Here, for the first time, is the rich and diverse history of women jazz musicians, from rural tent shows and local dance halls to urban theaters and the vaudeville stage, from the steamboats of St. Louis to wartime army bases, from big bands and small combos to the yearly Women's Jazz Festival in Kansas City and New York's Salute to Women in Jazz. Based on three years of extensive research and nearly seventy-five personal interviews, American Women in Jazz presents profiles of over sixty women, set in the context of the musical and social history of the times, many of whom have never before had a chance to tell their story or to speak as honestly, completely, and with such feeling as they do now.

Profiles fourteen women jazz singers.

Women have been involved with jazz since its inception, but all too often their achievements were not as well known as those of their male counterparts. Some Liked It Hot looks at all-girl bands and jazz women from the 1920s through the 1950s and how they fit into the nascent mass culture, particularly film and television, to uncover some of the historical motivations for excluding women from the now firmly established jazz canon. This well-illustrated book chronicles who appeared where and when in over 80 performances, captured in both popular Hollywood productions and in relatively unknown films and television shows. As McGee shows, these performances reflected complex racial attitudes emerging in American culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Her analysis illuminates the heavily mediated representational strategies that jazz women adopted, highlighting the role that race played in constituting public performances of various styles of jazz from “swing” to “hot” and “sweet.” The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Hazel Scott, the Ingenues, Peggy Lee, and Paul Whiteman are just a few of the performers covered in the book, which also includes a detailed filmography.

In jazz circles, players and listeners with “big ears” hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this interdisciplinary collection explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz. Essays range from a reflection on the female boogie-woogie pianists who played at Café Society in New York during the 1930s and 1940s to interpretations of how the jazzman is represented in Dorothy Baker’s novel Young Man with a Horn (1938) and Michael Curtiz’s film adaptation (1950). Taken together, the essays enrich the field of jazz studies by showing how gender dynamics have shaped the production, reception, and criticism of jazz culture. Scholars of music, ethnomusicology, American studies, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies approach the question of gender in jazz from multiple perspectives. One contributor scrutinizes the tendency of jazz historiography to treat singing as subordinate to the predominantly male domain of instrumental music, while another reflects on her doubly inappropriate position as a female trumpet player and a white jazz musician and scholar. Other essays explore the composer George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept as a critique of mid-twentieth-century discourses of embodiment, madness, and black masculinity; performances of “female hysteria” by Les Diaboliques, a feminist improvising trio; and the BBC radio broadcasts of Ivy Benson and Her Ladies’ Dance Orchestra during the Second World War. By incorporating gender analysis into jazz studies, Big Ears transforms ideas of who counts as a subject of study and even of what counts as jazz. Contributors: Christina Baade, Jayna Brown, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hairston, Kristin McGee, Tracy McMullen, Ingrid Monson, Lara Pellegrinelli, Eric Porter, Nichole T. Rustin, Ursel Schlicht, Julie Dawn Smith, Jeffrey Taylor, Sherrie Tucker, João H. Costa Vargas

Examines the contributions of women instrumentalists, composers, teachers, and conductors to American music, and suggests why they have gone unnoticed in the past.

Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor revolutionized music from the end of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, expanding on jazz traditions with distinctly new concepts of composition, improvisation, instrumentation, and performance. Miles, Ornette, Cecil is the first book to connect these three icons of the avant-garde, examining why they are lionized by some critics and reviled by others, while influencing musicians across such divides as genre, geography, and racial and ethnic backgrounds.

The topic of this book may seem unusual to some since there may be those who believe that Puerto Rican women may not have entered the jazz milieu during its early history. Nevertheless, an aim of the book is to dispel this and other false generalizations. The contents of this volume will document how Puerto Rican women were not only present in early jazz but how they played trailblazing and innovative roles and contributed to the emergence of the genre in the States and abroad. This work will present information that is confirmable through a variety of sources. The book may not be the definitive work on the subject but will serve as a starting point to: -document the success and achievement of several Puerto Rican women from the jazz age -consider the different strategies used for success in jazz and film by women -illustrate the evolution of various careers -consider the different personal circumstances under which success was achieved -consider how women in contemporary jazz and film can learn from their predecessors -provide women: older, young, and youthful, examples of success with documentary evidence on how to achieve Book Organization The book is organized into sections that cover a brief history of significant Puerto Rican women in music and the performing arts followed by biographical descriptions of pioneering women in jazz and film. The book also contains a brief discussion on Puerto Rican women in jazz today followed by a discussion surrounding issues affecting women in the arts today. Throughout the text there is commentary on the situations facing women, especially, male chauvinism, colonialism, racism, and anti-women prejudice in jazz. Every effort was made to include only facts that are easily confirmable. Unsupported tales or questionable events are avoided to ensure that the material contained in the volume can be used for teaching purposes and for curriculum development when credit is given to this work. In the process of developing the central theme of this volume, special effort was made to document those experiences where Puerto Rican women collaborate with members of the African American community to confirm how the cross-cultural collaboration resulted beneficial to both ethnic peoples. The book will detail the many instances where members of the African-American community assisted the fledgling Puerto Rican artists achieve success and stardom. Figures such as Helen Elise Smith, David J. Martin, Will Marion Cook, Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith, Dr. Laurence Clifton Jones, and other distinguished African-Americans are described. My hope is that this information will be added to historic works in African-American Studies.