Trumpet Queen

The phone is ringing, the intercom is squawking and the stereo is booming, but Clora Bryant moves serenely about her Crenshaw district apartment like a woman in the eye of a whirlwind. She is preparing for a trip to Washington, where on Friday her “supreme trumpet mastery” and lifetime contributions to jazz will be recognized by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with its Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival Award for 2002.

“I was sitting at my boombox working on my book,” says Bryant, recalling the moment she learned she would join the venerable sorority of jazz musicians, which includes Shirley Scott, Marian McPartland and local legends Vi Redd and Melba Liston, as the seventh recipient of the festival’s titular award.

“It was my old friend [pianist and Kennedy Center artistic advisor for jazz] Billy Taylor on the phone. He told me they were going to honor me this year and I just whooped and dooped,” remembers Bryant. “The Kennedy Center? For little ol’ me from Texas? A female trumpetiste? It was almost like the first time I played with Louis Armstrong. I got goose bumps. I’m getting goose bumps right now. You see, I’m a very goose-bumpy person.”

Goose bumps, hot-licks, spotlights and deep deep blues seem to punctuate the length and breadth of Bryant’s 59-year career. “People don’t know what you’ve been through,” she says, pausing a moment to reflect. “They don’t know the road you’ve traveled. I had to fight to keep from making the agents and the [casting] couch my source of employment. Y’see, my mother died when I was 3 and so my dad raised me and my two brothers, Fred and Mel. I really emphasize that about my father because that was during the ‘30s, during the Depression, and they wanted to put us in an orphanage.

“My father only made $7 a week and he had a tough row to hoe. He had always taught me to carry myself as a lady. But when I first decided I was going to play the trumpet he said, ‘You know, it’s going to be a challenge. Are you up to it?’ I had already made up my mind that it was going to be my life. And he said, ‘If you’re going to play in this man’s world, I’m behind you.’ And when he said that, I knew I could do anything. He taught me to be aggressive, assertive, persistent, consistent. He was strong--my knight in shining armor.”

The virtues that Charles Bryant inculcated in his daughter proved to be decisive. They helped her survive a racially proscribed and harrowing childhood that saw her father beaten and literally railroaded out of Texas by racists, her family broken apart, and Bryant exposed to the wiles of predatory kinfolk.

In 1941, big brother Fred went to war and 14-year-old Clora inherited the old trumpet he never got around to mastering. Music became her only refuge and she practiced day and night. “I’d close the door to my room and music was my world,” she says.

As a teen, her talent was spotted and nurtured by Conrad Johnson, a noted music teacher who had mentored Hubert Laws, Joe Sample and many other promising young Texas musicians.

“He took me under his wing,” Bryant says. “His thing was feelings. Like most of the elder statesmen of jazz, that’s what he emphasized--feelings, not just notes like they do today. Because the white man--and I don’t mind saying this--is so busy trying to take our music and put it into a classical bag. But jazz is not classical,” she says emphatically, spelling it out. “It’s c-l-a-s-s-i-c.

“Classic!”

In the 1940s there were many female singers and some pianists, like Mary Lou Williams, who were accepted, but the thought of a woman competing on equal terms with men playing any other instrument was considered nothing but a novelty. Nevertheless, as a 16-year-old, Bryant’s talents won her full scholarships to the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, as well as to Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C.

She opted to remain in Texas and join the Co-Eds, a 16-piece, all-girl orchestra that made its home on the campus of Prairie View College. Bryant patterned her trumpet style after her idols, Louis Armstrong and his successor, the fiery and sensuous Roy Eldridge, a swing era trumpeter who formed the crucial link between Armstrong and the emerging young iconoclasts like John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie who were harbingers of the brash modern sound in jazz.

The Co-Eds toured extensively in the South and Northeast and backed the hot Negro swing and jump blues artists of the day. In 1945, Bryant left Prairie View to be reunited with her father and brother Mel, who had found work in California.

“I came here in January of 1945,” Bryant recalls. “I wanted to go to school, and back in Prairie View they told me about USC and UCLA. They said that USC was a little prejudiced, so I opted for UCLA and they accepted me.

“But I found out that they were just as prejudiced,” she asserts. “There weren’t many [African Americans] out there, so the teachers would get funky. You’d report them to the counselor and they’d be on the side of the teachers; but I endured it. I dropped out after a year because I had to go to work.”

For an African American musician in the 1940s, “work” meant Central Avenue.

“I began playing with groups on the avenue, and that’s where I got my comeuppance,” Bryant says.

She accepted every challenge, performing alongside the most formidable young players on the block: Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Frank Morgan, Carl Perkins, Hampton Hawes, Art and Addison Farmer, Teddy Edwards, Sonny Criss et al. She also backed up jazz divas such as Josephine Baker and Billie Holiday. In 1956--the year before she recorded her first LP as a leader, “Gal With a Horn”--she met the artist who would exert the most important influence on her life and playing.

The Beginning of a

Lifelong Friendship

“I was as hot as a female could be here in Los Angeles,” Bryant recalls. “[Trombone player] Melba Liston was with Dizzy’s band and they were playing at a place out in Hollywood and I went to the club to see them. I was sitting between Sweets Edison and Charlie Barnet, and Dizzy’s up there playing. Quincy Jones and Lee Morgan and all these big cats were in the band. I didn’t know it, but Melba had told Dizzy about me. When intermission came he came over to the bar where I was sitting and said, ‘Hi Clora,’ and he kissed me on my forehead. I didn’t wash it for a week after that.”

The two trumpet players never became intimate, but from that moment, they were lifelong friends. Bryant, along with Gillespie’s widow, Lorraine, was instrumental in getting the hugely influential trumpeter a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1995.

Bryant is the mother of four, the grandmother of nine, and this month expects to be a great-grandmother for the second time. Over the years, she has toured the world, performing throughout Canada, Europe and Australia, as well as in the former Soviet Union in 1989, at the invitation of Mikhail Gorbachev. Bryant has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts grants for her work as a composer and has taught jazz history at USC, UCLA and Pasadena and Santa Monica city colleges.

Since 1980, she has been working on her autobiography, “Trumpetistically Speaking, Love, Clora Bryant.” A documentary based on Bryant’s life by UC San Diego professor Zeinabu Irene Davis is also in development. And the self-styled “trumpetiste” was an editor for “Central Avenue Sounds,” Steven Isoardi’s landmark survey of jazz history in South L.A.

In April 1996, Bryant underwent quadruple bypass surgery. Not even that dampened her spirit or slowed her down. “I was in the hospital for five days, but when I came home I had a party and danced all night. My kids said, ‘Mom, you’d better sit down.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m glad I’m living and I’m going to dance.’”

But the road traveled by Bryant, who turns 75 on May 30, has been tough. “L.A. does not recognize its own,” she laments. “They didn’t recognize that I was the only female to get up there on the jam session with Dexter and all those people. I’m the only female horn player that played with Charlie Parker,” she says, recalling how she met the jazz master in the ‘50s.

“Max Roach was playing at the Lighthouse with Howard Rumsey,” Bryant says. “I was playing in a place right next door called the High Seas. Charlie had been in ‘Frisco with Diz and Stan Kenton’s group and had come down to see Max Roach at the Lighthouse.

“It was a Sunday afternoon, and everyone tried to get Charlie to play with Max and the group, but he wouldn’t do it. He just wanted to hear Max. He knew me because he was friends” with her then-husband, bassist Joe Stone. “When he found out that I was next door he came in there and went up to the bandstand and asked if he could borrow a tenor. I almost wet my pants.

“We played a blues tune, ‘Now’s the Time.’ Charlie took that tenor and played the rim off of it, he emptied the Lighthouse. They followed him into the High Seas like he was the pied piper. My knees were weak all while we were playing.

“Music has been the thing that has sustained me over the years. That’s what helped me to see a lot of things through--through people misusing me and abusing me--all of it. Despite all I’ve been through, it’s still worth it. I guess it’s because music is in my skin. Plus I know I’m fulfilling my dad’s dream. Ooh, I’m getting goose bumps.”