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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/arts/music/year-in-jazz-women-musicians.html
By Giovanni Russonello
Dec. 1, 2017
For 77 hours straight in mid-September, the bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding broadcast live on Facebook as she wrote, rehearsed and recorded an entire album. The project, titled “Exposure,” was meant as a challenge to herself, but it became a display of dauntless prowess and grand ambition.
Viewers watched — usually a few thousand at a time — as Ms. Spalding demonstrated complex parts to her pianist, or decided whether to keep or ditch each take. “Exposure” showed that it was possible to turn the technical, obsessive process of recording jazz into a public spectacle. This could have fascinating implications.
That recording studios are among the most male-dominated spaces in the music industry and Ms. Spalding was often the only woman in the room felt like an afterthought at best.
Maybe it bears mentioning, though, that “Exposure” was one of many arresting statements made by female jazz instrumentalists this year. It has been a period of painful revelation and reckoning for women in the workplace across the country, and the same was true for jazz. But 2017 also felt like a moment of progress.
The drummer Terri Lyne Carrington said female instrumentalists are getting more recognition as awareness of the inequalities in jazz grows.CreditPeter Van Breukelen/Redferns, via Getty Images
Possibly for the first time, festival presenters could no longer get away with booking one or two female musicians next to a heap of men. “The awareness of it not being equitable for men and women in jazz has really come to a bit of a head,” said Terri Lyne Carrington, 52, an esteemed drummer who has long spoken out about sexism in the music industry. “As far as it resulting in more female instrumentalists becoming recognized — whether it’s albums or festivals or gigs — that’s steadily getting better.”
The year began with a reminder of how much work remains to be done. In March, the pianist and blogger Ethan Iverson posted an interview with Robert Glasper, a prominent fusion pianist, in which Mr. Glasper said he understood what female listeners wanted out of jazz. “They don’t love a whole lot of soloing,” he said. “When you hit that one groove and stay there, it’s like musical clitoris. You’re there, you stay on that groove, and the women’s eyes close and they start to sway, going into a trance.” He didn’t seem to imagine that the simplest way to attract female listeners might be to put more women onstage.
The comments — and Mr. Iverson’s obstreperous initial defense of his decision to publish them on a blog that had never run an interview with a female musician — drew a sharp backlash, partly because these days a quorum of women in jazz fully expect to be heard.
Perhaps the most startling debut albums in jazz this year were “Fly or Die,” by the trumpeter Jaimie Branch, and “Mannequins,” by the drummer Kate Gentile. Ms. Gentile plays original compositions that are at once grimy and resonant, tightly layered and charged with momentum. Ms. Branch uses extended technique and blustery abstraction to a dizzying effect.
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The cellist Tomeka Reid said that as she was getting involved with improvised music she had women role models: “I saw women leaders, women composers.”CreditRyan Collerd for The New York Times
A mentor to Ms. Branch, the flutist Nicole Mitchell, 50, had a banner year herself. The highlight was “Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds,” an album recorded with her Black Earth Ensemble, an eight-piece band playing percussion, strings and reeds from traditions across the globe. The suite bears the markings of communal expression, with a sound that’s grounded and raw.
The cellist Tomeka Reid, another acolyte of Ms. Mitchell’s, spent her year playing high-profile gigs with her own projects as well as with luminaries like Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell. She released an album with the saxophonist Nick Mazzarella and one with Hear in Now, a powerful trio of female string players.
“I really feel like I had a unique experience because I came up under Nicole and Dee Alexander,” Ms. Reid said. “When I was just getting into improvised music, I saw women leaders, women composers. I saw women putting projects together.”
In October, the Spanish-born pianist Marta Sánchez celebrated the release of a fine new album, “Danza Imposible,” with a performance at the Jazz Gallery, her quartet playing deft, loosely spooled originals and passing the melodies between instruments. Simona Premazzi also released a remarkable album this year, “Outspoken,” replete with tilting melodies and craftily idiosyncratic piano playing.
Even more than the piano, the tenor saxophone is an instrument whose major figures have nearly all been men. Yet you’re hard-pressed to find rising talents more exciting than Camille Thurman, whose sound is as commodious and strong as Hank Mobley’s, or Melissa Aldana, the winner of the famous Thelonious Monk competition. Closer to the stylistic fringe, the saxophonist María Grand, 25, released her debut EP, “Tetrawind,” an infectious bit of avant-funk.
Ms. Thurman almost didn’t pursue a career in music. At New York’s prestigious Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, she endured sabotage from male classmates and a shrugging response from teachers. “A few of them really made it difficult for us females in the band,” she said of her classmates, remembering that some girls quit playing altogether. “It’s implemented at an early age, these concepts of what gender is and what you’re supposed to do.”
The most noteworthy piece of writing to come out of the Iverson-Glasper fiasco was a nearly 6,000-word blog post by the vibraphonist Sasha Berliner, a 19-year-old jazz student at the New School. In it she tells of being overlooked or underestimated by teachers — despite her formidable talent — and reveals that she was sexually harassed by a figure whom she relied upon for gigs in the small San Francisco scene.
“I’ve witnessed it happen to a lot of my female peers, who are very young, and that’s discouraged them,” Ms. Berliner said in an interview.
The 19-year-old vibraphonist Sasha Berliner wrote a 6,000-word blog post about sexism in jazz in response to an interview Robert Glasper did with the pianist and blogger Ethan Iverson.CreditSF Jazz
The issues she had raised found a disconcerting resonance in November, when The Boston Globe published a series of reports about accusations of sexual misconduct by faculty members at Berklee College of Music. The Globe reported allegations that the trombonist Jeff Galindo — a faculty member who had since left the school and was teaching elsewhere — sexually assaulted a student, and that other former professors had tried to pressure students into kissing or sex. (Mr. Galindo did not respond to a request for comment.) At an emotionally charged town hall meeting, the school’s president, Roger Brown, acknowledged that 11 faculty members had been quietly dismissed over sexual misconduct allegations in the past 13 years.
The school has laid out some action items in response to the uproar, but a group of professors is calling for Berklee to intentionally raise its female representation of faculty and students to 50 percent by 2025.
More and more, organizations are starting to clarify their goals of inclusion. The influential pianist Geri Allen, who died this year at 60, left behind a program at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the All-Female Jazz Residency, which allows young women to learn directly from top jazz musicians. It’s not the only one of its kind.
In Montclair, N.J., the nonprofit Jazz House Kids brings jazz education to a diverse grade school population. Its president and founder, Melissa Walker, has spent the past five years beefing up her female faculty and developing a residency for girls called Chica Power.
The tenor saxophonist Camille Thurman, an exciting rising talent, said she almost didn’t pursue a career in music because of sexism at her high school.CreditNicholas Hunt/Getty Images for Jazz at Lincoln Center
“The young girls would ask questions and talk about how they’re in their high school jazz band and they’re not invited to solo, or their teacher will say young girls in jazz don’t play as well as boys,” Ms. Walker said. “These sessions began to really reveal that a little ‘chica power’ is needed.”
Looking again at Mr. Glasper’s comments, he was verging toward a critical point. Contemporary jazz hasn’t figured out how to relate to its audience. Crowds often seem to wonder, Are we here to share an improvisational ritual or to quietly consume a luxury item? This fall I saw two bright moments when artists offered novel responses to this question, reframing the act of performance and pulling the audience in close.
The flutist Claire Chase (not a jazz musician by trade, but an improviser deeply influenced by jazz), playing in Philadelphia at the October Revolution of Jazz & Contemporary Music, ended her solo set by leading the entire audience in a rendition of Pauline Oliveros’s “Listening Meditation,” during which everyone in the room sang in spontaneous harmony.
Two weeks later, the alto saxophonist Matana Roberts was performing at the BRIC Jazzfest in Downtown Brooklyn when she asked the crowd to hum a single note as she improvised. She cued our voices with one hand and played with the other. Periodically, she would take the saxophone from her mouth and blurt out an observation or a quip, typically something personal, mostly about how she was coping with life in the Trump era. Other times, she invited listeners to ask her questions. Then she would resume playing, and the audience would again start to sing. By the end of this show, the entire room was smiling, making eye contact, moved.
There’s nothing to suggest that these two musicians expressed themselves in any particular way because of their gender. But what we know is that until recently they might not have been in a position to stand up onstage alone, addressing the audience with generosity and informality, empowering the room, imagining the music as a space of open unity.
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