The presence of women instrumentalists in jazz at best making incremental progress -- albeit almost totally so in combos and bands that they themselves are leaders of (and in which one finds many, and sometimes mostly, men) -- it is clear that there should be no let-up in the effort to bring an end to this blatant form of discrimination in the jazz world. Women belong, and deserve to be, in the mainstream of the art form. That they are not is shameful. In fact, jazz is far behind not only American society but behind all other performing arts and all other musical genres in demolishing gender discrimination.

One of the most heartwarming expressions of concern about this salient issue was Nat Hentoff's Last Chorus column in the June 2001 JazzTimes. Titling his piece "Testosterone Is Not An Instrument," Nat alluded to Lara Pellegrinelli's "scorching . . . indictment" of Wynton Marsalis' Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra for excluding female instrumentalists from its ranks. Lara's broadside originally appeared in the November 2000 Village Voice and reappeared in an updated version in the March 2001 JazzTimes. Titled, respectively, "Dig Boy Dig: Jazz at Lincoln Center Breaks New Ground, But Where Are the Women?" and "I Guess I Would Notice. But that doesn't Mean You Shouldn't," the VV article can be read online at villagevoice.com and the JT one at jazztimes.com. The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra remains all-male as of this essay's posting in March 2004.

Nat Hentoff quoted Billy Taylor as a strong supporter of women instrumentalists. "Time won't do it," said Dr. Taylor. "There has to be an effort." In a trenchant follow-up Letter to the Editor in the September 2001 JazzTimes. British jazz author Mike Hennessey commended Nat "for his condemnation of the pernicious and persistent discrimination to which female musicians have been subjected for decades."

Nat also wrote, in the November 2003 issue of JazzTimes, a wonderful column on Diva. "If there were still big band cutting contests," he said, "[Diva] would swing a lot of the remaining big bands out of the place." (Nat's columns can be found on line at jazztimes.com but the magazine's website does not run its Letters to the Editor column, so the published hard-copy issue itself will have to be sought for Mike's letter.)

Another splendid article is "View from New York: J@LC -- Notice Something Missing?"(www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbx?id=34nw00v3) by Monique Buzzarté, "a trombonist/composer living in New York City specializing in new music. An author and educator as well as a performer, her advocacy efforts for women in music led to the integration of women into the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1997." Buzzarté's article has some arresting links, e.g., "Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of 'Blind' Auditions on Female Musicians," a study by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse published in the September 2000 issue of the <iAmerican Economic Reviewi>, showed that the adoption of screened auditions in symphony orchestras resulted in an astonishing 50 percent greater rate of advancement for women from the preliminary to the semi-final audition rounds, and much greater likelihood that they would win in the final round."

There was quite a flurry of e-mail action on the Jazzgrrls e-network in late 2000 and early 2001 in the wake of Lara Pellegrinelli's Village Voice and Jazztimes essays and sporadically over the course of the following several months. But I've seen virtually nothing on on Jazzgrrls on the theme of discrimination against women in jazz for about a year. (I've downloaded and stored on a Zip disk all of the Jazzgrrls e-letters on the subject since 2000, nearly 700 pages!)

Perhaps it's time to again mount the battlements. Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which receives federal funding, still has no women in its ranks.(Anybody out there for a class action suit?) A wonderfully ironic commentary on all of this was provided by the recent occurrence of a "Jazz and Democracy Symposium" at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, New York, on December 10, 2003. I haven't seen a transcript of the discussion so I don't know whether the absence of women in the LCJ Orchestra was cited as constituting a glaring contradiction of the symposium's theme. One hopes that there was at least one gadfly in the audience who put the question to Wynton, "Where is the other fifty per cent of the populace in your 'democratic' orchestra?" (For some wonderful photographs of the event by Enid Farber, log onto www.jazzhouse.org and scroll down to Jazz Photos in the Gallery and then to "The Jazz & Democracy Symposium.")

Two of my own books contain profiles dealing with this issue. In my <iThe Jazz Scenei>, published by Oxford University Press in 1991, Baltimore-based flutist Paula Hatcher discusses the status of women jazz instrumentalists as of 1990 and in my Living the Jazz Life (Oxford, 2000), Washington-area multi-reed and woodwind player Leigh Pilzer updates the scene a decade later. In the former book I "ghettoized" women in a dozen pages of the final, "Contemporary Scene," chapter. Chided for so doing, I spread women throughout Living the Jazz Life. I take pride in the fact that, of the forty musicians profiled in the latter, eleven are women instrumentalists. My forthcoming (January 2005) Growing Up With Jazz (Oxford) also contains profiles of some women instrumentalists from here and abroad.

Another issue that should be of concern to those who wish to see the elimination of gender discrimination in jazz is the ongoing, and flagrant, bias against women as critics of the music. Examine the mastheads of the leading U.S. jazz magazines and take note of the ratio of men to women writers and photographers. Down Beat has four women among the total of 58 contributors named, JazzTimes five of 61, <iJazzizi> seven of 48.

Several years ago I was examining the list of those who voted that year in the annual Down Beat International Critics Poll and noted that only three women were among the 103 critics listed. This number of women has remained steady since then. When the October 2002 issue arrived in my mailbox, an item therein persuaded me to approach the magazine on the shamefully meager representation of women in the ranks of its poll critics. I wrote the following Letter to the Editor to Down Beat.

September 18, 2002

Letter to the Editor

"Chords & Discords"

Down Beat

editor@downbeat.com

Dear Editor,

A circumstance that has for some years puzzled this longtime

Down Beat reader (who bought his first issue in the mid1940s

and has subscribed for more than three decades) was

ironically highlighted in Lee Konitz's Letter to the Editor [October

2002] in which he thanks "the gentlemen who voted for me."

Had Mr. Konitz (a very great and deservedly valued jazz artist)

perused "The Critics" list that accompanied this year's poll (see

page 47 of the August issue) he would have noted that he was about

99% accurate in expressing his gratitude to "gentlemen" alone. For,

of the 113 critics who submitted ballots this year, by my count only

two were women. (There may have been one or two more since

several of the given names are, for me, problematical.)

Since there is today no dearth of qualified women writing on

jazz, blues, and beyond, why are they all but absent from those

chosen to participate in the annual Down Beat International Critics Poll?

Respectfully,

W. Royal Stokes

I might note that, about five years ago when I first counted the total critics involved in the Down Beat International Critics Poll, the number stood at 103. Last year's 113 indicates that, while the total has increased, those added have not changed the representation of women in the list. There were three in the 2003 list. I ask you, why did Down Beat not add ten women instead of swelling the male contingent?

I was on the critics list back in the 1980s for four or five years and then unceremoniously dropped. (When that happens, one simply does not receive the ballot in March.) In the mid-90s I was once again sent the ballot and have continued to receive them. It is, incidentally, a time-consuming task to make one's choices and fill out the forms, and the recompense for the several-day effort is a Down Beat t-shirt and a year's subscription to the magazine. The poll's results are published in the August issue. Don't confuse the Critics Poll with the Reader's Poll. One participates in the latter by filling out and mailing the ballot that appears in the magazine in the July, August, and September issues. The Readers Poll results appear in the December issue.

So after sending off my Letter to the Editor I let three issues go by and then e-mailed Down Beat's editor in December asking why my letter had never appeared in "Chords and Discords," the Letters to the Editor column. He responded, "I don't think that the letter is going to run. It's far too past Critics Poll to be pertinent. There are very few women writing about jazz. That's a real problem. Honestly, give me a list of 10 who are regularly writing about the music. It's a real problem. We'd welcome them into the fray, but they just don't approach us, and the couple who have approached us and have stuck as valuable contributors, we are happy to use. Sorry that we won't publish the letter."

I guess one sure-fire way to render a Letter to the Editor untimely is for the magazine to sit on it for three months. Anyway, I wrote back that "not publishing the letter works against your stated aim of finding women writers. I mean, self-fulfilling prophecy and all that. Print the letter with an editorial response to the effect that Down Beat would welcome hearing from women writing on jazz (and blues) and I'm sure you would soon have a list of more than '10 who are regularly writing about the music'." I went on to contest his contention that there are few women writing on jazz and I provided him the names of 15 women currently publishing on the art form as critics, several of them eminent authors.

I concluded my letter with the observation that, "as for my letter being untimely, it is only my reference to Lee Konitz's Letter to the Editor in the October 2002 issue that in any (insignificant) way dates the letter. The virtual absence of women among the critics for the Down Beat annual poll is a timeless, and very serious, issue that should be addressed in an aggressive manner, not waiting for women to 'approach' the magazine. I would conjecture that most would hesitate to do so, having already concluded that the Down Beat editorial staff and its contributing writers is pretty much a male preserve. Not a happy image in this day and time, eh?"

I have yet to hear back from Down Beat on this matter and my Letter to the Editor has never appeared in the magazine.

Here's another instance of discrimination against women as jazz critics. The Future of Jazz (A Cappella Books, Chicago Review Press, Chicago, 2002), edited by Yuval Taylor, is a 241-page volume of ten chapters devoted to, e.g., "mainstream jazz," "jazz and race," "the business of jazz," "jazz vocals," "jazz institutions, infrastructures, and media", etc.

"Since this year [2002] may mark the centenary of the art form," says editor Taylor in his Introduction, he "thought it appropriate to ask ten leading jazz critics to ruminate on the state of the art and where it's heading." Pointing out that "choosing the critics was no easy task," he goes on to say that he "wanted a representation of a variety of viewpoints, geographical bases, and races" and "hope[s] [he] was successful on that score." That "representation" is comprised of Will Friedwald, Ted Gioia, Jim Macnie, Peter Margasak, Stuart Nicholson, Ben Ratliff, John F. Szwed, Greg Tate, Peter Watrous, and K. Leander Williams.

Taylor defends, in a parenthesis, the absence of women among the ten contributors to the volume: "(Unfortunately, while some of the best writers about jazz are female, they all seem to be historians; finding female critics who fit my criteria proved to be a task beyond my capacity -- although the fault may well be my own for not casting a wide enough net.)"

Commenting on that parenthetical disclaimer in her review of the book in the Jazz Journalist Association's quarterly Jazz Notes 13/3, 2002, Sunsh Stein says, "This book displays the minds, quirks, and strong opinions of ten men who write about jazz and were chosen to voice their musings on the future of the music we love. Ten men. No women. My significant other (male) looked at the book and said, 'Where are the women?'" Stein cites Taylor's reference in his Introduction to what she names an "egregious error" and she confesses, "We still didn't understand. Surely if Mr. Taylor wanted the healthy addition of a woman's voice in this group, he could have located one. Even the Supreme Court has women. But as it stands we have a book that could be subtitled Ten Guys Sitting Around Shooting the Shit." (Ms. Stein's review can be read online at www.jazzhouse.org; once you are on this site, click on Library, then click on Book Excerpts and Reviews, then scroll down the alphabetical list of writers to her name and the review.)

The absence of any women's voices among the critics is only one of the two major flaws of this collection. The other is that these, mostly "usual suspects," display, to a man, an astonishing ignorance of the many, many outstanding women horn, string, and percussion players working in the world of jazz today. At least fifty singers (probably more -- I lost count) are named in the index. Four women pianists -- Toshiko Akiyoshi, Alice Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams, and Lil Hardin -- are named, as is the all-women big band Diva. The only female instrumentalist -- other than the pianists -- who will find herself mentioned in the book is drummer Susie Ibarra. Virtually all of the references to the five non-singing women and to Diva are as entries in lists of exemplars chosen to make a point. Only Toshiko merits a several-word phrase. That is, the presence of women in jazz is all but ignored except in terms of their roles as vocalists.

Comments on the text above will be most welcome. May I suggest that they be sent both to me (wroyalstokes@gmail.com) and to the Jazzgrrls list (jazzgrrls@topica.com). I look forward to your responses. I won't post any responses on my website without permission of the responder.