Swingin’ Through the Years

Here’s something doctors do not recommend: In October, during a question-and-answer session exploring her remarkable life and career, 77-year-old jazz “trumpetiste” Clora Bryant suddenly kicked up her heels and leaped off the 6-foot-high stage at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Landing in the midst of the astonished crowd, she began to shimmy, swing and sing her signature raspy-voiced rendition of “What a Wonderful World.”

Many audience members were aware of the advisories on Bryant’s health ever since the quadruple bypass surgery in 1996 that ended her playing days. Many also were aware of Bryant’s unique philosophy about the bliss and benefits of live performance. “I stay very agile because I want to keep my heart going,” Bryant says. “I was singing, and I wanted to get closer to the people and shake their hands. The people gasped and their mouths were open, but I was on cloud nine.”

The event that had her so excited was the sneak preview of “Trumpetistically Clora Bryant,” a documentary on the life and art of this rare female musician, who made her name in the clubs of L.A.’s famed Central Avenue in the 1950s.

Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis, the film has been a labor of love, taking 17 years to complete. The two women met as students at UCLA in 1987. Davis, in her mid-20s, was set on a career as a filmmaker. Bryant had returned to college in her 50s to get a bachelor’s degree in music.

“We were introduced by a professor that we shared, Dr. Beverly J. Robinson,” Davis says. “She was at that time the only African American who was teaching in the department of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA. She was the beacon in the storm for lots of us students of color. At the time I started making films [in 1982], there weren’t a whole lot of black women filmmakers whom you could look up to.”

One of the many delights of the documentary is how Davis reveals Bryant’s determined and ultimately triumphant life story as a metaphor for the long roster of women whose talents and aspirations may be frustrated, but can ultimately transcend the restrictions of race and gender bias.

From the film’s romantic opening images, with the camera moving over the weathered body and brass works of a trumpet photographed in sharp, golden light, to the soft arpeggios of Bryant’s moody horn-playing swelling in the background, Davis creates a poetic landscape. She uses vintage photography and film footage to compress Bryant’s life into an hour, quickly spanning her humble roots in north Texas, where her doting single father raised her and two brothers on “seven dollars a week,” through her college years in the early ‘40s touring with the segregated all-girl band from Prairie View College, to her glory days playing alongside Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong and other celebrated artists of the day. There is rare performance footage of Bryant onstage in Los Angeles and New York, on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1960 and on her historic tour of the Soviet Union in 1989, culminating in her 2002 Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. All of this is highlighted with scenes of Bryant as mother, student and lecturer.

In addition to the powerful women who form the backbone of her narrative, Davis includes admiring cameos from jazz historians and legendary musicians such as Gerald Wilson, Billy Taylor, Teddy Edwards, James Newton, Oscar Brashear and Bryant’s musician sons, Kevin and Darrin.

There is a historic sequence with Bryant and her longtime friend and admirer Dizzy Gillespie. Before Bryant is revealed--performing like a whirlwind onstage, with her swinging horn punching and raking the air and her hair coiffed and crowned with chrysanthemums--you hear, floating on the stream of rhythms from Bryant’s horn, Gillespie’s distinctive voice affirming, “If you close your eyes, you’ll say it is a man playing. “

Today, Bryant rankles slightly at the comparison, and responds as if she hasn’t put down her horn: “I’m a trumpetiste, that’s why I stress that word. Because I’m not a trumpeter. I’m playing what they call ‘a man’s instrument.’ But I’m not trying to play like a man; I’m trying to play like what I feel.”

That’s not the only gender issue Bryant had to confront in her career. “I had to fight to keep from making the agent’s and the manager’s couch from being my source of employment,” she says.

Bryant’s struggles are what inspired Davis to persevere in making the film, which is getting final tweaks before its first L.A. screening at the Pan African Film Festival in February and an anticipated airing on PBS. During the 17 years, Davis completed five other films, got married, had a baby and worked as a freelance sound technician, high school teacher and university professor. (She now teaches at UC San Diego.)

“I hope the film has a long life in the schools,” says Davis, “because to me the target audience are young women who might be playing an instrument, but who may get discouraged or ridiculed. In New York, there were a number of women musicians in the audience, and this is the thing that made me cry. They said, ‘Thank you for telling my story.’ ”

Bryant hopes the documentary will bring her greater recognition in her adopted hometown of Los Angeles. “I would like them to give me my props,” she says. “I don’t carry any heavy baggage of what they didn’t do for me; I carry it as a wish that they would do something that would be greater than Washington or New York. Not because I think I’m so great, but because I endured. I stuck with it.”