Digging Down in the CBMR Archives: New Music Inspired by Melba Liston’s Scores

I have to dig down and do it from there, it’s all from my soul. I write soul music, more or less.

—Melba Liston (1996)

I first entered Melba Liston’s musical world through her work with iconic pianist and composer Randy Weston. An aspiring young saxophonist working in a record store in the early 1990s, I stumbled on his Spirits of Our Ancestors (Verve 551 857–2), in which Weston and Liston weave diverse strands of their musical heritage together, blending African rhythms with modern harmony, sophisticated composition with wild flights of improvisation. Twenty years later, I had the opportunity to explore that world further through Liston’s scores, archived at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago.¹ My most recent CD at that time, African Flowers (Origin 82572), documented a series of ten interconnected pieces portraying my experiences touring eastern and central Africa. For my next recording, I hoped to explore music that had influenced African Flowers, ranging from traditional regional African music to western-influenced styles such as Congolese Rumba to jazz works inspired by Africa. In the last category, the long collaboration between Weston and Liston looms large; from Uhuru Afrika (Mosaic Select 4) to Khepera (Verve-Gitanes 557 821–2), their most compelling work is permeated with African rhythms and themes.

Examining Liston’s archives, I initially focused solely on the Weston scores. Through these, I hoped to gain some understanding of how the two of them dealt with the African elements in their music and, if possible, apply their methods to my integration of African musical traditions into my own work. I also intended to identify some works that could be reorchestrated for my ensemble to pay tribute to the Weston-Liston canon as part of the aforementioned recording project. Shortly after commencing my research, however, I realized that very little of the CBMR collection revealed anything directly about Liston and Weston’s use of African source materials. The most significant materials are a letter from Weston (Weston 1959) to the record label Roulette, mentioning the need for a month’s preparation and research for Uhuru Afrika and the notation of percussion rhythms—unusual in these scores—for “Bantu.” The fact that these rhythms differ slightly from those on the recording perhaps indicates some collaboration between composers and musicians or a degree of improvisational freedom in the recording session. This is hardly surprising, though, and not enough to extrapolate much about the composers’ specific methods concerning the influence and integration of African music.

More importantly, as I looked through the vast collection of Liston’s scores for everyone from Weston to Dizzy Gillespie, Marvin Gaye to Mary Lou Williams, I came to recognize her unique voice and wide-ranging, yet rarely acknowledged, contribution to jazz, rhythm and blues, and other American musical forms in the latter half of the twentieth century. The narrative conveyed through her music inspired me to change the focus and intended outcome of my research; rather than revisiting works by her or her collaborators, I decided to compose music celebrating Melba Liston’s legacy.

Compositional Process

The first stage of my compositional process involved construction of a logical, meaningful narrative structure for the proposed piece. Liston’s career was long, and she was prolific; it would be impractical to address the entire scope of her contributions in a single work, even if that work consisted of several parts. Also, it seemed desirable to privilege some events and relationships over others. For example, Randy Weston’s impact obviously had to be addressed, but perhaps her arrangements for Johnny Griffin’s White Gardenia (Riverside 387), while masterful, were not as essential in tracing her artistic development. Through examination of archived scores and historical materials, I eventually settled on a six-movement form focusing on the period from Liston’s birth in 1926 to her return to the United States from Jamaica in 1979. While Liston continued to arrange prolifically until her death in 1999, ending the suite with 1979 presented several attractions. One was closure; [End Page...