Not One to Toot Her Own Horn(?): Melba Liston’s Oral Histories and Classroom Presentations

In a 2008 NPR Jazz Profile, Nancy Wilson narrates a pivotal moment in Melba Liston’s youth when Louis Armstrong recognized the talents of the sixteen-year-old trombonist in the Lincoln Theatre house band and encouraged her to take a solo. Wilson states: “But the shy, soft spoken trombonist has always been more interested in writing music, than in playing and soloing.” The next voice we hear is that of a much older Liston reflecting back: “I didn’t want to solo. I didn’t even desire to. No, No, No. I was not the solo type.” This is the kind of response Liston often gave to interviewers and band leaders on the topic of soloing. It is often interpreted as an expression of her shy, modest demeanor, and sometimes as a gendered decline of the masculinized subject position of the jazz soloist.¹ Her solos in performance, and on record, then, become occasions for audiences, fellow musicians, and scholars to marvel at this introverted player, who preferred to remain in the “background,” but whose talent was so great that she could, when pressed, overcome her reticence to produce a brilliant solo.

In this article, we listen carefully—not to Liston’s trombone solos on record (which also deserve dedicated scholarship)—but to what she said about her work and life in jazz. We construct our archive for this paper out of tellings for which audio recordings are available: a selection of class presentations, oral histories, and interviews between 1973 and 1996. We listen across Liston’s many tellings of her life to hear how she renavigated and renegotiated—in face-to-face interaction—situated encounters with jazz ideals in tension with one another. Our close listening not only opens new perspectives on Liston’s understanding of her life and career but also helps us to tune in to fuller understandings of multiple dimensions of jazz practice, jazz historiography, and the jazz archive. We also argue that listening to her oral navigations of a life in jazz-as-work suggests methodologies for jazz knowledge production in writing and archive building, which are employed by us in this coauthored article, and also by the Melba Liston Research Collective as a working group in-progress.

Listening Guide

Before we embark on our tour of aural engagement with Liston’s audio-recorded life-story tellings, we would like to highlight some of the questions and approaches that emerged as especially exciting to us. We begin with a consideration of how Liston’s tellings engage a critical interplay between the ideals of jazz as a collaborative endeavor and jazz as a soloist’s art. What can her experiences—and narrative and performative strategies for telling them to others—teach us about gendered jazz sociality in jazz-as-work? What can this teach us about jazz-as-history? How can they help us to listen to other jazz oral histories as jazz interactions and how might they intervene in the ways we practice and interpret jazz oral history? What do they tell us about “the role of personal memory in the construction of public [national] histories” (Cvetkovich 2003, 57)? How do these ways-of-telling help us to understand the range of social and institutional interventions created across these instances? And how does listening aurally and to multiple tellings help us to envision modes of jazz life-story telling, not only beyond hagiography, but beyond transcription? And how might Liston’s emphasis on collaborative aspects of jazz-as-work bring nuance, affect, and dynamic interaction into our collaborative work as jazz historians, oral historians, ethnographers, ethnomusicologists, educators, and archivists?

The interview scenarios we examine generally compel Liston to compose a narrative of her life and career in music. If the way a jazz musician references the melodic contours of a standard says much about her or his artistic priorities, process, and style, we can similarly learn from the ways in which Liston riffs across presentations and oral histories on the contours of professional guideposts...