Two Strikes and the Double Negative: The Intersections of Gender and Race in the Cases of Female Jazz Saxophonists

Abstract

On January 1,2012,1 was invited to a party at my friend's house in Brooklyn, New York, where about ten jazz musicians gathered and celebrated the New Year over food and drinks. They knew me both as a jazz saxophonist who worked from the late 1990s to the early 2000s and as a researcher who conducted fieldwork in the late 2000s in New York City. Some of them helped me to connect with female jazz saxophonists to interview for my dissertation research. After talking about my research and several female saxophonists' remarkable success in recent years, a white male (and friend) mentioned, You know, white guys are the least favored in the scene. Yes, that's very true, another white male immediately responded. According to those two men, black musicians are more appreciated and female musicians attract more attention. In a similar way, one of my musician friends in Pittsburgh told me recently, You're a hot commodity because you're a woman sax player. I'm a white guy, nobody cares. These white male musicians' comments suggest that two different systems of preference are at work here: black musicians over white musicians because of authenticity, and female musicians over male musicians because of novelty. As a result, they perceive a certain hierarchy in the jazz scene: black men, black women, white (nonblack) women, and white (nonblack) men. This grading, whether valid or not, is different from the ones seen in many areas in American society where white males are often ranked the highest. More importantly, their comments demonstrate that the instrumental jazz scene is a site where both gender and race merge in complex dialogues that involve authenticity, belonging, and career advancement. This article explores how such issues, surrounding gender and race, intersect in the experiences of female jazz saxophonists. Based on interviews with female jazz saxophonists who are active in New York City, I draw attention to how African-American cultural identity affects female saxophonists' employment and the way they perform gender in the context of jazz. Specifically, I examine the meanings of these racial and cultural issues for African-American and non-African-American women who play jazz. How do these women talk about these issues in the context of their lives as performers? Why are there so few African-American female jazz instrumentalists in the current jazz scene? These questions and interviews frame this study, which shows the complexity of how African-American and white women experience jazz and demonstrates how gender issues in jazz can be shaped by race, especially various notions about blackness. The first part of the article focuses on issues of authenticity and jazz performance, especially as viewed by white female saxophonists, both American and European. The second part addresses practical, employment matters, chiefly the roles race and gender play in the employment of white female musicians and their interactions with male musicians. The third and fourth sections draw attention to the views of African-American women on similar subjects as previously mentioned and explores issues surrounding the scarcity of African-American female instrumentalists. My ideas of gender and race, as well as the use of intersectionality as an analytical framework, should be explained further. I subscribe to Stuart Hall's definition of cultural identity that consists of two seemingly opposing views: a fixed, unchanging, cultural essence, yet not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history, and culture but rather constantly undergoes transformation (Hall 1989, 69-70). In his discussion of Afro-Caribbean cinema, Hall posits that cultural identity belongs to the future as much as to the past (Hall 1989,69-70). I also draw on Judith Butler's concept of gender performativity; I consider categories of identity performative (Butler 1990). In other words, there is no essential quality for any identity category. …