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.
Last year's NPR poll featured only one female leader in the top ten (Mary Halvorson), while the late Geri Allen, Terri Lyne Carrington, Carla Bley, Jane Ira Bloom, Kris Davis, Melissa Aldana, Allison Miller and Esperanza Spalding showed up in the "The Rest" section as honorable mentions (along with almost 35 male leaders). Just one woman, Shirley Horn, was in the Reissue section, perhaps the most deserving section of a critical spotlight (my own Reissue section this year also features only men, so I'm not exempting myself from blame). Meanwhile, six of the eight vocalists were female. (Good to know that the old gender roles are alive and well.) Perhaps most worryingly, none of the top-voted debut albums in 2016 were led by women. It's hard to believe no women recorded great debut records from late fall 2015 to late fall 2016 - and yet the most votes still went to men (as I say later, please visit the full results, linked below, to see all the votes cast). If it's not a level playing field at step one, no wonder the deck is stacked later on.
This isn't just an NPR poll problem. A few more examples: Nextbop.com, where I used to be a staff writer, publishes best-of (or "favorite") lists each year. Nextbop bills itself as a place for "The Next Generation of Jazz"; in 2016, its editor-in-chief's list was all men. The only woman even name-checked was Terri Lyne Carrington, as a producer. Nextbop staff writer Ben Gray wrote that "jazz is so diverse"; the only woman's name even mentioned on his list was a guest vocalist, Angelique Kidjo.
Peter Hum at the Ottawa Citizen also included only male leaders on his 2016 top ten, and in the thirteen "honourable mentions." Four women leaders appear on the "Best Canadian jazz albums" list. Kris Davis and Shirley Horn appear in other sections. This seems to be something of a pattern - the overall "best" list is dominated by men, while other categories, with more qualifiers attached, get the women's names - for example, Kris Davis's record is on Hum's list of best duo albums.
Davis, Anat Fort, and Esperanza Spalding (who "is to jazz what FKA Twigs is to R&B") were the three leaders who showed up on Ron Hart's list of twenty best jazz albums last year.**
Going bigger, the only women on The Telegraph's poor 2016 list were singers, only one of them alive (this list also misspells "Avishai Cohen," so it wasn't exactly crushing it). Still writing at the New York Times last year, Nate Chinen included just two female leaders, Mary Halvorson and Kris Davis, and namechecked Susan Alcorn, on his jazz-heavy top-ten list. Fred Kaplan's 2016 list at Slate also only featured two women - Shirley Horn and Sarah Vaughan, in the historical releases section. Both of them nevertheless showed up, collaged with Wadada Leo Smith, in the illustration at the top of the article. Horn is described only as a singer, not a pianist. When Kaplan hedges about whether or not to include another album in his jazz top ten, it's by David Bowie.
Of course, there were many more votes for women artists in the full NPR poll results from 2016 than showed up in the top ten, and you should go look at those results and see who got those votes. But the fact still remains that the names that dominate tend to be men, with women often found in sections other than the general top ten. Whether this is a flaw in jazz as a whole, or an issue with list-making, I'm not sure. Perhaps - probably - both. As Ethan Iverson writes of jazz competitions at Do The Math:
The great virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin explained the problem with piano competitions to me thusly: “You are supposed to put your soul into the music, and you end up getting told that some souls are better than other souls.”
What makes one album better than another? Because two or three more people put it on a list than another record? It's a system that rewards the better-known over the obscure, and the establishment over the upstarts. And, this year more than last year, we need to recognize that "the establishment" in jazz means men. Looking through the lists from last year, you'll see the same names over and over and over again. In the usual top-ten list model, this is a good thing - it means we all agree, and it gives us the illusion of objectivity (the NPR poll results even have a "Methodology" section). But when the majority of those names are of men, we have to start asking the hard questions about why. There are women playing and recording jazz; if we want there to be more, we have to ask why they aren't being well enough documented in the jazz community's annual, and most visible, moment of self-congratulation.
*
I can't fix this myself, with just one list. Still, this year, I thought more carefully about my NPR ballot than I have about previous lists I've made. My main motivation in participating at all was to vote for Cécile McLorin Salvant; there is a certain coterie of jazz singers who get a lot of exposure despite not actually being jazz singers much at all, and hopefully my vote will help Salvant, who actually is in a jazz tradition, win over someone like Gregory Porter (who, I suspect, gets a lot of votes because he's the latest in a line of Great Popular Hopes for jazz, someone we hope will bring jazz with him when he starts making money and winning Grammys; ask the jazz community how well that worked out with Robert Glasper and Esperanza Spalding).
But since I had to compile ten best albums, three reissues, and a Latin jazz record as well as voting for Salvant, I went through the records I've received for review and a few others that crossed my path and came up with something that I hope is better than the short-lived list I put together in 2013. It features three women leaders in the top ten - Jihye Lee, whose orchestral album commemorating the Sewol disaster is magnificent, and Kris Davis and Yoko Miwa - as well as Hyeseon Hong's Ee-Ya-Gi (Stories), another orchestral record, in the debut category, which features Ingrid Jensen. It's not enough, but I wanted to only include albums I did actually listen to and love. (For instance, Satoko Fujii has certainly earned a place on lists this year, but my own musical taste meant she didn't make the cut for mine.)
I also tried to stay away from some of the overtly political records that have come out since last Thanksgiving (the earliest that can be included on the NPR poll), from Noah Preminger's Meditations on Freedom to that weird album Delfeayo Marsalis put out last fall (according to the press release, "Delfeayo Marsalis and the Uptown Jazz Orchestra campaign to Make America Great Again! with infectious big band sound." Yeesh). Music has great power, of course, and I included Ron Miles's I Am A Man precisely because I believe that it made its power felt not through press releases, like Preminger, but through the music.***
And lastly, as I mentioned above, I wanted to include the records that stayed with me this year. Top ten lists are a plague on the jazz community. Come December, and everyone starts rolling 'em out. But as my 2013 list shows, those lists can have surprisingly little staying power. I'm sure that in four years, I won't have all of these 2016 records anymore, but I sure hope I have more than just one!
My 2017 ballot (with selected commentary)
New Releases:
Mostly Other People Do The Killing, Paint (Hot Cup). Back in 2014, I went up against Richard Williams (here's his 2016 best-of list) on the BBC's late great Jazz On 3 to defend MOPDtK's Blue, but I've never been the biggest fan of their other records. This one caught me; it's a tightly wound spring of a trio record, like Money Jungle if all the musicians liked each other, or like a hard bop record in a tumble dryer.
Django Bates’ Belovèd, The Study of Touch (ECM). From the off-kilter "Passport" to Bates's own hymn "This World," this record is beautiful. I love a piano trio when it's done well - the three instruments on The Study of Touch are like three limbs of the same body. I often find, when I hear records sent to me for review, that I latch onto one as a standout track. On this record, I couldn't get four or five of the tunes out of my mind. Mastery that hasn't lost the ability to hear itself with fresh ears.
Jihye Lee, April (self-released). Lee wrote and arranged these pieces, which commemorate the Sewol ferry disaster. These kinds of records have to walk a delicate balance beam between perceived ponderousness and flippancy, and April falls into neither. It wears its subject both lightly and with genuine feeling, letting the shifting colors of the music tell the story.
Mark Masters, Blue Skylight (Capri). Ellington and Mingus - natural pairing. Mulligan and Mingus - less so. Props to Masters for not bending over backwards to make "Apple Core" sound like a Mingus tune or "Peggy's Blue Skylight" like a Mulligan one. There's something to say for simply hanging two pictures beside one another and seeing what happens in the middle, and these are excellent pictures.
Stephan Crump, Kris Davis & Eric McPherson, Asteroidia (Intakt). This fascinatingly avant-garde music takes no prisoners. I had the great pleasure of meeting Kris Davis many years ago at the Maine Jazz Camp up in Farmington, but she kind of fell off of my radar over the years. Drummer Eric McPherson, whose work with Fred Hersch is phenomenal, is the name that drew me to this record. This trio is never self-indulgent, and the music drives forward relentlessly, pulling the listener along with it.
Lee Konitz, Frescalalto (Impulse!). None of these musicians needs my analysis or endorsement to be successful, so I admit it - I put this record on here because of Lee Konitz scatting on "Darn That Dream." Go buy it already.
Aaron Parks, Find The Way (ECM). I don't enjoy Aaron Parks the same way I don't enjoy Gilad Hekselman or Eric Harland - first of all, out of rebellion, because it seems like jazz fans in my generation are supposed to enjoy Aaron Parks, and second of all, because their music seems ultimately grounded not in feeling but in technique. I do not expect to enjoy these three musicians when I start listening to them, which of course makes it very enjoyable on the occasions when they prove me wrong. The record I always point to as "the one Aaron Parks record I like" is Dear Someone, a 2009 album by bassist Anders Christensen with the incredible Paul Motian on drums. My opinion is that Parks was grounded, or perhaps simply balanced, by Motian, a drummer who foregrounds feeling over sterile technique. The same occurs on Find The Way, where Parks is joined by Ben Street (who I always enjoy as a fellow Mainer) and Billy Hart. This is really great music, and a testament to its greatness is that it could easily be made into a Billy Hart record or a Ben Street record simply by changing the bolded name on the cover. There's a good amount of floatiness here, but there's also earthiness, and raw power, and even vulnerability - something the Eric Harlands and Gilad Hekselmans can seem scared to show.
Ron Miles, I Am A Man (yellowbird). This is really a supergroup - Miles, Jason Moran, Bill Frisell, Thomas Morgan, and Brian Blade. It's a group with a lot of range working with a set of powerful tunes that themselves cover a lot of ground; the result is one of the best modern jazz records I've heard in quite a while. A tune like "The Gift That Keeps On Giving" could have been recorded in 1994 (in the best possible sense), while the closing "Is There Room In Your Heart For A Man Like Me" could easily feature a musician like Gilad Hekselman (again, in the best sense). Through it all, of course, it could be played by no one else but Miles and this group. At times both familiar and surprising, this is essential listening.
Gerald Cannon, Combinations (Woodneck). I've been a bit dismayed by the latest fad of having many, many guests on albums. It started, I think, with Robert Glasper, and ruined Otis Brown III's debut a few years ago. In my opinion it creates a superficiality in the music, a focus on names rather than sounds, a difficulty digging in to something with an ever-changing group. So I was very pleasantly surprised to hear how well the guests are used on this album - intentionally, as combinations (heyo!) that become instruments in themselves, rather than simply as hooks to make up for weak music.
Yoko Miwa, Pathways (Ocean Blue Tear Music). It's not ground-breaking. But I like this trio's almost "Poinciana"-like take on "Dear Prudence," and Pathways balances tunes that seem to just love swinging (a lost art in these Eric Harland days) with a blend of more contemporary influences, from Michel Camilo to bassist Avishai Cohen. It's a tight group that doesn't sound like it's going through the motions or hitting the latest trends.
Reissues:
Thelonious Monk, Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 (Sam/Saga)
Various Artists, The Savory Collection, Vol. 3 – Honeysuckle Rose: Fats Waller & Friends (The National Jazz Museum in Harlem)
Bill Evans, Another Time: The Hilversum Concert (Resonance)
Vocal:
Cécile McLorin Salvant, Dreams and Daggers (Mack Avenue II). This record is the reason I participated in the NPR poll. I'm really pulling for Salvant, because she's actually a jazz singer, and not many actual jazz singers (by which I mean singers who draw on the actual jazz singing tradition of Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Betty Carter, and others, rather than lounge singing) get the kind of exposure Salvant's been getting. Aaron Diehl is very boring, and Salvant should leave Mack Avenue and work with Jason Moran (it's a shame that the great Geri Allen is gone), but this album is still a virtuoso performance. She doesn't solo per se, instead embellishing melodies with an incredibly creative ear, working with an impressive range and skill with dynamics and rhythm. This is a singer who takes risks, and when "jazz" singing today is the lockjaw floatiness of Gretchen Parlato or the safely poppy Gregory Porter, a young singer who is both within the jazz idiom and taking actual risks with the Great American Songbook should be encouraged.
Debut:
Hyeseon Hong, Ee-Ya-Gi (Stories) (MAMA). I was honestly surprised that Ee-Ya-Gi is Hong's debut record. She's clearly been working with these charts and group for a while, and that time shows in the recorded work - this is a very accomplished record. It both stays in the recognizable world of modern orchestral jazz and strays into more experimental territory, exploring electric keyboard and wordless vocal textures along with more traditional big band ones. These elements, along with the traditional folk music influences that shade Hong's compositions, are balanced very skillfully here. Excellent solos throughout from the likes of Rich Perry and Ingrid Jensen.
Latin:
Miguel Zenon, Tipico (Miel Music).
My 2013 ballot:
New Releases:
Kurt Rosenwinkel, Star of Jupiter
J.D. Allen, The Matador And The Bull
Charlie Haden & Hank Jones, Come Sunday
The Bad Plus, Made Possible
Brad Mehldau, Where Do You Start
Brad Mehldau, Ode
Matt Wilson's Arts and Crafts, An Attitude For Gratitude
Butch Warren, Butch’s Blues
Linda Oh, Initial Here
Dave Douglas, Be Still
Reissues:
Charlie Rouse Quartet & Quintet/Dave Bailey, Yeah/We Paid Our Dues/Takin' Care Of Business/Gettin' Into Somethin'
Bobby Timmons, This Here Is Bobby Timmons/Easy Does It
Evans Bradshaw/Roosevelt Wardell, Look Out!/Pieces Of Eighty-Eight/The Revelation
Vocal:
Esperanza Spalding, Radio Music Society (I have no memory of listening to this album)
Debut:
John Raymond, Strength & Song
Latin:
Correo Aereo, Semillas de Inmensidad
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* Like, say, Cécile McLorin Salvant, whose 2013 record WomanChild is pretty good, if not on the level of her more recent work.
** There may be hope for this year, as Hart's list of the best so far in 2017 (published in May) includes three women - even if one of them is Diana Krall (on the outskirts of jazz at best), shown lounging on top of a table, and even if it does make Krall's album all about producer Tommy LiPuma (no, really). "The beauty of jazz is its unabashed blindness to age, race, color or gender," Hart writes. Uh-huh. (The fact that sexuality isn't included on the list, and that Gary Burton and Fred Hersch are still jazz's token gay musicians, is a whole other article).
*** See my post from November on E.B. White and the duties of artists for more on dealing with times of tyranny.
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