On Christmas Day 2020, Disney and Pixar's animated feature film Soul, a meditation on finding the spark that illuminates the beauty of living, streamed on Disney+ for the first time. Soul is Pixar's first film to feature an African American main character. Told through the perspective of Joe Gardner, a middle school band teacher and pianist, Soul situates him in the boroughs of a multiethnic and multiracial New York City. On the very day that he believes he has at last achieved his dream, a gig with a prominent jazz band at a well-known jazz club in, arguably, the jazz capital of the world, he has an accident landing him in The Great Before, “where new souls get their personalities” before coming to Earth. Gardner must make it back into his comatose body lying in a hospital before the gig begins.1Before we see the accident, we see Joe in his public school classroom. He's transcribed “Things Ain't What They Used to Be” on the green chalkboard and is attempting to lead his middle schoolers through practice on instruments barely hanging together. “1–2–3–4 stay on the beat. 2–3–4. That's in sharp, horns. I see you Caleb. Connie go for it.” Connie, a twelve-year-old Asian girl, rises from her chair to take the trombone solo. Joe's eyes express his pleasure, but the other children laugh, breaking Connie's intense focus on the music. She drops to her seat deflated. He then recounts a story to illustrate for the class that “it's a good thing” Connie had become “a little lost” in the music. Joe's story is a remembrance of his father, also a musician, who would take him to hear live music in jazz clubs. Once, he heard a piano player who opened the world to him. To Joe, the pianist seemed to float off the stage, and “he took the rest of us with him.” As Joe demonstrates the chords and voicings of that remembered performance, he gets a little lost in it himself, and the children give him their rapt attention. “That's when I knew I was born to play.”2Joe's affirmation and support of Connie as a young female improviser demonstrates how to manage the delicate moment when girls and gender nonconforming students may drop out of jazz. He encourages Connie by deflecting the ridicule she might have felt after her solo from her classmates who laugh nervously, not malicious but nonetheless mocking. Joe redirects them not through scolding but by connecting through experiences told in musical stories. The laughter still hurts, and, after school in high dudgeon, Connie arrives at Joe's apartment for her private lesson: “I came to tell you I quit. . . . Band is a stupid waste of time. . . . I think jazz is pointless.” Seconds later she says, “You know Mr. G., I was practicing this one thing. Maybe you could listen and tell me to quit after.” She asks to be heard both in complaint and in performance. Joe understands. “She might say she hates everything, but the trombone is her thing.” Joe supports her not only because she is a girl, but because she seeks her voice in the music. Joe creates for Connie what Camille Thurman calls the “safe space to learn,” crucial to building the musical knowledge and performance technique to grow as a musician.3While Joe creates a safe musical space for his students, his own career as a pianist is not as certain. When Joe is offered a full-time job (with benefits!) as the band teacher, his mother wants him to take the job. She had to manage their family's economic uncertainty as his father chased his music-making dreams and doesn't want that for her son. Joe wants to play though. His former student Curley, now drummer for the brilliant saxophonist Dorothea Williams, invites him to the Half Note to audition for Williams. Voiced by Angela Bassett and music played by saxophonist Tia Fuller, Dorothea Williams's character vibrates with authority, skill, and creativity. Joe is visibly shook being in her presence. The quartet she leads is gender inclusive and multiethnic. It is also one demanding that you take the risk and play even when you don't know what to play. As Joe finds the groove and then takes off, getting lost in the music, Williams reconsiders her first impression of him, the “teacher.” He is good, she decides, and offers him the job. Joining Williams's quartet is the epitome of making it as a musician; she, a famous black woman leader, is willing to take a chance on him, Joe Gardner, the unknown educator toiling in the salt mines of teaching middle school band. She welcomes him with the name “Teach.” After their first performance, feeling somewhat depleted from the experience, Joe wonders if that is all there is. He asks Dorothea “What happens next?” She replies, “We come back tomorrow night and do it all over again.”I open with this synopsis of Soul to tease out the gender dynamics present in Joe's jazz world. Joe, Dorothea, and Connie help us to imagine what a more equitable jazz culture might look and sound like by drawing our attention to what it means to mentor across gender lines, to be heard in complaint and in performance, to be demanding yet inviting, to be self-expressive and caring.4Soul asks us to imagine a jazz world in which women are visible, integrated, and central, aligning women's stories with men's rather than making them exceptional. Both Dorothea and Connie are instrumentalists, not singers, who are often set apart from the collective that is the band. They are both also rooted in jazz as the primary musical choice for their creative expression. Soul is imperfect, is sweet, is hopeful, and nevertheless is also critical in that it balances these emotions with others that explore uncertainty, and fear, and ennui. There is no single happy outcome; as Dorothea tells Joe, we come back and do it all again, day after day, not with resignation about the impossible task set before us, but with a commitment to working together to create anew each day.I would argue that these gendered elements of Soul reflect a way of imagining jazz as an equitable space, a way of seeing in action what the music makes us feel is possible to imagine of a just world. Gender remains a useful category in jazz studies because it illuminates the continuum of expectations and experiences of men, women, and gender nonconforming people that are performative, punitive, and liberating in jazz culture and music. I would also argue that by listening to black women within jazz, one can create even more compelling ways to imagine a just and equitable world.Jazz as rhetorical form gives us language for imagining democracy in action; jazz as black music gives us language for conceptualizing love and freedom in undemocratic times; “jazz feminism” as praxis might engender a model of justice that is restorative, generative, and inclusive. Much of our critical attention has been to the influence of black women vocalists within blues to give scope to black experience. Angela Davis proposes in Blues Legacies, Black Feminism that we might read Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as proto-feminists: their music reflected the concerns that would later come to be recognized as central to contemporary feminist discourse, including domestic violence, paid labor, travel, and sexuality. “The birth of the blues was aesthetic evidence of new psychological realities within the black population.” The idea of “freedom” among the black working class underwent a cultural reimagining: “The blues . . . articulated a new valuation of individual emotional needs and desires.” This focus on individual needs was a shift from how the spirituals reflected “collective aspirations.” Additional shifts included conceiving the performer as distinct from the audience and foregrounding matters of the everyday over those of the sacred. These shifts were not merely musical but reflected shifts in the broader culture that made it possible for audiences to hear a blues woman as having something to say.5Davis's focus on the intersection of race, gender, and the aesthetic is a critical lens that, Robin James argues, often goes unremarked in philosophical approaches to aesthetics, including those of feminists. Davis, writes James, points us to an “aesthetics of transformation” in her analysis of “context and content.” This aesthetics is radically different than the “aesthetics of receptivity,” “a paradigm of loss and appropriation grounded in white heteromasculine privilege,” allowing white men to consume the bodily and emotional experience seemingly accessible to women and men of color.6 If Davis recovers for us the history of black women as creative, political intellectuals and James examines that history as a subject of (white) feminist analysis, what might it mean to imagine black feminism as a critical disposition rooted in the specificity of jazz culture?7 Is there potential to understand jazz as in and of itself a feminist space? Davis makes “latent” “claims about aesthetics—about what art is, what it does, and why and how it is pleasurable. . . . This aesthetic [a black feminist blues aesthetic that normalizes the experiences of working-class black women who sang and listened to the blues] identifies an experience of pleasure in art that results not from appropriation, but from complexity, contradiction, and transformation.”8I think I am a jazz feminist, if by jazz feminist we mean someone who approaches the study of jazz culture through the critical frame of feminist theory. I might also be one if we mean someone who understands jazz as a music that reflects and responds to the social, political, and cultural contexts out of which it emerges and persists. I might be one if we mean someone who finds within jazz a space free enough for me to “be” despite the continuing conundrum of being a woman-in-jazz. But I wonder if there is something specific about jazz that evades understanding as a site within which a sui generis feminism has perhaps existed. How do we cultivate alignment between understanding gender within jazz critical practice and black feminist approaches to gender in black music (across all genres)? As jazz is a genre coded in racial terms, is jazz feminism coded as black in the same ways in which blues feminism and hip-hop feminism are? Are we speaking the same critical language, and, if so, are we listening to one another? In bridging this gap, do we create the possibility of a feminist jazz critical practice that speaks to the world we live in now, rather than the past?If we were to try and locate “jazz feminism” as an emergent identity9 as I try to do here, we might imagine it surfacing in the era bridged between the careers of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. By turning our focus to women instrumentalists, we enlarge the capacity of recognizing how jazz helps us “feel” what can't always be put into words, either about black experience within the segregated postwar period or about freedom dreams.10 Black women instrumentalists have claimed space since the postwar period, even as that space was more often than not circumscribed by patriarchal assumptions about their playing and their place on the scene. These women negotiated embracing the demands of the music (learning how to play and to play well), while also resisting the sexism regularly directed at them. In this essay, I will sketch how we might listen for what black women—who have always already been in the music as instrumentalists, producers, DJs programming jazz on radio, and jazz critics and journalists—say about their experience of gender and expectations of inclusion, equity, and accountability within jazz. Imagining a more just future—imagining justice—is a guiding principle of black feminist thought. How do these women want to be heard? What are their priorities as creative thinkers?11 Their experiences and expectations form the aesthetics and politics of their sound and also suggest a black feminist critical disposition and ecology within jazz, one more vibrant and resonant than that in Soul.* * *In 1962, saxophonist Vi Redd released her first album as a leader, Bird Call, which was produced by Leonard Feather. In the liner notes, Feather writes, “Whether she eventually makes her name as a fine singer who also plays alto, or as a compelling alto player who also sings, I hope these sides will prove definitive to establishing Vi Redd as an important new name in jazz.” Feather's comments speak to the representational conundrum women instrumentalists found themselves in during the postwar jazz scene. Regardless of the fact that Redd had an established reputation as a saxophonist, she nevertheless had to sing to make the album a viable proposition.Redd was born in Los Angeles to drummer Alton Redd and Mattie Redd. Her great aunt was the multi-instrumentalist and venerated music teacher Alma Hightower, who taught celebrated jazz artists such as Dexter Gordon, Chico Hamilton, Melba Liston, Clora Bryant, Ernie Royal, and Redd herself. Several of her students were members of the Works Progress Administration children's band she led called the Melodic Dots.12 Unlike most other young women of the time, Redd was never discouraged from performing jazz music since her whole family was so intimately involved in teaching it and performing it on Central Avenue, then a key scene for black musicians. “I think I was one of the first women around L.A. during that time, early ’50s and late ’40s that had a band, had nerve enough to get a band. So Martha Young played piano, that was Lee and Lester Young's niece, and my brother played drums, and Walter Benton . . . played tenor, and I played alto and sang and got the gigs.”13Bird Call was meant to be a tribute to Charlie “Bird” Parker, in part reflecting how much Vi Redd is said to have sounded like him. Redd says that she “never had a chance to hear him play, you know? I never got a chance. But in some strange way his music was in the air, and it influenced me and so many others.”14 Feather described the premise of the album as consisting of all tunes “recorded by Bird at one time or another.” He also noted that “Vi was a little perturbed lest the average listener draw the inference that she “is trying to copy Bird,” which was not her intention. Though her natural alto sound, as well as her phrasing and ideas, have a great deal in common with Parker's, there was no deliberate attempt at imitation.”15 Feather chose all of the tunes played on the album, including “Anthropology,” for which he “took the liberty of writing a new set [of lyrics] with a social message.” The other original piece composed by Feather was “I Remember Bird,” which “if there is a wistful or nostalgic quality here, represents the way I feel about Bird as well as the way Vi feels.”Redd's second album, Lady Soul, also produced by Feather in 1964, was burdened by the continued lack of commitment to presenting her as an instrumentalist. Critic John Tynan reviewed the album saying, “A discovery of Leonard Feather, Vi Redd may be more celebrated in some quarters as a better-than-average jazz alto saxophonist than as a vocalist.” Vi Redd said of the album, “It wasn't the right thing to do.” Yoko Suzuki, in her study of Redd's invisibility as an instrumentalist and the lack of opportunity she had for recording despite the respect other musicians had of her, writes, “One wonders why Redd had more opportunities to perform in public than to record. It is possible that musicians recognized her excellence as a saxophonist and invited her to sit in with them. Who gets recorded, however, is not necessarily determined by recognition and reputation among musicians.”16Except for these two albums, Redd did not have much of a recording career. She spent a period of time after recording them focused on parenting as well as teaching in California. Her decision to stay closer to home stemmed from her son's comment after a tour that he was tired of going to his grandmother's while she was away. “And one day that just stuck with me. I've got to be home now with these guys, the two of them. So then I started teaching.”17 Redd eventually began touring again, taking advantage of school holidays for extended trips.Marian McPartland recorded a television show called “Styles of Jazz” in 1981 using footage of Vi Redd, Melba Liston, Carla Bley, Erica Lindsay, and Jane Ira Bloom to represent the different styles of jazz emerging from the postwar period. When introducing footage of Redd from the 1960s, McPartland situates her as marking the shift from big bands with their “good time sound” to small group bands: [Small bands provided a] more intimate, introspective sound that accurately reflected the disillusionment and loss of innocence that people seemed to feel in the period following World War II. This is the music associated with Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis. The music that became known as bebop. And, it bred a whole new school of followers. Here for example is Vi Redd leading her own group in a haunting blues dedicated to Charlie Parker.We see Redd blowing into her horn, dressed in a high-necked, short-sleeved sweater and slacks, her hair with a slight bouffant and relaxed curl. McPartland continues, “I like looking at Vi. Unlike Ina Ray Hutton, Vi doesn't consciously use her beauty as a selling point for the band. She lets the beauty of her music be the band's attraction.”18 McPartland was well into a long career as a musician and as an expert on jazz when this documentary was filmed. The ease with which she undercuts the very expertise she'd invested in Redd by commenting on what it means to “look” at Redd is astounding. McPartland doesn't make such comments when discussing the performances of Jane Ira Bloom or Carla Bley, two white women like herself.* * *To return briefly to Soul, a lot of attention—as is the case with most animated films—is paid to the voice actors portraying the characters. Jamie Foxx voices Joe; Foxx is, in addition to being an actor, a musician and a singer. Curley, the drummer and former student of Joe's, is portrayed by QuestLove, drummer, writer, producer, and cofounder of the Roots. Dorothea Williams's dialogue is voiced by actress Angela Bassett, a casting that resonated with black audiences because of the resonant tonality and warmth of her voice, as well as recognition of her bearing as a dignified black woman. She gives an authority to Dorothea that emphasizes the respect the character commands within the world of the film. Importantly, when Dorothea is performing, she is “voiced” on the saxophone by saxophonist Tia Fuller. Fuller—Spelman alumna, former member of Beyoncé’s touring band, Grammy nominee for best jazz instrumental album for Diamond Cut, and professor at the Berklee College of Music—is in the current “vanguard of women virtuosi” in jazz, a cohort that includes women across lines of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.19 With Fuller voicing the saxophone Dorothea plays, the film reinforces the importance of black women's voices as creators in jazz.Fuller recalls that as a middle schooler she'd wanted to play the flute in jazz band but her band teacher encouraged her to play the saxophone with their similar fingerings. “To me, [the alto] was more empowering than the flute because I could play louder as a kid. I instantly fell in love with it.”20 The flute remains her secondary instrument, while the piano, which she studied from age three to thirteen, remains key to her composing practice. In addition to jazz band, she was in marching band and concert band in high school. Coming from a family of musicians and educators, Fuller's life has always been aligned with the music, and jazz in particular. “I passively listened to jazz as I was growing up because it was always pumping through the house. Anytime I got in the car with my dad, it was jazz. . . . I took jazz for granted because it was around me all the time.” Though she didn't start “enjoying jazz until late in high school,” albums by Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, and Wayne Shorter were favorites in middle school.21Her father, bassist Fred Fuller, describes her as a “very powerful player. I noticed this when she was playing at the nightclubs with me. She would play stronger than other people. She was very articulate and mature at that age. Her sound was just so strong.”22 He advised her to “go in and be fearless, even when you are afraid. . . . I didn't want you to grow up and be afraid to play, so I pushed you, because I knew what you'd have to endure as a woman.”23 Fred Fuller approached fathering and mentoring her as a young musician with the clear eyes of someone cognizant of the patriarchal elements of the jazz scene and the intent to equip her to counter them. His descriptions of her sound and playing emphasize her power, creativity, and maturity, adjectives that strengthen rather than reduce her skill. Tia Fuller's music is marked by, as she herself describes it, her facility with rhythm and syncopation, her precision, as well as her embrace of the harmonic freedom the saxophone offers. She finds herself increasingly tapping into “some of the sweeter parts of [her] sound.”24 Fuller thinks deeply about listening and technique as fundamental to being able to play with ease and complexity, as well as to compose.25Tia Fuller experienced kinship and mentorship across multiple communities in Atlanta when she attended Spelman, a historically black women's college. Fuller found college to be an affirming social context allowing her to enter a “phase of awareness” “of the importance and power of being a black woman. . . . Everybody's smart; everybody's beautiful; everybody's talented.” Rather than feeling the atmosphere as one of dehumanizing competition, she felt herself honing her intellect and musicianship enthusiastically. “Again it's the idea that iron sharpens iron. And it's wonderful, some of my best friends are people I met at Spelman.”26 Joe Jennings, founder and then director of the Spelman College Jazz Ensemble, mentored her, keeping her “grounded” and inspired to “keep working,” building a practice regime of six to eight hours a day.27 Because Spelman didn't offer the conservatory experience, “it forced” Fuller, she says, to “create [her own] conservatory in the community. . . . I had to be deliberate about my approach in placing myself amongst other professional musicians.”28Prior to launching her professional career fully, Fuller earned a master of arts in jazz pedagogy and performance at the University of Colorado, the first graduate of the program. As a teacher, Fuller describes herself as, in part, stepping into her purpose. “Be proactive with your preparation to create smooth transitions.” She tells her students: “I want to encourage and inspire and change the internal narratives we tell ourselves so we can keep moving in faith, not fear. . . . [K]eep working and honing your skills,” but “also love yourself, affirm yourself.”29 Fuller describes herself as a “representative of all of these women out here that are grinding.” She embraces the responsibility of being a role model and feels accountable to others struggling to find their footing. “Terri [Lyne Carrington] served as that for me prior to me even knowing who she was. . . . That was an unspoken, internal narrative that spoke to me, ‘She's doing it, you can do it.’”30Terri Lyne Carrington has produced Fuller's most recent albums, encouraging her to “align [her]self with some of the masters in the community, so you'll play up to that level and be pushed.”31 Carrington describes Fuller as “steeped in the blues tradition. She has a great understanding of jazz and her instrument's lineage. She didn't skip anything—she took Point A to Point F. Her technique is strong. Her energy is strong. Her material sounds familiar, but feels like her own thing. She has all the qualities of someone who is the truth in the music—the real deal.”32 Carrington's description of Fuller's sound and technique is grounded in appreciation of Fuller's deep knowledge of the music and her instrument, and the uniqueness of her voice. Carrington hears in Fuller the capacity to take risks as an artist, a necessary characteristic for continuing to grow as a musician.Fuller admits to being affected by the “psychological dimension of being a woman” and being hesitant to fully express herself when first coming to the New York jazz scene. “I've dealt with sexism, inadvertent sexism, sometimes racism—sometimes a combination of both,”33 acknowledges Fuller.Fuller's demand for accountability in dismantling sexist gatekeeping in jazz reflects a critical disposition to the way the culture functions and a willingness to call out how men and women may be complicit in maintaining the system. “Systemic sexism doesn't mean all men in the jazz business are sexist, obviously. And I am very thankful for the female mentors I have met in the last six years or so. . . . But the fact that I only recently have been able to really connect with women in my field is just one more example of the way the industry tilts toward men.”35 Her demand for accountability is self-imposed as well as outer-directed. Recognizing herself as in a privileged position, but refusing to be conceptualized solely as the exceptional woman instrumentalist or as a gatekeeper, Fuller instead wants to be “a beacon of light for not only other women, but men, too.”36Fuller's access to jazz as a site of creative expression affirmed her sense that jazz was a place where she belonged. Despite the experience of sexist gatekeeping, she has continued developing her sound and embraced the desire to “play all [her] stuff,” “to dig in,” and to listen “to the inner voice.”38 She noted, not long after her 2019 Grammy nomination, that “I've taken ownership over being, and not proving who I am, or trying to prove who I am; allowing myself to be in the process and embracing every aspect of being a woman, an educator, a musician, a woman of color in the male-dominated world.”39* * *At times, strategies of resistance to systemic sexism look like tactics of performance. Thulani Davis, the poet/novelist/librettist/journalist/scholar, recently released a career-spanning collection of her poetry. She writes in her acknowledgments about the heaviness of the COVID-19 pandemic as the emotional context of the book coming into focus, about how she was sustained by the vibrancy of black protests against the murder of George Floyd (during what she calls the American Spring), and about the joys of remembering with her friend poet Jessica Hagedon their “adventures on two coasts ‘back when.’” She writes, “The laughter was a balm” during the intensely grief-ridden present.40The poems are about the music, mostly jazz, and about being a creative woman with a personal history long entwined with the music. Davis remembers, “I have heard this music in a lot of clubs that no longer exist, opera houses in Italy that will stand another hundred years, parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, L.A., San Francisco, and Washington, DC as well as on Goree Island and in Harare, Zimbabwe. Some of it was in lofts in lower Manhattan now inhabited by millionaires, crowded bistros in Paris that are closed, and legendary sites like Mandel Hall and the Apollo, radio studios, recording studios, and my many homes.” Davis here describes a public yet also intimate history—one of freedom of movement and also memorialization of enslavement; one of creative community replaced by gentrification; one of cultural institutions and family spaces. Davis recalls performing many of her poems with musicians such as Cecil Taylor, Joseph Jarman, Marilyn Crispell, Anthony Davis, and David Murray in “different improvising configurations.” In “C.T. at the Five Spot,” she writes, “I have heard this music ever since I can remember / I have heard this music.” Davis explains that she learned a lot from Cecil Taylor about how as a poet to engage improvised sound, particularly the importance of “just getting in the fray. I heard that space for me, or . . . I made a space. Because you make a space in the music.”41* * *Even as we recognize and critique jazz as a musical and social space that is dominated by men, we rarely explore and interrogate the experience of masculinity as a gendered identity. Specifically, we often fail to recognize how people who push against limiting narratives by telling their own stories or forging their own paths within the often conservative cultural framing of jazz think about gender as a lived experience. How must we listen and read differently to interpret those multiple and shifting identities?42 The performance of masculinity is one that runs a spectrum of practices, from the cishet normative to queer and nonbinary. We must ask not just who can do masculinity better, but what is this thing we think masculinity is when the culture itself demands a model of masculinity that produces emotional expression and emotional labor that cultivates an ethics of care, the nurturing of relationships, discipline and mastery of form, collective work and imagining? Even as we see the potential of a masculinity untethered to the biological (i.e., using “physicality” versus “aggression” to name musical qualities desired), one that allows and enables the care of others as a founding precept of the cultural form and narrative (and that care to include the radical reimagining of our political lives in the language of democracy and improvisation), we still confront the limited imagining of how we all may contribute and find our place within the culture.Hip-hop feminism arises in part as a critique of second-wave black feminism and its hyperfocus on the misogyny of hip-hop lyrics and visual representations of black women. Hip-hop feminism also emerged out of a specific generational experience of Generation X black womanhood. Hip-hop feminism asks what does it mean to claim the space between musical and intellectual cultures with which one experiences both belonging and