The Really
I decided to start writing this blog when several straws combined to break my back. A $25 ticket price for a Maine Jazz Camp fundraising event that showcased an evening of former campers, all of whom were white men; a call from a musician I had hired over the years but who never hired me and I thought—yay, finally—but it was a call about babysitting his kids; and a young white male jazz graduate new on the scene who, when I asked him if he would play, would only do so if he received $100 while at the same time a Black pianist had the opposite concern—he didn’t want people turned away from listening to music because they could not afford the ticket price. I got to the point where I simply could not watch the same old same old unfold year after year, generation after generation, in the place where I was trying to make music.
Playing a musical instrument in any non-classical genre is an extremely male-dominated field. Blind auditions, which began in the 1970s in professional American orchestras, have led to gender parity in classical music, but this is far from the case in jazz and rock/pop bands. In any local scene, you will find men playing instruments and women singing. The fungibility of classical musicians lends itself to blind auditions, but jazz and popular music seek individual voices that preclude the “blind” approach. Further, the ways that many students learn popular styles is embedded in a history that transformed jazz from a Black space to a consciously white one. The first jazz/popular music degree program was at the segregated North Texas State Teachers College. This lineage and its values have influenced how young people are trained as musicians, including the normalizing of exclusivity: that all white male spaces are normal and unremarkable.
In this blog I will denaturalize this comfort, state the obvious that routinely goes unstated, and point out how each new generation on the scene brings forward these values. First, when folks attend a fundraising event for the Maine Jazz Camp and see only white male musicians, they are taught (again) that this is a space for white men and everyone else is “unusual.” Second, I don’t even have kids, yet I am called for childcare, not a gig (in fact it was to help him go to his gig), by a 30-something male jazz musician. It does keep me feeling young, because I’m always younger than mad-men-era jazz bros who come on the scene every year. Third, the 20-something-I-think white male musician who would only play for $100 demonstrates his understanding of what jazz is. It is about what he is worth; what he deserves. The Black male musician who is concerned about who can listen to jazz comes from a different background and conception of what jazz is. I am not saying all Black musicians think one way and all white musicians think another way. I am saying that there are different traditions and value systems that have different definitions of what jazz is.
How is this all possible in 2024? What are the causes and conditions that support these perspectives and actions in a post-George Floyd, post-#MeToo era when so many young white men think they are anti-racist, anti-sexist, and inclusive? This is what I explore in The Really. Feel free to leave comments if you want to participate in the exploration.
Years ago, I was an 8th grade English and English Language Learning teacher in Oakland, CA. There had been some minor fracas of which I remember nothing, except that an ELL student wanted to make sure I knew what happened from his perspective. Upon my desk I found a folded piece of lined notebook paper on the outside of which was neatly penned: “The Really.”
