Rehearsing The Blues: December 2017

UPDATE: I reached out to several writers in the jazz community about this piece, and the one who got back to me was Howard Mandel, president of the Jazz Journalists Association. Howard has graciously allowed me to excerpt some of his reply here. The JJA wasn't included in the original post, and Howard provides excellent information about its representation of women in its awards, as well as on its exploration of some issues regarding female jazz writers and critics (I've edited his comments slightly for clarity):

Maria Schneider, Rene Marie, Anat Cohen (two Awards), Claire Daley, Jane Ira Bloom, Nicole Mitchell, Mary Halvorson and Regina Carter all won [JJA] Awards. This was the 8th Award for Nicole, the third I think for Mary, and the others also have won top place multiple times. So women won almost a third of the Awards for music and musicians. (We do make a distinction between male and female vocalists, giving awards to each, so call it 8 winners, not 9, in the race for gender parity). From my vantage overseeing those Awards, I've been impressed with women taking top honors in horn categories. Maria Schneider has also won as composer/arranger/big band leader etc. many times - not sure that's because her work is beloved or that she is (in a way that might not attach to male bandleaders).

Speaking of an upcoming JJA panel on Women in Jazz Journalism, Mandel notes that

we came up with a very small group of writers from which to draw... [b]ut most of them are not very active, not published in notable magazines, don't have books or even blogs. A big difficulty in recognizing the excellence of women artists, it seems to me, is that there are so few women writing about jazz (more writing about contemporary classical music) and there seem to be no magazines geared towards women that cover jazz. More women in jazz education, but I'm told that is a female-challenging field, too.

Women in jazz media tend to be broadcasters or publicists, and there are a few photographers. No editors, that I know of... And even with the greater prominence of women instrumentalists, that will take some longer time to change.

Howard, I think, agrees with me that the best-of lists are certainly a symptom of a larger "illness," if you will, in the jazz community. But he asks an excellent question about treating that illness: are the lists themselves "where we should begin, or instead with concerted efforts to cover women as well as men all year long, to get their stories out in jazz media, and to find women to write from their individual perspectives for broad audiences?" The answer to that question, it seems to me, is certainly the latter. But I would also say that it seems that often a) women are written about during the year only to disappear when lists come out in December, or b) women are not written about until some token female musicians have to be found for that year-end list.

It is a complex issue, and one I hope is taken up and explored more deeply across the jazz community. (Many thanks to Howard for offering his invaluable response to my original post!)

*END OF UPDATE*

It's nearing the end of the year, which means it's about time for the 12th annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll (also known as the 5th annual NPR poll). I was invited to contribute, purely on the strength of my now moth-eaten reputation as a jazz writer (once jazz people put you on an email list, you stay on it). Ballots were due today, and the full results will be out in a week or so. Davis, one of my all-time favorite jazz writers (his essays on the Marsalis brothers in the '80s are still some of the very best commentary on the neo-traditional movement in jazz) is doing very good work with this poll, which aims to be as comprehensive, and thus as fair, as possible. Still, it's not perfect.

Neither am I. The last time I contributed to the poll was in 2013. I hunted up my ballot from that year; of the top ten albums on my list, only one - Kurt Rosenwinkel's Star of Jupiter - is still even in my music library. Oops. Even worse, only one of my top ten was an album made by a woman (Linda Oh), and only one of the remaining albums had a female instrumentalist in the band (...Linda Oh again, on Dave Douglas's Be Still, which also has vocals by Aoife O'Donovan), while I gave two slots to Brad Mehldau (Mehldau's obviously a master, but what on Earth was I thinking?). Esperanza Spalding got the best vocal album on my ballot, which just seems like a mistake. There were less high-profile and more jazz-oriented singers recording great stuff in 2013, surely.*

In the current climate of politics and pop culture, this failing on my part caught my eye. Despite a higher profile for the issue in recent years, jazz still has a gender equality problem, and year-end lists are one of the easiest places to see it in action.