Women and Music-A Journal of Gender and Culture最新文献

{"title":"Missing Maestra: Meshell Ndegeocello’s We Insist!","authors":"Shana L. Redmond, Robeson C. Haley-Redmond","doi":"10.1353/wam.2023.a912256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2023.a912256","url":null,"abstract":"Missing MaestraMeshell Ndegeocello’s We Insist! Shana L. Redmond and Robeson C. Haley-Redmond In a normative world, a performer’s introductory question of “How’s everyone tonight?” is unremarkable and one that even when genuine rarely engenders a response It’s a call to order more polite than “Hey,” more graceful than “Let’s start.” But if taken seriously it is also an invitation, a way into a performance that acknowledges that the goings-on on stage are only part of the event. Under the conditions of the global COVID-19 pandemic and in a season of unrelenting anti-Black, transphobic, antiwoman violence in the streets and at all levels of legislature, Meshell Ndegeocello’s greeting hit differently. Offered in her distinct register, “How’s everyone tonight?” was a kind gesture and greeting and, when paired with a noticeable pause, previewed the possibility of not only witness but also a broad exchange that would invite more than those in the room into the conversation. This possibility was already present—was anticipated, in fact—well before anyone entered the venue or, in my case, logged onto the livestream. Ndegeocello was in residency at Symphony Space on the Upper West Side, and this night’s event was titled “Meshell Ndegeocello: We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite.” Inspired by and curated in dense entanglement with the 1960 album and legacy of the intrepid drummer-composer-bandleader Max Roach and his ensemble, including the powerhouse vocalist Abbey Lincoln, Ndegeocello’s evening was saturated with expectation, not only for Roach and Lincoln but, low-key, for the other Lincoln too. Roach and musician-composer-writer Oscar Brown Jr. began composition of We Insist! in anticipation of the centennial celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). Though too often narrowly routed through Abraham Lincoln, emancipation was the doing of a variously scaled rebellion and “general strike” of the enslaved, and it is they who haunted the Ndegeocello performance during Black History Month 2022.1 [End Page 99] Roach and Brown’s take on the promise of freedom was far more critical than celebratory. Freedom Now staged the moment of its release as a reckoning with the unfulfilled mission of the Proclamation and was an amplifier for the movements that insisted on their due rights, right now. Four years later Nina Simone continued to put pressure on the established civil rights time line in “Mississippi Goddam” when she ventriloquized white society as continually saying, “Go slow.” Her retort: “But that’s just the trouble. / Too slow!” The lethargy of progress, if ever one believed in such a thing, quickly gave way to doubt and, eventually, resignation to the fact that the failure to achieve justice was not a matter of excessive time but limited will. Black people could simply not expect equal protection in this country or world (as decolonization movements everywhere documented). The civil rights legislation of 1964 was a start rather than an end t","PeriodicalId":40563,"journal":{"name":"Women and Music-A Journal of Gender and Culture","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135710998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cornerstone Conversation with Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice Advisory Board: June 9, 2021","authors":"Angela Y. Davis, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Carrie Mae Weems, Gina Dent, Romi Crawford, Nichole Rustin","doi":"10.1353/wam.2023.a912249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2023.a912249","url":null,"abstract":"Cornerstone Conversation with Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice Advisory BoardJune 9, 2021 Angela Y. Davis, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Carrie Mae Weems, Gina Dent, Romi Crawford, Moderator, and Nichole Rustin, Respondent Before Romi Crawford begins the discussion with the advisory board, she asks Terri Lyne Carrington to describe the beginnings of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. terri lyne carrington. I noticed there was a problem and I finally stepped in and did what I could. And I hadn’t been doing that all along for some reason. I was caught up with being a creative musician and my career. And then one day I met with some students, and they expressed that there was not a space for them in the college where they felt safe and nurtured and all the things that I felt coming up, even from my teachers. So, I just woke up one day and thought, well, the very least I can do is to try and create a space here, and it just grew from there. I had a conversation with Angela [Davis] and Gina [Dent] about it, and Angela pointed out that “justice” needed to be in the title, and we went from there. We have six ensembles, a liberal arts class, our students have traveled to do performances, and we have a book that we’ve been working on that will be coming out early next year of compositions by women composers.1 There’s corrective work involved, and we’re just trying to keep the conversation moving forward. There’s a lot of young men who gravitate to our Institute, because they recognize that gender justice is their job, too. I think these young men feel that they’ve had to perform a certain [End Page 10] kind of masculinity that seems to be natural or normal on the jazz stage and in jazz culture. A lot of young men are rejecting that. carrie mae weems. Thank you for inviting me to participate. I know about these early conversations. I was just listening to the radio on the way home, dashing home, listening to field recordings of East Indian men. And even within that context of rural music and doing recordings, and they were calling it a “search for the blues,” a sort of authentic, East Indian music, even within that context, out of all the people that they recorded they only recorded a single woman’s voice. A single woman’s voice. I was thinking about this in relationship to Terri and her breadth of work and the depth of her work. I met Terri through her work with the incredible pianist whom we’ve lost, Geri Allen. All of us were very close with Geri. And then I met Esperanza Spalding through Terri. I’ve met a number of really important women musicians and artists through Terri. And one of the things I see Terri doing is really widening the path for us. Laying down herself for us. We are gathered here today because she brought us together yet again, and that’s a part of her ongoing dynamic activism, to bring us together in all these various ways. It means a great deal. Because men take up an extraordinary amount of space. They assume tha","PeriodicalId":40563,"journal":{"name":"Women and Music-A Journal of Gender and Culture","volume":"93 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135711012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fireside Chat with Special Guests: Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice","authors":"Robin D. G. Kelley","doi":"10.1353/wam.2023.a912252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2023.a912252","url":null,"abstract":"Fireside Chat with Special GuestsBerklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice Robin D. G. Kelley Edited Transcription I’m honored to have this rare opportunity to be in conversation with the brilliant Terri Lyne Carrington and all of you. There is simply no institution, on any university campus, like the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. The idea of gender and jazz justice is something that we all have to rally around and embrace. It’s not for exclusive groups—it’s for the globe. I’m not the first or the last to make what should be an obvious point: that Black Feminist Thought is an interrogation into all forms of oppression and possibility. I say this not only because of Black women’s unique subject position, not just because Black women experience racism, gender, and class oppression and exclusion. Black Feminist Thought is not merely a reaction to oppression but an accumulation of lessons we as a people carried with us in order to survive and move forward. It was often left to women, femmes—particularly working-class Black women and femmes—who, at the grassroots level, had to figure out ways to survive and create a different future for all of us. It is not an accident that the established radical Black feminist organizations have embraced an anti-capitalist vision of the world, one that rejects all forms of gendered discrimination, exclusion, exclusivity, and the narrowing of possibility—including the narrowing of sexuality. This is not to say that Black feminism hasn’t struggled with its own contradictions, including the marginalization of lesbian, queer, and nonbinary communities, say, fifty years ago. Black feminism is also always in motion, and an abiding commitment to interrogate, address, and resolve contradictions and difficult challenges is its strength. But let’s return to the larger point—that Black feminism’s radical vision sought to create a different future of all of us. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) recognized that the emancipation of all humankind was made [End Page 62] possible by ending all forms of oppressions that affect Black women—around health care, the economy, violence—whether it’s gendered violence, intimate partner violence, or state violence. Their statement was not a call to grant Black women greater access to the existing system, or for race- and gender-integrated social democracy. Rather, they demanded a deeper disordering of racist, capitalist heteropatriarchy that required a remaking of the whole of life—production, reproduction, safety, pleasure, the right to bodily autonomy, everything. It argued that a nonracist, nonsexist society could not be created under capitalism, nor could socialism alone dismantle the structures of racial, gender, and sexual domination. The struggle wasn’t just the public fight in the streets or the public fight for representation, nor was it just socialism defined as providing resources in a very public way—decent jobs, collective labor.1 Put differently, ","PeriodicalId":40563,"journal":{"name":"Women and Music-A Journal of Gender and Culture","volume":"159 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life by Amy Cimini (review)","authors":"Elizabeth Frickey","doi":"10.1353/wam.2023.a912261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2023.a912261","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life by Amy Cimini Elizabeth Frickey Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life. By Amy Cimini. Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 336 pp. To those familiar with her work, Maryanne Amacher stands out among avant-garde composers of the late twentieth century as a maverick of the sound art genre. A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen and frequent collaborator with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Amacher is primarily known for her large-scale sound installations, including City Links (1967), Music for Sound-Joined Rooms (1980), and Mini-Sound Series (1985). Her work has often been cited as possessing a uniquely ephemeral quality, not just in the temporary nature of her multimedia installations (which she referred to as “structure-borne sounds”) but in the literal phantasmic character of her electronic sounds. Following her death in 2009, Amacher left behind very few officially sanctioned recordings and published scores, leaving only the ghostly traces of her personal archive.1 Amy Cimini’s recent book Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (2022) is a deeply necessary contribution toward an increased awareness of Amacher’s works and her role within (and contradictions with) modern US experimentalism. Wild Sound brings the reader directly into contact with the peculiarities of Amacher’s personal writings and the traces left behind in her archive. Cimini frames her introduction to the text (and much of the rest of the work) around one such artifact: Amacher’s detailed notes from Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” wherein she adapts Haraway’s “I want a feminist writing” into her own “I want to make a music” (1). In drawing from apparently felt connections between Har-away’s theorization of feminist technoscience and Amacher’s own musical aspirations, [End Page 116] Cimini constructs her critical analysis on a much broader plane than the standard biographical project. Cimini also situates her work not just within the plural “musicologies” she refers to (e.g., “a new, critical, or cultural musicology” or “an embodied musicology” [25]) but within media/technology studies, critical feminist scholarship, and biopolitics as well. To Cimini, in her ventriloquy of Har-away, Amacher is not only reimagining her role as a composer but reconsidering her role in a shifting sociopolitical milieu of the late twentieth century, as reflected in its “industrial telecommunications, urban transformation, and emerging bio-technologies” (5). Wild Sound is more than an exploration of Amacher’s life and work—it is an exploration of Amacher’s curiosity toward the rapidly changing politics of life itself, and, as such, it must consider her constructed sounds through this same framework. Amacher’s fascination with life is felt consistently througho","PeriodicalId":40563,"journal":{"name":"Women and Music-A Journal of Gender and Culture","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Kitchen to Carnegie Hall: Ethel Stark and the Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra by Maria Noriega Rachwal (review)","authors":"Corinne Cardinal","doi":"10.1353/wam.2023.a912259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2023.a912259","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: From Kitchen to Carnegie Hall: Ethel Stark and the Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra by Maria Noriega Rachwal Corinne Cardinal From Kitchen to Carnegie Hall: Ethel Stark and the Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra. By Maria Noriega Rachwal. Toronto: Second Story Press, 2015. 208 pp. From its beginnings in the eighteenth century, the symphony orchestra has been primarily composed of male musicians—a tendency that remained in place until the mid-twentieth century. Professional orchestras in North America and Europe did not hire women. Women were encouraged to study music but only with the objective of improving their marital prospects and climbing the social ladder. In addition, women could not learn just any instrument: social etiquette required women to study only those instruments that would enhance their femininity. The careers of women musicians were usually limited to singing or musical instruction for children. This domestic ideology put forth by bourgeois society sought to maintain the image of women as passive, submissive, and socially mute. What [End Page 108] made it so that women today can play wind instruments or percussion, and succeed as orchestral conductors? In From Kitchen to Carnegie Hall (2015), translated into French as Partition pour femmes et orchestra (2017), musicologist Maria Noriega Rachwal presents the work of the pioneering Ethel Stark, a visionary who worked to break down gendered barriers and open up new possibilities for women musicians. Through archival research and interviews with women musicians, Rachwal tells not only Ethel Stark’s story but also that of the Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra (MWSO), the first orchestra in Canada composed entirely of women. Maria Noriega Rachwal uses a range of primary sources to recount the tumultuous history of this atypical orchestra, including interviews and conversations with former members of the MWSO, such as Lyse Vésinat and Pearl Rosemarin Aronoff; recordings and photographs; and an unpublished memoir provided by Max Haupt, Ethel Stark’s nephew. Archival materials are drawn from the University of Calgary Library, Library and Archives Canada, the Jewish Public Library (Montreal), and the University of Toronto Library. The book is divided into eleven chapters, with the material presented chronologically, plus a prologue and a concluding note. The first chapter takes up Ethel Stark’s early years, exploring her family origins, social circle, and musical studies. Raised in a musical family in Montreal’s Jewish community, Stark studied violin from age nine with violinist Alfred De Sève and later with Saul Brant at the McGill Conservatory. Stark was not only the first woman admitted to the conducting program at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia but also one of the earliest Canadian women soloists to perform on American radio and the first woman to play under the baton of maestro Fritz Reiner—a conductor who, according to Rachwal, incarnated the image","PeriodicalId":40563,"journal":{"name":"Women and Music-A Journal of Gender and Culture","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jazz Organizations, Gender Disparities, and the Stereotyping of Black Women","authors":"Jordannah Elizabeth","doi":"10.1353/wam.2023.a912255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2023.a912255","url":null,"abstract":"Jazz Organizations, Gender Disparities, and the Stereotyping of Black Women Jordannah Elizabeth With vulnerability, I write this piece: raw and unable to detach from an enforced vision of my nature as calculating, cold, abrasive, and mean. It is the plight of a Black woman leader. I have looked back time and time again wondering how I have come to be seen with such traits that I’ve never attributed to myself nor to my personal exchanges with others. In thinking of the perplexity, the navigation of the Black woman within jazz organizations and networks, I think of my own experiences with the slowly building, incremental, passive microaggressions in which I and other Black women are systematically made out to be aggressors. This so as not to undermine male supremacy and dominance in senior leadership and management positions. Black women are oftentimes emotionally and mentally belittled and accused of being a threat more than an asset. I have personally experienced a couple of instances in my mostly positive two-decade-long career, where I’ve been subject to microaggressions and ousting; they were not incredibly traumatizing, as I learned about patience and timing of assertion. I am lucky, as I am well liked by white colleagues, and have been able to fit in regarding realms of respectability. Many Black women with darker skin, fuller figures, dialect and accents, and names that do not hide their Blackness suffer more. Being from Baltimore and being able to communicate within different communities offered me more opportunities. I am, though, always concerned about Black women who work in their own communities and have limited professional options in jazz, as some towns can only accommodate so many professionals, there being only one university, or one or two specialized organizations, or institutions that desire only graduates of prestigious schools and conservatories. [End Page 96] For me, negativity began when I started to set and maintain clear boundaries. Of course, there are still many positive voices, but battles ensued at a scale I had not experienced before when I started saying “no.” These nos were not even hard rejections or the closing off of compromise. In retrospect, I remember I also began to prioritize my family and writing, cutting back on the overgiving of time, money, emotional support, and bandwidth to some social justice causes and friends. I chose to streamline my energy to a smaller pool of people, specifically for the several weeks I needed to finish a book. Seemingly in response to prioritizing my own well-being and career goals, I began being called aggressive, insane, mean, a bully, and controlling, when for many years prior to this I received very little condemnation or negative interactions aside from a normal amount of unavoidable conflict. Traits in Black women such as ambition, assertiveness, setting clear boundaries, and speaking the truth about injustice are often construed as confrontational and a source of conflict","PeriodicalId":40563,"journal":{"name":"Women and Music-A Journal of Gender and Culture","volume":"475 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135711003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers ed. by Terri Lyne (review)","authors":"Caity Gyorgy","doi":"10.1353/wam.2023.a912257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2023.a912257","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers ed. by Terri Lyne Caity Gyorgy New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers. Edited by Terri Lyne Carrington. Boston: Berklee Press, 2022. 184 pp. For years, jazz fake books contained tunes almost exclusively written by men. The occasional woman’s name might be spotted, such as Bernice Petkere, Ann Ronell, or Dorothy Fields, but for the most part, printed songbook resources were a boys’ club. This is why reading through New Standards as a woman is so inspirational and validating. It is much more than a fake book: despite the subtitle stating that the book includes “101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers,” many of the compositions are arranged and feature intros, added rhythmic and harmonic notation, and endings. Traditionally, lead sheets are fairly bare-bones and do not include added musical material. The inclusion of arrangement ideas provides a more personal experience with the compositions and with the women who wrote and arranged the music. For example, Geri Allen’s composition “Unconditional Love” (p. 30) includes an intro with instructions for a left-hand piano rhythm, a bass melody, and directions for when certain instruments should start playing. These instructions continue into the “Head” section of the piece with melody and comping cues for the pianist indicated by “Piano L.H.” in measure 10 and “L.H. Comping Simile” in measure 14. Carmen Lundy’s composition “(I Dream) In Living Color” (pp. 154–155) also features a detailed intro that includes piano voicings, rhythmic hits, and a horn cue. This horn cue is particularly interesting because lead sheets in The Real Vocal Book do not include horn cues.1 In Ingrid Jensen’s composition “Higher Grounds” (p. 14), she has included modal information at specific sections of her piece. For instance, the intro is marked with “Phrygian” before the first measure of music even begins. Similarly, in measure 13 of the A section underneath the C♯-minor-13 chord, she has indicated “Aeolian.” Having this modal information allows the improvisers to better understand how the composer thought about the harmony, even if they choose to interpret it differently in their improvisation. The tunes are organized into thirteen subgenres: Blues, Bop, Even 8ths, Graphic, Groove, Medium Swing, Odd Times and Mixed Meters, Post Bop, Slow/Ballad, South American/Afro-Cuban/Global, Three-Four, Up Tempo, and Vocal. The categorization of sub genres provides readers with easy access to new styles of music with which they might not be familiar and gives them a good jumping-off point to explore more music from each genre and artist. It highlights that women are a part of—and have always been a part of—these styles. New Standards features compositions from different generations of musicians, demonstrating the presence and importance of women throughout the history [End Page 104] of the music. From the early to mid-twentieth century, with women such as Lil Hardin Armst","PeriodicalId":40563,"journal":{"name":"Women and Music-A Journal of Gender and Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135711008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How Do We Sound? How Do We Listen?","authors":"Sherrie Tucker","doi":"10.1353/wam.2023.a912254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2023.a912254","url":null,"abstract":"How Do We Sound? How Do We Listen? Sherrie Tucker Thank you, Tracy, and thank you, everybody—and thank you to the faculty at the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice for this incredibly reflexive, inspiring, interactive discussion of how you approach pedagogy through your work in this teaching and learning environment that is unlike any other. Your work veers dramatically and urgently away from the dominant models of jazz performance training. I just kept thinking, is this what their department meetings are like? Can we Zoom in? Just amazing discussion, openness, spirit. I took so many notes—your conversations are so unlike much of what is out there. And I want to thank the organizers of this incredible two-day event to spend quality time thinking through issues of jazz and gender justice with Black women at the center of jazz, jazz education, and jazz studies—and this conceived as a return—not as “breaking news, this just in!” Black women have been at the center of jazz, jazz studies, jazz and gender studies, jazz and racial justice studies, social justice studies, and social justice organizing for decades, recognized or not, in a continuum that is as old and as new as jazz itself. From my perspective, Black women have been at the center of the critical turn in jazz studies for at least thirty years. It’s been great to see so many of the people who I associate with this turn on this program. You have been at the center of developing frameworks for remembering and knowing the Black women at the center from before you were born. As we’ve heard again and again over the last three days, through the lens of Black feminist theory and praxis, centering Black women is not a narrowing but an expanding. It is capacious. A jazz that centers Black women, and Black feminist theory and praxis, returns and propels us toward a capacious jazz. Yesterday, Angela Davis talked about how “jazz helps us to feel differently,” an important part of “community-building projects.” She said, “It allows us to feel [End Page 86] what we cannot always put into words” and that jazz is a “practice of freedom.” Yesterday, we heard several rich discussions about Black feminist theory and praxis— and how it means many different things to different people and changes over time, while identifying some key principles. Capacious—such a beautiful word—kept recurring: the idea that Black feminist theory and praxis was not always inclusive in the same ways, but that it has been capacious in the tenet that freedom for Black women would mean freedom for everyone. The “everyone” has expanded at times, which is another principle: that Black feminist theory and praxis is responsible to changes in consciousness and expanding notions of inclusion. Robin D. G. Kelley offered a concise working definition of Black Feminist Thought yesterday as, and this is what I wrote in my notes, that [Black feminism] was “an interrogation into all forms of oppression and possibility that is born of Black women’","PeriodicalId":40563,"journal":{"name":"Women and Music-A Journal of Gender and Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135710993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"(Re)Imagining Jazz Education through the Lens of Black Feminist Pedagogy: (Presented at the 2021 Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice)","authors":"Paula Grissom Broughton","doi":"10.1353/wam.2023.a912251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2023.a912251","url":null,"abstract":"(Re)Imagining Jazz Education through the Lens of Black Feminist Pedagogy(Presented at the 2021 Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice) Paula Grissom Broughton Introduction Beginning in fall 2023, Berklee College of Music and Spelman College began a domestic exchange program that allows students from each institution to spend a minimum of one semester on each other’s campus every year. This agreement evolves from a simple question: How can we address the absence of jazz music on a campus where the art form was once performed, encouraged, and celebrated? Such a simple question required countless virtual meetings conceptualizing various components of what this academic domestic exchange would involve, from curriculum logistics to financial responsibilities. There were various concerns raised during the several months of meetings, but two key matters pervaded over the course of planning and developing this exchange: (1) jazz music is an essential component to teaching and learning music on our college campuses, and (2) women of color should be at the center of the curriculum content and pedagogical delivery of this music. Understanding the historical and musical background of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) like Spelman College provides educators, researchers, and pedagogues a framework for examining how institutions can reimagine teaching and learning jazz music. It is within the context of Spelman’s rich legacy and unique environment that this article examines and discusses the dissolution of its jazz ensemble and offers suggestions for future opportunities for revitalizing jazz studies at a women’s college. Spelman College—A Haven for Black Women’s Cultural Expression Of the current 101 HBCUs in the United States, Spelman College is one of only two historically Black colleges for women.1 Spelman is ranked among the top [End Page 51] US liberal arts colleges, as well as the top ten US colleges for women. Located in the city of Atlanta, Georgia, the cradle of the civil rights movement and home of two Nobel Peace Prize winners—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Jimmy Carter—Spelman cultivates “free-minded” leaders through speaking, writing, and critical thinking in the classrooms. Spelman helped birth twentieth-century movements that affected academic diversity through faculty and student leadership in, as well as support of, the US civil rights movement, through the 1981 establishment of a women’s center and comparative women’s studies program, and through faculty and student activism for its first Black woman president, Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, appointed in 1987. Spelman College has a long-standing mission of educating women of color and preparing its students to be change agents in their communities. The institution boasts of its recognition of being a global leader in the education of women of African descent, and its dedication to the intellectual, creative, ethical, and leadership development of its students.2 Spe","PeriodicalId":40563,"journal":{"name":"Women and Music-A Journal of Gender and Culture","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The College Jazz Program as Tradition Making: Establishing a New Lineage in Jazz","authors":"Tracy McMullen","doi":"10.1353/wam.2023.a912250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2023.a912250","url":null,"abstract":"The College Jazz Program as Tradition MakingEstablishing a New Lineage in Jazz Tracy McMullen The habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark As part of a special issue devoted to the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice’s 2021 symposium, Return to the Center: Black Women, Jazz, and Jazz Education, a reader may understandably surmise that this article’s title refers to the institute and its potential to reroute jazz lineages to better include women and nonbinary musicians in the present and future. I have taken up this very argument in other publications and have described the institute’s work as a Black feminist project that addresses gender inequity as well as white supremacy in jazz education.1 But here, surrounded by work representing the positivity, hope, and concrete solutions offered by the symposium, I want to explore the historical roots of the problem that the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice (JGJ) is now taking the lead to address. As jazz became more popular during the 1920s and 1930s, many young white men wanted to learn and perform this music. Whether it was called jazz, swing, or dance band, the music that was labeled “hot” and employed extensive improvisation was associated with African American bands and was often taught and learned in spaces where Black artists were the authorities. In the segregated United States, many white musicians would feel uncomfortable in a space where their race was no longer invisible and difficult realities of race and racism could not be ignored.2 Wanting to learn jazz, but in a way that was comfortable [End Page 32] for them, white male musicians established a new lineage in de facto or de jure segregated colleges and universities where they could have a safe (for them) segregated space to translate the music into their terms without having to face discussions of race and racism. This new lineage instantiated jazz education based on white male desires that placed Black students and female students on the outside.3 This article investigates the program that is regularly cited as the progenitor of college jazz degree programs: North Texas State Teachers College (now University of North Texas [UNT]) and its degree in “dance band” established in 1946 in Denton, Texas. While North Texas could not single-handedly initiate nor propel the problem of the jazz lineage as I will describe it, the program established a template that later jazz programs followed. Close investigation of its origins and inclinations helps illuminate the beginnings of this lineage. I focus on what is usually elided in discussions of this formative program: its status as a legally segregated college for its first ten years. A recent article in DownBeat magazine about the seventy-fifth anniversary of North Texas’s jazz program offers a useful anecdote for the ways race is avoided in discussions of jazz education, and I use the article as ","PeriodicalId":40563,"journal":{"name":"Women and Music-A Journal of Gender and Culture","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135711007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}