One (April 4, 1990)
-
More on Esvan Mosby's estate -- Jamming at the Milimo on Western Avenue -- The geographical spread of the clubs -- Playing with males and coping with male chauvinism -- Playing on the road while pregnant and taking care of a baby -- The Hollywood Sepia Tones -- A six-week television show -- Other all-girl bands on television.
-
TAPE NUMBER: V, Side One (April 18, 1990)
-
Musical styles on Central Avenue -- More on clubs and musicians -- Takes lessons from Alma Hightower and Lloyd Reese -- Bebop on Central -- Wallichs' Music City record store -- Meets Dizzy Gillespie -- Rhythm and blues -- More on touring with the Prairie View Coeds -- George Treadwell -- More on getting started in Los Angeles -- The Queens of Swing.
-
TAPE NUMBER: V, Side Two (April 18, 1990)
-
Meets Quincy Jones and Ray Charles -- Threatened by jealous wives -- Move to New York in the early fifties -- Playing in Canada and Chicago -- Meets Charlie Parker while playing at Hermosa Beach, California -- More on playing with all-girl groups -- Stops working with girl groups -- Eric Dolphy and the Oasis Club -- Musician hangouts in the early fities -- More on Dolphy -- Wardell Gray -- Playing San Francisco in the late forties -- Jam sessions at Percy's Melody Room in Glendale, California.
-
TAPE NUMBER: VI, Side One (April 18, 1990)
-
The role Central Avenue played in Bryant's life -- How music brings back memories -- Amalgamation of Local 767 and Local 47 of the American Federation of Musicians -- What was lost by amalgamating -- Bryant's concern for today's African American youth -- Fighting against Local 47's firing of the last black business agent in the union -- Women in the union -- How studio musicians split off from other musicians -- The decline of Central Avenue as a result of police harassment.
-
TAPE NUMBER: VI, Side Two (April 18, 1990)
-
The musical significance of Central Avenue -- The inadequacy of musical labels -- The media's sparse coverage of jazz -- The geographical spread of the clubs -- Loss of the Central Avenue camaraderie -- Final thoughts on Central Avenue's significance.
Clora Bryant (2), Vienne (F) 1987 - Trumpet Legends:
Sweet Baby blues & Jazz Band: CLORA BRYANT (tp), Jimmy Cheatham (tb), Curtis Peagler (as), Jimmy Noone Jr (ts, cl), Dinky Morris (ts), Jeannie Cheatham (p, voc), Red Callender (b), John Morris (dm), Vienne (F), July 8 1987 Baby, You Don't Have to Go Photos Michel Laplace. Archives Michel "Bunk" Laplace. See DVD-Rom "Le Monde de la Trompette et des Cuivres" & CD-Rom "Jazz Etc" by Michel Laplace
May 30, 1927 Clora Bryant, S'posin'
Clora Bryant /Gal With A Horn 1957
Clora Bryant (Trumpetiste) - Interview -
Ladies Behind the Beat.TV
https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/la-rebellion/films/trumpetistically-clora-bryant
Trumpetistically, Clora Bryant
This film presents a fond and informative portrait of pioneering female jazz trumpeter Clora Bryant, a proponent of West Coast jazz whose early stints with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm led eventually to collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, among others. Rich with tunes and anecdotes, the documentary handsomely details Bryant’s long journey in music and her influence on generations of musicians.
—Shannon Kelley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeinabu_irene_Davis
Zeinabu irene Davis captures black woman icons with her unapologetic and undistorted lens. She depicts the life of Clora Bryant, the star and protagonist of Trumpetistically, Clora Bryant, as experiences setbacks from stereotyping and unfair treatment in the jazz world, despite her widely-recognized talent and unwavering passion. The 1989 film dives into the life and struggles of Clora Bryant–an indisputable jazz icon–through the documentary lens of the unheeded real. Beginning with her early life when she fell in love with the trumpet and ending well after Bryant lost her ability to play, this documentary shows how one woman defied the odds to become of the best trumpet players of any generation.
One thing that was clearly illustrated in this 57-minute documentary was the importance of remembrance and inheritance in African American culture. The emphasis Bryant placed on teaching her sons the importance of carrying a note, demonstrated Black women's pride in sharing both their talent and their secrets to overcoming racist and sexist obstacles with younger generations (Trumpetistically, Clara Bryant). She wanted them to achieve success while remembering their history and the sacrifices that not only she, but their ancestors made for their betterment. Women like Bryant wanted to leave the world knowing not only that their craft would live on, but that their children, loved ones, friends, and young Black people in general could take an easier route to discovering their true identity and freedom. One thing that Bryant did not want to pass on is her trauma. She endured hardships and sacrificed so that the future generations would not have to do the same. However, this is America; a system built upon structural racism and a racial hierarchy that scorns everyone who is not at the top. The trauma has endured. It has spanned decades with no end in sight. How do we stop it? One element that Davis's work achieves is emphasizing the importance of inheritance and the role that trauma plays in affecting multiple generations of Black Americans without recreating or causing new trauma.
Film Credits:
| Individual | Role(s) |
|---|---|
| Zeinabu irene Davis |
Director Producer Writer |
| Lillian E. Benson |
Writer Editor |
| Katherine Engstrom |
Cinematographer Editor |
| Willie Dawkins | Cinematographer |
| Charles Burnett | Cinematographer |
| S. Torriano Berry | Cinematographer |
| Yasu Tsuji | Cinematographer |
| Biya Ababulga | Cinematographer |
| Clora Bryant | Cast |
| Dizzy Gillespie | Cast |
| James Newton | Cast |
| Helen Cole | Cast |
| Teddy Edwards | Cast |
| Marc Arthur Chéry | Producer |
| Pierre Désir | Cinematographer |
The Girls In The Band - Official Trailer 2
The International Sweethearts of Rhythm - Best Female Jazz Band:
The International Sweethearts of Rhythm was the first integrated all-women's band in the United States. During the 1940s the band featured some of the best female musicians of the day.[1] They played swing and jazz on a national circuit that included the Apollo Theater in New York City, the Regal Theater in Chicago, and the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C.[2][3] After a performance in Chicago in 1943, the Chicago Defender announced the band was "one of the hottest stage shows that ever raised the roof of the theater!"[4] They have been labeled "the most prominent and probably best female aggregation of the Big Band era".[5] During feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s in America, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm became popular with feminist writers and musicologists who made it their goal to change the discourse on the history of jazz to include both men and women musicians. Flutist Antoinette Handy was one scholar who documented the story of these female musicians of color.[6]
History
Early years
The original members of the band had met in Mississippi in 1938 at the Piney Woods Country Life School, a school for poor and African American children.[7] The majority who attended Piney Woods were orphans, including band member Helen Jones, who had been adopted by the school's principal and founder (also the Sweethearts' original bandleader), Laurence C. Jones.[7] During a 1980 Kansas City Women's Jazz Festival interview, band member Helen Jones said that the existence of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm was the result of Jones's vision. In the 1930s he was inspired by Ina Ray Hutton's Melodears to create an all-female jazz band at Piney Woods.[7] Having been an entrepreneur when it came to fundraising, in the early 1920s Jones supported the school by sending an all-female vocal group called the Cotton Blossom Singers on the road.[8]: 85–86 Following the fundraising successes of the band and other Piney Woods musical groups, he formed the Swinging Rays of Rhythm led by Consuela Carter. The band toured throughout the eastern U.S. to raise money for the school. According to the saxophonist and bandleader Lou Holloway, the Swinging Rays of Rhythm became the resident all-female swing band at Piney Woods after April 1941 when the Sweethearts began traveling cross-country.[8]: 137 Holloway said the Swinging Rays were understudies for the Sweethearts, performing for them when the Sweethearts had to attend school after missing too many classes.[8]: 138 In 1941 several girls in the band fled the school's bus when they found out that some of them would not graduate because they had been touring with the band instead of sitting in class.[8]: 171
Leaving Piney Woods
In 1941 the International Sweethearts of Rhythm became a professional act and severed connections with Piney Woods.[8]: 6 The band settled in Arlington, Virginia, where a wealthy Virginian supported them.[9] Members from different races, including Latina, Asian, Caucasian, Black, Indian and Puerto Rican,[10][11] lent the band an "international" flavor, and the name International Sweethearts of Rhythm was given to the group. Composed of 14- to 19-year-olds, the band included Pauline Braddy (tutored on drums by Sid Catlett and Jo Jones), Willie Mae Wong (sax), Edna Williams and thirteen others, including Helen Jones Woods, who was the daughter of the Piney Wood School's founder. Anna Mae Winburn became bandleader in 1941 after resigning from her position leading the Cotton Club Boys in North Omaha, Nebraska, which featured guitarist Charlie Christian[12] and Fletcher Henderson.[7][13] Winburn led the band until her retirement.[8]: 154
The first composer for the band was Eddie Durham, with Jesse Stone replacing him in 1941. Durham left the Sweethearts to form Eddie Durham's All-Star Girls Orchestra, taking some of the Sweethearts with him.[4] Stone brought in professional musicians to help bridge the gap between experienced and inexperienced players.[8]: 159 Two of Stone's professionals were trumpeter Ernestine "Tiny" Davis and saxophonist Vi Burnside. Both were members of the all-black Harlem Playgirls during the 1930s.[8]: 161 The sixteen piece International Sweethearts of Rhythm included a brass section, heavy percussion, and a deep rhythmic sense, along with many of the best female musicians of the day.[14] About the group's self-titled recording, Lewis Porter wrote, "The sixteen recordings here reveal the dynamic blues playing and driving riffs for which the band was noted, as captured in Armed Forces Radio Service broadcasts of 1945 and 1946."[15]
The venues where they performed were predominantly, if not only, for black audiences. These included the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., the Regal Theatre in Chicago, the Cotton Club in Cincinnati, the Riviera in St. Louis, the Dreamland in Omaha, the Club Plantation and Million Dollar Theater in Los Angeles.[8]: 6 Critic Leonard Feather wrote, "if you are white, whatever your age, chances are you have never heard of the Sweethearts[...]".[7]
The Sweethearts swiftly rose to fame, as evidenced by one Howard Theater show in 1941 when the band set a box office record of 35,000 patrons in one week. In Hollywood they made short films to use as "filler" in movie theaters.[16]
Although the International Sweethearts of Rhythm were successful, as they made two coast-to-coast tours in their bus, a few impediments remained.[8]: 157 According to pianist Johnnie Mae Rice, because of the Jim Crow laws in the southern states of the former Confederacy, the band "practically lived on the bus, using it for music rehearsals and regular school classes, arithmetic and everything".[7] Segregation laws prevented them from using certain restaurants and hotels.[17] During the 1980 Kansas City Women's Jazz Festival, saxophonist Roz Cron said, "We white girls were supposed to say 'My mother was black and my father was white' because that was the way it was in the South. Well, I swore to the sheriff in El Paso that that's what I was. But he went through my wallet and there was a photo of my mother and father sitting before our little house in New England with the picket fence, and it just didn't jell. So I spent my night in jail."[7] Because of situations like this, the band members took precautions. For example, the white women in the band wore dark makeup on stage to avoid arrest.[18][19] They made relatively little money as a traveling band. According to saxophonist Willie Mae Wong Scott, "The original members received $1 a day for food plus $1 a week allowance, for a grand total of $8 a week. That went on for years, until we got a substantial raise—to $15 a week. By the time we broke up, we were making $15 a night, three nights a week."[7]
Popularity
After Stone left in 1943 he was replaced by Maurice King, who continued the tradition of professionalism that Stone brought to the group.[8]: 159 (King later arranged for Gladys Knight and the Detroit Spinners.) The band performed at the Apollo Theater in 1943.[8]: 171 In 1944 the band was named "America's No. 1 All-Girl Orchestra" by DownBeat magazine.[18] The band enjoyed a large following among African-American audiences. They played battle-of-the-bands concerts against bands led by Fletcher Henderson and Earl Hines and sold out large venues such as the Rhumboogie Club in Chicago. According to D. Antoinette Handy, the band received a larger vote than was given to Erskine Hawkins and his band!".[8]: 155 According to bassist Vi Wilson, jam sessions sometimes turned into battle of the band sessions between the Sweethearts of Rhythm and the Darlings of Rhythm. "They said, 'Those girls play like men.'"[20]: 70 During World War II, African American soldiers overseas wrote the band letters, asking them to come to Europe to perform. When the band toured France and Germany in 1945, the members became the first black women to travel with the USO.[8]: 162
The International Sweethearts of Rhythm performed in 1948 with Dizzy Gillespie at the fourth annual Cavalcade of Jazz concert at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles on September 12.[21] They also performed at the eighth Cavalcade of Jazz concert on June 1, 1952 when Anna Mae Winburn was leading.[22] In 1980, jazz pianist Marian McPartland convinced the organizers of the third annual Women's Jazz Festival in Kansas City to reunite the Sweethearts.[7] Included in this interview were nine of the original members as well as six of the band's later members (four were Caucasian).[7]
Disbanding
Among the reasons given for the band's breakup were aging, deaths of members, weariness of life on the road, marriage, career changes, problems with managers, and lack of funds.[8]: 165–166 Tiny Davis turned down the opportunity to tour with the band in 1946.[23] Rae Lee Jones continued to fight for the Sweethearts, but after 1946 the key instrumentalists had left and the band began to unravel with Jones's death in 1949. Guitarist Carline Ray Russell said musical tastes were changing.[8]: 165 Jazz writer Frank Tirro said that bebop musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Kenny Clarke were trying to change jazz from dance music to a chamber music art form.[8]: 167
Legacy
Despite the impact of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm being repeatedly ignored in popular histories of jazz, the band enjoyed a resurgence in popularity among feminists in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the band was among the first marketed as women's music. Several feminist writers, musicologists, and others have taken on the task of elevating women's contributions to and integral participation in the making of jazz history. For example, Sherrie Tucker, author of several articles on the subject matter as well as the book Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s, states the importance of bringing women into the male-dominated construction of jazz history:
[T]hrough serious study of jazzwomen's oral histories, scholars might learn new narrative strategies for imagining and telling jazz histories in which women and men are both present. Because women who played instruments other than piano were seldom the 'favored artists' of the 'superior genres,' and because they were hardly ever recorded, they have had little access to the deceptive 'coherence' of mainstream histories. Therefore, they are uniquely positioned to suggest new frameworks for telling and interpreting jazz history.[20]: 68
With this said, perhaps one of the greatest outcomes of the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, for the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and their devoted fans at least, is the record contribution of the producer Rosetta Reitz, who has shared with the world a small but quintessential piece of aural history. Her biographical liner notes for the International Sweethearts of Rhythm record, as well as top quality recordings, have been made available worldwide through her company, Rosetta Records, whose focus is primarily to feature female and black jazz and blues musicians who are not usually recognized for their tremendous talents.[15] The International Sweethearts of Rhythm record compilation (1984) was followed two years later by a documentary short film directed and produced by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss,[14] "at the onset of the third-wave feminist movement".[24]: 183 International Sweethearts of Rhythm: America's Hottest All-Girl Band premiered at the 1986 New York Film Festival.[25][26]
There has also been considerable scholarship conducted regarding the "International" aspect of their name and the effect it had on the band's acceptance among African Americans and whites in the South.[27] According to one jazz historian the band membership included "Willie Mae Wong, Chinese saxophonist; Alma Cortez, Mexican clarinet player; Nina de LaCruz, Indian saxophonist; and Nova Lee McGee, Hawaiian trumpet player. They were all children of mixed parents; the rest were Afro-American."[28] A publicity poster for the band's September 1940 performance in Emporia, Virginia included the text "America's Greatest Female Band, The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, In Whose Veins Flow the Blood of Many Races: Indian, Mexican, Chinese, Negro".[8]: 119 The first white musicians joined in 1943.[8]: 119
There were also several lesbians in the band, including Tiny Davis, whose independent music career and partnership with Ruby Lucas were later the subject of Schiller and Weiss' documentary Tiny and Ruby: Hell Divin' Women.[29]
In 2004 the Kit McClure Band released The Sweethearts Project on Redhot Records. It is a tribute album recorded entirely with an all-female band using only songs the Sweethearts recorded.[30]
In March 2011, six of the surviving members of the band donated memorabilia and artifacts from their touring years to the National Museum of American History. The ceremony marking the donations was the kick-off event of the Smithsonian Institution's Jazz Appreciation Month, and the band members received a standing ovation from attendees.[31] The International Sweethearts of Rhythm Collection at the Archives Center, National Museum of American History makes available to the public for research news clippings, photographs, correspondence, ephemera from USO travels, newsletters, books related to the group, and sound recordings.
In 2012, the compilation album International Sweethearts of Rhythm: Hottest Women’s Band of the 1940s was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[32]
In May 2021, the Urban One Honors ceremony recognized the band for their contributions as a symbol of success over adversity.[33]
Personnel
The lineup of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm changed throughout the band's career. The names listed below are how the members were billed at the time; names after marriage may be different.
- Virginia Audley † – vocalist
- Grace Bayron – saxophone
- Judy Bayron – trombone
- Pauline Braddy † – drums
- Lorraine Brown – tenor and baritone saxophone
- Nancy Brown – trumpet
- Clora Bryant – trumpet and vocalist
- Vi Burnside – tenor saxophone
- Toby Butler – trumpet
- Ina Belle Byrd † – saxophone, trombone
- Ray Carter – trumpet
- Ester Louise Cooke – trumpet and trombone
- Alma Cortez † – clarinet and saxophone
- Rosalind "Roz" Cron ‡ – alto saxophone
- Ernestine "Tiny" Davis – trumpet
- Nina de La Cruz † – saxophone
- Lucille Dixon – bass
- Amy Garrison – saxophone
- Margaret "Trump" Gipson – bass
- Ione Grisham † – alto saxophone
- Irene Grisham † – tenor saxophone
- Helen Jones † – trombone
- Zena Latto[34] – saxophone
- Roxanna Lucas – guitar
- Evelyn McGee † – vocalist
- Nova Lee McGee † – trumpet
- Colleen Murray – tenor saxophone
- Sadie Pankey † – trumpet
- Geneva Frances Perry – alto and tenor saxophone
- Marge Pettiford – saxophone
- Mim Polak – trumpet
- Corinne Posey – trombone
- Lena Posey – trombone
- Carline Ray – double bass
- Johnnie Mae Rice † – piano
- Bernice Rothchild † – bass
- Jane Sager – trumpet
- Helen Saine – baritone and alto saxophone
- Edna Smith – bass
- Mabel Louise "Big Maybelle" Smith – vocalist
- Ernestine Snyder †
- Lucy Snyder †
- Johnnie Mae Stansbury – trumpet
- Jean Starr – trumpet
- Jean Travis – trombone
- Edna Williams † – trumpet, accordion, singer, arranger
- Selma Lee Williams – tenor saxophone
- Anna Mae Winburn – band leader, singer, piano, guitar
- Willie Mae Wong † – baritone saxophone
- Myrtle Young – tenor saxophone
Arrangers/musical directors:
- Eddie Durham
- Maurice King
- Jesse Stone
Discography
The band recorded four songs.[36]: 19
- International Sweethearts of Rhythm: Hottest Women's Band of the 1940s (Rosetta Records)
Track listing
- "Galvanizing" (Maurice King)
- "Sweet Georgia Brown" (Bernie, Pinkard, Casey)
- "Central Avenue Boogie" (Buck Clayton)
- "Bugle Call Rag" (Meyers, Pettis, Schoebel)
- "She's Crazy with the Heat" (Maurice King)
- "Jump Children" (Sweethearts and King)
- "Vi Vigor" (Maurice King)
- "Lady Be Good" ( George and Ira Gershwin)
- "Gin Mill Special" (Erskine Hawkins)
- "Honeysuckle Rose" (Razaf and Waller)
- "That Man of Ine" (Maurice King)
- "Diggin' Dykes" (Vi Burnside)
- "Don't Get It Twisted" (Maurice King)
- "Tuxedo Junction" (Dash, Johnson, Hawkins, Feyne)
- "Slightly Frantic" (Maurice King)
- "One O'Clock Jump" (Count Basie)
The following album is a compilation of live radio appearances:
- Hot Licks 1944–1946: Rare Recordings from One of the Best American All Girl Bands of the Swing Era[37]
Filmography
The International Sweethearts of Rhythm were featured in several short films (including Soundies), one feature-length film,[36]: 90 [24]: 261 and two documentary films. They were:
- Harlem Jam Session (1946 Associated Artists Productions - Soundie)
- How About That Jive (1947 Associated Artists Productions - Soundie)
- International Sweethearts of Rhythm (1946 Associated Artists Productions - Soundie)
- Jump Children (1946 Alexander Productions - Soundie)
- That Man of Mine (1946 Alexander Productions - feature film)
- That Man of Mine (1946 Alexander Productions - Soundie)
- Harlem Carnival (1949)
- International Sweethearts of Rhythm (1986 documentary directed by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss)
- The Girls in the Band (2011 documentary directed by Judy Chaikin; includes segments on the band)
A 2004 DVD called Swing Era: Sarah Vaughan features Vaughan, along with little-seen material from the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.[38]
Further reading
- Nelson, Marilyn (2009). Sweethearts of Rhythm: The Story of the Greatest All-Girl Swing Band in the World. illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. New York: Dial Books. ISBN 9780803731875. OCLC 269282146. (young adult book)
- Deans, Karen (2015). Swing Sisters: The Story of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. illustrated by Joe Cepeda (First ed.). New York: Holiday House. ISBN 9780823419708. OCLC 843785531. (juvenile book)
External links:
- Video of a conversation with six band members as part of the Smithsonian Institution's Jazz Appreciation Month events, 2011
- Promotional photo, c. 1946.
- Band photo
- Profile of Carline Ray (of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm) by Arnold Jay Smith (www.jazz.com)
- "Women in Jazz" by Sherrie Tucker at PBS.org
