CLORA BRYANT

Dizzy Gillespie called her his protégé. But faced with sexist discrimination, she did not establish herself as a bandleader until middle age. Clora Bryant, a trumpeter who was widely considered one of the finest jazz musicians on the West Coast  — but who ran into gender-based limitations on how famous she could become — died on Aug. 23 2019 in Los Angeles. She was 92. A self-described “trumpetiste,” Ms. Bryant came of age in the 1940s, aligning herself with the emerging bebop movement. But she never lost the brawny elocution and gregarious air of a classic big-band player, even as she became a fixture of Los Angeles’s modern jazz scene. Often faced with sexist discrimination, without support from a major record label or an agent, Ms. Bryant did not come forth as a bandleader until middle age. By that point the jazz mainstream had moved on to fusion, a style she never read more...