“When you put that iron in your mouth, you run into problems.”
Clora Bryant, a trumpet player who broke barriers in jazz, was raised a Baptist and
taught that anything with a backbeat was likely “the devil’s music,” But even on the
North Texas prairie where she grew up, the siren sounds of jazz found her. She was
excited by the jazz she heard on the radio and when her older brother was drafted, she
found a trumpet in his room that he had never truly learned to play. Her father, Charles
Bryant, warned his daughter she’d likely face resistance. “But anything you want to do,
I’m behind you,” she recalled her father telling her. “You keep playing.”
Bryant always knew that her gender and color would pose challenges in her desire to be
taken seriously as a modern jazz trumpeter. Ms. Bryant stated, “When you put that iron
in your mouth, you run into problems, the other horn players gave me respect, but the
men who ran the clubs considered me a novelty”
Bryant, self-proclaimed as a “trumpetiste”, was often seen, sequin-clad, in all-girl
combos. It was only in her middle years that she emerged as a regular participant in the
best big bands and small groups in LA and beyond. Bryant played the trumpet with such
passion and fury that she became a mainstay in the growing jazz scene along Central
Avenue in the 1940s. Dizzy Gillespie once told Los Angeles Times jazz critic Leonard
Feather that Bryant was the most underrated trumpet player in L.A. And when she
played the Riviera in Las Vegas, Louis Armstrong was so impressed that he hustled up
his band and joined her onstage.
Inspired by Dave Brubeck’s decision to take his music to Moscow, Bryant wrote a letter
directly to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and asked him to use his authority to let her
become “the first female horn player to be invited to your country to perform.” In 1988,
she arrived in Moscow and played at a jazz festival, and later the city’s marquee jazz
club. She was accompanied by a film crew from UCLA, where she — late in life —
decided to study music history. Filmmaker Zeinabu Irene Davis, a fellow student at
UCLA, released “Trumpetistically Clora Bryant,” a documentary that captures the
musician in full force, using her as a metaphor for the racism and gender bias that held
back women with ambition.
In 2002, Bryant was awarded the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award at the
Kennedy Center in Washington.
Much of her memorabilia — photos of her with Count Basie’s trumpet section, pictures
with Duke Ellington, a baby grand piano she composed on — burned in the 1992 riots
following the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King.
Music: From her 1957 album “Gal with a Horn”, Clora Bryant with “This Can’t Be Love”.
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