JAZZ : Melba Liston: Tribute to Jazz Pioneer

Melba Liston is smiling.

That she can summon the resources to smile is a near-miracle, given the story of her roller-coaster life in music.

Sitting in a wheelchair at the Los Angeles home she shares with her octogenarian mother and an aunt, Liston is surrounded by mementoes: photos with Quincy Jones, in whose band she toured Europe in 1960; with a group of fellow trombonists at Birdland in 1955; with Cole Porter, with ex-New York Mayor Edward Koch, with Dizzy Gillespie.

She has neither played trombone nor written any music since a stroke five years ago. This afternoon, at the Proud Bird Ballroom on Aviation Boulevard in Los Angeles, a tribute to the Kansas City-born composer will bring together dozens of her admiring friends: Lorez Alexandria, Clora Bryant, Buddy Collette, John Collins, The Cunninghams, Teddy Edwards, Sandy Graham, Harold Land, O.C. Smith, Horace Tapscott, Cedar Walton, and her closest collaborator, the pianist Randy Weston.

This super-session will provide funds that should give her a chance to renew, with the help of computers, her interrupted composing career, and even buy a new trombone. Her horn was stolen before she left New York and moved back last January to Los Angeles, where she lived for 20 years from the age of 11.

Melba Liston is one of a kind. She became the first woman to break into the all-male horn sections of name bands--Gerald Wilson, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie--while building a name as a brilliant composer/arranger. But the dues were heavy: in 1950, tired of the paucity of opportunities for women, she took a job with the board of education and, except for weekend gigs and some movie-extra work, did nothing else for four years. Then Gillespie, in whose band she had played a few years earlier, brought her out of retirement to join the historic first-ever U.S. State Department-sponsored jazz tour.

“That was an amazing experience,” she recalls. “We were in Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Greece--in some of those places they were used to just seeing women behind a veil, so here I’d step out front in this fancy evening gown while the band backed me in my arrangement of Grieg’s ‘Anitra’s Dance,’ which I called ‘Annie’s Dance,’ or Debussy’s ‘Reverie,’ and they were kind of surprised.

“I only got into trouble once--I went out one day to go bike riding, wearing pedal-pushers, and some women teamed up behind me and made me go back to the hotel and put on a dress.”

Quincy Jones, Phil Woods, Ernie Wilkins and Benny Golson were in that band, which quelled anti-American demonstrations wherever it went. Later there was a Latin American tour. “The people there were much richer. On the way from the airport we’d hear boos, but when we got into town and met with students who knew us, everything was fine.”

In 1958 she recorded her first album as a leader, “Melba Liston and Her Bones,” for MGM (not yet reissued on CD), flanked by six other trombonists. Then came an offer from Quincy Jones to act as musical director for his orchestra in “Free and Easy,” set to open in Amsterdam and tour the continent. The band members had speaking roles on stage and were dressed in colorful 1880s costumes.

“It was a big hassle for Quincy, because the show flopped and fell apart. He kept the band together in Europe at his own expense for almost a year after that; it was rough for him but we sure had a ball over there.”

The 1960s found Liston floating in and out of jazz. As befalls many composers, she took whatever job came along, whether it meant writing a chart for Eddie Fisher or free-lancing at Motown, where her work might be used by anyone from Marvin Gaye to the Supremes. But there was the occasional prestigious gig, too: arranging for the Buffalo Symphony, co-leading a band with trumpeter Clark Terry or scoring an album for her perennial friend Randy Weston.

Still, it was never quite steady enough, never commensurate with her qualifications. In 1974 Melba Liston gave up playing. Randy Weston suggested she go with him to Jamaica, where he was to meet some relatives. “It turned out they were looking for a teacher at the University of the West Indies, so they hired me.

“I stayed 5 1/2 years, as director of the Afro-American Pop and Jazz Department. I taught theory, ear training, student ensembles, improvisation. During my last year there I picked up my horn again, and the Women’s Jazz Festival in Kansas City talked me into going there to play.”

That year provided the turning point. Visiting New York, she found conditions had improved and she soon settled there, leading what was originally an all-female group. “We had a good band at first, but those all-women situations don’t seem to work out. Two of them left; I had to let two others go, and I had to replace them with men.”

The stroke was due to a combination of factors: “I was kind of overworked and frustrated by all those years I had been fooling around and not really going anywhere.

“I don’t remember anything that happened for several months; I couldn’t speak and my whole right side was paralyzed. I have some use of the right arm now, but the right hand is still not working properly.”

Has she thought of playing left-handed, like the southpaw trombonist Slide Hampton? “Yeah, I’d considered that, but then just as I felt ready to start practicing seriously, my horn was stolen.”

As if the slow recovery were not painful enough, two months ago she broke her ankle. “It’s nothing to worry about; I’ll still be in a cast when I go to the tribute, but in a week or two I expect to be walking again.”

She will also be writing again, no matter how complex the process. “I may have to dictate the notes, or get someone to help me master this computer, which I can use with my left hand.”

Randy Weston has been a constant help throughout her ordeals. Accompanied by an aunt, she went with him to Morocco and later to Switzerland.

“He just wanted me to come on stage and take a bow, but at one concert in Geneva, I directed the whole program with my left hand. I wasn’t too good at it, but I’ll be better next year.

“Randy has given me my first new writing assignment; I’m going to arrange another album for him. He’s coming out here and he’ll be recording it in March.”

Meanwhile, one of the definitive Weston/Liston collaborations, “Uhuru Afrika/Highlife,” is due for release this week in the Capital/Roulette series. Described in Langston Hughes’ notes as “The first Afro-American salute to the new Africa,” this 1960 work features Clark Terry, Freddie Hubbard, Max Roach, Kenny Burrell and Yusef Lateef in a setting of West African highlife rhythms.

Liston counts this as one of her proudest achievements; however, when she was asked to name the most memorable time of her entire career, her answer involved no one record or orchestra.

“I’d say it was my stay in Jamaica. I went down there again last Christmas with Randy and saw my old friends. It was very rewarding, because there was a union head who originally said he didn’t want a jazz band there, and then when I left he swooped up all my students; now they are all working for him. So I guess I managed to prove something.”

She has also proved, by a combination of resilience and determination, that after all the years of struggle and setbacks, it’s never really over till it’s over.