Black Women Working Together: Jazz, Gender, and the Politics of Validation

Abstract

In essay Black Women and Music: A Historical Legacy of Struggle (2001), Angela Davis chronicles cultural and historic trajectory black women musicians have advanced through music in their transition from free people to enslaved persons to free but oppressed people in relation to context of their lives in Africa and America. While Davis situates her discussion in how black women have used spirituals and blues as a means of developing social and political consciousness, her theoretical scope could easily be enlarged to include other forms of black music, most notably jazz. One of arguments Davis raises concerns common reading of black women's relationships with each other in larger scope of popular culture. These relationships are often framed as competitive and antagonistic. Rarely has complex and layered engagement between black women been acknowledged. In recent years, popular culture has perpetuated trope of competitiveness, hostility, and violence between black women through social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and reality television (e.g., Basketball Wives, Real Housewives of Atlanta). These depictions have been used to stereotype black women, discredit their viability in certain social environments, and reject them as intellectual beings. But close examination of social and familial relationships between women exposes a complex culture of engagement and socialization. These relationships are at times defined by layered and multifarious praxes through which collectives of black women have engaged in self-definition; created systems of knowledge that provided skills to navigate political, social, and economic spheres; and formed safe that have supported their process of brokering power. Why has this competitive narrative permeated popular culture and our readings of how black women engage with another? One reason is that this narrative has been defined by emotional responses generated from engagement between black and women in public and private spheres. The supposed lack of good black who can sustain good relationships with good black women serves as undercurrent for competitive and sometimes toxic relationships between black women. This is furthered with proliferation of mythology of strong black woman and her engagement with weak black men and supposed subversion of social and power structures that define masculinity. These ideological beliefs raise a number of questions when considered in relation to interactions between black women and in larger contexts of popular culture. How has competitive narrative framed how black women musicians are read and defined within popular culture history and criticism? To understand this we must interrogate how narrative of competition and engagement of black women musicians have been documented in historiography of jazz. The narrative of competitive personality or inability to get along among black women musicians has become paramount to mythologies that have shaped public understandings of culture of jazz. (1) It is often used as of rationales for why women are disruptive to work being done in spaces where jazz is created. The prevailing thought is that competitiveness that women exhibit in these spaces is that is destructive rather than productive to working environment. The male competitive spirit in jazz, however, is essence of creative energy generated. It is the necessary constant, for it produces cultural hallmarks, real-time moments of genius and frames infinite nature of possibility that occurs when work together even when poised or posed in competitive stances. When this type of analysis is extended to women musicians, it is often subverted from its role as tool of empowerment that helps develop her individual musical voice to where she is forced into battle to be one female creative voice that survives and earns a place in historical narrative. …