I never know when a relatively obscure topic will strike a chord and produced a bumper crop of terrific comments. “Does Jazz Really Need DEI?”turned out to be such a post. Here is the second standout response, a Comment of the Day by johnburger 2013 on the post, Does Jazz Really Need DEI?
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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 E flatMinor? 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 fantastic because the lead singer is a woman? No. The combo is 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 wasn’t great because she is a woman; she was great because her voice compelled attention and takes you on all kinds of sonic adventures. [Editor’s note: Linda cannot sing any more because of Parkinson’s, but she was indeed great, and is still a great interview.)
As for “racial justice,” does that mean that only minorities are allowed to play jazz? Dizzie Gillespie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane are not considered jazz geniuses because they were African American. No, they were great because they wrote and played the vocabulary for modern jazz. What about Buddy Rich? Was rich 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.
Ethics Alarms 
Dave Brubeck’s quartet may have looked like a group of white accountants, but their 14th album’s Time Out was an exploration into time signatures fairly new to jazz. Joe Morello’s drumming was an experiment with 5/4 time that makes Take Five a standard. Give me those white accountants playing great jazz any day. Don’t mess with perfection in the name of DEI.
I confess my ignorance. I know not of any of the artists you mentioned until you got to Linda Ronstadt. Her voice was sultry, the Peggy Lee of the 70″s
My selection of women-fronted bands was purposeful: The artists I mentioned are at the forefront of their particular genres. Within Temptation is symphonic metal; The Warning are rock/hard rock. Kiki Wongo is playing in an alternative rock mainstay Smashing Pumpkins tour, and Linda Ronstadt is, well, Linda Ronstadt and can do whatever she pleases, even if she is no longer able to sing.
There is a big push in modern rock music to celebrate women in rock bands, as if that is some sort of new phenomenon. I guess someone should tell Janis Joplin and Grace Slick about it.
jvb
Thank you for the honor, sir.
jvb
Impressive, John. Are you a musicologist in your spare time?
Linda Ronstadt. What a voice. And boy, was she ever cute.
The technician who tunes our piano in Southern Arizona tunes Linda’s in Tucson as well, although he says Linda spends most of her time in San Francisco. Her losing her voice. I guess God has a strange sense of humor.
By the way, the big music venue (Arizona Opera and Tucson Symphony, etc.) in Tucson bears her name, as well it should.
I can add a note about the Gender Justice program at Berklee. Although there have been great female jazz artists, their numbers were and remain relatively few, for whatever reasons. To some extent, this may be due to the stigmatizing of jazz music as a pursuit — and certainly as a career — for women, and a consequent (albeit nebulous) lack of encouragement. My daughter is one of a small number of female jazz musicians in our Southern city, just finishing high school, and one of a smaller percent playing professionally. She spent a part of two summers at Berklee in the Gender Justice program, and it helped her musically, of course. But it also helped her connect with a variety of women who are pursing jazz as a career, better understand the barriers some of them have faced and how they overcame them, and made valuable connections should she have difficult questions or concerns going forward. I’m by no means a DEI fan or apologist, but I can’t deny the benefits of this particular program because I have witnessed them directly. Not all cancers are equally malignant or invasive or metastatic; similarly, not all DEI-ish programs such as this one are the absolute cultural scourge some commenters suggest. Maybe after a period of time the inspirational aspects of the Berklee program under discussion will have outlived their purpose. Meanwhile, I enjoy this blog by Jack Marshall in particular because important grey areas are not reflexively “decolorized” by a black-white duality, such as we can’t help but notice in most left-wing writings. Yes, we need the bright light of reason to expose the absolute absurdity and/or noxiousness of certain ideas, opinions, customs, rules, laws, behaviors, positions, etc., and in many of these instances we don’t need to get lost in nonsensical or irrelevant minutiae. But the Gender Justice program at Berklee may not be one of the latter. Sometimes what seems like the bright light of reason is really just Clorox bleach.