Amanda Ameer, blogger behind artjournal’s Life’s a Pitch, was bummed by the low number of women at pianist Brad Mehldau’s recent Village Vanguard performance (but glad about the audience’s wide age-spread). She cites jazz women instrumentalists as being rare, too. What’s up with this, she wants to know. Send her “the literature on this topic.”
Well, there isn’t any — jazz commentators have to depend upon anecdotal experience and personal observation as basis for their speculations and analysis about jazz audiences, as so many other topics. From my perspective, though, women don’t dislike jazz — throughout my life I’ve been involved with women who like it plenty. Of course, I select all my friends for that trait, but my interactions have also included undergraduate students in my NYU classes on American music over the past 23 years, and my mother who, never before an avid fan, in her early ’80s has taken up jazz appreciation courses (and complains that most of the presentations harken to an ever-more-quickly-receding Swing Era).
The problem is that no one in the jazz world, with the exception of jazz educators, has pleasantly invited women to partake of the music. Rather than being marketed to, women have been neglectfully, perhaps unconsciously, shut out.