Feminist Aesthetics in Jazz: An Interview with Susanne Vincenza of Alive!

Abstract

Except for singers, women musicians have been silenced by rigid stereotypes and economic sanctions as systematically as women writers, women politicians, and all other women professionals. In the United States, women jazz artists have faced perhaps the toughest odds of all. Ironically, jazz evolved from the blues, a musical idiom developed at least as much by women as by men, and women have made important contributions to mainstream jazz throughout its history. Jazz seems to me to be very well suited to a revolutionary feminist consciousness because of its history and because it is essentially elastic, more open to idiomatic change than other musical genres. Even though their history has been suppressed, jazz women have persevered: the First Annual Kansas City Women's Jazz Festival in 1977 signaled a continuing effort by these women to recover their history and to become more audible. That same year gave birth to one of the best and most innovative groups performing feminist music. After meeting at San Francisco's Jazz Workshop, bass player Susanne Vincenza, singer Rhiannon, and percussionist Carolyn Brandy began to compose experimental jazz and to perform for audiences across the country, including the major women's music festivals. In 1979, the trio expanded to include drummer Barbara Borden and pianist Janet Small. Eight months later, the group recorded their first LP, Alive! followed in 1981 by an impressive live album, Call It Jazz, and they have just released a third recording, City Life, on their own label.2 They have not only succeeded as jazz musicians, they have done so on their own unconventional terms. Like others on the feminist music circuit that has grown up in the last decade, members of Alive! are changing the musical idioms through which they speak to us. As they sing in the Gil-Scott Heron lyric,