Women In Jazz Research Articles

Disassembling the gendered archetype of the male jazz impresario in the United States

In the United States, jazz impresarios historically inhabited the quintessential cosmopolitan role of (white) male jazz critic and intrepid discoverer of Black musical creativity. This article explores the once entrenched and yet recently challenged gendered and cultural dynamics surrounding the powerful jazz impresario role in an era transitioning from a local individualized coterie of fans and critics with liberal socio-cultural politics to a more specialized, transnationally networked world of professionalized music agents and institutions. To trace this role, the seminal jazz impresarios John Hammond and George Wein are recollected, uncovering their particular embodied enactment of masculinity within the American jazz presentation and festival world. Through second-wave feminist initiatives, a critical counterpoint to this prominent role is explored, including the efforts of pioneering Black musicians and composers Melba Liston and Mary Lou Williams in the 1960s, the first Women in Jazz Festival programmers Carol Comer and Dianne Gregg during the 1970s and 1980s, and the tireless efforts of record label owner, critic, and concert promoter Rosetta Reitz during the 1980s and 1990s. These contrasting legacies set the stage for new avenues of curatorship and jazz presentation which take into account intersectional obstacles and experiences of both women in jazz as well as women behind the scenes in the American jazz music industry.

Beyond a Lush Life: Representation and Performativity at America's [Only] Queer Jazz Festival

Beyond a Lush Life: Representation and Performativity at America's [Only] Queer Jazz Festival

Recension of the Marie Buscatto's Book, Women in Jazz: Musicality, Femininity, Marginalization

Recension of the Marie Buscatto's Book, Women in Jazz: Musicality, Femininity, Marginalization

Mary Lou Williams and the Role of Gender in Jazz: How Can Jazz Culture Respect Women’s Voices and Break Down Barriers for Women in Jazz while Simultaneously Acknowledging Uncomfortable Histories?

Since at least the 1940s, jazz musicians, scholars, journalists, and historians have expressed ambivalent and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward pianist, composer, and educator Mary Lou Williams. Though she undeniably experienced significant hardships throughout her career at least in part due to gender-based discrimination, Williams has also been recognized and celebrated as an important figure in jazz history in a variety of ways since at least the 1970s. Recent scholarly and mainstream discourses dedicated to Williams reveal an apparent widespread tendency within jazz culture to celebrate the pianist as a noteworthy historical figure at least in part due to her gender, and some institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center have tried to demonstrate that jazz culture reflects certain currently prevalent progressive values, namely diversity, equity, and inclusion. Such narratives encounter the problem that jazz culture has historically been a male-dominated field that has rarely treated its female practitioners equitably. The contradictions between the apparent facts of jazz history and more recent narratives celebrating the contributions of women such as Williams raise important and potentially uncomfortable historiographical and ethical questions for the jazz community. This article suggests that practical trial-and-error efforts aimed at actively engaging more women performers in jazz culture might be more promising projects for institutions as opposed to investing resources in continuously attempting to revise narratives about the role of women in jazz history, regardless of whether the aim of historical analysis is to point out past sexism or to try to obfuscate it or atone for it.

Women Jazz Instrumentalists in Turkey within the Context of Gender

In this work, women jazz musicians in Turkey have been examined within the gender studies context. The purpose of this research, of which its theoretical frame was formed with a socio-musicological approach, via female musicians who are active in jazz music in Turkey, is to research and form a descriptive analysis by asking questions, such as: how gender roles affect women's careers, what steps female musicians have to go through in a sector dominated by men in order to be seen and which roles are attributed to women in jazz. Due to the fact that women jazz musicians who play instruments are a minority, the scope of the subject has been limited to ‘women jazz instrumentalists in Turkey’, and in-depth interviews were conducted with selected sources within this context. The boundaries of the research topic were determined by the conducted interviews, and utilizing the feminist theory, qualitative research methods were used. With this research, an effort was made at forming a systematic reference about female jazz musicians, which was previously not found in a thorough academic research before in Turkey. The people selected for the examination of their status in the field of jazz were seen as a starting point for the research of the subject, and following the transcription of their interviews, an attempt was made to determine the causes and conclusions of gender inequalities within jazz music in Turkey. Using the implications and the results gathered during the research, there was an intention to place an emphasis on the recognition of women jazz instrumentalists beyond what's known. In conclusion, in this paper, in order to provide support to studies of musicology with a feminist approach, up to date observations were made with the examination of women jazz instrumentalists in Turkey within the gender context.

‘Staying Golden’

This article seeks to contribute to the growing scholarship on feminist and queer approaches to jazz studies by focusing on the place and intersections of jazz, gender, and sex(uality) in the television sitcom The Golden Girls. A highly popular U.S. sitcom from its first season in 1985 until its final season in 1992, The Golden Girls consistently explored and exploded norms of gender and sexuality. It showcased the lives of four middle-age-to-elderly women—Sophia Petrillo, Dorothy Zbornak, Blanche Devereaux, and Rose Nylund—who were single, who lived together, and who led sexually active lives. In so doing, The Golden Girls challenged the dominant framing of women, and especially senior women, as lacking a sex drive, and it rewrote the popular script of household/kinship formations as patriarchal institutions. In short, The Golden Girls was a sitcom that presented women as sexually desiring and desirable agents whose everyday lives subverted and did not depend on the normative ideals of heteropatriarchy. It is at this intersection of the sexual and the everyday that I explore the workings of jazz in The Golden Girls. I argue that jazz became a premiere site through which the show’s main characters articulated and performed gender, sex, and sexuality differently. I posit that jazz mediated how the characters expressed their as well as other bodies, desires, and pleasures outside of the norms framing (older) women’s lives. For example, the characters once hired what they assumed to be an all-female jazz band for a charity function, but the band actually comprised gender non-conforming musicians. In another episode, Rose is hesitant to attend a wedding because, as she later tells her housemates, talking to men who like jazz at weddings increases her sex drive and could potentially cause her to cheat on her boyfriend. These as well as other examples illustrate how jazz organized non-heteropatriarchal forms of gender expression (e.g., gender queer musicians) and erotic desire (e.g., non-monogamy) on the show.
 Importantly, this article will focus on swing music’s effect on the sexual lives and experiences of The Golden Girls’ main characters. Each character was either an adult or child/ adolescent during the big band swing era of the 1930s and early 1940s, and they maintained nostalgic and erotic attachments to swing as older adults. I build on the scholarship on women’s participation in swing to not only explore consumption rather than production, but to also investigate the temporal markings of this gendered consumption. Specifically, I examine how these older women and women living outside the traditional swing era (i.e., women living in the 1980s/1990s) used swing to critique sexism, ageism, and heteronormativity, and instead, produce new knowledges of gender and sexuality. As such, I illustrate how The Golden Girls presents another site through which to explore the voices, presence, and embodied erotics of women in jazz—subjects often excluded from the historical archive. Indeed, The Golden Girls, as a women-centered sitcom, provides a way for us to highlight women in jazz in new and exciting ways.

Making Women in Jazz Visible: Negotiating Discourses of Unity and Diversity in Sweden and the US

The aim of this article is to examine responses to a project that aspires to further gender-equal jazz scenes in Sweden and the US. The project brought together actors at various levels of the industry: cultural agencies, commercial organizers, activists, and artists. Our analysis – with special focus on resistance voiced – is based on observations, interviews with organizers, and a documentary about the project. The project’s central ambition was to make women in jazz visible in order to change a structural imbalance where men still take up most of the space on stage. This ambition was, however, complicated as different actors resisted a female–male binary, and thus the very idea of “women in jazz”. The resistance was played out through gender equality discourses of either unity or diversity, varying in relation to national context and generation. The article also discusses visibility as a central but also problematic aspect for gender equality efforts in music

Bringing Something New: Female Jazz Instrumentalists’ Use of Imitation and Masculinity

ABSTRACTCreativity is often denied to women, and female jazz instrumentalists have been accused, openly or subtly, of lacking their own innovations. These critiques can reveal the manner in which jazz historians and critics, past and present, discuss creativity and how these ways fundamentally disadvantage historical and current jazz women. Several areas of jazz scholarship have benefited from investigations of the female and the feminine. What has previously been underplayed, though, was the manner in which women created musical spaces for themselves by using methods that were often considered uncreative. Despite feminism’s successes in reclaiming the historical value of female jazz instrumentalists such as Lil Hardin and Mary Lou Williams, these women confound modern women by insisting on describing their own playing as masculine. Some jazz women took their comparisons with men a step further, associating themselves with specific performers; for example, Valaida Snow, a trumpeter and singer, marketed herself as “Little Louis,” thus encouraging listeners to connect her performances with Louis Armstrong. This work details the reasons that women jazz instrumentalists utilized mimicry to gain access to masculine musical spaces and the successes that they experienced as a result. In reclaiming women’s imitative techniques, I recast women as creative entities.

Understanding the experiences of women in jazz: A suggested model

Jazz has long been recognized as a male-dominated field, with females traditionally having only limited acceptance, often in the roles of singer and pianist. Researchers have explored sources of the gender imbalance in the field of jazz and jazz education, but there is no theory or framework to organize such findings. This directed content analysis of the journal Jazz Changes, the official magazine of the International Association of Schools of Jazz published from 1994 to 2000, analyzed published answers to the following question posited by the journal editors, “Women in Jazz: Why aren’t there more women in jazz education?” Analysis suggests a model including three social-psychological theories to describe the female experience in jazz. The theories include Rosabeth Kanter’s theory of tokenism, which describes a learning environment that females might perceive or experience in jazz; Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson’s theory of stereotype threat, which offers insight into why female musicians might make a choice to not participate, or discontinue participation, in the jazz idiom; and Albert Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, which is offered as a possible guide to providing instruction in jazz that fosters female participation. These theories are offered together as a model framework for future study of both historical and present experiences in gender and jazz.

Perspectives on the Melbourne International Women's Jazz Festival

This paper examines the significance of the Melbourne Women’s International Jazz Festival as a long-established annual event highlighting the contributions of women jazz musicians to Australian music culture. Nine women were interviewed about their experiences with MWIJF as performers, composers and/or organizers, as were the founder of the festival and current CEO. The importance of the festival to the participating artists’ creative and career development and its role in supporting emerging women artists are revealed through their comments. The festival is contextualized with reference to the historical experiences of women jazz musicians both in Australia and internationally.

The Girls in the Band: College Version dir. by Judy Chaikin (review)

The Girls in the Band: College Version. DVD. Directed by Judy Chaikin. With discussion guide and supplemental USB media device. Website with supplemental materials: http://thegirlsintheband.com/ [Studio City, CA]: Artist Tribe and One Step Productions, 2014. $99.00 (High schools and public libraries); $349.00 (College Version).The Girls in the Band is a step forward in filling a persistent gap in the standard narrative of jazz history. The role of women in jazz constitutes a parallel history largely unacknowledged by the commentators, historians, bandleaders, and record labels who had a role in deciding who and what was important in the genre. The film makes clear that women musicians of the highest caliber have been active in the entire history of jazz, even if conventional histories cast them in decorative or novelty roles, or have emphasized the glamour of singers to the exclusion of instrumentalists. The film's historic footage and oral histories provide a case study in the reality that history is only so objective, having been told through the lens of human perception by those who were chosen or allowed to tell the story.The discussion is framed by the observation of how few women were present in the historical photo, A Great Day in Harlem, which otherwise brought together a pantheon of legendary jazz musicians, and closes with a 2008 re-enactment which assembles several generations of women jazz musicians. The scope and pacing of the full-length film emphasizes the swing era, with earlier jazz primarily represented by Lil Hardin Armstrong. Artists active since the 1970s are also prominent, if presented in somewhat rapid-fire fashion toward the end of the film. The contrast in pacing is less apparent in the shorter classroom version (included as a separate DVD with the College Version), but the coverage between the 1950s and 1970 is noticeably lighter with both versions.The film records valuable oral histories before several interview subjects passed away, including Marian McPartland, Billy Taylor, and Peggy Gilbert. More information on circumstances of the interviews would be helpful to researchers; news articles which the film cites also invite further investigation, but were not included in bibliographical information.Ordinarily, packaging is of consequence to the quality of a film, but here, the cover art does an immense disservice, ironically demonstrating many of the skewed expectations for women musicians, and skewing expectations of the quality of the film. It features a Caucasian woman, in a tight-fitting, sleeveless little black dress with black lace reminiscent of lingerie, who is apparently pretending to play the alto saxophone in an unnatural-looking posture, and is therefore present for the sake of appearance rather than substance. A professional jazz saxophonist consulted by the reviewer noted: Left thumb not even on thumb rest, left fingers appear to be hanging on to the keys, preventing any movement. Right pinky is on a post . . . rather than the E-flat key (B. Bohnstengel, contacted August 4, 2014). These dismal appearances could deter other potential viewers and purchasers.The cover art presents an unintended teachable moment in its demonstration of many of the issues emphasized in the film, including gender steering of women to appropriate instruments (why not a baritone sax?), obnoxious costumes, and the premium of beauty to which women musicians were subjected without regard to talent. …

Melba Liston: “Renaissance Woman”

new is a sober, sensible creature, conscious of his environment, knowing that not all is right, but trying hard to become adjusted to this civilization in which he finds himself by no will or choice of his own. He is not the shallow, vain, showy creature which he is sometimes advertised to be. He still hopes that the unreasonable opposition to his forward and upward progress will relent. But, at any rate, he is resolved to fight, and live or die, on the side of God and the Eternal Verities. --William Pickens The Negro 1916 (1) (Gates, and Jarrett 2007, 84) All your life you have heard of the debt you owe 'Your People' because you have managed to have the things they have not largely had. --Marita O. Bonner On Being Young-- A Woman--and Colored 1925 (Wall 1995, 9) Melba Doretta Liston, the brilliant self-taught trombonist, composer/ arranger, and educator who challenged the gender status quo in jazz must be counted among those Black women whose tremendous accomplishments within the American musical landscape lay dormant for far too many years. A cultural nationalist, Liston utilized her own internal challenges as well as the pain and suffering of her people as muse, meaning, and manuscript for her artistic endeavors. This essay posits that we might better understand Liston's achievements, importance, influence, as well as her artistic and political motivations by viewing her and her work through the lens of the Harlem Renaissance. movement's terms and cultural politics provide insight into Liston's personal experiences and professional realities. I hope to reveal Melba Liston as a woman as defined by an expanded reading of the intellectual Zeitgeist of the New Negro and glean historiographical insight about Liston (and by extension other jazz women) through the experiences of better-, but still under-documented Renaissance women writers. One may ask why it is important to understand Liston as a woman. answer is simple: in order to correct the historical chronicle, it is not enough to cut and paste missing biographical details or to quietly insert the comprehensive accomplishments and accolades of hidden or forgotten voices. Just as Liston influenced and supported many of the voices that have been chronicled as significant contributors to jazz and black music, her dynamic contributions should be equally visible and included within the historical narrative of the music that she loved, nurtured, and nourished. term woman references comprehensive influence across a multitude of expressions or fields and reflects a life-long legacy of impact. Liston exemplifies the term, and as a practitioner, teacher, and leading voice of her generation, deserves placement among the ranks of those who have reached the upper echelons of black cultural expression. Renowned author, educator, actress, and activist Dr. Maya Angelou proudly referred to herself as a renaissance woman (http://mayaangelou.com), and a brief exploration of the blogosphere suggests Patrice Rushen, Terri Lyne Carrington, Esperanza Spaulding, and other phenomenally talented women within the arts as women. latter three women are not only expanding the sound, presentation, and awareness of jazz and black music on a global stage but are among a greater number of brilliant, innovative, and expansively influential black women who, like Melba Liston before them, are augmenting the boundaries of black cultural expression. Renaissance has been most notably documented through the experiences of the men who codified, portrayed, composed, scripted, and choreographed during and beyond the period. Alain Locke, Aaron Douglas, Duke Ellington, Charles S. Johnson, and Charles Williams are among the brilliant men who have been heralded as the creative architects and archetypes of the period and its determined, self-reflexive identity, the Negro. …

Jazz women, gender politics, and the francophone Atlantic

This article explores the francophone bourgeoisie's class-based connection with advocates of race uplift in the United States, revealing the transnational similarities between middle-class French and American hopes and fears about racial representation through black “culture,” whether literary, artistic, or musical. It shows that, given this transnational context, jazz not only presented a real promise to black communities in representing their culture as innovative and civilized, but also posed a threat because of associations between jazz, primitivism, and sexually suggestive performances. Finally, it engages with the commentaries produced by black francophone women about black American performers in Paris and about black popular music. It argues that, in these commentaries, black French intellectual women began to explore how to move beyond the stereotypical images of black women generated by the jazz craze. This was a position marked by race uplift, but not necessarily a compromise position for black agency or a purely assimilationist stance. The article concludes that in the process of formulating a response to jazz, a set of literate French men and women of color began to define their own music – notably the Caribbean biguine style – against jazz and to promote it as a source of pride and racial identification. In doing so, they demonstrated an early instance of Negritude values intermingled with race-uplift concerns.

Jazzwomen: music, sound, gender, and sexuality

This paper offers a feminist contribution to the critical exploration of jazz histories. It demonstrates the ways jazzwomen have been and continue to be excluded from the practices and processes that form dominant jazz culture in the UK and USA. I show how jamming and improvisation as well as producing sound(s) in leisure places and spaces function to reproduce male entitlement to jazz. In addition to this historical excavation, I draw from two semi-structured interviews with professional white women tenor saxophonists. The arguments I pursue concern the openings and closings for women in jazz and the physical and temporal leisure (and work) spaces that players have entered and occupied. It appears that the production of jazz sounds, which themselves have various currencies in wider society, are significant to how women have been and continue to be recognized as jazz musicians. Specifically, I argue that a gendered critique of the social construction of sound is important to feminist analyses of music and leisure. Women did contribute to the early formation of jazz genre: for instance, women singing the blues crafted a sensory mode of expression that was rich and deep in gendered meaning. However, women instrumentalists, especially ‘horn’ players (saxophones, trumpets, and trombone) often go unheard, and unknown. They have been made invisible.

Some Liked It Hot - Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928–1959. By Kristin A. McGee. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. 2009

Some Liked It Hot - Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928–1959. By Kristin A. McGee. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. 2009

Some Liked It Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928-1959 (review)

Some Liked It Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928-1959 (review)

Some liked it hot: jazz women in film and television, 1928-1959

Women have been involved with jazz since its inception, but all too often their achievements were not as well known as those of their male counterparts. Some Liked It Hot looks at all-girl bands and jazz women from the 1920s through the 1950s and how they fit into the nascent mass culture, particularly film and television, to uncover some of the historical motivations for excluding women from the now firmly established jazz canon. This well-illustrated book chronicles who appeared where and when in over 80 performances, captured in both popular Hollywood productions and in relatively unknown films and television shows. As McGee shows, these performances reflected complex racial attitudes emerging in American culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Her analysis illuminates the heavily mediated representational strategies that jazz women adopted, highlighting the role that race played in constituting public performances of various styles of jazz fromswing to hot and sweet. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Hazel Scott, the Ingenues, Peggy Lee, and Paul Whiteman are just a few of the performers covered in the book, which also includes a detailed filmography.

The Prejudice Against Women in Jazz

The Prejudice Against Women in Jazz

A Candle for Queen Ida

in jook joint on no map but the map of memory the private possession of few and one of them ... sometimes asks where was that? somewhere back in the woods ...--davenport (1991, 26) In Los Angeles, in 1982, I was invited to hear white women's jazz band. I was reticent about going mainly because of my musical background. That is, I grew up in northeast Georgia at time and in an environment where serious music and dancing were valued, daily activities. Before I was ten years old, I had heard (on vinyl) Eddie Harris, Dave Brubeck, Ketty Lester, Mahalia Jackson, Roy Hamilton, Jimmy Reed, and others. However, trusting my friends Jean and Bella, I went, reluctantly, and heard the band Alive! The group was excellent; the singer, Rhiannon, was incredibly powerful, and I had (to understate) most wonderful experience. Rhiannon's performance of Wild Women Don't Get the Blues was so compelling that I went to hear the group second time. The next night, I was totally thrilled when Rhiannon sang, pointing at me, Wild Women ... like doris--are the only ones / who will learn how to fly! As soon as possible, I got their album and learned that Ida Cox wrote Wild Women, but it was twenty years before I learned that my theme was written, performed, and recorded by Ida Cox in 1924, that Ida Prather Cox (1896-1967) was from Toccoa, Georgia, sixteen miles north of Cornelia, my hometown, that Cox and I are working-class Affrilachians, (1) and that Cox and I are both poets. Ida Cox was major songwriter, song stylist, and an important creator during the black women's blues era (the 1920-30s). (2) She recorded at least eighty-seven songs for Paramount between 1923 and 1929 and another eleven for Vocalion and Okeh in 1939 and 1940, and she was titled, in Paramount's publicity, the Uncrowned Queen of the Blues (Santelli 1993, 105). Each of the classic era blues singers has some justifiable claim to fame and blues royalty, but Ida Cox is unique in that she wrote almost 100 songs in her lifetime (Reitz 1981). (3) That, alone, is an impressive achievement. As contemporary of Sippie Wallace, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and others, Cox is mentioned in several blues studies, (4) but I found no major book or articles solely dedicated to her life and work. (5) I do have collection of five compact discs of songs recorded by Ida Cox between 1923 and 1940 with liner notes and lyrics to most of the songs (Cowley 1999). Also, in my vinyl archives, I discovered reissued Ida Cox album,f' Lacking secondary sources, I immersed myself in these primary materials, the sound and textures of Ida Cox's voice, the inventiveness of her lyrics. Listening to the first disc, I was initially overwhelmed. The songs were redundant, predictable variations on heterosexual relationships, on loving well or poorly; being treated well or badly; leaving or staying; good luck, bad luck; two-timing men and back-stabbing women; death, retaliation (including death); moving on, staying, coming back--and all of it all over again and again. I was appalled--what could I say about any of this? Plus, since my ears (and sensitivities) are tuned to the smooth sound of contemporary recordings, I had trouble even paying attention. I was at first completely bored. Then, suddenly, I was totally attentive, and the same elements that I thought redundant became intriguing. Enlightenment, revelation, enjoyment, and engagement followed. Each time I replayed song, I heard something delightful and pleasing and found something else to say about Ida Cox's music. This article's purpose is to celebrate, acknowledge, honor, and I hope, illuminate the artistry of Ida P. Cox. The title, a candle, refers to my ritual of lighting votive candles to honor people and events (Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, full moon, winter solstice, payday). This article is candle of appreciation, analysis, and description of Cox as singer-lyricist-poet. …

Landing on the wrong note: jazz, dissonance, and critical practice

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Poetics of Jazz: From Symbolic to Semiotic 2. The Rehistoricizing of Jazz: Chicago's Urban Bushmen and the Problem of Representation 3. Performing Identity: Jazz Autobiography and the Politics of Literary Improvisation 4. Space is the Place: Jazz, Voice, and Resistance 5. Nice Work If You Can Get It: Women in Jazz 6. Capitulating to Barbarism: Jazz and/as Popular Culture 7. Up for Grabs: The Ethicopolitical Authority of Jazz Conclusion Works Cited Sound and Video Recordings Consulted