Introduction: The Research Needs All of Us

When the members of the Melba Liston Research Collective (MLRC) pitched the idea of devoting a special issue of the BMRJ to the life and work of Melba Liston, my response was enthusiastic and immediate. After all, one of the main reasons I even knew about the CBMR as a graduate student was because it housed the Melba Liston collection. On joining the CBMR as interim executive director in 2007, however, I was surprised to discover how little activity such a major collection had generated up to that point. I was working to raise the profile of the collection and to create opportunities for students, composers, performers, and scholars to engage the materials even as the members of the Collective were organizing around their shared research interests. This issue, a result of these joined efforts and of the MLRC’s dedication and vision, introduces new perspectives on Liston across a range of disciplinary lenses and hopefully heralds broad and sustained scholarly interest in her life and work.

Appropriately, the Liston collection came to the CBMR via Randy Weston in 1998. As Collective member Lisa Barg’s article, “Taking Care of Music: Gender, Arranging, and Collaboration in the Liston-Weston Partnership,” will elucidate, Liston and Weston’s is considered one of the great arranger/ composer partnerships in jazz, favorably compared by many to that between Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn or Miles Davis and Gil Evans. Liston and Weston met in 1957 and worked together for about four decades on numerous critically acclaimed projects like Little Niles, Uhuru Afrika, and Highlife. Liston’s health began to deteriorate in the mid- to late nineties, and Weston was concerned about her health, her safety, and her artistic legacy. She was at the time, living by herself in a wheelchair with all her music, in a Harlem apartment with no lock on the door. Weston contacted Dr. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., CBMR founder and then director with his concerns. Suzanne Flandreau, CBMR head librarian and archivist, met Weston and Liston in Brooklyn, carefully packed up her music, and had it shipped back to the CBMR. Shortly thereafter, Liston moved to California to live with her aunt and contacted the Center to express that she did not feel comfortable out there without her music and to ask the Center to send it back (which it did). After Liston died in 1999, the collection made its way back to the CBMR.

At forty-four boxes, the Melba Liston Collection is one of the CBMR’s largest and is made up almost entirely of music manuscripts including lead sheets, scores, and parts. It documents her work as arranger, composer, and to a certain extent, educator. There is virtually nothing here about her career as a trombonist; it seems clear what she felt was important. There is one letterbox of papers that contains lyric sheets, scant teaching materials from her time teaching in Jamaica (1973–1979) at the Jamaica Institute of Music, and other miscellaneous fragments. University of Illinois graduate student Kristin McGee, now an established jazz and popular music scholar based at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, processed the collection. Her schematic privileges archival provenance; it reflects, to a great degree, the way Liston herself organized the materials. It is inventoried in two main series: 1) lead sheets and 2) scores, both arranged in alphabetical order. Series One includes collections of works by a single composer as well as a subseries of lead sheet collections and songbooks that includes music from Liston’s theatrical productions like The Dread Mikado. In her essay, “Smile Orange: Melba Liston in Jamaica,” Collective member Dianthe “Dee” Spencer writes about Liston’s compositions and arrangements for theater and film, including Mikado and her score for the 1976 film Smile Orange. Series Two includes arrangements and transcriptions as well as subseries for arrangements from gig books, for works for individual musicians, and for scores and arrangements by other composers. Lyric sheets and miscellaneous fragments make up the scant third series.

The collection holds manuscript scores of her arrangements that represent dozens of jazz musicians...