Smashing the brass ceiling: Women take on music’s most blokey genre

Jazz has pretty much always been a guy thing. Back in the mid-20th century, it was men who played bebop and hard bop, post-bop then free jazz in dingy late-night basement bars, their trumpets and saxophones shrieking angularly over comping drums and walking bass lines while other men sat around tables smoking, stroking their chins, nodding like they got it. The jam sessions that became a fixture of the 1970s New York loft scene, then of jazz culture in general, were macho battles in which male musicians stood and shredded faster and harder, each fixed on outdoing the other.

If women feared jazz, well, who could blame them?

While it’s easy to name a female jazz vocalist – Ella, Billie and Nina can even go by their first names – citing a female-identifying jazz instrumentalist or bandleader is trickier. Even today, should a woman player walk into a new venue with a group of male jazz musicians, even if she’s holding her music case, she’s assumed to be a singer. Which in turn pisses off jazz singers – this dismissal of their craft as “easy”. Need proof of the voice as instrument? Just listen to Billie Holiday.

Jazz, however, is changing. As it has always done. The genre regularly defies reports of its death to reinvent itself with each new generation of musicians, moving forward by absorbing new musical elements while keeping a foot in tradition.

The jazz currently booming among a younger demographic in cities including London, Chicago, Cape Town and Melbourne is another incarnation of this most porous of musical forms, which is incorporating everything from grime, hip hop and Afrobeat to disco, funk and DJ culture in crossovers that are levelling the playing field. Here are young female instrumentalists unafraid of jumping in to perform solo, or to play in different bands, or compose a jazz suite, or push for something new. Once considered secondary to their menfolk (the extraordinary legacy of spiritual jazz harpist Alice Coltrane was until recently obscured by that of her husband, sax giant John Coltrane), women in jazz are increasingly staking their claim.

Of the 400-plus acts at this year’s Melbourne International Jazz Festival, 61 per cent include ensembles with at least one female-identifying musician and 46 per cent of performances are female-led. Among them, five-time Grammy-winning American bassist and vocalist esperanza spalding folds the musical traditions of Brazil into abstract, often message-driven tunes that traverse jazz, soul and rock. Also on the bill is tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia, one of the UK’s brightest young talents, who blends hip-hop, broken beat and the rhythms of London’s Afro-Caribbean diaspora with modal wig-outs and, on new sophomore album Odyssey, orchestral arrangements for strings.

There’s also Melbourne-born, UK-based trumpeter, keys player and singer Audrey Powne, whose sound involves ambient soul grooves, soaring trumpet solos and songwriting smarts, as well as Melbourne-based, South Korean-born vocalist and experimentalist Sunny Kim, revisiting Bright Splinters, a collaborative project [with minimalist composer/trumpeter Peter Knight] that uses acoustic and processed sound to explore culture, identity and connection.

“Jazz here has become more approachable,” says Sunny Kim. Credit: Sung Hyun Sohn

“I think Melbourne is unique in its openness to experimentation and willingness to blur the lines between genres, partially due to the cultural diversity here,” says Kim, who moved to Melbourne in 2018, and who, like many women working in jazz in Australia, is similarly reshaping what Australian jazz means.

“Jazz here has become more approachable for audiences who may once have found it unfamiliar or intimidating and who are interested in how it intersects with other sounds, be it Indigenous music or electronic or classical influences.”

Also from Melbourneis the festival’s 2023 First Nations Artist in Residence, Noongar woman and soul-jazz singer Bumpy, premiering Tooni, an avant-jazz project about “survival and revival” made with members of the Australia Art Orchestra and sung partly in language.

“Tooni is influenced by a trip I made back to Country, visiting relatives and speaking about mission days and Dreamtime stories and much more,” says Bumpy, who studied jazz improvisation at the Victorian College of the Arts.

“Jazz for me is all about capturing and sharing spirit and providing a space to process and heal.” It’s jazz through an Australian – a First Nations Australian – filter. Jazz as shapeshifter: malleable, questing, a receptacle for storytelling. The jazz voice as a conduit for change.

“Jazz for me is all about capturing and sharing spirit and providing a space to process and heal,” says Bumpy.Credit: Georgia Mein

But despite the rising number of bands in the program led by female instrumentalists or singers (such as New York-based Nicole Zuraitis, winner of Best Jazz Vocal recording at this year’s Grammys, and Grammy-nominated Jazzmeia Horn, also New York-based), the bands they front are still full of men.

“The festival seeks to curate a balanced program every year, which includes factors such as gender, cultural diversity, age and stylistic breadth,” says Hadley Agrez, MIJF CEO and program director. “We recognise that gender equity is a serious issue across the music sector and there is an extraordinary amount of work to be done. Jazz lags behind even the rest of contemporary music.”

Things have improved since 2014, when just 21 per cent of MIJF projects were female-led and only 42 per cent of ensembles included a woman.

The festival’s Take Note initiative aims to accelerate gender parity by appointing an emerging female musician – this year, Melbourne-based flautist and improviser Erica Tucceri – to lead workshops for young musicians, particularly women and gender-diverse people, in high schools across Victoria.

“You can’t be what you can’t see” is Take Note’s philosophy, and it’s with this in mind that Tucceri will be premiering an ambitious new work for a 10-piece ensemble, including double percussion and Melbourne’s Invictus String Quartet, wielding sounds from jazz house (think smooth jazz with pumping beats) to the rocking psychedelia of 1970s Brazil.

“Young female musicians need female mentors,” reiterates Nubya Garcia, one of the many famed alumni of Tomorrow’s Warriors, an award-winning London organisation providing free jazz training to girls and young people of colour. A space where jam session etiquette – keep your turn brief, so someone can have theirs – is learned by young men as well as young women. Where jazz chops are valued, and the American songbook memorised, before students can set their jazz free.

“Young female musicians need female mentors,” says Nubya Garcia.Credit: Danika Lawrence

“I was blessed to find a community that was more diverse than anything I’d experienced,” says Garcia, who in 2016 co-founded Nérija, an all-female sextet mixing spiritual jazz and African rhythms, and with dozens of other ex-Warriors and conservatoire graduates began performing in fourth-wall-smashing venues called things like Steam Down and Total Refreshment Centre. Their own brand of jazz folded in the music their parents played, that they’d grown up listening to (Nigerian Afrobeat, Ghanaian highlife, Jamaican dub) with the sounds of urban London (grime, rap, drum’n’bass) and wrapped it in freewheeling grooves with beat-dropping club attitude.

Melbourne had an equivalent scene, tucked away at house parties, strafed with disco, funk and the sounds of Dj culture, welcoming trained and self-taught players, however they choose to identify. In cities around the world, this new energetic form brought a whole new female audience to jazz.

“There’s a whole new generation of female players coming up who are doing incredible work – because they still really have to be better than good,” says Audrey Powne.

This shift is reflected in MIJF’s program. “We’re aware that what’s gaining traction with the younger mixed demographic is jazz by musicians who aren’t into playing jazz clubs and concert halls,” says Agrez. “So, we’re doing a free night of live acts and DJs across nine CBD venues titled Night Crawl. Audrey Powne is a part of that sound, and Erica Tucceri, so they’ll be there.”

Powne, who was once told by a university lecturer that she’d “have to work twice as hard as my male counterparts to get ahead”, has had a busy year. After finishing touring with the Teskey Brothers this month, she made her sold-out debut at the famous Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Soho, London, armed with a full band, a string quartet and a critically acclaimed solo album, From the Fire, released in February.

“The jazz scene in Australia is informal so it can be socially challenging,” she says. “Most bookings are mates booking mates. I felt I wasn’t considered for a lot of gigs because most ensembles were all-male and kept that way for social reasons.

“But what this means,” she continues brightly, “and what I’ve seen, is there’s a whole new generation of female players coming up who are doing incredible work – because they still really have to be better than good.”

Sunny Kim performs with Bright Splinters at The Jazzlab, October 18; Audrey Powne is at Howler on October 24; Bumpy performs Tooni at Arts Centre Melbourne on October 18; Nubya Garcia plays 170 Russell on October 23. The Melbourne International Jazz Festival runs October 18-27; melbournejazz.com