for the Arts. Death After suffering repeated strokes, Liston died in Los Angeles, California on April 23, 1999, a few days after a tribute to her and Randy Weston's music at Harvard University. Her funeral at St. Peter's in Manhattan featured performances by Weston with Jann Parker, as well as by Chico O'Farrill's Afro-Cuban ensemble and by Lorenzo Shihab (vocals). Composing and arranging Liston was already writing and arranging music while in high school and she viewed that work as the central contribution of her career, stating on numerous occasions throughout her life that she preferred writing music to playing and soloing. Her early work with the high-profile bands of Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie shows a strong command of the big-band and bop idioms. She worked as an arranger for numerous recording companies, especially Motown, and arranged scores for dozens of high profile musicians, including Clark Terry, Marvin Gaye, Mary Lou Williams, and Gloria Lynne. However, perhaps her most important work was written for Randy Weston, with whom she collaborated on and off for four decades from the late 1950s into the 1990. Her work with Weston has been compared to the collaborations of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington. Liston worked as a "ghost writer" during her career. According to one writer, "Many of the arrangements found in the Gillespie, Jones, and Weston repertoires were accomplished by Liston." Legacy Liston was a female in a profession of mostly males. Although some consider her an unsung hero, she is highly regarded in the jazz community. Liston was a trailblazer as a trombonist, composer, and a woman. She articulated difficulties of being a woman on the road: "There's those natural problems on the road, the female problems, the lodging problems, the laundry, and all those kinda things to try to keep yourself together, problems that somehow or other the guys don't seem to have to go through." She goes on to recount the struggles she experienced as an African-American woman, which affected her musical career. However, she generally spoke positively about the camaraderie with and support from male musicians. Liston also dealt with larger issues of inequity in the music industry. One writer has said, "It was clear that she had to continually prove her credentials in order to gain suitable employment as a musician, composer, and arranger. She was not paid equitable scale and was often denied access to the