Long considered the great American experiment in democracy – informally desegregated long before Jackie Robinson broke the “colour line” in sports – jazz harbours a dirty secret concerning the role that women have played in its 100-year evolution. Aside from singers, whose role was tightly circumscribed on the bandstand and in the studio, women were systematically excluded from participating as equals – regardless of ability. Today, although you are still more likely to find photogenic singers like Jane Monheit, Norah Jones and Diana Krall than their less-glamorous sisters on the covers of jazz publications, things are changing, thanks to shifting social values and a generation of female musicians who demand to be heard.

Any survey of women in jazz would be wanting without a roll call of those who paid the cost of lost gigs, missed opportunities and stifled dreams inside the music business prior to the 1970s. There’s no better place to start than Mary Lou Williams, whose compositions were performed by Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington but who never found fame on their level. Although a brilliant pianist, she remains overshadowed by a number of influential men she tutored at the keyboard. Hazel Scott was another first-rate pianist, enrolled at Julliard at age eight and the host of her own radio program at 16. Arguably the equal of Oscar Peterson, she is far better known as the wife of controversial black leader Adam Clayton Powell than as a musician. North Dakota native Mary Osborne is a vital link between guitarists Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery, yet she spent her prime years in anonymity, working as CBS’s house guitarist until she dropped out of jazz altogether to teach in 1962. Vi Redd, a highly lyrical alto saxophonist from the Charlie Parker school, was another talented player who dropped out of the game to pursue a teaching career – a more traditional role for women. Sadly, there are hundreds more you won’t find in the pages of most historical studies of jazz.

Looking at the field of older women who remain active in jazz it’s still easy to point to musicians like pianist Joanne Brackeen – a contemporary of Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea with a fraction of their notoriety – and wonder why jazz turned its back on women when it was so open to men with personality quirks and chemical addictions that made them pariahs outside of music.

Author and scholar Angela Davis stated it eloquently at a 2002 panel convened in San Francisco to study the issue: “Jazz (is) the last artform to recognize the significance of feminism. At the beginning of the 21st century, jazz women are still considered the exception. Even though there are vast numbers of women of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds playing jazz on every instrument and in every genre, women continue to be purged from the jazz imagination, except as vocalists or sometimes pianists.”

Fellow scholar Sherrie Tucker, whose book Swing Shift examines the phenomenon of the all-woman bands of the ‘40s, echoed Davis’s comments: “How is it possible to still imagine jazz (without women)? How is it that we can have a 19-hour documentary on the history of jazz where women are not musicians? There were women in Ken Burns’s JAZZ, but they served to construct the male jazz hero in the roles of bad wives, bad mothers, prostitutes and as vocalists who were not so much musicians as tragic women.”

It is not surprising that Burns’s film missed the contributions of important contemporary women instrumentalists like Carla Bley, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Maria Schneider and Jane Bunnett since his narrative stops with the rise of jazz-rock fusion in the early ‘70s. It was only as acoustic music began to re-assert itself in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s that a new crop of women began to assume leadership roles. Both Bley and Akiyoshi led highly influential orchestras that attracted many of their best male peers as contributors, opening the door for Schneider, who inherited the role of orchestral wizard from her former mentor, Gil Evans. Players like Bley also pointed the way for other women like Brackeen, Amina Claudine Myers and Jane Ira Bloom, who in turn were joined by a younger generation, including drummers Cindy Blackman, Terri Lyne Carrington and Susie Ibarra, alto saxophonist Christine Jensen and her trumpeter sister, Ingrid.

Certainly, the feminist movement in general played a role in changing the attitudes of all involved: male musicians, managers, record companies executives, critics and magazine editors included. More importantly, though, young women like Ibarra, Schneider, Bunnett and the Jensens began to assert their right to express themselves through their music and have it heard. Ibarra, a Filipino-American who grew up in Texas, took inspiration from her mother, who had challenged the norm for women of her generation and entered medical school at age 16. Schneider, a native of Minnesota who studied at the Eastman School of Music, was encouraged by Gil Evans’s example to strike out on her own and refuse to sublimate her musical vision to the will of others. Bunnett, a freethinker and tenacious iconoclast who was bounced from several high schools in Toronto before finding a place in music, believes passionately in the power of improvisation as expression. Still, she’s highly pragmatic when it comes to what it takes to make it in the music business.

"There’s still a quota system when it comes to women. I’ve tried to get into festivals and been told, ‘We already have our woman headliner.’ It makes you cringe."

She worries that many young women still don’t get the opportunities that come to their male counterparts.

"If you’re as talented and as serious as musicians like Ingrid Jensen or Renee Rosnes you can break down the barriers that are there. I think that when you look at the women who are able to make a living in jazz, which is a very marginalized art, it’s still true that you have to be twice as good if you’re a woman."

Twice as good, that is, if you want to play things by the old rules. Increasingly, young women – and men – are finding new ways to express themselves through jazz and reach an audience.

Ingrid Jensen has been vocal about wanting to break the tried-and-true model. She openly shuns the industry machinery that puts provocatively posed singers on the covers of jazz magazines.

"When I see one of those magazines feature a woman like that I just feel really sad. A lot of the young players I meet at clinics these days don’t buy into that at all. They don’t care if their trumpet player is female or if the guitarist is gay or the drummer is a lesbian. It’s all about the music for them."

The more these young players – musicians like the expressive Toronto-based trumpeter Lina Allemano and the remarkable violist Tanya Kalmanovitch – move into the public eye on their own terms, the more those who remain tied to tradition will be forced to either recognize them as equals or make a legitimate stand against them. Combined with the exceptionally strong field of women singers on the scene today – ranging from promising newcomers like Ottawa native Leah State through established stars like Cassandra Wilson to polished veterans like Sheila Jordan – the powerful corps of female instrumentalists is well positioned to institute long-overdue and lasting change to the face of jazz.
 

James Hale is a regular contributor to DownBeat, Coda and Planet Jazz. This reprinted with the permission of James Hale and the Ottowa Jazz Festival. You can contact him at:
 http://www.ottawajazzfestival.com
or email him at:
 jhale@sympatico.ca
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