Education
She studied improvisation using a wire recorder to record her own soloing along with jazz records, and studying the results.
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Clora Bryant
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She became adept at a variety of genres, from jazz to classical, and performing versions of famous jazz solos of the day. In addition, she honed her own unique improvisational skills in jam sessions along Central Avenue in Los Angeles, the center of the mid-"40s West Coast African-American jazz scene. Clora Bryant performed in her high-school band.
She turned down a scholarship to study at Oberlin College in Ohio and enrolled at Prairie View Agricultural and Mechanical, a historically Black college in Texas known for its Jazz Band Program.
In the early 1940s she toured Texas with the college"s all-female band, the Prairie View Company-eds. The Prairie View Company-Eds went to New York in 1944 for a successful gig at the Apollo Theater, where Clora Bryant scored a hit with the song "I Had the Craziest Dream", on which was her version of a solo by trumpeter Harry James.
She also spent a week at the Million Dollar Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles with the legendary all-female orchestra International Sweethearts of Rhythm, and in 1948 she toured with the all-female, all Black "Queens of Swing". In 1948 Bryant married Joe Stone, a bassist who played with several Rhythm & Blues bands.
They started a family, and Clora continue to perform while pregnant and as a young mother.
Later she attended University of California, Los Angeles, where she became influenced by bebop and gained the attention of Dizzy Gillespie. She was the only female musician to perform with Charlie Parker, at the Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach, California. She subsequently toured with singers Billy Daniels and Billy Williams.
She appeared on The Editor Sullivan Show and later became the first American female jazz musician to play in the Soviet Union on a request from Mikhail Gorbachev.
Since suffering a heart attack in 1996 she has been unable to play but still sings and lectures on jazz.
Membership
In 1951, she was a member of an all-female sextette led by Ginger Smock, that broadcast for six weeks on Columbia Broadcasting System.
