Melba liston biography of michaels
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Scripts and Grooves
I was quietly cataloging LP’s for Marr Archives from the Norman Saks Collection, when a local Kansas City artist caught my attention. IT WAS A WOMAN! It was a female jazz musician from Kansas City and it was not Mary Lou Williams or Julia Lee. As most women in jazz are known for singing or piano, I was doubly surprised to find that this female jazz artist was a TROMBONE player.
Melba Liston, the jazz trombonist, was born in Kansas City on January 13, 1926. She played with all of the great bands: Gerald Wilson, Dexter Gordon, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and Quincy Jones.
She endured the abuse that many female jazz performers endured during that time and was outspoken about that mistreatment. This exploitation caused her to leave music for a while. She spent most of her years in California, but finally came back to music and music education in the 70’s. This brought her back to Kansas City for the Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival with her band “Melba Liston Company”.
Even after a stroke, Melba continued to write and arrange music that melded African Rhythms with American Jazz.
The Marr Sound Archives carries many recordings featuring Melba Liston, but one of my favorite songs is “Pow” from the Melba and Her Bones LP on MGM’s Metro Jazz lab
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Melba final Her Brass - Accomplishments of description Great Coloratura Liston
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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