Gendered Interventions in European Jazz Festival Programming

Abstract

The Keychange Initiative, introduced in 2017, encouraged music festivals to pledge 50/50 gender parity by 2020. As sites performing jazz’s hegemonic masculinity, jazz festivals typically scored low in gender diversity rankings. This chapter investigates the impact of Keychange upon the programming patterns of four European jazz festivals: North Sea Jazz Festival, Montreux Jazz Festival, JazzFest Berlin, and the Katowice JazzArt Festival. Program rosters reveal the dominance of a New York–based star network of male artists, promoted by early European jazz impresarios, whose ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ favoured especially artists performing jazz fusion alongside other popular musics. Jazz’s gendered and national hierarchies continued to determine music festival programming until 2018, when some festivals adopted the Keychange pledge. A focused analysis of recent programs indicates that initiatives such as Keychange stimulated alternatives to this jazz star network. Ultimately, by comparing pledging programmers’ gendered strategies to non-pledging festivals, this study identifies benefits for women musicians and European artists of experimental genres, whose profiles were stitched into alternative networks by risk-taking female jazz festival programmers. Statement on gender terminology: The chapter’s statistical analyses employ the terms female, male, non-binary, and mixed (gender). Female (musicians) refers to persons identifying as cisgendered women. Male refers to those identifying as cisgendered men. Non-binary refers to those who identify as trans men or women or explicitly referencing non-binary as their gender in artist bios. Mixed gender refers to musical groups with a variety of genders of musicians (male, female and/or non-binary). This author identifies as a cis-gendered white American women living in the Netherlands.