Jean Coston Maloney

Coston played for national meetings of the NAACP and the National Association of Negro Musicians as a child.^[6] She was mentioned in The Crisis when she was twelve years old,^[2] after she was a finalist in a statewide piano competition in Indiana.^[6] At age 18, she taught music appreciation at an Indianapolis summer school sponsored by the YWCA.^[7]

Coston gave recitals in Atlanta in 1940,^[8] and in Knoxville in 1941.^[9] "Miss Coston displayed a pleasing tone, dexterity, and fine shading," wrote Atlanta critic Gamewell Valentine in 1940.^[10] She also performed in radio broadcasts.^[11] In 1949^[12][13] and 1953, she was guest soloist with the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra, playing for a non-segregated audience.^[14][15][16]

Coston taught piano at Spelman College in 1939,^[8][17] and Howard University in Washington, D.C.,^[4] Dillard University in New Orleans^[18] and at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania,^[12] all historically black schools (HBCUs). Her students included Ellis Marsalis Jr.,^[19][20] who studied with her from 1950 to 1951,^[21] and Geneva Handy Southall (at Dillard).^[22]

Coston married physician Arnold Hamilton Maloney Jr. in 1942.^[5] They had three children. She died in 1968, at the age of 51, in Chicago. There is a scrapbook of her correspondence and ephemera in the Western Michigan University Archives & Regional History Collections.^[23]