S03E03 – Melba Liston, Kansas City, 1926

Non ho mai pensato di essere una donna che suona il trombone. Ho sempre pensato di essere una musicista che suona il trombone.

Kansas City, 1926

“I was treated badly because I was a woman, and sometimes because I was Black. But music never left me—on the contrary, every time I tried to leave music behind to ‘get my head straight,’ music would drag me out of the house all by itself. Damn it, I would tell myself, you’re Melba Liston, you play the trombone—if you did that at home, do you know how many people you’d drive crazy? Nah, I’m not made for that kind of thing.”

There was a time when women musicians were considered an exception, when a woman who played the trombone in jazz was seen as a pioneer. As if society at the time had decided which instruments were masculine and which were feminine. Which musical styles, which performance venues were for men and which were for women. As if playing sacred music on the piano in church were a “woman’s thing,” while playing jazz trombone in a nightclub were a “man’s thing.” Men could invade female territory without causing a stir—like when Fats Waller played sacred music in church—but when a woman overturned the established order, a woman playing the trombone in a club among men… well, guys, that was a very different matter.

“They always ask me how I ever got the idea to play the trombone, as if it were something crazy. To those who ask me—often men—I always give the same answer: WHY NOT?”

Every human story is the result of a chance combination of places and people: where you’re born, who you’re around, your family, your neighborhood. Melba was born in Kansas City in 1926, a city that from that year onward would become the home and stage of Count Basie, Ben Webster, Lester Young, Bennie Moten, and important women musicians like Julia Lee and Mary Lou Williams. Do you remember Mary Lou? She would have a powerful influence on the orchestra known as Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy and on the local music scene (if you haven’t already, listen to the episode dedicated to her in the first season of this podcast). A jazz-guitarist grandfather and father, a singer mother, and a whole network of musician friends all around.

Melba is only seven years old when she presses her nose against the window of Jenkins Sons Music Company on Walnut Street, the city’s music store. Four shop windows full of pianos, guitars, and wind instruments. “I want that one,” she said, “and no other.” It was a trombone that, on its stand, was taller than she was. Yes, of course, we’ve already said that at the time the trombone wasn’t considered a woman’s instrument (let alone a child’s), but her mother doesn’t think twice—she scrapes together money from the whole extended family, and the trombone birthday present is taken care of.

The trombone is a complex instrument. I don’t mean that there are simpler instruments and more difficult ones—every instrument involves similar degrees of difficulty, even if at different stages of learning—but the trombone, brass instruments in general, isn’t exactly immediate. Producing a sound on a piano is as simple as pressing a key; on the trombone, producing a sound requires a specific position of the lips, which vibrate thanks to a particular airflow. A piano key is always the same; lips change every day. On the trombone, to lip position and airflow you have to add the positions of the slide—that thing that lengthens and shortens by sliding in and out. Melba not only seems to handle this complexity with great agility, she’s also incredibly quick to learn. She plays with her grandfather, who teaches her gospel, spirituals, and the blues. She has an extraordinary ear, and at eight years old, after just one year of study, she’s already on the radio as a trombone soloist. And then they complain about child labor.

As we were saying, every human story is the result of a chance combination of places and people.

It’s 1937 when Melba’s family decides to move to Los Angeles.

“Los Angeles in ’36? In New York, the music scene was all in Harlem. The most important clubs were there, and almost all the musicians lived there. You could walk down 125th Street and run into Fats Waller, Billie Holiday. Los Angeles is huge—there wasn’t such an important, central neighborhood. Jazz had a different flavor, more… institutional? Yes, that’s it. You know Kansas City? Clubs packed with people, sweat, musicians going all out, people making love in the bathroom… well, that kind of thing in Los Angeles wasn’t as evident. It’s as if it was less blues than Kansas City and less revolutionary than Harlem, but still alive… just different!”

Jazz is a story of migration—you can’t understand it without looking at a map. What happens in a city, its social, political, and industrial dynamics, the transportation network… all of these things powerfully influence the development—or lack thereof—of a scene, of a cultural movement. Los Angeles is a West Coast city that, in the second half of the 1930s, tries to emerge from a dark period marked by corruption and repression. The election of a reformist mayor in 1938 signals a new era: greater rights for workers and left-leaning policies (including a certain leniency toward racial policies) make Los Angeles attractive to many African Americans who move there from the South and the Midwest. A business-oriented outlook and incentives for innovation foster the growth of a new industry—that of cinema and film studios. This is the birth of Hollywood, of American cinema.

Los Angeles therefore needs music and musicians perhaps more than any other city at that moment, but it also has specific demands that must be met. Jazz here has a different genealogy. A scene emerges made up of highly literate musicians, more inclined toward an idea of collective sound, of orchestral sound. Arrangement takes on a central role and pushes the idea of writing to a higher level. Musicians work simultaneously with pop singers, dance orchestras, radio ensembles, and in studios where film soundtracks are created. All of this produces musicians capable of quickly adapting their language, managing volume, and modulating phrasing. Instinctive gesture is complemented by an idea of sound structure; individual virtuosity takes on less importance in favor of a collective vision.

Melba is catapulted into a city in the midst of profound change—a city that is more formative than revolutionary, decidedly less mythical than Harlem, but fundamental, central to what modern jazz will become. Places, people. The randomness of fate leads Melba to enroll in a school where the teaching of the arts is entrusted to Alma Hightower, an extraordinary woman, a great educator and a visionary. Alma knows how to read her time and her students perfectly; she recognizes talent and enhances it to the fullest. Thanks to Alma, Melba discovers that she has a strong aptitude for writing and arranging. She studies piano and explores the possibilities of her trombone within ensembles, orchestras, and small groups. In the same period, Dexter Gordon is also enrolled at the same school and takes part in Alma’s extracurricular projects alongside Melba. It is during this time that Melba and Dexter meet and begin playing together.

“Melba and Dexter were two inseparable musical souls. Melba, however, was more complete and clearly tougher. When Melba and I went down to Central Avenue and she got up on stage for the jam… well, first she had to overcome prejudice, and only then could she start playing. We women always have to prove twice as much to be worth half as much. Dexter didn’t have that problem—people applauded him even before he set foot on the stage. He didn’t have to prove anything. You think I’m exaggerating? At those jams, Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy played regularly too. Both were sons of that Los Angeles. Today everyone knows who the great saxophonist Dexter Gordon was; every jazz fan knows everything about Charles Mingus or has *Out to Lunch!* by Eric Dolphy in their record collection. Melba? And yet her first job in the pit band of the Lincoln Theater came through one of Melba’s contacts—they called her because she played well and knew how to arrange, and it was she who brought Dexter in.”

Pit bands are theater orchestras, those bands of fifteen or more people who played in the pit—the recessed area in theaters—and performed live soundtracks for silent films or accompanied theatrical shows. It was the very first professional engagement for Melba and Dexter and consecrated them as friends and colleagues, a bond that remained even when Dexter was hired first by Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra and then by Billie Eckstine’s band in New York.

“Dexter knew very well that he owed a lot to Melba, and for that reason he respected her immensely. He even dedicated a piece to her that he wrote especially for her and that they recorded together—it’s called *Mischievous Lady*, and it was meant as a tribute to her intelligence, her wit, and her sense of fun.”

The Second World War had a powerful impact on the U.S. music scene. Many musicians were called up to serve, and only a few remained in the cities. But not women. For this very reason, Gerald Wilson decided to contact Melba Liston. He needed a trombonist and an arranger, and he would never have dreamed of hiring a woman—he said so himself when, to his own astonishment, he had to admit he’d struck gold.

“I had to hire a woman… after all, the few men who hadn’t been drafted knew their worth and were already employed. When I went to hear her play, I was blown away—damn it, she really knew how to play the trombone, and then they told me she could write well too. At first I only encouraged her to check the arrangements, to transcribe a few parts, but then I realized she had a natural gift for making the horn sections sound good. She had class and brains. Of course, she didn’t sign any arrangements—imagine a woman doing that—but in reality, she was the one doing them. In hindsight, I can tell you that my orchestra would not have survived without her.”

The experience with Wilson was an enormous formative moment for Melba, one that ushered her into the world of major professional big bands. It was an experience that taught her a great deal—above all, it taught her how to write from within an orchestra, to write for real people and therefore to bring out their strengths. Of course, everything has a cost. An experience so formative for Melba the professional musician was just as destructive for Melba the woman.

She was the only woman in the orchestra and she played a “male” instrument. She was constantly subjected to sexual jokes and mockery; she would later report sabotage and isolation. Of that experience she herself said: 

“You had to be twice as prepared to be accepted, and even then it wasn’t guaranteed. It toughened my character—I learned how to survive, that’s for sure.”

“One day I picked up the phone and Dizzy Gillespie was on the line—well, I nearly fainted.”

It was the late 1940s. The big dance orchestras were going through a period of crisis: people no longer felt much like dancing, and pit bands were gradually being replaced by sound films. Many musicians began thinking about moving in search of something new. It was in this context that the call came—Dizzy Gillespie, long distance from New York. What was finally surprising was that Dizzy didn’t just want her specifically—he wanted her because he knew she was an excellent reader, that she could arrange, that she had developed a modern musical language. He had heard her with Wilson, and as he was putting together an ultra-modern, ambitious orchestra—a bebop big band—he needed someone exactly like her.

When Melba arrived, she felt as if she were stepping into the center of a hurricane. Dizzy’s big band was not a normal swing orchestra: it was bebop searching for a large-scale form—fast, nervous, intellectual. Every night was a test of musical endurance. Melba was young, once again the only woman, a trombonist in a world that still didn’t quite know what to do with the trombone in bop. She played in the section with absolute precision, but she still felt the constant gaze upon her: she had to prove twice as much, speak half as much. Tempos were often dizzying, the air thick with competition. There was no room for insecurity.

Dizzy respected her enormously as a musician. He knew Melba understood the orchestra. She didn’t just play: she wrote, corrected, adapted, made that explosive music possible within a big band. Her arrangements helped hold together trumpets, saxes, and trombones when the language seemed ready to burst in every direction. And yet, many times her work here too went unsigned, absorbed into the collective mechanism.

Life on the road was hard—trains, hotels, clubs, and a loneliness that never really went away.

“The experience with Dizzy is something I will always be grateful to the universe for. It was perhaps the most difficult period of my life—musically exhilarating, humanly exhausting. It taught me an enormous amount about music; I played with incredible musicians and traveled the world. But above all, it taught me my value—what I’m worth. It taught me what it means to be a woman musician; it made me understand what I want, and it taught me how to choose. For example, to choose not to work anymore, as much as possible, with sexist assholes.”

From that point on, Melba chose different paths, more conscious collaborations. Yet within her future arrangements, backlit as it were, you can still hear the echo of that ferocious big band and of a woman who learned how to stay on her feet at the heart of bebop.

After Dizzy, Melba Liston doesn’t make noise, doesn’t seek the center of the stage, but redefines her own way of being in jazz.

Having left Gillespie’s big band in the early 1950s, Melba is by now a complete musician: she has lived through swing, bebop, orchestral life, and the harshness of touring. She knows one thing clearly: she no longer wants to be just a functional presence. She wants to be heard.

For a time she still works as an instrumentalist with major names—Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Quincy Jones—but progressively the trombone moves into the background. It is writing that calls to her. Arranging becomes the place where she can fully exercise her musical intelligence, without having to fight every night for symbolic space.

In the 1950s comes the decisive encounter with Randy Weston. With him, Melba finds something she had never had before: total trust. Weston entrusts her with the sound of his music, and she builds arrangements that are deep, earthy, full of Africa, space, and gravity. It is here that Melba becomes truly recognizable: a unique orchestral voice, capable of strength and delicacy at the same time.

“Melba is an artist and a professional of the highest level. She takes the melodies I create, orchestrates them, arranges them, making them powerful—building my music as if she were me, without being me. She understands music better than anyone else; she has an incredible musical sensitivity. She is able to translate spiritual and cultural ideas into concrete orchestration without needing much explanation: she already hears where the music wants to go.”

With Randy, Melba finds balance—the environment in which music is as it should be: collaboration, not competition.

“Melba and I understood together the power of music, of the orchestra as a cultural and political act. Do you have any idea what the 1960s were like? *Uhuru Afrika*, our favorite album together, is openly connected to the African American liberation movements. For me, Melba is and will always be the guardian of African memory in jazz.”

At the same time, life is not easy. Health problems, financial difficulties, periods away from the scene also lead her to work outside jazz, as a teacher and assistant. But she never stops writing. When she returns, she always does so as a quiet authority, not as a promise.

In the 1960s and ’70s, her name circulates among the most attentive musicians: those who know, know. Melba doesn’t seek visibility, but builds music that lasts. After Dizzy, there is no explosion, but a sedimentation—not an escape from jazz, but a stance.

If with Gillespie she learned how hard it was to stand at the center, after Dizzy Melba Liston chooses to stand at the heart of the music, where sound takes shape and remains.

Melba’s is a story of strength, resilience, and awareness. It is the story of an active woman who did a great deal for women in music. She did so together with Mary Lou Williams, whose New York apartment was a meeting place for many women in music—a space for exchange and mutual support. Melba and Mary Lou, both strong women in a male-dominated world, found common ground in this and became close friends. Melba also supported women’s bands festivals in her hometown and in many other places. She continued to do so even after the 1980s, when a stroke forced her into a wheelchair.

The historian Sherrie Tucker (author of *Swing Shift*) wrote:

“The history of women in jazz is not a correction. It is an expansion of the truth.”

Melba Liston died in 1999 at the age of 73. Her discography is currently being rediscovered. Beyond *Melba and Her Bones* and *Colcano Blues*, two albums under her own name, there are dozens of records on which she played—and, above all, on which she was an uncredited co-author. Only today, thanks to the work of many historians, are we discovering how many recordings credited to Quincy Jones, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Dinah Washington, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, and Dexter Gordon bear her imprint.

“My generation owes a great deal to those who opened the way. Melba Liston is one of my heroines.”

—Maria Schneider, conductor and composer.

There was a time when it was written—implicitly—that women could play the piano in church, the harp, perhaps sing in an orchestra, but nothing more. A time when a woman playing the trombone in a nightclub alongside men was an exception, something so incredible that it overshadowed the music itself. Is that time truly over?

---

Il podcast è scritto da Guido Maria Bianchini e Marta Leoni.
Voci di Guido Maria Bianchini e Laura Magni.
Sigla e montaggi di Guido Maria Bianchini.