But feel free to just ignore them if you don’t want to read them.

-cvj

I’m going through a ‘Europa’ phase presently. This is the song by the master, Carlos Santana:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weoGpyvIqP8.
There exists a blues-y guitar version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKo0FK6-O-E
too, but the version I like the best is the sax version. Here is a sample by Gato Barbieri
http://www.mp3search.ru/asx.m3u?id=2888947
that brings tears to my eyes. I must admit, however, that my jazz tastes have been influenced by my dad, so here is a Europa version by him:
http://www.amara.com/Europa_AlGraps.mp3.

*slightly offtopic*

Were you ever into the type of jazz where everything is improvised on the spot, with nothing pre-written? (I don’t know what it’s called offhand).

Years ago I use to go see jazz jam sessions of this sort at various nightclubs, largely to watch how the guitar players played. I was mainly interested in seeing what technical playing tricks the guitarists were using, which I could pick up and figure out later. Sometimes I would approach the guitarists after the gig and have a chat with him/her about various technical things in their playing style.

As I said… Perhaps we just choose to emphasize different things.

Cheers,

-cvj

I’m not sure we’re really disagreeing all that much, nor do I think you are disagreeing with the various historical assessments.

Most male jazz musicians had no important influence on the form, and there were many, many more of them than there were women. There are only a few musicians of either sex who were seminal. It is indeed difficult to measure the influences of particular participants on the field, but that is not quite the same as identifying those who had important influences, however imprecisely defined, and distinguishing those individuals from the rest. That males have had more influence on jazz than females is, I think, a brute fact. There were so many more males playing jazz than females that this is not surprising. It’s simple counting, and the pertinence was that I responded to your question about whether more males than females like jazz with an expansion into comparing the numbers of females vs. the numbers of males who played jazz and influenced jazz. The reasons why there were so many more male jazz musicians than females is not quite the same subject, and I for one have no quarrel with the view that much of this is explained by bigotry (”social norms”).

Various jazz histories discuss why the male/female imbalance is especially skewed between instrumentalists and singers. That imbalance provoked, in part, the comments comparing the influence on the form of instrumentalists versus singers, sorted by sex. To say that women, as a whole, were “not significant in the history of jazz” is an overstatement. It is more accurate to say that women, as a whole, have been underrepresented as important instrumental contributors, but highly influential as singers, where they have been disproportionately concentrated as jazz musicians. Women have also been underrepresented, both in numbers and influence, as jazz composers, arrangers, conductors and producers. I really don’t think this is controversial, any more than I think it would be controversial to point out that there are a lot more male physicists than female physicists, and that if you look at the history of physics you’ll (therefore?) find more important contributions to the science from males than females. One reason to point out these imbalances could be historical accuracy. Another could be to help try to change it. A third could be to provide data to permit a sociological analysis of why it’s the case. None of these should be confused with trying to use historical data to justify the imbalances.

What might be more controversial would be an argument that women instrumentalists, composers, arrangers, bandleaders, and producers were relatively uninfluential even as a percentage of their comparatively small numbers. I neither made, nor reported, such an argument (and I’m not a good enough music historian to know if such an argument is viable). Interestingly, it is not controversial that women jazz singers have had huge influence disproportionate to their numbers (either absolute or compartive), and that’s an “emphasis” I personally make whenever I get a chance.

Consider the possibility that Jazz remains male dominated, and -to come back to the subject of the post- remains perceived as a “guy thing” precisely because of the sort of over-emphasis that people place on how seemingly insignificant women were in its history. Your posts were not off-topic at all.

Cheers,

-cvj

(*He was an excellent pianist, but people don’t really remember him much for that.)

Why is it pertinent to point out so markedly the women you and your references consider to be irrelevant (before even doing justice to the ones we know about who were relevant)….especially when there are countless male jazz performers - that you don’t mention - who may well also have done nothing for the development of the form.

Would it not make more sense -given how remarkably hard it is to measure the effect on a field of just one person’s contributions- to focus on the positive contributions that have been made, rather than dive right in with an assessment (based on somewhat subjective analyses) of how insignificant an entire group is? Especially when the social norms of the time were known to put them at a serious disadvantage with regards equal access to opportunity to contribute. Why do we make the same mistakes of blindness again and again?

What I’m talking about here is how the things that are being emphasized in your postings simply serve to emphasize the erroneous view that women were not significant in the story of jazz, whether that was your intention or not. This is the sort of example that serves to damage the whole enterprise (in terms of access to all), in my opinion.

Forgive my pressing on this point, but I just have a bad reaction to this sort of self-fulfilling historical assessment. Let’s put it down to a difference in approach and leave it at that, shall we?

-cvj

There is a good deal of historical information about resistance to women in jazz, and not just from the expected bigots but from many male jazz musicians themselves. Dahl’s book has several striking examples. I’ve not seen any reputable modern arguments that women are in any way “unsuited” for jazz, nor any historical arguments contradicting the idea that a large reason why there were so few women in jazz was lack of opportunity. Nor am I aware of any literature “discounting” the “exceptions;” indeed, my sense is that exactly the opposite is usually the case. There is, by the way, a fairly good-sized literature about women in jazz, written by women.

Mary Lou Williams … yes. As an instrumentalist and a composer and an arranger and a producer. But we’re back to counting, again, and what I was reporting was the virtual nonexistence of women instrumentalists who have been significant in jazz — for whatever reason. It’s not that there have not been good women jazz instrumentalists — comparatively few, but still a bunch. It’s that I haven’t found a jazz historian or musician who identifies women jazz instrumentalists who have influenced the genre in a significant way. (I appreciate your not trying to kill the messenger here … but I have to say that I can’t think of any either — other than Williams.)

All this is somewhat off-topic, I’m afraid. The original post was about whether women “liked” jazz as much as men, and here I am running off at the mouth about history and musicology and other similar things which are only tangentially related to that. I don’t know if women like jazz as much as men do, or if not why not, but historically and musicologically jazz was and still is male-dominated. It is conceivable — maybe, I suppose — that some of this relates to taste.

I’ve always loved Big Band / dixieland / Louis Armstrong-type music - I guess since I grew up listening to a lot of marching band music (and there I was also exposed to the Night in Tunisia/Birdland/Caravan/etc.) However, my appreciation grew after taking a jazz history class in college. I also really loved seeing the Ken Burns documentary as well. My fiance just pulled out my textbook and read through it, so we’ve had some interesting conversations about who shaped jazz history.

In particular, one of the people that I now love very much is Miles Davis. After our first class, I walked right out and bought Kind of Blue.

Since then, I’ve loved seeing Sonny Rollins in concert, and have really enjoyed Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. And we both think that Sting is one of the premier jazz musicians of our time.

The Bessie Smiths and the Billie Holidays were clearly not just “along for the ride.” But many of the “girl singers” were. Their jobs were often mostly to provide a link between the bands and their audiences; they strengthened bands’ commercial appeal. They wore flashy clothes and lots of makeup, and their musical jobs were to come out front of the band periodically and sing a few bars of melody. Most of them — not all of them — contributed not much to the music itself. Linda Dahl, in Stormy Weather, The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazz Women, calls these singers “vocal pom pom girls.” Almost always — not always, but almost always — they were the lone females in the bands. There were hundreds of them, and musicologically most of them are legitimately “dismissed” as having little or no lasting influence on the form.

No one (”) denies the huge influence of female jazz vocalists on jazz instrumentalists (of any sex). CJJ’s example of Billie Holiday is undoubtedly the best. I know of no jazz player, or historian, who does not think she “changed everything” and “influenced everybody.” And Holiday was of course not the only one. It’s easy to expand the list. But there still weren’t very many women singers who had an important influence on jazz. Counting is not the only thing, but it counts. It was a quantitative point, not a qualitative one.

The comments about singers performing in other genres was mostly definitional. There are arguments about whether certain singers are properly considered “jazz” singers, and one of the arguments you’ll hear in favor of a “no” answer is when a singer performs mostly in another genre. I, myself, think that’s pretty restrictive. But a related point is worthy of some consideration. Collier, for example, is inclined to discount Ella Fitzgerald as a “jazz” singer because, he says, while she was “capable of singing with jazz cadences” she was presented mostly as a popular vocalist and therefore “tied to the melody line” to a degree inconsistent with his rather restrictive view of what, properly, should be called “jazz.” I, myself, think this is too restrictive, but a related point is worthy of some consideration. Collier, again, argues that Fitrzgerald (and others) “at times … have a tendency to land squarely on the beat, thus interfering with the swing.” Maybe, or maybe not, but the point should not be rejected out of hand.

Peter Apfelbaum various incarnations of the Hieroglyphics Ensemble included many quite excellent female performers featuring their skills on sax, bass, drums, and lead guitar. At times Zappa assembled units with excellent female players, particularly those with jazz leanings who were officially aligned with European symphonic orchestras. So, yes, they are out there, but not in the glaring lights as more and more of them need to be.

-cvj

Likewise with artists, accountants and garbage collectors… what could this all mean?

Thanks.

Nonetheless, it is probably true that there have been no female jazz instrumentalists who were seminal to the form (at least historically). Collier does take a somewhat restrictive view of what “jazz” is, and this contributes to the imbalance as there were (a few) more women instrumentalists participating in music which Collier would not recognize as “pure” jazz but which others might include within the genre.

I have several issues with the thesis you are reporting on here. (I’m not shooting the messenger). These are the same arguments that are used to argue that women and people of colour are inherently unsuited to doing physics or mathematics because of the attitudes that meant that they did not get the same opportunities to contribute to it at earlier times (and even now, but that’s another story) except for a few “exceptions” which are discounted for some reason or other.

I could go on about that point, but let’s move on….

We come then to whether The Bessie Smiths and Billie Holidays were just “girl singers” along for the ride, or whether they helped shape the music. It’s unbelievable that someone who really understands Jazz can even question the huge influence of the human voice on the entire core of the music. Listen to any of the great saxophonists who are quoted as representing some of the foundations of the genre (Pres, Bird, etc) and what do you hear? You hear the human voice. You hear the stylings (note choices, timing, etc) of some of the great singers of the day. When those guys finished playing a gig, who did they sit and listen to for their inspiration a lot of the time? Those “girl singers” so dismissively referred to.

Can you listen to a huge amount of Lester Young without hearing Billie Holiday? And there are so many more examples…. you don’t get very far before you find a male Jazz musician from those times (the honest ones) listing singers as among their greatest influences. Sometimes those singers are male, but then who influenced them?

And how can you discount the amazing contributions of Ella Fitzgerald to Jazz (oh my goodness) because she sang in other genres too? Does that mean that Wynton Marsalis is not a jazz musician because he has made many fine classical recordings? Or Louis Armstrong because of all of his “feel good” popular recordings? Or maybe Miles Davis because he invented fusion, played rock and roll, and recorded Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time”? Or because he is a guy we get to say instead that he was a pioneer and simply invented new forms. Different rules for the men than those we use for the women….

And then we come to the instrumentalists…. funny how we can pin so much on the influence of one man (in the case of say Charlie Parker, or John Coltrane, or….), but when there is one woman doing something, we say that due to the small numbers she can’t be counted as significant? Don’t you find that a little odd? So let me mention Mary Lou Williams…. for a start (goodness knows how many have been forgotten because the history is usually written by… men… big surpirse).. How come Mary Lou Williams is not mentioned in the above?!! It boggles the mind. Where would the whole Kansas City sound be without her playing, composition, leadership and arrangements, I wonder? What about all those great male players who grew up learning their chops in her band? What about Nina Simone (later on)? If she chose not to sing she would still have been a kick-ass pianist and arranger….

Wow. It is easy to see where my friend partly got her misunderstanding from, really. The role of women is still totally written out of the story by people today. And a lot of men continue to perpetuate the mythology that Jazz developed with little or no significant input from women. Then, hearing it repeated so often, women start believing it, and then the whole thing reinforces itself. The analogue with attitudes to women and minorities in the sciences is almost perfect. This is very discouraging indeed.

Ok, I need to go cool off now.

-cvj

I don’t have a problem that jazz is mostly dominated by males, as is most of my favorite music, but since my sister chose the saxophone for band in elementary school and played throughout high school I don’t have the idea that men are necessarily better at it, but it is curious that the girls in school did not choose the sax, horn, trumpet, and trombone- most went for the flute and clarinet. ???

I just realized that one of your questions: “how do I really know that they liked it as much as I did (whatever that means)? What if they were just humouring me?”

Hmm, yeah, what does that mean? If one is saying “I like jazz” when they really don’t, that’s easy enough to discern - what do they away from you? But as far as levels of intensity, i.e., “as much,” that can be compared to many things. If someone likes flowers, do they like them less than you because they don’t grow them or know all their names as you do? Does physics fascinate them less because they can’t do all the equations? Does someone love a poem less because they don’t know about iambic pentameter? I’m curious as to why “as much” would even matter.

There were some female jazz singers (although once again Collier takes a restrictive view of what this means), and some jazz historians have implied that females constitute the majority (or at least the best) of the jazz singers. Names often remarked include Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Ivie Anderson, and Anita O’Day. If one broadens the definition a bit, the “girl singers” with Big Bands (and swing bands) can also be included (at least once they became part of the music and not just window dressing). Many people would include Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Helen Forrest, and even Julie London, although these singers (and others like them) were never “pure” jazz musicians (and sang a lot of music other than jazz).

In modern times, women are still underrepresented as jazz instrumentalists, but less so than previously. And there is a current crop of female jazz (or at least jazzy) vocalists who are at least competent and sometimes spectacular. Examples include Catherine Russell, Stacey Kent, Tierney Sutton, Ingrid Lucia … and there are many more. (It’s a good time for “chick singers.”)

I like jazz and I’m female, for the record.

The reason I like it is firstly, I grew up in Pittsburgh which had at some point one of the most vibrant jazz scenes in the country, so I was exposed to it at a very young age. You know how the main NPR station usually plays classical? Yeah, in Pittsburgh we do jazz. It’s the way to be.

The second reason I like jazz is because jazz involves being clever in a sense that few other genres of music do… my favorite thing about it is how you can hear several different versions of the same melody by different artists and they won’t nessecarily sound the same at all. This doesn’t really happen in other genres of music, which I think is a pity.

But then, I will note that I like pretty much all music short of rap, techno, and country, so if your post was about, say, indie in the same context I could list a few reasons as to why it’s great.

Now here’s the thing that gave me pause. My friend mentioned something else. She’s of the opinion that Jazz is in fact a “guy thing”, and that (on balance) women don’t really like jazz. This includes everything from the music itself to the whole business of sitting in a small dark (sometimes smoky - but less so these day) room listening to this stuff. It’s a guy thing. Women just tolerate it.

My mother used to “drag” us to smoky dark bars (nice ones) where local jazz artists played back when I was an adolescent (won’t go into that, but we loved it). I’ll never forget the regular saxophonist there; seeing jazz live is invigorating and I enjoy the intimacy of small places where one can see the instruments being played. Likewise I recall seeing a Spyro Gyra concert in a small round theater with a rotating stage and enjoyed it immensely even though I mostly don’t listen to jazz, blues, and R&B much at home. (At home I like music I can sing or dance to get me moving. Jazz and blues is for relaxing.)

However, just looking at Wikipedia’s entry on jazz, what type of jazz are we talking about? I have to agree with Duke Ellington’s comment: “It’s all music.” I like what I like. But traditional jazz I prefer live, yes, and I really don’t know much about it as a genre. But that’s the great thing about music - you don’t have to - that’s up to you. There’s a visceral enjoyment and a technical/skill level enjoyment, and they are two different things.

During my lifetime Jazz got fusioned into rock and classical and all other genres. What distinguishes jazz from other genres?

It seems that if some talented instrumentalists come together and put a nice sound which doesn’t sound like any of the other known stuff then it is called jazz. To me this is like string theory.

Jazz is undefined. Just like String Theory.
Jazz is elegant. Just like String Theory.
Jazz is cool. Just like string theory.
Only a few dig Jazz. Just like string theory.
Jazz is improvisation just like string theory.
And Jazz makes no predictions. Just like String theory.

I may be all wrong though. Or maybe I am not even wrong. Just like string theory