Jazz Women

Lara Pellegrinelli’s article “Separated at Birth” sparked interest for me concerning gender roles in jazz from a historical point of view. She discussed how jazz singing ignited the beginning of jazz, yet was quickly abandoned after its birth. She explains this idea by saying, “To present jazz as ‘art music,’ many authors attempted to divorce it from low culture and the entertainment contexts with which singing was associated, thereby containing sexuality and the female body. Instead, they focused their attention on horns that sound like voices, an elevation of ‘raw’ musical materials.” (44) She describes the parentage of jazz, blues being feminine and ragtime being the masculine, and explains that it is no wonder why singing got the shaft from the beginning. She writes, “Despite its symbolic and practical importance in jazz’s parentage, singing is dropped from historical narratives soon after the music’s birth.” (32)

These days in the jazz setting, one might notice that the context of women in jazz has not changed much since its origin. When thinking of female jazz musicians, one will usually think “vocalist.” Despite this, however, women are clearly gaining visibility as jazz instrumentalists. It is important to remember that women entered the genre mostly as untrained vocalists. For example, Pellegrinelli (2008) writes that some styles of jazz were suited for the untrained, feminine voice and cites the blues as an example. Other musical styles required musical skill and precision, and therefore, were mainly relegated to male performers (2008).

I was watching Letterman the other night and saw the episode featuring Quincy Jones and Snoop Dogg performing “Get the Funk Out Of My Face” off of Jones’ new album. It was pretty great. I also noticed that out of all of the musicians on the stage, only three of them were women. The two backup singers and of course Felicia Collins. It’s true that Esperanza Spalding was on Letterman a few years back. This is a huge deal considering that she is not only a jazz musician but a female jazz musician. For a jazz musician to be featured on the show is quite an accomplishment for the genre. Anyway, Spalding was very well received by the audience and especially by Letterman. So this really raises the question of whether or not she would have actually landed that gig had she not been a young and sexy African American artist that played the string bass while she sang a seductive song. How does her image reflect on her legitimate talent? Is she judged by the same standards of other musicians within her genre or does her gender and image change the level of which she is judged upon?

I will here make the pretty obvious statement that women deserve to be in the mainstream of this great American art form. What I find rather interesting is that jazz in and of itself seems to be much farther behind American society and other art forms when it comes to gender discrimination. (Even the Supreme Court has women!!) A rather obvious example concerns Jazz and Lincoln Center and its clear lack of the female gender amongst their ranks. J@LC has indeed overcome many issues including nepotism, reverse racism, and age discrimination, but they have yet to overcome gender discrimination. “I hire orchestra members on basis of merit.” says Wynton Marsalis, implying that women are not up to the standard. He says that the turnover (15 positions) is slow, so there are no available opportunities.

Job opportunities and musical standards aside, I do feel that other aspect of the genre takes a real hit due to the absence of women and the representation of the female view in the jazz critic forum. W. Royal Stokes in his article entitled Women in Jazz: Some Observations Regarding the Ongoing Discrimination in Performance and Journalism, notes the limited amount of women on the list of the 113 critics involved in Downbeat Magazine. As he investigated this issue further, he was confronted with numerous excuses, the main one having to do with the fact that female critics hardly approached that magazine itself looking for work. Stokes expresses the views of many when he writes, “I would conjecture that most would hesitate to do so, having already concluded that the Down Beat editorial staff and its contributing writers is pretty much a male preserve. Not a happy image in this day and time, eh?”