The book Big Ears discusses the interesting topic of gender in jazz. The aim of this collection is to bring gender studies into jazz studies in a situation where in previous years the emphasis on gender studies has been on classical music and pop. This approach is a much-needed addition to jazz studies, which have generally shied away from the concept of gender, even though the highly masculinised music genre would seem like the ideal area for the use of such an approach. Big Ears, an interdisciplinary effort, aims to fill in this gap in jazz research. The book itself is divided into three parts and consists of 14 articles, only some of which will be discussed here.
The first part concentrates on looking at jazz history from a gendered perspective, opening our eyes to the marginalised experiences. Lara Pellegrinelli discusses singing as a gendered domain and points out that singing has been a neglected field within gender studies, where instrumentalists have been the focus of scholarly attention. This emphasis is connected to singers’ mainstream popularity and discussions of value. Turning away from singing and accessing instruments has been a way of achieving musical sophistication. In their act of establishing jazz's credentials as art, historians removed jazz from its entertainment contexts by emphasising instrumentalists. This confines the singers to an inferior social space and erases singing from the cultural memory of jazz.
The most interesting article in the book is Christina Baade's work on Ivy Benson's Ladies’ Dance Orchestras, who were contracted to the BBC during World War II. Through Benson, Baade reveals a wider historical debate over women doing men's jobs and being viewed as profoundly threatening via their invasion of the male territory of musicianship. While women moved into the work front and into tasks perceived as masculine, Britain as a nation became obsessed with maintaining heightened gender difference. The reactions Benson was faced with reveal, according to Baade, ‘the sense of male entitlement ingrained’ in the musicians’ profession (p. 106). The BBC contract was seen as too big for a girls’ band to fulfil and as something to which any men's band had a greater claim. The female musicians in the course of these developments started to use glamour as a strategy. Through reassuring men that femininity and gender differences still existed, Benson was able to negotiate her success.
In her chapter, Tracy McMullen concentrates on the cultural replay and re-enactment taking place within jazz. Through nostalgia and homogeneity, McMullen looks at how the racially diverse and gender-mixed Yale Concert Band, under the leadership of Thomas Duffy, re-enacts the 1940s Glen Miller Band's white masculinity in the contemporary world. This setting is interesting, as according to McMullen, Miller himself would not have welcomed women or men of colour into his band, while this also brings forth the gender ritual of a big band and a jazz performance. For her the re-enactment creates a unity that depends upon all the band members becoming white men. McMullen also looks at how Wynton Marsalis, in his work at the Jazz at the Lincoln Centre, highlights black masculine hipness. In this transition the flow of the text is momentarily lost and the connection between these two parts could have been better constructed, but the concepts presented are nonetheless important and interesting.
Part two approaches gender through the context of improvisation and performance through the concept of embodiment. Julie Dawn Smith's article looks at a European feminist trio through the idea that experimental women musicians are heard as women out of control. In her discussion, Smith uses concepts such as hysteria and madwomen. As a whole the article doesn't necessarily work as well as one might expect. The descriptions of the trio's performance and the theoretical discussions appear as if they are two separate entities. This is especially apparent when Freud is pulled into the article. I could not see that the sub-chapter on Freud gave anything unique to the article, and leaving this part out would have made the article a more composed entity. However, the chapter does bring up several interesting ideas and opens new doors for looking at women as improvisers.
Part three discusses what it means to represent jazz. It opens with Ursel Schlicht's article on women musicians and audiences in post-war Germany. In her approach she highlights how in post-war Germany listening to jazz symbolised a courageous distance from Nazi ideology. Under the Nazis jazz was perceived to be dangerous, but also vital. The new dance styles were perceived as excessive and threatening to a woman's good reputation. In the general public this raised fears about weak men and overtly sexual women. Interestingly enough, similar discussions have also been visible in France (see Jordan 2010). Through the analysis of public discussion, Schlicht points out that female jazz fans could not be taken seriously and that women were expected to prefer smooth (white) over hot (black) jazz, and not to understand the ‘real’ thing.
The common thing with gender studies still seems to be an emphasis on women. Yet men could also be approached through gender studies and a few such openings are welcomingly apparent in this book, providing interesting themes for further studies. For example, Jeffrey Taylor states in a passing comment that he has detected suggestions that the hyper-masculine subculture among early jazz pianists in the 1920s may have ‘developed in response to the fact that many early ragtime and jazz pianists were gay’ (p. 55). If this is true, these kinds of findings and perspectives would provide a field for interesting research that could offer useful insights into early jazz culture while also challenging existing views of that historical era. More work on such topics would be very welcome.
The book nonetheless has considerable problems. Firstly, the reference technique used is confusing. The references are marked in the endnotes following each article, while there is also a shared bibliography at the end of the book. Most of the endnote references are not listed in the bibliography, which leads one to wonder why there is a shared bibliography at all. There are also quite a few mistakes in the references, such as the year in the bibliography being different from the one marked in the text, or the year in the endnotes being different from the year in the back bibliography. By the time one gets to Smith's article one has just got used to looking at the references at the endnotes. Smith nonetheless suddenly mentions the references (year, page) within her text. Such discontinuity and inaccuracy in the referencing from one article to the next creates an atmosphere of unprofessional editing or rushed work.
Secondly, I found it disturbing that a few of the chapters did not have any subheadings. Fourteen pages of text without subheadings makes the reading somewhat burdensome. In addition, the book's three parts do not really work as well as they could have. The last part seemed more a random collection of texts than a collection of interconnected articles. Thirdly, I was uncomfortable with the way the editors highlight the idea of providing a forum for woman scholars (p. 27). Creating (or maintaining) such gendered oppositions within academia is questionable. This emphasis on women scholars is also rather peculiar as the book includes several chapters written by men.
Lastly, the editors list one of the aims of the book as being to provide a teaching tool for such places as jazz seminars. While I am not sure if the book as a whole would work as a teaching tool, certainly at least a few of the articles – such as Baade's – could be a useful addition in teaching.
Overall, as Rustin states, the anthology shows that ‘examining gender is a vital and important framework for understanding the music and the culture’ (p. 6). Opening up discussions about gender within jazz studies is a welcomed addition to jazz studies.
