Clora Bryant, Trumpeter and Pillar of L.A. Jazz Scene, Dies at 92 Dizzy Gillespie called her his protégé. But faced with sexist discrimination, she did not establish herself as a bandleader until middle age.
Clora Bryant, a trumpeter who was widely considered one of the finest jazz musicians on the West Coast — but who ran into gender-based limitations on how famous she could become — died on Aug. 23 in Los Angeles. She was 92.
Her son Darrin Milton said she died at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after suffering a heart attack at home.
A
self-described “trumpetiste,” Ms. Bryant came of age in the 1940s,
aligning herself with the emerging bebop movement. But she never lost
the brawny elocution and gregarious air of a classic big-band player,
even as she became a fixture of Los Angeles’s modern jazz scene.
Often faced with sexist discrimination, without support from a major record label or an agent,
Ms. Bryant did not come forth as a bandleader until middle age. By that
point the jazz mainstream had moved on to fusion, a style she never
embraced.
And
even when jazz history became a subject of major academic concern in
the late 1970s and ’80s, she was rarely celebrated at the level of her
male counterparts, who had enjoyed greater support throughout their careers.
But among themselves, those same musicians often recognized her virtuosity, and she played with many of them. Dizzy Gillespie , an inventor of bebop, found himself dazzled upon first hearing her in the mid-1950s, and took to calling her his protégé.
“If you close your eyes, you’ll say it’s a man playing,” Gillespie said in an interview for “Trumpetistically, Clora Bryant,” a documentary directed by Zeinabu Davis. (He apparently intended it as a compliment.) “She has the feeling of the trumpet. The feeling, not just the notes.”
Writing in The Los Angeles Times in 1992 ,
when Ms. Bryant was in her mid-60s, Dick Wagner noted that she retained
her beguiling powers. “When Bryant plays the blues, the sound is low,
almost guttural, a smoldering fire,” he wrote. “When she plays a fast
tune, the sound is piercing — the fire erupts.”
Clora Larea Bryant was born on May 30, 1927, in Denison, Tex., the youngest of three children of Charles and Eulila
Bryant. Her father was a day laborer. Her mother was a homemaker who
died when Clora was 3, leaving him to raise his children alone on a
salary of $7 a week.
Ms.
Bryant credited her success as a trumpeter to her father’s tireless
support. “Nobody ever told me, ‘You can’t play the trumpet, you’re a
girl,’” she said in a 2007 interview with JazzTimes magazine . “My father told me, ‘It’s going to be a challenge, but if you’re going to do it, I’m behind you all the way.’ And he was.”
She
started out on the piano but took up the trumpet after her high school
established an orchestra and marching band. Showing preternatural
talent, she often woke up at dawn to take private lessons before the
school day began.
In 1943 she declined
scholarships to the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio and Bennett College in
North Carolina to attend Prairie View A&M University — a
historically black school outside Houston — because it had an all-female
16-piece jazz band. “When I found out they had an all-girl band there,
that’s where I was going,” she said in a wide-ranging six-hour interview with Steven Isoardi for the University of California, Los Angeles’s oral history program.
In
1946 Ms. Bryant joined the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, the
country’s leading all-female swing ensemble, where she was a featured
soloist. Credit Ernest Mac Crafton Miller But
in 1945, after two years at Prairie View, Ms. Bryant moved with her
family to Los Angeles and transferred to U.C.L.A. (Her father had been
run out of Texas by a group of white people who accused him of stealing
paint.) She immediately found her way to Central Avenue, the bustling
nucleus of black life in the city, where jazz clubs abounded.
After
hearing the trumpeter Howard McGhee at the Downbeat, she fell in love
with bebop. She was underage, so she stood just outside the door,
transfixed. But she soon found her way inside.
“I would not go without my horn,” she told Dr. Isoardi, remembering attending nightclubs like the Downbeat and the Club Alabam .
“If I knew there was going to be somebody there, I’d have my horn with
me, because I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to try to learn
something.”
In 1946 Ms. Bryant joined the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, the country’s leading all-female swing ensemble, where she was a featured soloist.
(Jazz bands led by women had become popular during World War II, and
many of these ensembles continued to thrive for years afterward.)
Soon
after, she joined the Queens of Rhythm, another large group. When its
drummer left, she learned drums to fill the role. A crowd-pleaser, she
sometimes played trumpet with one hand while drumming with the other.
Ms.
Bryant married the bassist Joe Stone in the late 1940s, and the couple
had two children. In one publicity photo with the Queens of Rhythm, she
subtly conceals an eight-month pregnancy. She and Mr. Stone eventually
divorced, and she raised their children as a single parent, continuing
to perform all the while.
Ms. Bryant
is survived by her four children — April and Charles Stone, from her
marriage to Mr. Stone, and Kevin and Darrin Milton, from her
relationship with the drummer Leslie Milton — as well as nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Her brothers, Frederick and Melvin, died before her.
Throughout
much of the 1950s she regularly led jam sessions around Los Angeles.
She also played in the house band at the Alabam, where she backed up
visiting stars like Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker. She moved to New
York for a brief time but soon returned to Los Angeles, where she would
stay for the rest of her life, remaining a well-known performer and a
mentor to younger musicians.
In
1956, the trombonist Melba Liston arranged for Ms. Bryant to meet
Gillespie when he toured Los Angeles. He took her under his wing and
gave her a trumpet mouthpiece that she would use for decades. Ms. Bryant
later returned the favor, leading the charge to get Gillespie his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame .
She recorded her sole album as a leader, “Gal With a Horn,”
for Mode Records in 1957. To satisfy audiences, Ms. Bryant had taken up
singing onstage, and the label’s executives demanded — against her
wishes — that she sing on the album’s eight tunes. But it is her trumpet
solos that stand out: She often leaps out of the gate with a stoutly
articulated melody before spiraling into coiled runs, her bold delivery
reflecting the influence of Louis Armstrong as much as first-wave bebop
pioneers like Gillespie and Fats Navarro.
By
the mid-1950s, Ms. Bryant was performing around the country with
various groups and accompanying the vocalist Billy Williams in his
popular Las Vegas revue. They appeared together on “The Ed Sullivan
Show,” and Ms. Bryant contributed a track to Williams’s album “The Billy
Williams Revue.”
In the 1970s and
’80s Ms. Bryant stepped forward more as a leader, fronting a combo she
called Swi-Bop. She toured internationally and often performed with her
brother Melvin, a singer. In the late 1980s and ’90s, her son Kevin was
Swi-Bop’s regular drummer.
In 1988,
with tensions easing between the United States and Russia, Ms. Bryant
wrote a letter to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, saying she
hoped to become “the first lady horn player to be invited to your
country to perform.” His cultural ministry invited her to the Soviet
Union, where she toured the next year.
Ms.
Bryant retired from playing trumpet in the 1990s after suffering a
heart attack and undergoing quadruple bypass surgery. She committed
herself to preserving and passing on jazz’s legacy, giving lectures at
colleges and universities, working with children in grade schools around
Los Angeles and coediting a book on Los Angeles jazz history.
In
2002 the Kennedy Center presented Ms. Bryant with a lifetime
achievement award at its Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival. She
sang some of her own compositions at the event, flanked by younger musicians.
At
the conclusion of Ms. Davis’s documentary, Ms. Bryant acknowledges the
frustration of having been passed over while watching her male
counterparts rise to stardom, but she expresses a dauntless pride
nonetheless.
“I’m sitting here broke
as the Ten Commandments, but I’m still rich,” she says. “With love and
friendship and music. And I’m rich in life.”
from www.nytimes.com
Edited by snobb - 02 Sep 2019 at 12:26pm