Dexter Gordon and Melba Liston: The “Mischievous Lady” Session

Figure 1.

Photo by Ray Whitten, Ross Russell Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin.

On a Thursday afternoon on June 5, 1947, at the C. P. MacGregor Studios in Hollywood, California, Dexter Gordon had a record date for Dial Records and wanted Melba Liston there. Not only did he want her to play, but he also wrote a tune for her, the aptly titled “Mischievous Lady.” Dexter on tenor saxophone and Melba on trombone were joined by Charles Fox on piano, Chuck Thompson on drums, and Red Callender on bass, for two three-minute recordings. Melba was twenty-one years old, Dexter was twenty-four years old, and the oldest one in the band was Red Callender, who was thirty-one. Here was a recording with five musicians who were young in years but who had plenty of musical experience and were ready to do the job at hand with Melba as peer and as “Mama.” As Melba remembered it, “When he got his record date, he said, ‘Come on, Mama’—I think they were callin’ me Mama already back then, ‘cause I used to fuss with them about smokin’ their cigarettes or drinkin’ their wine—and they’d come and get me when something was goin’ on, and I would play little gigs with them. I was scared to go in the studio, though, because I didn’t really hang out with them when they were jamming and stuff. I was home trying to write, so I didn’t have that spirit on my instrument as [an] improvisational person. I was really very shy. I really didn’t want to make that record session. I don’t know which was worse—makin’ it or trying to persuade them to leave me out of it” (Placksin 1982, 181). But she made it, and the recording became a part of the body of fertile music that young jazz musicians produced in the middle of the twentieth century, music that was the product of years of working together in close community—studying together, eating together, laughing together, and, yes, playing together. The recording also showed Melba as “Mama” in a different sense: She was the “boss” of an improvisational sound that made her, at the very least, first among equals and that won her a legendary status among jazz musicians. The recording date pays homage to an accomplished musician seemingly too modest to acknowledge her musical influence or dominance.

Melba joined the Musicians Union (Local 767, the Colored Musicians Union) when she was sixteen-years old in order to take her first professional job as a member of the Lincoln Theater pit band. We tend to think of the postwar generation of innovative musicians as fully grown artists who made the world anew and blew the culture open with their revolutionary sound, but it is important to remember how young they were at these key moments in their own creative lives and in the changing cultural times. The environment around Los Angeles, and Central Avenue in particular, allowed for a community of young musicians to grow musically and socially. These relationships were formative and, in the case of Dexter and Melba, led to friendships that lasted throughout their lives. The musicians lived near each other, many in the Central Avenue area or, simply, “the Eastside,” and they spent hours practicing together in living rooms and garages before and after school. Dexter and Melba first started playing music together when he was seventeen and she was fourteen. Melba had come to Los Angeles from Kansas City three years prior, a shy eleven-year-old who had already decided that she would be a musician.¹ She and Dexter went to McKinley Jr. High School together before Dexter went on to Jefferson High School. According to him, Melba knew much more about music than the guys in their group and it was common for them to go to her for explanation of chord changes, transposition, and songwriting. (All references to what Dexter Gordon recalled about...