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On the fringes, where the prairies begin to give way to the foothills of the US west, in the 1930s, there were countless young Africans in America learning and expressing a cultural gift created in the land of their African foremothers, and tinged with the influence of the Indigenous and European experience in music in the United States of America. Kansas was a heaping bowl of Trail of Tears folkways of Indigenous and African roots intertwined in a sauce incomparable painful memory, since the deathmarch from Georgia and the US Southeast. Spiced with the bold flavor of the Mississippi delta blues, gospel church exhortations, popular White country folk compositions, New Orleans street marching bands (influenced but not based on European brass bands exclusively) and the bustling, train and machine sounds as additives, there was no doubt that a new dish was on the stove.

In this section of the vast country, a child prodigy on the piano, would eventually be playing, before elementary school was completed, in rough and tumble bars for appreciative adult crowds. Her name was Mary Lou Williams. And Kansas City, Missouri, a bubbling center of song, and its dozens of clubs that winked at the Depression due to illegal White run crime. A descendant of Irish immigrants, and longtime politician, Tom Pendergast had ruled the area. Before the thirties’ were up, he wound up in a US prison for tax fraud. This was Mary Lou’s finishing school.

Another girl, born in Kansas City, on 13 January, 1926, and who had moved to Los Angeles in 1937, was destined to help create new paths in melody and harmonic construction, as well as arranging. The copper skinned, broad cheeked child was playing an instrument in a pit band at age 11 in the California megapolis, and it wasn’t the permissible instrument for young women, the piano.

Giving the instructor, that her mother had hired to coach her on the trombone, back talk, Melba Liston had already a foundation for greatness. How do you argue with a youth, who at age eight, had learned to play, by ear, the long slided brass horn, with multiple and complex note positioning? Alma Hightower, a woman who ran a local band for children, adored Melba’s potential, but at sixteen, against Ms Hightower’s opinion, Melba insisted on joining the musician’s union.

Melba may or may not have known that Trummy Young, a Count Basie legend, was going to see his profile diminish. Or that the speech-like soloist Dickie Wells of the then famous Teddy Hill Orchestra would step by step be outpaced by a trombone player of another dimension. Influenced by something that a Florida trumpet dervish, Fats Navarro, and an equally unique Kansas City saxophone wizard, Charlie Parker, had whispered musicially in his ear, JJ Johnson, just two years beyond Melba in age, was going to be congratulated as a trombone master of the decades to come.

Melba, who grew to be tall and alluring, may or may not have known that she would, through her excellence, one day stun these men, and others, by sitting among them, jamming, and if need be, shaking the spit from her horn after a riff, walking among these men on stages and in the studio and outrage most by writing arrangements that they were to play—if they could!

Melba Dorretta Liston was just a child then. And she might have heard of women, who had by this time, endured to become respected musicians in a hostile environment, such as, Margie Creath, Lil Hardin Armstrong or Valaida Snow. But African women had to contend with an ”industry” leaking with racism that African men faced. Tommy Dorsey, an influence on trombone she later claimed, or Glenn Miller, while playing music often less sophisticated, or covers of what Africans created, reaped the millions of dollars. And while wincing from this, far too many African men turned their despair and fury on women musicians.

Melba Liston, as any woman performing the music then and today, would see the time arrive when she had to handle the comments deriding her ability, intellect and ambitions thrust at her by men of all races. She would have to fight off, when she could, sexual propositions in order to accept engagements or recording dates. Deflecting men’s hands on her body, like the invasive unbusinesslike offers, when she didn’t want this, as any women artist can attest to, became a challenge. She, like some of the women who have courageously become known as brilliant musicians, has had to admit that she was not able to stop all of these unwanted attacks.

Melba, at an age of wonder at band sounds, and the minor scales that intertwine themselves in the African Classical Music of the generations of Africans in America, misnamed jazz, likely knew one item: that she loved the art!

In The Shadow Of KC

Kansas City, was where the relative freedom to create had magnetically drawn in Missouri native and tenor saxophone royal, Coleman Hawkins, who at age 35 had already spent years soulfully dazzling Europeans in Scandinavia and France. His acknowledged reed peer, the laid back silky player, Lester Young, (taught in part by his saxophone playing mother how to play his instrument) and drumskin commando Jo Jones and their leader, Count Basie, made the city’s sounds their trademark. The rotund man from New Jersey with a tinkling keyboard accent for their powerhouse group had fused some of the region’s clamor with the Count’s own mentor’s genius. Bill Basie had been given instruction by an even wider young fellow in New York City beforehand, Thomas ”Fats” Waller. In time, the aggregate was broadcasting into the US night the new sounds. A emotive Ben Webster, throaty roar, growl and velvet whisper on his tenor saxophone, helped keep standards high when he dropped into town with Duke Ellington’s crush of musical all stars. One, trombonist Laurence Brown, would make an impression on Melba Liston as she found her voice on the horn.

The ”cutting” floor was dangerous enough for well known touring headliners to quit in a huff when the after club hours improvisations began. A local young cub might gain tremendous admiration and a ”oldhead” have to realize that the advancement in rhythm, chord structure, speed or pace of phrasing, breath control, or in the case of pianists, depth of the science of harmony, had changed. By decades end, a city boy who had been laughed at in his early KC cutting contests, arrived in New York City, in 1939, ready to change the face of the music:

[1]Charlie Parker discovered the revolutionary style by using higher interval of a chord as a melody line, with related changes. This style enabled Parker and others to use chords of well known standards, add original melody lines and become composers of original numbers that never sounded like the melodies from which they were adopted.”

Melba Liston, although her family moved to the desert city of Los Angeles at an early age, lived in the shadow of Kansas City, her birthplace and that of a creative explosion that would rock the second half of the 20th century.

Woman On The Trail

In 1943, a Chicago bandleader was building a career as an innovator. Gerald Wilson, who had left the eminent Jimmie Lunceford organization, hired the 17 year old trombonist and young woman with the writing skills. Melba Liston began her journey on the path of the professional musician in the US.

”I was a slow player, a ballad, and blues player. My ear was alright, but I was involved in arranging all the time and didn’t go jamming and stuff like that.”

By 1947, however, having grasped some concepts that JJ Johnson had on ”the bone”, Melba was accomplished enough to record with a lanky, charming Los Angeles school friend. If they had not seen alto saxophonist Charlie Parker on his first west coast visits-memorable not just for the scorching tandem with a 30 year old trumpeter/music theorist, Dizzy Gillespie, they had felt this California earthquake. Before age nineteen, he had been an improvisational force with the highly regarded Kansas City band led by blues keyboardist Jay McShann. Charlie had every serious musician, from the Central Avenue racially segregated clubs to the White film score composers, talking, and wondering what the possibilities of collaboration were. But Charlie, the African in America with all the wit, genius and dreams, had personal concerns—resistance to accepting racist booking and accomodations in LA and around the US, and a heroin habit. Both had ruined his life, the ”horse” he had ridden since age 14 in KC. In eight years, Charlie would pass on, to the grief of millions.

Melba entered a studio with her Los Angeles former schoolmate, a son of a medical professional who treated musicians, a tenor saxophone player, and in the future, he joined Charlie Parker as a world renown, nimble improviser. His name was Dexter Gordon.

In 1948, Melba took her long trombone case, and her staff paper to new heights of public recognition, down into the gutters of sexist insults from men co workers. Dizzy Gillespie hired Melba for his legendary big band.

Regarding the sexual harassment and assaults, Melba states, (Gillespie bands of 1948 and ’56-’57):

”When I started going with Gerald Wilson I was okay because I had his support so I didn’t have to worry. But when I got back into Dizzy’s band it was the same thing all over again.”

Joining Melba was a quiet, intense man that Dizzy had heard of, from his own former base, Philadelphia, by the name of John Coltrane. The saxophone player had been learning quickly about complex music ideas since attending a music school, and getting his taste of performance in a US Navy combo, and the competitive Philadelphia scene. Paul Gonsalves, another sax ace, sat near Coltrane, and John Lewis, who would later help form the Modern Jazz Quartet, had a piano chair in the innovative band. During this period, a busy one for Melba, she contended with men refusing to play on dates because she was a woman. She was called a bitch and men resented her charts, including Dizzy, the harmonic virtuoso, (taught much by Mary Lou Williams!) due to their level of challenge, musically. Alto saxophone player, Vi Redd, comments on her friend’s astounding writing:

” Melba’s just always been an advanced musician...we had to struggle to keep up with her...”

Melba learned more of the scene from touring the US South with Billie Holiday, whom she worked with in 1949. Gerald Wilson had been asked to form the backing band, with the then modern ”bop”touch, and Melba was chosen. Billie was a self assured woman who had battled for her artistic and business power since the 1930s, but who now had to adjust to changing audience tastes. The group was stranded in South Carolina before Melba quit. She took a position in the Los Angeles public schools, as an administrator.

There were few acceptable music roles that African women were by custom allowed during these days. Singers, such as Billie, Ella Fitzgerald (who would increasingly be marketed as a pop singer, though she had one of the best conceptions of the new 40s sound), and two dynamic, piano playing vocal wonders, ”Bebop” Betty Carter, out of Detroit, and Newark’s Sarah Vaughan, who Billy Eckstine was grooming, did find a way to popularity.

But women musicians, including the songwriter/vocalist/pianist Mary Lou Williams, were often stalled in a sexist quagmire in the US.

Melba became dissappointed at her prospects, and stepped away from the lights, taking a clerical position. She was 24 years old, about the same age as John Coltrane, and though she was more likely than not more accomplished than he, it would be seven years before Melba would return to full time activity. Coltrane, on the other hand, would have opportunities to develop his brilliance, playing with other up and comers, such as fellow tenor Sonny Rollins, and would be picked out of many to be a sideman for the music’s trendsetters, like Miles Davis (born, like Melba, in 1926) and Thelonius Monk. Melba Liston, a competent big band section player, ”bop” soloist, and composer and arranger, because she was a woman, didn’t get this kind of chance. Her full worth to the world, musically, is not known.

Hollywood Blues

Gathering around the television, for those that could afford the huge box with the small black and white screen, became the thing to do in 1950s America. And one reality was made plain to Africans in America—they were going to be ridiculed, as they had been in the movies and radio. In fact, some of the first “Black” presences on televison’s initial years were carryovers from traditional American racist media of decades gone by. Two White men their skin painted to look “Black” continued to degrade African people in a former radio program, now visually insulting television broadcast of Amos ‘n Andy.

Ernie Kovacs, New Jersey born “comedian” was one of America’s popular television acts-he and other Whites dressed up as chimpanzees in men’s suits, supposedly “playing music” to slapstick results. The name of Kovac’s famous monkey group, clad in dark clothing, was the Nairobi Trio, mocking Kenya’s major city, then the scene of crumbling British colonial forces in the face of the determined Mau Mau. Another early television regular was about a large boned “happy Black maid” which also harped on stereotypes White society craved, of satisfied African servants in the US.

African people in the spotlight of racially segregated celebrity in the 1950s had a degree of conscience. Even Duke Ellington, who had played in foreign palaces for heads of states, could not stay in many of the hotels his grand orchestra performed at in the US. Americans, in European cities, when the inhabitants would not enforce American style racism, pressured the Marshall Plan recipients to comply in degrading African musicians or US military troops. Some artists began to refuse bookings in the South, or demanded that audiences be racially integrated. Most performers did not have the political outspokenness of a Paul Robeson, who was fingered by the Communist search and destroy campaigns of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Fortunate few were able to travel overseas on tours, and countries such as England had restrictive union clauses that barred many performers, despite growing desire to hear the music. But there was a way to fight back. Charles Mingus, a freewheeling and defiant Los Angeles bassist formed his own label, Debut, with Max Roach, the drummer. Dizzy Gillespie did the same. A cultural/political alarm clock rang to bring Africans in America into consciousness with the dozens of Asian and African nations fighting White might globally. Being able to travel on tours around the world, conversing with other Africans and other nonWhites, and having the mental space to reason out their feelings and self-determination ideas was an education. The artists had seen a world not always accepting of the US propaganda and were willing to share this with their people. Musicians named their compositions names after African countries, in allegiance with the battles being won against British and imperialist colonization. Musicians sang about strike power for workers in US plants, not only blues (Leadbelly) and with White folk singers, but popular musicians. The scourge of drugs on the streets of African peoples’ areas, a deluge after the Korean death trap for many US soldiers, affected and destroyed lives of bright lights. Fats Navarro had overdosed in 1949, The visionary “Bird” Parker died in 1955, and numerous people, including Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Jimmy Heath, James Moody, Hampton Hawes had to “kick” to stay alive. But a new awakening, even with the drug connected deaths of Charlie and then luminaries such as Lester Young and Billie Holiday, later in the 50s, was on the way.

Art Blakey, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Yusef Lateef, Max Roach and a tall man in his twenties, with rolls of baby fat, but wise to the building political winds, bassist Charles Mingus, started to create music anchored in the feeling of a people about to explode in defiance. Yet the music was instrumental. Racist custom, from the days of outlawing African singing, as well as the drum, in the American colonies, by the English, also framed the message of resistance in the mid fifties.

One of the signs of the changing times was that the US government, stung by television broadcasts worldwide of its brutal containment of African people, the generations in the US, began using music to sway international opinion. In propaganda response, the years to come would feature US State Department sponsored bands playing in Africa and Asia to firstly, glorify the US government, and send Africans from America to implicitly do so, and to spread around “American” culture in the form of “Jazz”. The US propaganda over the VOA (Voice of America) global short wave radio increased its music content, as had US Armed Forces Radio in 1940s imperialist war, included music, sometimes recorded live, by Jay McShann’s legendary Kansas City band, Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five, Count Basie and others.

Melba had, with her ability to play the harp, and radiate African beauty (a then head turning afro hair style created her “exotic” look) been in a few 1950s Hollywood movies. As a film extra in Los Angeles, this supplemented her wages. She grew restless, and made the decison to return to professional music, accepting Dizzy Gillespie’s offer to join the US State Department big band for 1956-57. On a South American tour, she wrote arrangements for the ’57 band. Some were recorded, such as Annie’s Dance, My Reverie, Stella by Starlight, The Gypsy, and were successful sellers.

Around this time, the good natured, but structure minded drummer, Art Blakey, whose Jazz Messengers had been originally gotten together in 1949, got Melba to agree to play in his classic organization. Always welcoming performers’ who had compositions to share, Art, who had been given pointers by the 1930s percussion great, Chick Webb, as a youth, wanted to see Melba spread her wings. Melba recorded with the group in 1957.

Also in 1957, New York City born pianist/composer/conductor Randy Weston, a six foot eight man who could play two grand pianos at once, with his immense wingspan, recorded with a large group. The second vinyl disc would be finished in 1960, and featured Melba Liston as arranger. Reminiscent of his admiration for early 1900s conductor James Reese Europe’s penchant for gigantic orchestration, Randy employed nearly three dozen for the project. Below, a listing of the recording artists of note of that day, and emerging talents, now known as creative sources in their own right. The personnel of the double LP titled Bantu (and later, Uhuru Africa):

Bantu ................................................................................... Roulette Re 130
1957, 1960
Released 1976

Melba Liston, trombone, arrangements

Some of the tracks were named: Uhuru Kwanza, African Lady, Earth Birth, and Honeysuckle Rose.

By 1959, Melba was in Europe with a financially failing but artistically innovative Quincy Jones led project, Free and Easy. The former trumpeter and arranger/composer, born in Chicago, but raised in Washington State, would go on to fame in the 60’s and 70’s. Quincy, Melba has stated, wrote the “light” material, while she wrote the denser, more sophisticated arrangements and compositions.

Melba was about to meet someone that would also collaborate with her on compositions. And together, bring her the satisfaction of her life’s work, finally.

Stand for Liberation

On the pulse of a rising African realization among a people taught to consider themselves “negroes”, were a handful of musicians that had made significant strides in various arenas in the early 1960s period of protest and rebellion. Artists had long made statements about US dehumanization of African people, simply by leaving. Dexter Gordon, Sahib Shihab, Art Farmer, Johnny Griffin, Kenny Clarke, Don Byas, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Sidney Bechet, Bricktop, Richard Boone, Bud Powell, Eric Dolphy, Nina Simone, Clifford Jarvis, Art Taylor, Josephine Baker, and Memphis Slim, are just a few of those who took the opportunity to try to live with dignity outside the US, and some never returned. Max Roach, Aminata Moseka, (aka Abbey Lincoln) Oscar Brown Jr., (the three also contributed socially conscious albums in the late 50s) and Charles Mingus are recognized as some who made firm (on and off the stage, running counter-Newport festivals) declarations about African peoples historical rejection of US racism. We Insist, Freedom Now Suite, (1961), the legendary album that Max Roach and his soon to be wife, the gifted vocalist and composer, Aminata Moseka led, was undoubtedly an African musical triumph. Its pressing brought a tidal wave of White critic attacks. One special participant was Coleman Hawkins, who, in his sixties, had for decades hauntingly expressed instrumentally (his vein freezing solo on Driva Man, for instance) that which was not allowed to be sung vocally, according to the unwritten threat of losing one’s profession, or even killed. Paul Robeson had his passport taken by the US government, for nearly a ten years, for his objection to a war hungry, racist America. Josh White, veteran blues and folk singer, was forced to tour Europe and had his legs broken by White US soldiers in England, because he steadfastly sang about a just society and world. Billie Holiday, who had written and defiantly sung Strange Fruit, the tale of US lynching of Africans, since the 1930s, had died in a New York City hospital, at age 49, discovered by doctors with less than a hundred dollars strapped to her thigh. She had been harassed by police for not having her musician’s papers, or on suspicion of drug possessioin from Philadelphia to Copenhagen. Max and Aminata would face a virtual recording ban, from 1964 into the 1970s in the US, managing to perform and record in places such as Oslo, Norway, Milan, Italy, Tokyo, Japan and “Red Communist” China, in order to survive. Their marriage, and artistic cooperation, however, dissolved in a miasma of reprisal by US corporations in this period. A mysterious fire destroyed a Watts, Los Angeles culture and art center in the 1970’s, some of its backers and instructors were Aminata Moseka and Sammy Davis, Jr. In the same neighborhood, a group of grassroots poets popular with African people, The Watts Prophets, were censored and investigated by FBI COINTELPRO (counterintelligence) which had by the late 60’s, begun to eliminate the Black Panther Party in shootouts in Los Angeles. Faubus Fables, an album by Charles Mingus, took a searing position on Arkansas governor Faubus and the Dixiecrats’ violent and racist policies. This 1962 recording also was condemned, and Charles and his band were investigated by the FBI. He soon began cutting his own records, again, after labels refused to associate with him. He was arrested on drug charges, and plans for an academy teaching children the music was abandoned in 1965. It was, effectively, five years before Charles Mingus made a comeback in recording and performance, in 1971. Purely expressing the rage of one’s people had been a centuries old taboo. This lingers today, with We Insist, Freedom Now Suite and Faubus Fables rarely being heard in the US on “jazz” or any other radio programming. Artists with anything affirming of African people in America empowering themselves, celebrating their greatness, or criticizing the US society and government on the failure historically and currently regarding race and international issues, is fiercely censored.

It was in this era that Melba Liston, like Aminata Moseka, began to popularize African women in America wearing their hair without chemicals and pressing combs to mutilate it to look like a European woman. Melba, like millions of other women and men, had listened to the Harlem speeches, visited African nationalist and Pan Africanist meetings, travelled and spoken to Africans from all over the earth. As a public figure, she expressed her racial dignity, appearing with a short “afro” for the remainder of her life.

Fulfillment

1960, predating the two monumental albums above, Uhuru Africa, also described, was pressed on Roulette Records. Melba found fulfillment in working with Randy Weston from this point on into the 1970s. She had been house arranger for Riverside Records when she met Randy, who was contracted to the label.

“Melba was incredible; she hears what I do and then expands it”, said Randy Weston in an interview.

Randy Weston, who decades ago has found common ground with traditional and contemporary musicians in West and North Africa, began to collaborate with Melba.

Six Albums were done together, with Melba contributing trombone artistry as well as her arrangements and compositions, some of which were co-written.

Widely popular and musically excellent, the Weston-Liston tandem were known to the world. Melba was now established, and after years of freelancing, she become an ace arranger and a respected trombonist. From the early times of KC bounce tempo and her absorption of big band and so called bebop and hard bop styles, Melba Liston had done what few musicians, what few African women could achieve. Milt Jackson, the vibraphone player out of Detroit, with perfect pitch, was a customer for Melba’s compositions. Duke Ellington, who reportedly had written 5,000 tunes that had never been performed, showed up for Melba’s creativity. Aminata Moseka, Clark Terry and others lined up.

The 1960’s also began a lucrative popular music composing business, writing for Ruth Brown, Gloria Lynne, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, Diana Ross, Tony Bennett, and numerous Motown performers came forward.

By 1973, Melba took a Director’s job at the Jamaica School of Music and remained there until 1979.

The 1980’s brought all women’s bands led by Melba into the US spotlight. She headlined a Kansas City women’s music festival one year with her group. Melba Liston and Her Bones was an album she released in this latter part of her career. And tragically, not quite in her sixties, Melba suffered a stroke, in 1985. A number of other strokes followed, and she was wheelchair bound, though continued to work with Randy Weston. He advised Melba, who could no longer play trombone, to compose more.

By the 1990s, with the advent of computer music software, Melba was on the go again, and participated in public.

On a spring day in the last year of the century, the woman of beauty, brains and determination, passed on, at age 73.

It has been said that one of Melba Liston’s wisdoms in the music scene was to engage older, experienced musicians as the bedrock for a performance or recording, allowing the mixture of the younger musicians to do two things:

One, the bringing of the coming trends results, in context of where the innovations are undoubtedly are rooted, bridging to the foundation of the older musicians.

Two, the teaching of the tradition of the music, naturally, cross generationally, occurs.

Melba Liston learned and taught. But she also left an example of perseverance for all women, and men as well, who strive to become musicians of excellence, nurturers of the culture of the generations of Africans in America for 450 years..

Each time that the names of the greats, especially trombonists are named, arrangers and composers are noted, Melba Liston’s should be one of the first.

Her achievements can be heard, it is true, in her crowd pleasing solo during Cool Breeze, with Dizzy Gillespie’s group at the Newport Jazz Festival of 1957, one of a few recordings later released by the band that day.

Each time that an African woman in America continues to play and write the 20th century’s most influential music, African “American” Classical Music (so-called Jazz), against the odds that still rise against her, Melba Liston‘s cleared pathway to brilliance, shines once again.

[1] From CD notes, (Skip Voogd) A Jazz Hour with Charlie Parker, Vol. 1, Bird of Paradise
JHR 73531

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Last modified: 06/24/03

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