Artist: Clora Bryant

Clora Bryant was an American jazz trumpeter. She was the only female trumpeter to perform with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. 

Bryant turned down scholarships from Oberlin Conservatory and Bennett College to attend Prairie View College in Houston starting in 1943, where she was a member of the Prairie View Co-eds jazz band. The band toured in Texas and performed at the Apollo Theater in New York City in 1944.

In 1946 she became a member of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female jazz band, earned her union card and dropped out of school.  Dizzy Gillespie became her mentor and provided her with work. She joined the black female jazz band the Queens of Swing as a drummer and went on tour with the band. 

In 1951, she worked in Los Angeles as a trumpeter for Josephine Baker and Billie Holiday. Two years later she moved to New York City. The Queens of Swing performed on television in 1951 as The Hollywood Sepia Tones, in a half-hour variety program on KTLA. They were the first women's jazz group to appear on television.

In 1951, she was a member of an all-female sextet led by Ginger Smock that was broadcast for six weeks on CBS. 

Bryant recorded her first and only album, Gal with a Horn, in 1957 before returning to the life of a traveling musician. She worked often at clubs in Chicago and Denver. In Las Vegas she performed with Louis Armstrong and Harry James. She toured with singer Billy Williams and accompanied him on The Ed Sullivan Show. During the 1960s and 1970s, she toured around the world with her brother Mel, who was a singer.

In 2002, she received a lifetime achievement award (the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award) from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Two years later a documentary about her was released. 

In an interview with JazzTimes, Bryant said, "Nobody ever told me, 'You can't play the trumpet, you're a girl.' Not when I got started in high school and not when I came out to L.A. My father told me, 'It's going to be a challenge, but if you're going to do it, I'm behind you all the way.' And he was." 

Further information about Clora Bryant is found here.