Smashing stereotypes: The women artists rocking the EFG London Jazz Festival 2021

“We have stories to tell, and music to share”
Making noise: Cassie Kinoshi, Sheila Maurice-Grey and Yazz Ahmed
Adama Jalloh/Toby Coulson/handout
Jane Cornwell9 November 2021

The next time you see a female jazz musician onstage, consider what it took to get her there. The stereotypes she had to smash. The room she had to make; space she had to own. Jazz is held to be the music of freedom, what with its roots in struggle, rejection of rules and bursts of on-the-fly brilliance, but women in jazz – instrumentalists, especially – are still comparatively few.

It’s better than it was. A major factor in London’s ongoing jazz renaissance is the high visibility of a core of younger female players. But clichés prevail: that any woman in a jazz band must be the singer. That instruments like drums, trombone and trumpet are better suited to men, that women don’t take solos, lead bands or write and produce their own music.

All of which is rubbish: the line-up for this month’s EFG London Jazz Festival positively shimmers with a wealth of multi-skilled, multigenerational UK jazz musicians who happen to identify as female: drummer Jas Kayser; trombonist Rosie Turton; trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey; guitarist Shirley ‘Nardeydey’ Tetteh; saxophonist, flautist and violinist Tori Freestone; pianists Nikki Iles, Nikki Yeoh and Sarah Tandy. I could go on, naming a plethora of others who’ve overcome feelings of isolation, fear of humiliation and a tendency to self-deprecation to showcase the beauty and power in the music they love.

Shirley Tetteh
Gomez de Villaboa

Trumpet and flugelhorn player Yazz Ahmed had few female role models growing up. “I started to think, ‘Maybe women aren’t cut out to play brass’,” says the Surrey-raised British-Bahraini, whose award-winning oeuvre – rooted in jazz, textured by electronics, laced with silvery Arabic modes – she’ll present at the festival in collaboration with her quintet and the BBC Concert Orchestra.

“But I did have a female trumpet teacher, and later I discovered women like Kiku Collins from Beyoncé’s band. I learned that you can play trumpet and still be perceived as feminine. I’d always thought I had to be one of the lads.”

Being judged more harshly than men – fact – has meant that female musicians often work twice as hard just to be accepted. Acclaimed London-based Polish-Ukrainian harpist Alina Bzhezhinska subverts notions of female harp players as “angels on earth playing soothing sounds” by weaving in Afrobeat, hip-hop and electronics. But as the leader of an all-male band she rarely lets her guard down.

“I’ve realised that I’m afraid to be vulnerable in case it’s perceived as weakness,” she admits. “So if it’s my time of the month and I’m suffering, for example, I say nothing; I still lug my harp around like I’m lifting weights. We female artists can spend years honing our stagecraft,” she adds. “We still need to own who we are.”

Alina Bzhezhinska
Steven Cropper

Visibility is one thing. How female musicians experience the jazz scene is another: “Do they get on stage, play then go straight home because they don’t feel welcome?” asks Pelin Opcin of Festival producers Serious. “Are they given enough opportunities to jump in and solo? Are they made to feel equal? Safe?

“It’s been a boys’ club for too long across the entire music industry,” she says. “There’s a lack of gender balance in festival line-ups; some programmers really mess it up. We have to work hard to come together.”

The grassroots changes sown by talent incubators including Tomorrow’s Warriors – the London organisation providing young people of colour and girls with free musical training – and multi-platform movement Jazz re:freshed are evident across the beat-friendly London jazz scene. And in the EFG LJF line up: tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia, nominated for this year’s Mercury Prize for her album The Source, is a member of female-led septet Nérija (who are opening for sax legend Charles Lloyd).

Alto-saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi, a 2019 Mercury nominee with her ensemble Seed, is variously in Nérija and Kokoroko, the Afrobeat-infused eight-piece led by former Tomorrow’s Warrior Sheila Maurice-Grey – who is also in Nérija.

Kinoshi is currently artist-in-residence for Kings Place’s London Unwrapped season, for which her curations include, for the London Jazz Festival, a collaborative installation that explores London life via handheld cameras, field recordings and electro-acoustic samples. She is taking part in a Festival tribute to late Afrobeat icon Tony Allen, and – alongside multi-instrumentalist Laura Jurd - has composed a specially commissioned piece of ‘third stream’ jazz-meets-classical music for the London Sinfonietta.

Such dexterity is a hallmark of jazz’s rising female stars. Cherise Adams-Burnett is a Jazz FM Vocalist of the Year who sings and plays flute in the 23-piece Nu Civilisation Orchestra. Jelly Cleaver is a guitarist, producer, activist and singer-songwriter traversing jazz, funk and DIY punk. Avant-garde Leeds trio JFrisco improvise defiant noise-scapes on sax, keyboards and electric guitar, challenging received ideas of performance, time and gender in the process.

“The energy, anger and sensitivity behind what we do can be threatening to the status quo,” says JFrisco sax player Lara Jones. “We’ve been mocked by people who don’t like the way we play or who we are but we don’t hold back. We have each other - and a huge community of women in music.”

She cites award-winning London-based organisation Blow the Fuse, founded in 1989 by jazz musicians Deidre Cartwright and Alison Rayner of seminal Latin jazz outfit The Guest Stars, as crucial in raising awareness of gender issues in jazz. “They are risk takers who continue to mentor younger women through jazz tours and double bills,” says Jones. “They’ve blazed a path for all of us.”

Recently founded collectives Women in Jazz and Women in Jazz Media have followed their lead: running workshops and master classes, curating talks and events. The designated Women in Jazz stage at August’s Wilderness Festival featured NAYANA IZ, a rapper/producer informed by jazz and Indian culture; while their London Jazz Festival event celebrates the UK’s female rappers and hip-hop and soul artists with sets by JGrrey – who has opened for Billie Eilish – and Kay Young, a recent signee to Jay-Z’s ROC Nation.

Women in Jazz Media focuses on raising awareness and appreciation of women behind the scenes: writers, presenters, photographers. Artists such as Sophie Bass, whose illustrations adorn album covers for Yazz Ahmed and Seed, and live painter Dora Lam, who is often found next to the stage capturing performances on canvas. Broadcaster-DJs such as Tina Edwards, who recently tweeted about what she has to factor in before accepting a gig: “Can I get home safely on nightbuses? Will the fee warrant a taxi? I sometimes get unwarranted attention; what if later I see him walking behind me as I haul a stash of records?”

Such concerns are real, and widespread. “Sharing the experiences of women who are established jazz musicians is necessary for younger women stepping into the scene,” says Opcin. “If you’re a man you probably don’t think about how difficult it can be. If you’re a good man then you’ll pay attention to all these narratives.”

Jazz and gender shouldn’t be a thing, of course. “I can’t wait until we’re able to stop using the term ‘women in jazz’,” says Bzhezhinska, who counts Seventies-era harpists Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby as major inspirations. “We’re getting there. We’re standing on the shoulders of some incredible female pioneers.”

Yazz Ahmed’s most recent 2019 album Polyhymnia focuses on courageous women, among them the influential British jazz saxophonist Barbara Thompson, who was awarded an MBE for services to music in 1996. “I’ll be playing my track ‘Barbara’ in this year’s Jazz Festival,“ says Ahmed, who has previously noted that most female musicians are more interested in collaborating than showboating.

“The traditional jazz culture can be very macho. As a woman you have to practice like crazy and play without fear to avoid being thought [of as] ‘not bad for a girl’.

“But there’s more and more of us all the time,” she adds. “We have stories to tell, and music to share. We need opportunities to flourish.”

The EFG London Jazz Festival runs from November 12-21, efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk

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