Melba Liston

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Melba Doretta Liston (born January 13, 1926 in Kansas City, Missouri, died April 23, 1999 in Los Angeles, California) was an American jazz musician (trombone, compositions, musical arrangements).

After playing in youth bands, she joined the big band led by Gerald Wilson in 1943. She began to work with the emerging major names of the bebop scene in the mid-1940s. She recorded with saxophonist Dexter Gordon in 1947, and joined Dizzy Gillespie's big band in New York for a time, when Wilson disbanded his orchestra in 1948. She toured with Billie Holliday (1949) but was so profoundly affected by the indifference of the audiences and the rigors of the road that she gave up playing. She took a clerical job for some years, and supplemented her income by taking work as an extra in Hollywood, including appearances in The Prodigal and The Ten Commandments. She rejoined Gillespie for tours sponsored by the US State Department in 1956 and 1957, recorded with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (1957), and formed her own all-women quintet in 1958. In 1959, she visited Europe with the show Free and Easy, for which Quincy Jones was music director.

In the 1960s she worked for a variety of leaders including Milt Jackson and Johnny Griffin, then taught at the Jamaica School of Music for six years (1973-1979), before returning to the USA to lead her own bands. She was forced to give up playing in 1985 after a stroke left her partially paralyzed, but she continued to arrange music with pianist Randy Weston.

Melba Liston made a reputation as an important jazz arranger, no small achievement in a field generally dominated by men. Much of her most important work was written for Weston, with whom she worked for four decades from the early 60s.