An extra in the background of The Ten Commandments and The Prodigal was one of the era’s most innovative jazz arrangers. This episode follows Melba Liston from a trombone at age seven in Kansas City, folk songs and spirituals with her grandfather, and study with Alma Hightower in Los Angeles, to a union card at 16, Gerald Wilson’s big band in 1943, and recordings with classmate Dexter Gordon, who dedicated Mischievous Lady to her.

We cover her recruitment by Dizzy Gillespie into a bebop big band with John Coltrane and John Lewis, tours with Count Basie and Billie Holiday, and the burnout that sent her to a clerical job in 1949. Then comes her return on State Department tours, an all-women quintet, work with Quincy Jones, arrangements for Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye, the four-decade partnership with Randy Weston, her years at the Jamaica School of Music, and the 1985 stroke after which she kept arranging with computer software and an assistant.

• What bebop demanded of a young trombonist and why her charts earned her place in the band
• The racism, sexism, and road logistics that drove her out of music in 1949
• How her dense altered harmonic voicings compare to a standard big band chart
• The ghostwriter problem: uncredited, underpaid arrangements for famous bandleaders
• Smile Orange, The Dread Mikado, and her 1987 NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship