Taking Care of Music
Gender, Arranging, and Collaboration in the Weston-Liston Partnership
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11679258 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Barg Barg (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 97-97 |
| Publication date | 2014-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Black Music Research Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0276-3605 • E-ISSN: 1946-1615 |
| Publisher | University of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5406/blacmusiresej.34.1.0097 |
| OpenAlex | W1968768533 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 6 |
If you care your music, the will care you: that was the advice that vocalist Leon Thomas remembered receiving from Melba Liston (Kaplan 1999, 424). Thomas's first professional encounter with Liston occurred at a rehearsal with Art Blakey sometime in the late 1950s. (1) As he recalled it, Liston arrived save the day: arrangements in-hand, accompanied by her instrumental team Walter Davis (piano) and Sahib Shihab (baritone saxophone). Liston gave the following directions an unprepared Thomas: You do the singing, I'll do the arrangements! (424). Thomas's remembrances Liston--her advice and the story their first meeting--provide a useful starting point for exploring issues gender, arranging, and collaboration in Liston's career. To take care your music in the professional sense refers musical activities and personal qualities historically coded as masculine in discourses on aesthetics and culture, such as discipline, autonomy, efficiency, and mastery. However, the phrase to care of evokes feminine-coded practices and values: nurturing, selfless devotion, interdependence, and attention detail. In her roles as arranger, composer, trombonist, musical director, and educator, Liston's career was defined by taking care music in all senses the phrase. Perhaps the most striking instance how Liston took care her music, however, is the Melba Liston Collection at the Center for Black Music Research. Liston's material legacy--as she meticulously collected, arranged, and donated it the CBMR--consists almost entirely music. Scores, be precise: forty-three boxes manuscripts (scores, parts, lead sheets), and only a single letterbox papers. The score-centered nature Liston's archive, as well as the nature the scores themselves, showcases her body work as an arranger and composer working behind the scenes in jazz and popular music. Liston's collection reverses the historical conditions in which she produced her scores, making visible for the public the products creative labor that were sources for musical performances, sources largely invisible audiences and listeners during her lifetime. The forms the scores perform another kind reversal, marking practices and histories collaboration, interaction, and co-creation rather than romantic notions authorship and autonomy, which are commonly assumed when dealing with notated music. As such, Liston's notated archive--or more precisely, the performance-centered musical events they participated in shaping--also troubles gendered and raced narratives heroic creation and individualism in jazz. This essay focuses on one musical moment from Liston's career, namely, her work with composer and pianist Randy Weston on the groundbreaking 1960 recording the four-movement suite Uhuru Afrika. I examine issues gender and collaboration in Liston's work as arranger, musical director, co-researcher, and conductor in the production this project within several overlapping analytical frames. First, I consider gender in relation discourses surrounding the historic role arrangers in big band jazz and how these discourses resonate in Liston's partnership with Weston. Second, I ask how Liston's role and practices as an arranger enabled her navigate the homosocial spaces in which she worked and how issues gender, intercultural dialogue, and collaboration play out in the sonic and interpretive details Liston's arrangements themselves. My argument is that through the musical agency her scores--their expressive, dramatic, and formal dimensions--and through her presence and participation in recording sessions as conductor/musical director, Liston charted a collaborative and creative path take care music that worked within and against prevailing discourses about gender, race, and jazz. Finally, I relate her strategies and practices oblique writing (Weston and Jenkins 2010, 74) the interests and strategies other contemporaneous black women artists and suggest that focusing on Liston's work in the making Uhuru Afrika refigures masculinist narratives collaboration and community during this transformative period in jazz
Art · General partnership · Political science · Sociology · Visual arts · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Theater, Performance, and Music History
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,4 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2024 (4) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |