Almost Like a Real Band: Navigating a Gendered Jazz Art World

Established in 1995, the Hamilton College Jazz Archive holds a collection of videotaped interviews, currently numbering over 300 entries, with jazz musicians, arrangers, writers and critics. Initiated by Milt Filius and directed by Monk Rowe, the collection initially aimed to interview all surviving members of the Count Basie Orchestra, but has since grown to include musicians from every era of popular American jazz up to the present day.

A culture of meritocracy operates in the ways in which technical and musical skills, especially improvisational skills, organize the jazz world. For example, despite strong barriers to mixed race bands playing live during the Swing Era, record producers often put together mixed race bands for sound recordings. Improvisational skill was developed and displayed during jam sessions. In these after-hours sessions, performers were organized by skill—if hot players were there, lesser players only watched—and consequential connections were made for gigs (see Berliner 1994, Gourse 1996, Lopes 2002, Peretti 1992, and Sandke 2010).

Our review of the literature about gender and the arts indicates that most arts worlds follow a gender exclusionary culture but few also have a simultaneous inclusive culture like jazz. For example, while major American symphonies may have an ideal of meritocracy, it was not operative until many adopted the practice of blind auditions and even then, women face limited opportunities for advancement into the highest ranks of orchestras, rarely become soloists, or play feminized instruments (Coulangeon, et al. 2005; Cowen 1996; Goldin and Rouse 2000; McLeod 1993). Rock and roll seems to have no culture of meritocracy as women are systematically steered towards feminized roles (singer or bass player) or pushed into “all-girl” bands (Clawson 1999, 1993; Croce and Cooper 1990; Fournet 2010).

The Hamilton College Jazz Archive was established in 1995 by Milton F. Filius, an alumnus of the College who had a great passion for jazz and was friends with many musicians. The interviews were conducted to record and preserve elements of jazz history that might otherwise not have been captured. Many interviewees were friends of Filius and his wife, Nikki, but many others were interviewed when they played gigs at the College. Others still were chosen for interviews based on a version of snowball sampling, wherein the Archive’s director would be put in touch with an artist of interest by someone already interviewed. The sample was not drawn systematically, but all musicians interviewed have achieved a recognizable level of professional success. The interviews were not collected for social-scientific data-gathering, but were rather intended to serve as autobiographical accounts of jazz history. As of 2018, the Archive holds 24 interviews with female jazz artists (and an additional 11 with women who held a number of jazz world occupations in recording, journalism, and composition) and over two hundred seventy interviews with male jazz artists.

Instrument categories in which some men but no women have been interviewed are banjo, clarinet, trombone, trumpet, tuba, vibraphone, and violin.

Data for the 2001 National Endowment for the Arts study of jazz musicians can be accessed at: http://​www.​cpanda.​org/​cpanda/​studies/​c00015. Data for 1960 comes from Feather (1962).

See endnote 4 for sources of statistics. In comparison women make up just over 30% of all musicians in the top American symphonies (Allmendinger and Hackman 1995, 429; Goldin and Rouse 2000, 717–18; Wakin 2005).

An additional nine women in the Archive were excluded from this study: eight worked in the non-musical side of the industry (production, journalism), and one was married to a prominent male musician.

Some male musicians described being discouraged by their parents from careers in jazz, but these dispersions were usually rooted in the perception that professional music is a low-status occupation. For example, while growing up in the 1960s, guitarist Howard Alden’s parents would occasionally suggest that he should become a doctor and play music just for fun, but he said that they gave up when they recognized his passion for music.

Male interviewees’ references to “lady singers,” “lady bass players,” or “lady bands” was so frequent that we did not bother to count. Calling out the gender of non-male musicians was normative.

“Cherokee” is a jazz standard written by Ray Noble that is characteristically performed at a high tempo.

Women’s reliance on male mentors or family members to gain entry to and advancement in various art worlds is also discussed by Cowen 1996, Lang and Lang (1988), and Valdez and Halley (1996).

Although men also relied on their networks for entry into jazz and as a source for new jobs their networks operated differently than women’s networks, and men had a wider set of options for landing jobs. First men’s networks were less rooted in family and more firmly based on friendships and professional relationships with other musicians. Second, men had far greater access to late night jam sessions which often functioned as informal auditions sessions for young players. Finally, hiring practices in the big band era were quite informal; bandleaders commonly relied on word of mouth to advertise positions and often acted on recommendations from trusted fellow musicians. Thus being embedded in male-centric musical networks facilitated entry into the jazz world and women are/were less likely to be tightly connected to these networks (see Huffman and Torres 2002 regarding key differences between men’s and women’s job-related social networks).