Riot Grrrl Revolution

women-in-music:

Melba Liston (January 13, 1926 – April 23, 1999).

American trombone, composer, musical arranger; born in Kansas City, Missouri. After playing in youth bands and studying with Alma Hightower and others, 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 went on to tour and work with Count Basie, Billie Holliday, Randy Weston, Ray Charles, Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie and many others. Her collaborations with pianist-composer Randy Weston, beginning in the early ’60s, are widely acknowledged as jazz classics.

She was forced to give up playing in 1985 after a stroke left her partially paralyzed, but she continued to arrange music with Randy Weston. In 1987, she was awarded the “Jazz Masters Fellowship” of the National Endowment for the Arts. After suffering from repeated strokes, she died in Los Angeles, California, in 1999, a few days after a major tribute to her and Randy Weston’s music at Harvard University.

(via women-in-music)

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