jazz

When female jazz players pierce the glass ceiling

Monday 09 June 2008

Why is there no gender equality in jazz? Some female jazz musicians talk about the need to shake off old habits. (Report: P.Lafitte and D.Charton).

If you look at any photo of a group of jazz musicians in France, you will find several men - old or young, and perhaps a few women, probably singers. But very few female instrumentalists.

It's a curious paradox for a musical genre that has always been viewed as a movement ahead of its times.

There are certainly female jazz musicians out there on the French scene:  musicians with long careers such as pianist Sophia Domancich, bassists Helene Labarrière and Joelle Léandre, and a new generation of female saxophonists such as Geraldine Laurent, Alexandra Grimal and Sophie Alour, and drummer Anne Paceo, who have all proved their mettle in the field.

But there aren’t many of them. “I sometimes discuss this with Joelle Léandre,” says Domancich, “and we say: where are they? We succeeded in making it in the jazz business, at live concerts – it’s possible. I think it’s a matter of identification. The jazz greats are male. It’s like in a bar: you don’t go there if there are only guys hanging around.”

Not too many aspiring female jazz musicians go to music schools. At the jazz department of the National Conservatory in Paris, there are currently only four women enrolled and about sixty men. And so, although in the past some female musicians made a success of their careers - pianists Mary Lou Williams and Alice Coltrane, for example –  they are not in the pantheon of jazz greats.

The ones who dare to try to get into the jazz scene have to put up with the existing stereotypes. “The first time I showed up at a jam session,” recalls saxophonist Grimal, “the organizers put me down as a singer. A woman is inevitably a singer. ”

Drummer Anne Paceo adds, “When I was 14 or 15, and I wanted to play drums at jam sessions, the organizers never gave me a chance. I seemed too young; and also - I was a girl. ”

Marie Buscatto, a professor at the Sorbonne, and a researcher at the Paris-based Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), wrote a book about the issue entitled, “Women of Jazz”. She believes that  “it’s not only more difficult for women to enter the profession than men but, even when they do, they are also more handicapped in their careers.”

It’s difficult however, to acknowledge the “handicapped”. The younger women performers balk at regarding themselves as victims. Now that they have attained fame, they avoid thinking about how they maintained networks among the mainly-male ranks.

For the moment, they regard their colleagues as “pals”. But they admit being afraid of the “freaks in the room” phenomenon, as Paceo puts it. “There’s the sense of always having to prove you are more than the men,” Grimal adds.

On several occasions, organizers assumed Domancich was a manager or a singer at jazz festivals. “A young man once said to me, ‘Ah, no badges, they’re only for the musicians.’  ‘And the female musicians? What do they do?’ I retorted. He was very embarrassed by his blunder and apologized,” she says.

With the arrival of new female jazz musicians, new behaviors seem to emerge. “I think that the jazzmen are happy to see women arriving on the scene,” says Grimal.