Jazz Feminism is to Soul as Purple is to Lavender

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2022-06-01
Journal	Jazz & Culture
Authors	Nichole T. Rustin

Abstract

On Christmas Day 2020, Disney and Pixar’s animated feature film Soul, a meditation on finding the spark that illuminates the beauty of living, streamed on Disney+ for the first time. Soul is Pixar’s first film to feature an African American main character. Told through the perspective of Joe Gardner, a middle school band teacher and pianist, Soul situates him in the boroughs of a multiethnic and multiracial New York City. On the very day that he believes he has at last achieved his dream, a gig with a prominent jazz band at a well-known jazz club in, arguably, the jazz capital of the world, he has an accident landing him in The Great Before, “where new souls get their personalities” before coming to Earth. Gardner must make it back into his comatose body lying in a hospital before the gig begins.1Before we see the accident, we see Joe in his public school classroom. He’s transcribed “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” on the green chalkboard and is attempting to lead his middle schoolers through practice on instruments barely hanging together. “1-2-3-4 stay on the beat. 2-3-4. That’s in sharp, horns. I see you Caleb. Connie go for it.” Connie, a twelve-year-old Asian girl, rises from her chair to take the trombone solo. Joe’s eyes express his pleasure, but the other children laugh, breaking Connie’s intense focus on the music. She drops to her seat deflated. He then recounts a story to illustrate for the class that “it’s a good thing” Connie had become “a little lost” in the music. Joe’s story is a remembrance of his father, also a musician, who would take him to hear live music in jazz clubs. Once, he heard a piano player who opened the world to him. To Joe, the pianist seemed to float off the stage, and “he took the rest of us with him.” As Joe demonstrates the chords and voicings of that remembered performance, he gets a little lost in it himself, and the children give him their rapt attention. “That’s when I knew I was born to play.”2Joe’s affirmation and support of Connie as a young female improviser demonstrates how to manage the delicate moment when girls and gender nonconforming students may drop out of jazz. He encourages Connie by deflecting the ridicule she might have felt after her solo from her classmates who laugh nervously, not malicious but nonetheless mocking. Joe redirects them not through scolding but by connecting through experiences told in musical stories. The laughter still hurts, and, after school in high dudgeon, Connie arrives at Joe’s apartment for her private lesson: “I came to tell you I quit… . Band is a stupid waste of time… . I think jazz is pointless.” Seconds later she says, “You know Mr. G., I was practicing this one thing. Maybe you could listen and tell me to quit after.” She asks to be heard both in complaint and in performance. Joe understands. “She might say she hates everything, but the trombone is her thing.” Joe supports her not only because she is a girl, but because she seeks her voice in the music. Joe creates for Connie what Camille Thurman calls the “safe space to learn,” crucial to building the musical knowledge and performance technique to grow as a musician.3While Joe creates a safe musical space for his students, his own career as a pianist is not as certain. When Joe is offered a full-time job (with benefits!) as the band teacher, his mother wants him to take the job. She had to manage their family’s economic uncertainty as his father chased his music-making dreams and doesn’t want that for her son. Joe wants to play though. His former student Curley, now drummer for the brilliant saxophonist Dorothea Williams, invites him to the Half Note to audition for Williams. Voiced by Angela Bassett and music played by saxophonist Tia Fuller, Dorothea Williams’s character vibrates with authority, skill, and creativity. Joe is visibly shook being in her presence. The quartet she leads is gender inclusive and multiethnic. It is also one demanding that you take the risk and play even when you don’t know what to play. As Joe finds the groove and then takes off, getting lost in the music, Williams reconsiders her first impression of him, the “teacher.” He is good, she decides, and offers him the job. Joining Williams’s quartet is the epitome of making it as a musician; she, a famous black woman leader, is willing to take a chance on him, Joe Gardner, the unknown educator toiling in the salt mines of teaching middle school band. She welcomes him with the name “Teach.” After their first performance, feeling somewhat depleted from the experience, Joe wonders if that is all there is. He asks Dorothea “What happens next?” She replies, “We come back tomorrow night and do it all over again.”I open with this synopsis of Soul to tease out the gender dynamics present in Joe’s jazz world. Joe, Dorothea, and Connie help us to imagine what a more equitable jazz culture might look and sound like by drawing our attention to what it means to mentor across gender lines, to be heard in complaint and in performance, to be demanding yet inviting, to be self-expressive and caring.4Soul asks us to imagine a jazz world in which women are visible, integrated, and central, aligning women’s stories with men’s rather than making them exceptional. Both Dorothea and Connie are instrumentalists, not singers, who are often set apart from the collective that is the band. They are both also rooted in jazz as the primary musical choice for their creative expression. Soul is imperfect, is sweet, is hopeful, and nevertheless is also critical in that it balances these emotions with others that explore uncertainty, and fear, and ennui. There is no single happy outcome; as Dorothea tells Joe, we come back and do it all again, day after day, not with resignation about the impossible task set before us, but with a commitment to working together to create anew each day.I would argue that these gendered elements of Soul reflect a way of imagining jazz as an equitable space, a way of seeing in action what the music makes us feel is possible to imagine of a just world. Gender remains a useful category in jazz studies because it illuminates the continuum of expectations and experiences of men, women, and gender nonconforming people that are performative, punitive, and liberating in jazz culture and music. I would also argue that by listening to black women within jazz, one can create even more compelling ways to imagine a just and equitable world.Jazz as rhetorical form gives us language for imagining democracy in action; jazz as black music gives us language for conceptualizing love and freedom in undemocratic times; “jazz feminism” as praxis might engender a model of justice that is restorative, generative, and inclusive. Much of our critical attention has been to the influence of black women vocalists within blues to give scope to black experience. Angela Davis proposes in Blues Legacies, Black Feminism that we might read Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as proto-feminists: their music reflected the concerns that would later come to be recognized as central to contemporary feminist discourse, including domestic violence, paid labor, travel, and sexuality. “The birth of the blues was aesthetic evidence of new psychological realities within the black population.” The idea of “freedom” among the black working class underwent a cultural reimagining: “The blues … articulated a new valuation of individual emotional needs and desires.” This focus on individual needs was a shift from how the spirituals reflected “collective aspirations.” Additional shifts included conceiving the performer as distinct from the audience and foregrounding matters of the everyday over those of the sacred. These shifts were not merely musical but reflected shifts in the broader culture that made it possible for audiences to hear a blues woman as having something to say.5Davis’s focus on the intersection of race, gender, and the aesthetic is a critical lens that, Robin James argues, often goes unremarked in philosophical approaches to aesthetics, including those of feminists. Davis, writes James, points us to an “aesthetics of transformation” in her analysis of “context and content.” This aesthetics is radically different than the “aesthetics of receptivity,” “a paradigm of loss and appropriation grounded in white heteromasculine privilege,” allowing white men to consume the bodily and emotional experience seemingly accessible to women and men of color.6 If Davis recovers for us the history of black women as creative, political intellectuals and James examines that history as a subject of (white) feminist analysis, what might it mean to imagine black feminism as a critical disposition rooted in the specificity of jazz culture?7 Is there potential to understand jazz as in and of itself a feminist space? Davis makes “latent” “claims about aesthetics—about what art is, what it does, and why and how it is pleasurable… . This aesthetic [a black feminist blues aesthetic that normalizes the experiences of working-class black women who sang and listened to the blues] identifies an experience of pleasure in art that results not from appropriation, but from complexity, contradiction, and transformation.”8I think I am a jazz feminist, if by jazz feminist we mean someone who approaches the study of jazz culture through the critical frame of feminist theory. I might also be one if we mean someone who understands jazz as a music that reflects and responds to the social, political, and cultural contexts out of which it emerges and persists. I might be one if we mean someone who finds within jazz a space free enough for me to “be” despite the continuing conundrum of being a woman-in-jazz. But I wonder if there is something specific about jazz that evades understanding as a site within which a sui generis feminism has perhaps existed. How do we cultivate alignment between understanding gender within jazz critical practice and black feminist approaches to gender in black music (across all genres)? As jazz is a genre coded in racial terms, is jazz feminism coded as black in the same ways in which blues feminism and hip-hop feminism are? Are we speaking the same critical language, and, if so, are we listening to one another? In bridging this gap, do we create the possibility of a feminist jazz critical practice that speaks to the world we live in now, rather than the past?If we were to try and locate “jazz feminism” as an emergent identity9 as I try to do here, we might imagine it surfacing in the era bridged between the careers of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. By turning our focus to women instrumentalists, we enlarge the capacity of recognizing how jazz helps us “feel” what can’t always be put into words, either about black experience within the segregated postwar period or about freedom dreams.10 Black women instrumentalists have claimed space since the postwar period, even as that space was more often than not circumscribed by patriarchal assumptions about their playing and their place on the scene. These women negotiated embracing the demands of the music (learning how to play and to play well), while also resisting the sexism regularly directed at them. In this essay, I will sketch how we might listen for what black women—who have always already been in the music as instrumentalists, producers, DJs programming jazz on radio, and jazz critics and journalists—say about their experience of gender and expectations of inclusion, equity, and accountability within jazz. Imagining a more just future—imagining justice—is a guiding principle of black feminist thought. How do these women want to be heard? What are their priorities as creative thinkers?11 Their experiences and expectations form the aesthetics and politics of their sound and also suggest a black feminist critical disposition and ecology within jazz, one more vibrant and resonant than that in Soul.* * *In 1962, saxophonist Vi Redd released her first album as a leader, Bird Call, which was produced by Leonard Feather. In the liner notes, Feather writes, “Whether she eventually makes her name as a fine singer who also plays alto, or as a compelling alto player who also sings, I hope these sides will prove definitive to establishing Vi Redd as an important new name in jazz.” Feather’s comments speak to the representational conundrum women instrumentalists found themselves in during the postwar jazz scene. Regardless of the fact that Redd had an established reputation as a saxophonist, she nevertheless had to sing to make the album a viable proposition.Redd was born in Los Angeles to drummer Alton Redd and Mattie Redd. Her great aunt was the multi-instrumentalist and venerated music teacher Alma Hightower, who taught celebrated jazz artists such as Dexter Gordon, Chico Hamilton, Melba Liston, Clora Bryant, Ernie Royal, and Redd herself. Several of her students were members of the Works Progress Administration children’s band she led called the Melodic Dots.12 Unlike most other young women of the time, Redd was never discouraged from performing jazz music since her whole family was so intimately involved in teaching it and performing it on Central Avenue, then a key scene for black musicians. “I think I was one of the first women around L.A. during that time, early ’50s and late ’40s that had a band, had nerve enough to get a band. So Martha Young played piano, that was Lee and Lester Young’s niece, and my brother played drums, and Walter Benton … played tenor, and I played alto and sang and got the gigs.”13Bird Call was meant to be a tribute to Charlie “Bird” Parker, in part reflecting how much Vi Redd is said to have sounded like him. Redd says that she “never had a chance to hear him play, you know? I never got a chance. But in some strange way his music was in the air, and it influenced me and so many others.”14 Feather described the premise of the album as consisting of all tunes “recorded by Bird at one time or another.” He also noted that “Vi was a little perturbed lest the average listener draw the inference that she “is trying to copy Bird,” which was not her intention. Though her natural alto sound, as well as her phrasing and ideas, have a great deal in common with Parker’s, there was no deliberate attempt at imitation.”15 Feather chose all of the tunes played on the album, including “Anthropology,” for which he “took the liberty of writing a new set [of lyrics] with a social message.” The other original piece composed by Feather was “I Remember Bird,” which “if there is a wistful or nostalgic quality here, represents the way I feel about Bird as well as the way Vi feels.”Redd’s second album, Lady Soul, also produced by Feather in 1964, was burdened by the continued lack of commitment to presenting her as an instrumentalist. Critic John Tynan reviewed the album saying, “A discovery of Leonard Feather, Vi Redd may be more celebrated in some quarters as a better-than-average jazz alto saxophonist than as a vocalist.” Vi Redd said of the album, “It wasn’t the right thing to do.” Yoko Suzuki, in her study of Redd’s invisibility as an instrumentalist and the lack of opportunity she had for recording despite the respect other musicians had of her, writes, “One wonders why Redd had more opportunities to perform in public than to record. It is possible that musicians recognized her excellence as a saxophonist and invited her to sit in with them. Who gets recorded, however, is not necessarily determined by and reputation among for these Redd not have much of a recording She a period of time after recording them on as well as teaching in Her to stay to from her after a that he was of to his while she was one day that just with got to be now with these the of them. So then I Redd eventually again, of school for a called of in of Vi Melba Liston, and to the different of jazz from the postwar When of Redd from the situates her as the shift from with their time to more sound that reflected the and loss of that people seemed to feel in the period This is the music with Charlie Parker, and The music that as it a whole new school of for is Vi Redd her own in a blues to Charlie see Redd into her in a and her with a and “I like at Unlike Vi doesn’t her beauty as a for the band. She the beauty of her music be the was well into a career as a and as an on jazz when this was The with which she the very in Redd by on what it means to at Redd is doesn’t make such comments when the of or white women like * to Soul, a of is the with most animated paid to the voice the is, in to being an a and a Curley, the drummer and former student of is by and of the Dorothea Williams’s is by Angela a that with black audiences because of the resonant and of her as well as of her as a black She gives an to Dorothea that the respect the character within the world of the when Dorothea is she is on the by saxophonist Tia former of band, for jazz album for and at the of in the of women in jazz, a that women across of race, and the Dorothea the film the of black women’s as in that as a middle to play the in jazz band but her band teacher her to play the with their was more than the because I could play as a I in love with The remains her while the piano, which she from to remains key to her In to jazz band, she was in band and band in high from a family of musicians and has always been with the music, and jazz in “I listened to jazz as I was because it was always through the I got in the with my it was jazz… . I took jazz for because it was around me all the Though she jazz late in high by and were in middle father, Fuller, her as a I this when she was playing at the with She would play than other She was very and at that Her sound was just so He her to in and be even when you are … I want you to grow and be to play, so I because I knew what have to as a and her as a young with the eyes of someone of the patriarchal elements of the jazz scene and the to her to them. His of her sound and playing her and that rather than her Tia music is as she her with and her as well as her of the freedom the She finds into of the of about listening and technique as to being to play with and complexity, as well as to and across in when she a black women’s found to be an social allowing her to a of the and of being a black … than feeling the as one of she felt her and the idea that some of my are people I at Joe and then of the her, her and to building a practice of to a the experience, Fuller, she says, to in the … I had to be deliberate about my in other to her career a of in jazz and performance at the of the first of the As a teacher, in into her with to create She tells her “I want to and and the we tell so we can in not … working and but love as a of all of these women out that are She the of being a model and to others to their as that for me to me even who she … was an that to you can do has produced most her to with some of the in the so play to that and be as in the blues She has a great understanding of jazz and her She took to Her technique is Her is Her but like her own thing. She has all the of someone who is the in the of sound and technique is grounded in of knowledge of the music and her and the of her in the capacity to take as an a for continuing to grow as a to being by the of being a and being to express when first coming to the New York jazz scene. with a of for accountability in in jazz reflects a critical disposition to the way the culture and a to out how men and women may be in the sexism doesn’t mean all men in the jazz are I am very for the female I have in the last or … But the fact that I only have been to with women in my is just one more of the way the Her for accountability is as well as as in a but to be as the woman instrumentalist or as a wants to be “a of for not only other women, but men, to jazz as a site of creative her that jazz was a place she the experience of she has continued her sound and the to all and to listen the She not after her that over and not who I or trying to prove who I allowing to be in the and embracing of being a an a musician, a woman of in the * of to sexism look like of performance. Davis, the released a of her She writes in her about the of the as the emotional of the coming into about how she was by the of black the of what she calls the American and about the of with her their on She writes, “The laughter was a during the are about the music, jazz, and about being a creative woman with a history with the music. Davis “I have heard this music in a of that no in that will in and as well as on and in of it was in in now by in that are and like and the recording and my many Davis a public yet also of freedom of and also of one of creative by one of cultural and family Davis performing many of her with musicians such as Davis, and in In at the she writes, “I have heard this music since I can I have heard this Davis that she a from about how as a to sound, the of getting in the I heard that space for or … I made a you make a space in the * as we and jazz as a musical and social space that is by men, we explore and the experience of as a gendered we often to how people who by their own stories or their own within the often cultural of jazz think about gender as a experience. How must we listen and read to those and The performance of is one that a of from the to and must not just who can do but what is this thing we think is when the culture itself demands a model of that emotional and emotional that an of the of and of collective and as we see the potential of a to the to name musical one that and the of others as a of the cultural form and that to the of our political in the language of democracy and we still the imagining of how we all may and our place within the feminism in part as a of black feminism and on the of hip-hop and of black feminism also out of a specific experience of black feminism asks what it mean to the space between musical and with which one experiences both and

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5406/25784773.5.1.01