Jazz trombonist, composer, arranger; paved the way for women in jazz roles other than as vocalists.
Right: Melba Liston in 1993
Far rt: Susan and Melba in 1993 at the International Women's Brass Conf.
The 1920s and '30s 1926 PRICES
An only child and a musical prodigy, Melba Liston was born in Kansas City, in 1926. Although she and her mother were poor, they had a piano and a radio. After hearing Fats Waller on the radio when she was six, Melba invented a numbering system so she could notate songs and sing them later.
One day she saw a trombone in a store window. ”I just had to have it. [It was] beautiful, standing in the shop window like a mannequin, and I was mesmerized by it. I was six or seven. My mom didn’t question it, she just ... got it for me.“ [1]
Movies were black & white, and silent until The Jazz Singer (1927) starring singer Al Jolson, a white man in blackface.
During the 1920s stock prices rose to incredible heights. Ads on radio and in newspapers and magazines urged consumers to buy cigarettes, coffee, and Coca-Cola. But on October 29, 1929, the bubble burst. Stock prices plummeted, and the country sank into an economic Depression.
In 1936, in the midst of the Depression, Melba moved to Los Angeles with her mother and enrolled in a Works Projects Administration (WPA) program run by Alma Hightower, a music educator who stressed the importance of black culture.
Bread .09/loaf Milk .56/gal
Car $275.00 Gas .23/gal
Average income: $1,427/year
President Calvin Coolidge
Ford Motors announced an 8 hour day, $5 minimum daily wage. Mordecai W. Johnson became the 1st black president of Howard University.
Hot toys:Raggedy Ann dolls, Crayola Crayons
Hot books: The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
By 1934 Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) was President; First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt traveled the country, speaking on behalf of FDR, who was confined to a wheelchair due to a childhood bout with polio.
The 1940s 1942 Prices
Melba turned sixteen in 1942, left Hightower’s band and joined the Los Angeles Musicians’ Union. She won a job in the pit band at the Lincoln Theater and began writing arrangements for the band.
During the 1940s she formed friendships with sax player Dexter Gordon, with whom she made her first recording (1947) and pianist Gerald Wilson, who hired her to play trombone in his band (1947—‘48). She also worked with Billie Holiday and Count Basie.
Basie recorded ”One O’Clock Jump“ early in 1942, but that November the American Federation of Musicians issued a ban on recordings. They wanted record companies to pay better royalties to record artists. The ban ended when Decca agreed to pay AFM union recording royalties late in 1943. In 1944, Capitol, Columbia and Victor Records signed the union agreement.
Bread .09/loaf Milk .60/gal
Car $1,100.00 Gas .20/gal
Average income: $2,348 /year
Hot books: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers; West with the Night, Beryl Markham
Fought on land, sea and in the air, World War II dominated the 1940s. Food, gas and other household products were rationed.
With so many men away at war, women in unprecedented numbers worked in factories, toiling round the clock to produce planes, ships and other war materials. But the U.S. military was racially segregated until 1948 when President Harry S. Truman ordered the armed forces desegregated.
The 1950s and 1960s
In 1950, Melba joined Dizzy Gillespie’s band which played two State Department tours (1956--‘57) in concerts that featured her arrangements. A classic African beauty with a graceful bearing and a ready smile, Melba stood tall and slender onstage with her trombone, charming audiences all over the world with her charisma and magnetism. [1]
In 1958 she formed an all-woman quintet, working at various clubs in New York and Bermuda. From 1959 – 1961 she was one of two women in the Quincy Jones band.
A chance encounter in 1958 led to a musical collaboration that lasted 40 years. Jazz pianist and composer Randy Weston, the jazz world’s leading proponent of African music and culture recalls: ”I was listening to Dizzy’s band at Birdland and saw this beautiful woman playing the trombone. It was Melba Liston, featured on her own arrangement of ‘My Reverie.’ When I introduced myself and we shook hands, it was like electricity.“ Melba played trombone and did arrangements on Weston's albums, from Little Niles (1959) through Khepera (1998). [5]
The 1970s, '80s and '90s
In 1973 she moved to Jamaica to teach at the University of the West Indies and to direct the Department of Popular Music Studies at the Jamaica Institute of Music (1973-1979). The first all-woman jazz festival in Kansas City in 1979 brought her out of retirement and back to the United States. She formed Melba Liston and Company, a mixed gender unit that performed at European jazz festivals and in New York City, including Carnegie Hall. [3]
In 1985 a stroke left her right side paralyzed, effectively ending her playing career, but her determination and dedication to music inspired her to continue working as a composer and arranger. ”Even though she’s in a wheelchair and paralyzed on one side,“ Randy Weston recalled in a 1999 interview shortly before her death, ”she still writes with her left hand on a computer.“ [5]
MENTORS: Dexter Gordon, Dizzie Gillespie, Mary Lou Williams, Clark Terry and, perhaps most importantly, Randy Weston.
IMPORTANT COLLABORATIONS: co-led a band with Clark Terry; composed and arranged for Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Freddie Hubbard and Art Blakey, and singers Tony Bennett, Eddie Fisher, Abbie Lincoln, Dinah Washington, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and for the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra. [1, 3, 4]
IDOLS: pianist, composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981) and trumpeter and composer, Valaida Snow (1903-1956). ”Valaida was beautiful and talented and smart," Melba said, "but she never seemed happy when I knew her.“ [2]
ON GENDER ISSUES: ”I had to prove myself, just like Jackie Robinson,“ she said. But after gaining acceptance from male musicians, she was ”... free all over the world. Musicians will take care of Melba.“ However, she believed women musicians were not given enough credit for their contributions. Citing blues singer Bessie Smith’s influence in the 1920s and ‘30s when black women were the top performers, Melba said: ”... if it wasn’t for the women there wouldn’t be no culture a-tall, a-tall.“ [1, 2]
HER LEGACY: On an instrument not often played by women, and working in a field dominated by men, Melba earned raves from players and critics alike, paving the way for other jazzwomen. Her command of big band and bebop idioms and her ability to blend African rhythms and percussion with brass and woodwind parts in large scale works was, in the minds of many, equal to the work of Miles Davis and Gil Evans. [6]
HONORS:
1987 The National Endowment for the Arts names Melba a Jazz Master, its highest honor in jazz.
1991 New York’s Lincoln Center first jazz concert, ”Blues to Africa,“ presents Randy Weston's
Big Band in works arranged by Melba.
1993 The first International Women’s Brass Conference (IWBC) honors her as a
brasswomen pioneer.
1994 Hip Bones: The Year of the Trombone Jazz Festival (Berkeley, CA) is dedicated to Melba.
Carnegie Hall features her big-band charts in a tribute to women in jazz.
1995 The Smithsonian interviews her for its prestigious Jazz Oral History project.
1999 Although too ill to accept, Melba is invited to share a residency with Randy Weston at
Harvard University; the concluding concert by Weston’s African Rhythms and the Harvard
Jazz Band (Tom Everett, director) features Melba’s arrangements, of which ”Hi-Fly,“
”My Reverie,“ and her 1967 composition ”Len Sirrah“ receive standing ovations. [5, 5a]
Selected Discography: Melba appeared on more than 50 recordings.
As Performer:
Dizzy in South America, Vol. 1 & 2, CAP (1956) Dizzie Gillespie’s band
includes one of her most famous improvisations on Gillespie’s ”Cool Breeze.“
The Jazz Messenger Plus Four, Cadet (1957) Art Blakey
Melba and Her Bones (1958) Columbia, produced by Leonard Feather
Forty Years of Women in Jazz, a Double Disc Feminist Retrospective, Jass Records (1989), reissue of ”My Reverie“ trombone solo with Dizzy Gillespie band (1956)
As Composer/Arranger:
Q Live in Paris, Warner Brothers (1960) Quincy Jones
A few of her many collaborations with Randy Weston: Uhuru Afrika/Highlife, Capitol (reissue of 1960, 1963 recordings); Tanjah, Verve (1973); Spirits of our Ancestors, Verve (1992); Volcano Blues, Verve (1993); Khepera, Verve (1998)
SOURCES:
1. Stormy Weather: the Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen, Linda Dahl, Limelight Editions, 1994
2. Conversations between Susan Fleet and Melba Liston, May 1993
3. ”Melba Liston, Jazz Master,“ Pat Mullan, Jazz Now, reproduced in IWBC Newsletter, Volume 2, Number 2: October, 1995
4. Jazz Masters, a National Endowment for the Arts publication, 2004, p. 61
5. ”Africa’s jazz messenger,“ Bob Blumenthal, Boston Globe, April 16, 1999, an interview with Randy Weston during his residency at Harvard University
5a. Concert review, Bob Blumenthal, Boston Globe, April 19, 1999
6. Peter Watrous, April 30, 1999, Obituary, New York Times.
