In 1999, Jazz Times asked me, among other writers on jazz, to select the best jazz recording of that year. I had no hesitation naming the Arbors' recording FIVE PLAY On The Brink (ARCD 19218). There was such swinging joy in these solos and ensembles, and the ballads were like overhearing an intimate conversation.
Some of my colleagues were surprised at my choice. They didn't come right out and say, "How could you pick an all-female band?" but implicit in their surprise was a refrain I've heard recurringly since I started writing about this music over 50 years ago: "Chicks just don't have the chops to get right into this music. They can sing and play piano, but horns?!"
This macho misconception still endures among some musicians of the other gender. Wynton Marsalis, for example, has yet to have a full-time woman player in his world-traveling jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. At an educational demonstration in front of Lincoln Center one of the women musicians held up a pertinent poster: "Testosterone Is Not A Musical Instrument."
Now, Arbors Records, a label that as Thoreau put it in another context, "listens to its own drum," presents FIVE PLAY ... Plus. The leader - and multi-dimensional drummer - is Sherrie Maricle, who also heads the all-woman big band, DIVA, of which I wrote in American Music Is (Da Capo Press): "If there were still big band cutting sessions, DIVA would swing a lot of the remaining big bands out of the place."
At Arbors' 2001 salute to Ruby Braff on his 74th birthday in Florida, I heard several members of this edition of FIVE PLAY "live" for the first time. Of Anat Cohen, originally a product of the lively Tel Aviv jazz scene, I wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "She filled the room with a huge, bursting sound and an infectious beat as she played with groups of diverse backgrounds and styles."
Also impressively present on alto saxophone and flute was Karolina Strassmayer who, as I noted, "moved in and out of various combos with warmth, wit and vigor." And Sherrie Maricle attentively and flowingly found the groove of the varying "rhythm waves" - as Basie guitarist Freddie Greene used to call the jazz pulse - of the groups she spurred.
In this set - along with Tomoko Ohno, Noriko Ueda, Jami Dauber and Barbara Laronga, of whom more as we move along, there are continual surprises - such is the challenging nature of this music. Until That Old Feeling, I didn't know of Anat Cohen's searching, spirited clarinet playing.
And, if I were to select one of the most luminously sensuous and haunting performances in modern jazz, it would be Noriko Ueda's arrangement of In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning with Noriko Ueda on bass and Barbara Laronga's deeply personal flugelhorn.
A song I'd not heard before that should be in the repertories of more groups is the Anthony Newley/Leslie Bricusse Pure Imagination, arranged - another surprise for me - by Anat Cohen, doubling on tenor, with pianist Tomoko Ohno who knows how to make music breathe.
I am of an age to have seen Shirley Temple in a first-run movie, but I never imagined hearing On the Good Ship Lollipop wittily arranged by Rich Shemaria in a jazz setting. Anat Cohen's transmutation of what started as a cotton-candy song reminded me of once telling her that although she undeniably has her own voice, I hear the soul of Ben Webster in her tenor playing. And on trumpet, Jami Dauber, like all significant jazz players, speaks on her trumpet. As the musicians of my youth used to say, she "tells a story."
In the interest of full disclosure, I am on the Advisory Board of International Women In jazz, an organization committed to "actively ensuring a place for women as a vital part of the past, present and future of jazz."
Women have always been at the vital core of jazz - not only Mary Lou Williams but also, for example, tenor saxophonist Viola Burnside with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. She could have held her own with Coleman Hawkins. And there are many more jazzwomen finally getting attention in books devoted to women in jazz, but not yet in some of the standard histories.
My own awakening to the absurdity of the notion that women in jazz were an oxymoron came when I was 16 and Woody Herman's band - before "the four brothers" - came to Boston in a theater. It was 1941, and my friends and I were eager to hear and see the show because we'd heard that Woody had actually hired a girl trumpeter, Billie Rogers.
Chuckling in anticipation of her clinkers, we heard a powerful swinger who cut the arrangements with confident elan. In Gene Lees' Leader of the Band: Woody Herman (Oxford University Press), he tells of how once this 22-year-old jazzwoman from Montana joined the band, a sideman, embarrassed to be on the same stand with a chick, resigned. But, as Lees noted, Woody remembered that when the band played five or six shows a day, Billie Rogers had more stamina than the rest of the section.
Lees added: "She always gave Woody credit for courage in opening the way for the other women to follow." And many continue to follow, but too many are still not getting a chance to be fully enough heard. I've done liner notes for jazzwomen who produce their own records because there are established labels that still think of jazz in terms of gender.
I wish I still had a jazz radio program. Way back in Boston, I ran The Jazz Album on WMEX, and greatly irritated some listeners by sometimes not announcing the names of the players until the recording was over. Some listeners accustomed to putting down certain musicians suddenly and enthusiastically found they had "rediscovered" those players.
Now, with more recordings by women players - though not enough - I would test the gender bias of both lay listeners of musicians. I'd play FIVE PLAY ... Plus, The DIVA Jazz Orchestra and other large and small combos consisting entirely of what DownBeat used to patronizingly call "distaff" players.
In her valuable memoir, All In Good Time (reissued by the University of Illinois Press), Marian McPartland, an historian of women in jazz when she's off the stand, writes: "Each of us in jazz is an individual - unique, different. The kind of life we have lived comes out in our music." Or, as Charlie Parker put it: "Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom; if you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But man, there's no boundary line to art."
No boundaries of race, gender, nationality, nor any part of the human condition. Jazz has become an international language because it tells such personal stories with such immediacy. To still have barriers against the stories of women betrays the essence of this music of the life force - everyone's life force.
For years, Dr. Billy Taylor has insistently - at Kennedy Center in Washington and other venues - included jazzwomen. As he has said, these barriers will fall, "but it takes effort."
However, as more listeners in this country and around the world get to hear FIVE PLAY, DIVA, and the growing number of other jazzwomen, the sheer joy and strength of their music will effortlessly bring pleasure - in Duke Ellington's liberating phrase - beyond category. |
