‘You’re playing like a girl’: Why is jazz still so male?

A few years ago the Improvised Music Company staged a special concert at the Sugar Club in Dublin. Designed as a 25th-anniversary celebration of a not-for-profit organisation that works hard to promote and support jazz and world music in Ireland, the evening featured no fewer than six bands – a “top-notch line-up of the new wave of Irish jazz”.

“It was a big event and a great success, but, thinking about it afterwards, we realised that all of the 20-plus musicians on stage that night had been men,” says Aoife Concannon, IMC’s creative producer. “It wasn’t in any way intentional, and we had attempted to programme bands with female musicians, but the realisation was, oh God, actually this is totally normal. And that no one even notices most of the time. It’s only when you see a woman on a jazz stage, particularly an instrumentalist, that it becomes noteworthy. It’s, like, ‘Oh, that’s exciting – look, there’s a woman on the drums!’”

In line with the IMC’s mission to “nurture and grow the scene for jazz and improvised music in Ireland”, the organisation decided to conduct some research. Staff studied the programmes of jazz festivals in Ireland in 2016 and discovered only 8 per cent of the musicians listed were women. The same applied to female students on jazz degree courses: as few as 10 per cent.

When the Improvised Music Company looked abroad the disparities were much the same. While female jazz vocalists are quite common, a UK study that same year found that just 5 per cent of instrumentalists were women. Internationally, live audiences for jazz, as well as those teaching, lecturing, researching, booking, promoting and writing about the music, were predominantly male. Clearly, something was not right.

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As in other areas of music and the arts, the imbalance was partly due to historical and structural forces. For a genre that greatly values freedom and self-expression, jazz has been surprisingly conservative when it comes to championing equality and inclusion, particularly if you’re a woman, gay or both. Jazz is unquestionably a patriarchy.

Of the 57 jazz musicians featured in Art Kane’s famous 1958 photograph A Great Day in Harlem, only three were women: the vocalist Maxine Sullivan and the pianists Mary Lou Williams and Marian McPartland. Which points to two preconceptions that remain key issues for women in jazz today.

The first is the tired yet stubborn stereotype that women sing and men play the instruments. “Oh, it’s still very much alive,” says the Derry-based saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Meilana Gillard, laughing. “I could walk into a jazz club carrying four saxophones and somebody would still ask me if I’m the singer or if I’m carrying my boyfriend’s horns or whatever. Though the funny thing is, I actually am a singer as well.”

The pianist and percussionist Bianca Gannon, who divides her time between Louisburgh, in Co Mayo, and Belfast, has had similar experiences. “People ask me what I do, and I’ll say I’m a musician, and all the time they’ll be, like – and it’s mainly men – ‘Oh, so you’re a singer.’ It feels like the only thing I’m given permission to be as a woman in jazz is a vocalist – and I certainly don’t mean that as any disrespect to singers, male or female. But it really grates.”

The second preconception is that certain instruments are “gendered” – that some should be played only by men, others only by women. This seems particularly prevalent when it comes to the choice of instrument made by girls and boys. “There is definitely something in our social conditioning that says the violin, cello and piano are some sort of ‘feminine’ instruments,” says Concannon. “Very few parents are encouraging their daughters to pick up the baritone sax or the drums. Those are for boys.” It is the same, it seems, with “masculine” instruments such as the trumpet, double bass and electric guitar, all of which have long and noble traditions in jazz. The situation is similar in classical orchestras.

Women in jazz face many other challenges. The macho and hypercompetitive nature of certain big bands and jam sessions, for example, may not favour and may even exclude women and girls, who are often a minority in those ensembles; one English bass player, Marla Kether, was once derisively told that she was “playing like a girl”. Research conducted among 10 anonymised leading female musicians who performed at Cheltenham Jazz Festival, in England, in 2019 also found three who had experienced “direct sexual harassment” in their careers.

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“You know, being a jazz musician is a hard job, with late nights and some bad experiences and no HR department to report a guy to,” says Gillard. “Women are often out on their own in a lot of ways, so I can understand why many would be put off pursuing jazz as a career.” Gannon agrees: “The woman’s experience in the world, generally, is much darker and much more difficult.”

It was for many of these reasons that in 2017 the Improvised Music Company organised a one-day festival in Dublin called Ban Bam (a play on “bean”, the Irish word for woman) that showcased women jazz musicians in Ireland and Britain. Three years later the company partnered with Moving on Music in Northern Ireland to launch a biennial development programme of the same name that aims to “support the work of Irish-born or -resident women and gender minority artists in jazz”.

The initiative involves mentorships and commissioning awards of €2,500 for new work premiered at dedicated Ban Bam concerts. In the most recent round, delayed by Covid, Gillard, Gannon and the Carlow-based pianist and saxophonist Carole Nelson received the assistance and support. The composers’ new works, performed by their own groups, will be presented this weekend at concerts in Dublin and Belfast; in May the three awardees will feature in an event at Manchester Jazz Festival. Composition themes are as diverse as video-game music, the nature of home and the mating call of an extinct Hawaiian bird; the music will be open enough to embrace pop, funk, gamelan, minimalism and collective improvisation.

“I’m absolutely thrilled,” says Nelson. “Not only has it kick-started music for a new album, but even the existence of an award like this can have an effect. If just one woman somewhere picks up a pen or a desktop recording set-up and composes, or picks up their instrument and goes for it, because there’s something to go for, then the programme has succeeded.”

Nelson’s credo is a version of the maxim that “you can’t be what you can’t see”; that philosophy extends to another IMC project that was launched last year: Jazz Camp for Girls. A three-day summer programme for “young female-identifying musicians” aged 11 to 15 with little or no experience of improvising, the event is designed to be supportive, inspirational and fun, with girls “making up songs and experimenting”. This summer three jazz camps will be held: at Dublin City University and at the University College Dublin and MTU Cork schools of music.

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The Improvised Music Company initiatives are part of a wider campaign for greater access, opportunity and equality for women jazz musicians. Irish organisations such as the Royal Irish Academy of Music and the Choice Music Prize have signed up to Keychange, a global movement launched in 2017 in which participants pledge to a 50:50 gender balance. Many leading European jazz festivals – the EFG London Jazz Festival, Cheltenham Jazz Festival, JazzFest Berlin and Moldejazz – have done the same.

Ireland’s leading jazz jamboree, the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival, has not made the pledge. “We have not been engaged by this initiative, but we will certainly look into it,” the festival’s director, Mark Murphy, who also owns the Sugar Club, writes in an email. “Our focus is on artistic merit, availability and showmanship. We have no issue booking 10 women and zero men.”

In Britain, transformative organisations such as Blow the Fuse and Tomorrow’s Warriors have for many years played a crucial role in raising the profile of women in jazz. The list of musicians who have benefited from their support is long and illustrious: it includes Nubya Garcia, Cassie Kinoshi, Zara McFarlane, Laura Jurd, Yazz Ahmed and the London-based Irish improvising vocalist Lauren Kinsella.

Change is also taking place at music colleges. Many have introduced blind auditions, some have signed up to the Keychange pledge and a few, such as the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, have introduced “gender equity” programmes. In 2018 the prestigious Berklee College of Music, in Boston, established an Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice; founded by the celebrated drummer and educator Terri Lyne Carrington, it aims “to engage in the pursuit of jazz without patriarchy”.

As with many types of affirmative action, there has been a degree of resistance to these programmes and manifestos; some have argued that they inevitably lead to compromised standards and discrimination against high-quality male musicians.

In 2018 the American author Lionel Shriver, whose husband is the jazz drummer Jeff Williams, wrote an article for the Spectator that was headlined “Jazz is dominated by men. So what?” In it she contended that “the legislation of gender parity is injurious to the music”, that such schemes “elevate numerous women who are not ready for prime time” and that “fixing perceived injustice with another injustice creates – surprise – more injustice”.

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Aoife Concannon, Ban Bam’s creative producer, disagrees. “I’ve heard these arguments, and I just think they’re a bit lazy. And also a bit insulting. Jazz’s gatekeepers need to use their imaginations more; they have to accept there’s an imbalance and take some responsibility for developing the artists that they work with and the future of a music that they obviously care about.

“When there are more women on stage, there are more women in the audience. That’s just how it works. So it makes total sense for programmers to build a more diverse audience for jazz. If they want to have a sold-out gig in 20 or 30 years’ time, why would they not encourage 50 per cent of the population to take part?”

The Ban Bam concerts, featuring new works by Meilana Gillard, Bianca Gannon and Carole Nelson, take place at Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, on Saturday, January 20th, and the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast, on Sunday, January 21st