Finally, taking a bow | https://news.harvard.edu/
Finally, taking a bow | https://news.harvard.edu/
Finally, taking a bow
Many jazz greats knew names, music of these four women, but Radcliffe Fellow Maxine Gordon wants to make sure rest of us do too
Their names and music are not widely known today, but author Maxine Gordon, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, aims to rectify that injustice.
Gordon, a lifelong jazz fan and wife of Dexter Gordon, the late tenor saxophone great, spent decades working in the music business, mostly as a road and tour manager for jazz musicians. In 2018, she completed a book her husband had begun about his life, “Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon.”
During a talk Wednesday, Gordon previewed a project she’s researching during her fellowship about the lives of four Black women musicians who found success and built lasting careers despite facing “unrelenting obstacles” in the ultra-competitive, male-dominated music world between the 1930s and early 1970s: vocalists Maxine Sullivan and Velma Middleton, organist Shirley Scott, and Melba Liston, a trombonist and accomplished composer and arranger who worked with Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones in the 1950s, and later, reggae star Bob Marley.
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