MELBA LISTON
The code of behaviour at ladies’ finishing schools never recommended taking
up the trombone. The instrument didn’t rival the piano or the cello in
drawing
room decorum. And yet the only two well-known women trombonists were both
glamorous to look at. Melba Liston was one of them and the English Annie
Whitehead, assured enough to appear naked with her horn on the sleeve of
her
last CD, was the other.
Melba Liston certainly saw every side of show business. On one occasion
she was stranded with Billie Holiday, both of them broke, in a hostile
South
Carolina, and on another she walked about playing a harp in the film “The
Ten
Commandments” (1956). She suffered the perils of being the only woman in
travelling big bands. “Rapes and everything. I’ve been going through that
stuff
for all my life – ‘Yeah, well, you know, it’s a broad and she’s by herself’.
I’d
just go to the doctor and tell him, and that was that. But the older I
got, the
less it happened. I don’t know how old I was,” she laughed, “but it stopped
all
together.”
It was her talents as a composer and arranger that distinguished her, rather
than her work as an instrumentalist. She wrote scores for innumerable big
bands including those of Quincy Jones, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and
Dizzy Gillespie. Her long association with her mentor the pianist and
composer Randy Weston took her to the forefronts of modern jazz and Tony
Bennett, Billie Holiday, Abbey Lincoln and Diana Ross were amongst the
vocalists that commissioned work from her.
“I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, but I was raised between there and
Kansas City, Kansas, where my grandparents were. I got my trombone when
I
was seven. They decided to form a music class at my elementary school
and
a travelling music store came with a variety of instruments. When I saw
the
trombone I thought how beautiful it looked and knew I just had to have
one. No
one told me that it was difficult to master. All I knew was that it was
pretty and
I wanted one.” She had problems using the slide. “I was tall then, but
I didn’t
reach to sixth and seventh position. I used to have to turn my head sideways.
By the time she was eight, Liston was good enough to play solo trombone
on
the local radio. Her mother had found a trombone teacher for her. “He wasn’t
right. I don’t know how, but I knew. So I said no, cancelled, and went
on my
own. I was always good in my ears, so I could play by ear.”
The family moved to Los Angeles in 1937. Liston was bright enough to join
high school there in the eighth grade, although she had only been in the
sixth
in Kansas. “My music teacher at the school was real nice. He rode home
with
me and asked my mother could he adopt me. He said he wanted to further
my
music and he wanted to send me off to some teachers. But I didn’t go, I
just
wanted to stay home with my mom.”
Some of her school friends introduced Liston to Alma Hightower, a music
teacher who ran a big band made up of children from the neighbourhood.
“She
was okay as a music teacher and I loved her.”
But the two fell out after four years when, at 16, Liston joined the musicians’
union. Her teacher thought that she wasn’t ready for such a step. Liston
joined the pit band at Los Angeles’s Lincoln Theatre. “They would have
a movie
and then the show would take over. The all-girl Sweethearts of Rhythm band
played at the Lincoln and they wanted to take me with them when they
finished. I was riding with two of them and they got to carrying on – I
mean not
carrying on with each other. And I said ‘I’ll be back,’ and I went and
hid. Then I
went and told my mother. I went on back with the band at the Lincoln.
“I was writing music by this time for this time for different acts who
would come
in and didn’t have their music. I was at the Lincoln for about a year,
I guess.”
In 1943 the theatre stopped having shows and Liston joined a new big band
being formed by the trumpeter Gerald Wilson, who had just left the Jimmy
Lunceford band. Wilson’s band was good enough to go out on tour and when
it
reached New York took over from Duke Ellington at the Apollo Theatre. It
made
records back in Los Angeles, and Liston also recorded in a small group
with
the tenorist Dexter Gordon, an old school friend. Gordon had composed
“Mischievous Lady”, one of the numbers they recorded, as a tribute to Liston.
“My big infIuences were Tommy Dorsey and Lawrence Brown, but I didn’t work
towards being a front line soloist,” she said. “I was a slow player, a
ballads and
blues player. My ear was alright but I was involved in arranging all the
time and
didn’t go jamming and stuff like that.”
Liston stayed with Gerald Wilson until in 1948 the band broke up in New
York.
She and Wilson joined Dizzy Gillespie’s progressive big band that
at that time
included saxophonists John Coltrane and Paul Gonsalves and the pianist
John
Lewis.
“That was a fantastic band and so different to anything that had ever happened
in California,” said Liston. “The music, the whole attitude and personality
of
the band was so exciting, I just couldn’t believe it.” When Gillespie broke
the
band up in 1949 Liston went again with Gerald Wilson, who had been hired
to
form a band to accompany Billie Holiday on a tour of the South. “It was
a little
ahead for people down there. They weren’ t ready for Billie Holiday and
this
Bebop band, what they really wanted was dance music. The farther we got,
the smaller the audience became and by the time we reached South Carolina
there was just nobody. It wasn’t a happy scene and we were on the band
bus
day and night. We finally made it to Kansas City and then sent for money
from
Los Angeles. It was two days getting to us. So we had a lot of oatmeal.”
Liston was so disillusioned that she left the band and gave up music. She
returned to Los Angeles where, for three years, she took a job as an
administrator for the Board of Education. She temporarily gave up the
trombone, but continued to compose and arrange. “The job was good
experience and brought me out a little. I used to be very shy and hardly
ever
spoke to strangers, so it kind of freed me up.”
At this point she had a brief subsidiary career as a film actress. “I had
a long
thing with Lana Turner and walked around behind her playing a harp in ‘The
Prodigal’ (1955) and was a member of the palace orchestra in ‘The Ten
Commandments’. I was tall and skinny then and they said that had they
known about me sooner they could have used me in several of those Egyptian
movies. I never really took acting seriously. It was nice doing those movies
but
they’re all crazy out there in Hollywood.”
In 1956 Gillespie was invited to form a big band to tour the Middle East
and
Asia on behalf of the State department. Liston gave up the
administrative job and rejoined the band. She returned to it the following
year
when the State Department sent Gillespie to South America. This was a
historic band and it had some of Liston’s best writing at the heart of
its library.
Her best arrangements for it included “Annie’s Dance”, “My Reverie” , “Stella
By Starlight” and “The Gypsy”, all of which were recorded. Fellow musicians
abused her at this time. “When I started going with Gerald Wilson I was
okay
because I had his support so I didn’t have to worry. But when I went back
into
Dizzy’s band, it was the same thing all over again.” She appeared
with
Gillespie’s band at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957, and the subsequent
recording survives as one of the most exciting of all big band albums.
Liston
played a powerful solo on the piece “Cool Breeze”. Quincy Jones had been
a
trumpeter in Gillespie’s band and when he formed a band to tour in Europe
with the show “Free and Easy” with music by Harold Arlen he asked Liston
to
join.
“Several of us who were in Dizzy’s band went with Quincy’s orchestra. I
was
writing all the time for that band and Quincy would write the light tunes.
They
were his kind of thing. Ernie Wilkins wrote the hard-swinging Basie-type
numbers and I did the ballads and standards. We had a nice little family
circle
going.” Despite its popularity the package hit financial problems,
and the
musicians had great difficulty getting back to New York where, loyal to
Jones,
they rejoined his band when he put it together again. Liston spent most
of the
Sixties working in New York freelancing as an arranger and playing on studio
sessions. She was house arranger and conductor for the Riverside record
label. She scored the music for albums by Milt Jackson, Randy Weston,
Gloria Lynne and Johnny Griffin. She also arranged albums for Marvin Gaye,
Billy Eckstine and The Supremes. She worked often with trumpeter
Clark
Terry and they briefly co-led a big band. She also played for Charlie Mingus,
appearing at his infamous New York Town Hall concert of 1962. But the most
important event of the period was the establishment of her long-term musical
partnership with Randy Weston who was also working for Riverside. Initially
he
employed her to put flesh onto his compositions. “Melba is incredible;
she
hears what I do and then expands it,” said the composer. She will create
a
melody that sounds like I created it. She’s just a great, great arranger.”
Returning to Los Angeles in the late Sixties she worked with youth orchestras.
She moved to Jamaica in 1973, staying there until 1979. She taught at the
University of the West Indies and was director of popular music studies
at the
Jamaica Institute of Music in Kingston.
On her return to Los Angeles she formed an all-girl septet called Melba
Liston
and Company. The group was the main attraction at the 1979 Kansas
City
Women’s Jazz Festival. Although she dropped the all-girl line up, the band
survived until 1983.
The partnership with Weston flourished and in all the two made six albums
together – “Blues to Africa”, “High Life”, “Little Niles”, “Spirits
of Our
Ancestors”, “Tanjah”, “Music of the New African Nations” and “Volcano Blues”
.
“We never said it directly,” said Weston, explaining the philosophy of
their
composing, “but we both knew that to do a recording we would want to have
the older musicians to give us that foundation, and then we would get the
younger musicians on top. The older musicians have the know-how, they know
all the secret things that we don’t know about music. Melba always made
sure that we would have that kind of base.”
Liston was due to appear at the Camden Jazz Festival in 1986 but was
prevented from doing so by the first of several strokes. From then on she
was
confined to a wheel chair.
Subsequent strokes forced her to give up playing, but she continued to
compose and arrange.
Last week a concert was given in her and Randy Weston’s honour at Harvard
University. Because of illness she was unable to attend, but heard a recording
of the programme at her home.
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OBITUARY
