Jazz, Gender, Authenticity Proceedings of the 10Th Nordic Jazz Research Conference Stockholm August 30–31 2012 Alf Arvidsson, Editor
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Jazz, Gender, Authenticity Proceedings of the 10th Nordic Jazz Research Conference Stockholm August 30–31 2012 Alf Arvidsson, editor I Svenskt visarkiv/Statens musikverk statensmusikverk.se The articles published here are the authors’ revised versions of the presentations at the 10th Nordic Jazz Conference: Gender and Notions of Authenticity in Jazz, Stockholm, August 30-31, 2012. The Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research does not necessarily support opinions, statements and results clai- med in the texts. Cover photo: Monica Petrini, alto sax, ca. 1956. One of Sweden’s first female saxophonists. Photo from Estrad’s archive/Rolf Dahlgren, in Svenskt visarkiv. Alf Arvidsson, editor: Jazz, Gender, Authenticity Copyright © 2014 Svenskt visarkiv and the authors Publikationer från jazzavdelningen, Svenskt visarkiv, nr 25 ISBN: 978-91-979205-3-7 ISSN: 0281-5567 II Contents Introduction by Alf Arvidsson 5 For Whom is It Important? Marie Selander 16 The Conceptualization of Race, Masculinity, and Authenticity in Early Jazz Historiography Mario Dunkel 25 Billie Holiday, Authenticity and Translation Annjo Klungervik Greenall 35 Come Sunday Morning: Mahalia Jackson, Jazz, and Signifying Spirituality Barry Long 52 Nordic Jazz: A Historical View Janne Mäkelä 61 Østerdalsmusikk 1975–2012: New Wine in New Bottles? James Dickenson 72 The Racial Imagination and Authenticity in Swedish Jazz: The Swedish Reception of Miles Davis’ Versions of Dear Old Stockholm Mischa van Kan 79 Is She a True Jazz Singer? Viveka Hellström 88 Jazz, Popular Music, and Gender; the Case of Lill Lindfors Alf Arvidsson 96 III Narrative Power of the Self: Jazz Representation by Aziza Mustafa- Zadeh Olena Huseynova 104 Gender at Play in Jazz Venues in Britain Elina Hytönen-Ng 114 Women in Contemporary Austrian Jazz Christa Bruckner-Haring 127 Jazz Curricula and Personal Voices Ari Poutiainen 144 Ways of Reading an Armstrong Quote – Moves in the Sociology of Music Erik Nylander 157 Inside the Head of a Trad Jazz Musician Jens Lindgren 173 ‘Over In The Glory Land’ – The story Behind a Real New Orleans Traditional Henrik Smith-Sivertsen 186 ‘Light. Gullin.’ chapter VII Eva Sjöstrand 210 About the Authors 213 IV Introduction Alf Arvidsson Jazz and… When jazz research started to be conducted in a more permanent stream, from the 1950s and onwards, there was a strong tendency to focus on jazz in a ‘pure’ sense. Just as the jazz discourse from the 1930s had been growing out of a will to define a pure and authentic jazz, that was to be separated from other forms of popular music – and put on display under the jazz moniker (see Dunkel’s paper in this volume), it was important for jazz research to focus on jazz per se. This can be seen as an embodiment of the dominant jazz discourse among researchers, that gave them credibility with the leading jazz critics (even when the two categories did not actually combine), but also as a strategy within the wider field of music research; if jazz was to be promoted as a subject of serious research, it was important that the jazz tradition was taken as a given, an autonomous phenomenon worthy of study in itself. After all, this was the dominant way of doing musicology – defining and delimiting a form, selecting the most important lives, works, and epochs, and studying them as rather autonomous entities, relating them more to one another than to ‘outside’ factors. Today, jazz is accepted as a legitimate research subject on par with classical music (although funding for such research probably shows differences). However, there have been many new questions raised within musicology – and the cultural study of music in general, as an effect of various theoretical contributions to the field. For one thing, distinctions between genres is no longer taken for granted; rather, researchers explore how genre borders are built and retained, how status and attention are awarded and distributed, and how this affects the socio-economical conditions for the music, and directly results in changes in the music. The inner dynamics of Western classical music, jazz, and other genres is still an 5 important subject. After all, even if genre labels are of limited value as concepts for the analysis of music, they are still a social fact since the safeguarding of genre borders is performed and lived by people investing emotions, efforts, and economical resources into keeping them very much at work. However, there are other questions, themes, and perspectives that can contribute to a deeper understanding of jazz. These include the physical conditions affecting the existence of jazz in society, the variety of meanings ascribed to it, other uses and functions, or the practices of musicians and the resulting sound. And, some of these questions cannot be posed with a presupposition that jazz should have a privileged position, nor indeed that the concept of genres should be a relevant factor at all. But broader perspectives like ‘race and music,’ ‘emotions in music,’ and ‘what type of music constitutes popular music,’ can very easily lead back to issues of genres such as jazz, through questions such as: are these topics taken up in similar ways in different genres? Or, is there perhaps a functional cleavage between genres? Has one specific genre become the conduit for this issue? If so, has this affected the genre, and how? Has this phenomenon reinforced or destabilized the genre? For the 10th Nordic Jazz Research Conference in 2012, the terms gender and authenticity were chosen by the organizing committee as relevant themes around which to gather discussion. The call for papers received a response beyond the committee’s expectations and hopes – the response from countries outside the Nordic region was surprisingly strong. Unfortunately, not all of the proposals could be accepted, due to the restricted time and space available for the conference. Gender… There seems to be a general pattern in how gender issues have been introduced and developed within different spheres of culture studies during the last decades of the twentieth century.1 Initial works set out to establish a complete picture by focusing attention on the marginalized and omitted women, often in historical revisions with ‘there have also been female…’ as a leading principle. The next step has been to question the system of inclusion and exclusion of forms and genres, and roles, within a hegemonic system. This approach often revealed how genres, considered 6 to be ‘minor’ or insufficient, have been those available to women (as performers or audience members). Likewise, the distribution of roles, differentiated in music production and consumption has been studied, often finding women active in less visible roles that are, nevertheless, crucial to the process. Here, inspiration has often come from anthropological cross-cultural studies of gendered divisions.2 Yet another perspective includes a closer study of cultural works from the analytical traditions of semiotics and/or discourse, and poses questions of how gender is represented, constructed, refracted, and negotiated through both the individual work, and a conglomeration of works. That is, art works are not simply products of a system of gendered differences, but are studied as one of the forces that produce and reinforce gender differences. A wider perspective includes not only the music, but also aspects of performance, both on and off stage, as well as speaking and writing about jazz, and performative aspects of masculinity and femininity. It should be pointed out that these steps are not phases that succeed one another in some kind of developmental scheme, but are rather a model of how definition, expansion, and re-definition create the growth of a field. The introduction of new ideas and perspectives doesn’t necessarily make the previous questions and tasks invalid, although they may have to be refined and restated in more complex ways. Jazz studies have followed this pattern fairly well. Two ground-breaking surveys from the 1980s, one by Sally Placksin and one by Linda Dahl, focused on how women had been marginalized. The studies took the first compensatory steps by bringing some prominent musicians to the forefront.3 Some biographies have followed, celebrating musicians such as Lillian Hardin Armstrong, Hazel Scott, Valaida Snow, and Mary Lou Williams, thus countering the tendency of historical writing that neglects women.4 Sherrie Tucker’s study of all-girl bands during the 1930s and ‘40s was important in revealing how there can be, even in a male- dominated genre, quite large spaces for women. But here, it becomes evident how the writing of history tends to favor the ‘name’ bands and individuals, and how the permanent, rather than the temporary structures ÷ the long careers rather than the short and disrupted ones ÷ are put in focus.5 If the field is widened to also include women as composers, arrangers, fans, critics, photographers, and patrons 7 ÷ the roles that in jazz discourses often are subordinated to the roles of musicians and record producers ÷ the gendered complexity of jazz becomes clearer and, at least somewhat, reduces the impression of jazz as an ‘all-male’ phenomenon.6 Even so, male dominance is not just a matter of men outnumbering women, but also a question of how masculinity is taken to be the norm. Some recent studies have explored how masculinity is constructed in jazz and how, and why, such constructions are taken for granted as intrinsic values of jazz.7 That this masculine hegemony also presupposes a heteronormative sexuality has had a strong repressive effect; the experiences of homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, and cross-dressers, have only fairly recently been possible to speak of.8 Since jazz studies is a marginal field in musicology, as is gender studies, there is still much work to be done, even on the basic level of identifying and describing female jazz musicians.