Big Ears

In jazz circles, players and listeners with "big ears" hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this interdisciplinary collection explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz. Essays range from a reflection on the female boogie-woogie pianists who played at New York's Cafe Society during the 1930s and 1940s to an interpretation of representations of the jazzman in Dorothy Baker's 1938 novel, Young Man with a Horn, and Michael Curtiz's 1952 film adaptation. Taken together, the essays enrich the field of jazz studies by showing how gender dynamics have shaped the production, reception, and criticism of jazz culture. Scholars of music, ethnomusicology, American studies, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies approach the question of gender in jazz from a variety of perspectives. One contributor scrutinizes the tendency of jazz historiography to treat singing as subordinate to the predominantly male domain of instrumental music, while another examines pianist and composer George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept as a critique of mid-twentieth-century discourses of embodiment, madness, and black masculinity. Other essays include an exploration of performances of "female hysteria" by Les Diaboliques, a feminist improvising trio; an examination of BBC radio broadcasts of Ivy Benson and her Ladies' Dance Orchestra during World War II; and a reflection by Ingrid Monson on her doubly inappropriate position as a female trumpet player and a white jazz musician and scholar. By incorporating gender analysis into jazz studies, Big Ears transforms ideas of who counts as a subject of study and even of what counts as jazz.