Re-Masculating Jazz: Ornette Coleman, "Lonely Woman," and the New York Jazz Scene in the Late 1950s

Abstract

This article focuses on how the principal codes of masculinity in jazz were represented by musicians and their music in a particular place and time, and the various means by which these established notions were challenged and refigured by an alternative model. More specifically, I will look to 1959 as a moment of contestation between established codes of jazz masculinity and a new approach stage by Ornette Coleman. For reasons that will be made clear, I will concentrate on Coleman's performance of his composition Lonely Woman to exemplify my assertions regarding jazz and gender. While I will be arguing that Ornette Coleman's approach undermined accepted notions of masculinity in jazz, I do not to suggest that his music is somehow inherently feminine. Musical works-like all cultural worksonly mean in relation to other works. If Coleman and his colleagues did serve to re-masculate jazz, that is only because conceptions of the masculine had already been established in that tradition. The 1959 appearance of Ornette Coleman's group at New York's Five Spot jazz club, coinciding with the release of their album, The