I would say that DEI has more rapidly than most reached the final evolutionary stage noted by philosopher Eric Hoffer, who famously observed that every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. The problem with that is that DEI was never a great cause to begin with. However, it has definitely entered its racket stage, and maybe its certifiably insane stage. Behold…
Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice—no, I’m not making that up— at Boston’s Berklee College of Music has issued the results of a study that claims to show that because “male-identified jazz educators” outnumber “female-identified counterparts” six to one, it is proof that jazz “remains predominantly male due to a biased system.” The Institute’s website asks,“What would jazz sound like in a culture without patriarchy?” One wag’s answer: “Probably like nothing at all.”
Indeed most jazz musicians and composer are male. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if any variation from demographic equality proves bias, oppression and discrimination in your DEI worldview, then this phenomenon is sinister. Researcher Lara Pellegrinelli PhD is an “ethnomusicologist” who contributed to the study. She blathers, “To identify each jazz faculty member by gender, we examined the pronouns we encountered in these sources—and found only “he” and “she” in reference to the educators in our study. This is why we use the terminology “female-identified” and “male-identified” for our data, as opposed to sex assigned at birth or the descriptors “female-identifying” and “male-identifying,” which suggests a more active process of participant self-identification.”
Oh.
The study is “intended to help administrators understand how gender affects the production and reproduction of knowledge in jazz education, a professional arena critical to halting women’s erasure and disrupting systemic inequalities.” This is supposed to advance the Institute’s vision to “cultivate creative practice and scholarship within an integrated and egalitarian setting,” “engage ourselves and others in the pursuit of jazz without patriarchy,” and “recogniz[e] the role that jazz can play in the larger struggle for social justice.”
Yikes.
With a handful of notable exceptions like trombonist Melba Liston, Vi Redd, Shirley Scott, Marian McPartland, and Toshiko Akiyoshi in past decades and more recently Terri Lyne Carrington, Esperanza Spalding, Ingrid Jensen, and Anat Cohen—none of whom have the fame and public recognition of Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck—jazz composition and instrumental mastery is overwhelmingly male. I periodically listen to a jazz band in a local restaurant, and it sports a superb female sax player. But the other six musicians are male, with the additional women performing all being vocalists.
Occam’s Razor would suggest that for many reasons girls and women are not drawn to instruments like the trumpet, drums and trombone, and that they prefer to play piano or be in front of the band, singing.
There are other factors as well. Jazz musicians traditionally earn their livelihoods during long nights, exhausting tours, and work in smoky bars and clubs. These are not inviting environments for mothers and young women. It is also true that established cultural stereotypes are self perpetuating. Jazz combos and bands began as male groups, and thus it was likely that girls and women were and are unlikely to be drawn to them, except as singers.
None of this should compel an organized effort to seek out or manufacture female jazz musicians or instructors; to give the hiring of women priority over the hiring of the best artists, or to interpret the possibility that women just aren’t as interested in jazz as men are as a sinister phenomenon that must be “fixed.” Men still dominate musical composition in all genres. What matters is that the quality music gets written, performed and sold. Women greatly outnumber men in the textile arts: nobody seems overly concerned about it. Maybe men, for mysterious reasons, are not drawn to that mode of expression. The disproportionately small participation of females in jazz composition and instrumental performance may be similarly benign.
But then there would be no need for an Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice….
Ethics Alarms 
More female identified humans are having babies. I’d like to see the DEI specialists sink their teeth into that!
Have a pleasant evening and keep the faith…🤠
Next, the Institute of Astronomy and Shape Studies at MIT will inform us that, because nearly every known star in the universe is round, there exists an inherent bias in the system toward square stars.
We’re doomed!!!
Musical numbers: Math and music nurture a deep and complex relationship
The above article goes beyond the Occams razor theory and delves into the type of thinking required in music development. Jazz by its nature is improvisational which requires an innate understanding of rhythm and timing; both of which are rooted in mathematical thinking.
What this researcher should have done was to examine the correlation between women in mathematical fields and women in improvisational music. Nothing stops women from composing except their own abilities and interests. Sometimes the reason is simply the underrepresented person do not have what it takes to be superstars.
Bingo, and yes, that was what I was circling around and too blotto yesterday to be clear. Thank-you. I’m an idiot, but not as big an idiot as Dr. Pellegrinelli, which is faint praise indeed.
Being a read it and play it student of the piano, I am in awe of jazz players who can improvise on the piano. Simply incomprehensible to me. What an other-worldly skill and mind.
As a woman musician and mathematician (my husband would claim engineers aren’t mathematicians, but the lay person sees no difference), I think there is one aspect of Jazz that you are forgetting. I tried Jazz and not only do I hate the sounds of Jazz (I like Chopin, Beethoven, and Holst as my personal preference), but I also found the emphasis on improvisation impossible. I cannot improvise music, or anything really. I have no skill at making up music, though if you give me sheet music not horrendously above my level, I’ll play it for you, at least with adequate practice. I can sing nearly anything (in my range) that you can throw at me in at least seven different languages, and with a little time, I can do them from memory. I have a repetoire of several hundred songs that I can pick up and perform adequately on a given day without much more than a little warmup. I read soprano and bass clefs before I read English (my only language). I dabble in 7 instruments, with 2 of those mastered “enough”.
All of this is not to toot my own horn. I have much I could do to improve my music, but I have other priorities and I am happy at “good enough”. However, with all this musical study, I have found that while I can do a lot, I CANNOT improvise, nor can I make up my own lyrics. This means that Jazz musicianship is beyond my reach. It takes a different type of mind than mine to be a good Jazz musician, and not just someone who knows the math and the theory. There is another element besides musical and mathematical thinking, that of a certain type of creativity.
This is an area that I am deficient in for many disciplines. I can knit, crochet, cross stitch, and embroider a hundred different patterns, but I cannot make my own pattern to save my life. I can take a basic programming language and instructions for a set of functions and program up a large variety of operations, but I cannot write a full program from scratch. I can critique mathematical proofs (at my level, not that of my husband’s doctorate), but don’t ask me to write one. I can cook or bake from a recipe, but I cannot throw food together and make it work. Don’t ask me to decorate, as I cannot create a vision and make it come to fruition.
In addition to this, most girls choose instruments in a band (or in rich communities, orchestras) that are not sterotypically Jazz instruments. Flutes, Clarinets, Piccolos, Violins, and Oboes were the majority female instruments in my middle, high school, and college experiences. Males tended to choose the heavier instruments. As a French Horn player, I can tell you that I was an anomaly. There were a few girls who played alto sax, but tenor saxes were almost typically male. No one told us that we couldn’t play the other instruments, but these were the instruments we chose, not unlike the choice between teaching and engineering. Women make choices based on interests, just as men do, and our agency should not be denied for “equity”.
There have been some issues in the past with the equality of musicianship. Compare the famous Robert Schumann and his wife Clara. I would say that Clara has the more interesting and challenging pieces, but Robert is the one that everyone knows about. He was more socially acceptable and highly thought of than his wife, which may or may not have contributed to his significantly larger number of compositions, which may or may not be why he is more highly regarded. Indeed, for the longest time, male composers were approved of, but women were forbidden the art. We can say this for nearly any profession in history, however, including teaching, whereas today the majority of teachers, at least in the lower grades, are female. Historical precedent does not equate to today’s reality. We have made huge changes in society.
Some women have creativity in the kitchen, but not in sewing, others can sew without a pattern and never do anything but burn food. Others excel at all of the above, so I don’t necessarily think that creativity is lacking in the feminine as a whole. However, the subset of women who like Jazz, have the ability to play the instruments that are Jazz oriented, and have the mathematical, musical, and creative skills to excel in Jazz are few, not even counting the women who wish the work of Jazz, as mentioned before, in smokey bars and long road tours not conducive to the family that many women want. This does not mean there is an equity problem in Jazz or that the patriarchy is destroying everything and we have to rewrite the entire societal contract to give women a leg up on something they don’t want/are able to compete in. Merit and skill should be what we deal with, not some statistical version of “equality”.
Wow! What a great post! Going up as a Comment of the Day, ASAP.
Yeah, another tour-de-force, Sarah. Outstanding!! You bring up some really interesting points – especially regarding instrument size and improvisation – that I would not have considered.
I like Holst (love “The Planets”), but I’m a bigger fan of Resphigi’s tone poems. Try “The Pines of Rome” on for size and see what you think. I recommend the recording of Muti conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Who calls Dr. Pellegrinelli an “ethnomusicologist”? She does, of course, because “pseudoscientist” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Shouldn’t she stick to bottled water?
Count Basie to Marian McPartland upon his first hearing her perform (as reported by MM herself): “My! You play … so many notes!”
As is often the case, this post went off in a totally different direction than I thought it would based on the headline. I thought it would be a “white guys can’t jump” thing, recalling Jerry Mulligan was once, much to his annoyance, told white guys can’t play jazz; you have to be black.
Here I thought Berklee College of Music was a serious institution. Silly me. Any institution with the following mission statement should be dismissed:
“The mission of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice is to support and sustain a cultural transformation in jazz, with the commitment to recruit, teach, mentor, and advocate for musicians seeking to study or perform jazz, with gender justice and racial justice as guiding principles.” (emphases added).
Just out of curiosity, what the hell does “gender justice” mean and what does it have to do with vamping in EflatMinor? Do we only study songs written by women? Do women prefer major modalities over augmented fifths? Do women avoid playing the F#maj13add4addflat7* chord?
Music is the one medium where gender and race are monumentally irrelevant. Is Within Temptation is fantastic because the lead singer is a woman? No. They are great because their music is complex and full of surprises. The Warning (my most recent favorite band) isn’t great because it consists of three Mexican sisters. No. They are great because their music is intricate and heavy. The fact that they started out very young and have gained world-wide recognition as a family band is interesting but they are phenomenal musicians and songwriters. Kiki Wongo isn’t great because she is a woman, but because she has talent and tone, and can melt your heart or tear your face off with her guitar playing (Smashing Pumpkins realized her greatness when they selected her out of 10s of thousands of applicants for their lead guitarist on their latest tours). Linda Ronstadt isn’t great because she is a woman; she is great because her voice compells attention and takes you on all kinds of sonic adventures.
As for “racial justice” does that mean that only minorities are allowed to play jazz? Dizzie Gillespie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane are not monsters because they were African American. No, they are great because they wrote and played the vocabulary for modern jazz. What about Buddy Rich? Rich wasn’t great because he was white? Hardly: he is great because he could play drums like nobody’s business and had a sublime sense of rhythm.
jvb
*Ed. Note: That, my friends, is the inestimable, venerable, and incomparable Alex Lifeson Chord, which opens their magnum opus “Hemispheres: ‘Cygnus X-1 Book II, Hemispheres. I: Prelude.'” There is anecdotal evidence that Rush did not appeal to women. I never got that. The many, many, many concerts I have attended over the last 40 years clearly demonstrated that Rush did, in fact, appeal to women. Some were even more rabid fans than your humble correspondent, going so far as to tattooing their likenesses on various parts of their physiques.
A COTD, John.
Thanks, Jack. It may make amends for the terrible errors in my CNN app post. For that, I must hide under my desk.
jvb
I may be wrong but I dont think any o fthe great jazz celebreties mentioned attended or attended a school of music
Ha! Great point!
Indeed. Dream Theater, though, consists of Berklee grads. That is worth something.
jvb