When iconic jazz singer Billie Holiday sighed: ‘You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation”, she wasn’t simply referring to slavery.
What Lady Day was smarting about was a different kind of bondage: the tendency for women in jazz to be billed at worst as back-up singers, or at best as sultry interpreters of standards rather than innovative artists in their own right.
These days, there are still plenty of satin-bedecked boobs jiggling around the jazz circuit, but if you look beyond the cleavage line there are also plenty of women who aren’t just belting out tired ‘Great American Songbook” standards. A pair of ground-breaking instrumentalists shattering the stereotypes at this year’s festival bear testimony to this.
Take drummer Cindy Blackman. She may be best known as the kinetically sexy pulse-keeper for funk rocker Lenny Kravitz. She may also have hit celebrity-rag headlines recently by marrying rock guitar god Carlos Santana. And yes, with that ‘loud ‘n proud” Afro, she just might be one of the most fierce femmes to hit the jazz scene since soul-funk sister Betty Davis seduced Miles Davis with her Bitches Brew. But it’s her serious musical chops, not just her sex appeal that’s earned the 51-year- old Blackman a reputation as one of jazz’s most innovative drummers.
‘I’m a black woman, so I’ve encountered racial prejudice and I’ve encountered gender prejudice. I’ve also encountered prejudice against my Afro when I wore that out,” she once told Drumhead Magazine. ‘But I’ve also encountered prejudice against my musical opinions. What I’ve learned to do is completely ignore that.”
Four-limbed, polyrhythmic groove
What Blackman doesn’t ignore is her quest for creativity. She’s one of a handful of drummers who moves easily from straight-ahead hard bop (1988’s Arcane) to funky progressive rock fusion (2010’s Another Lifetime) and back again. For Blackman, playing the drums isn’t just about keeping time. It’s about creating it.
‘Drummers should have a lot of impact and a great sound without being limited to a conventional role in the band. The drums should speak just as freely as anybody,” she wrote in the liner notes to 1992’s Code Red. No conventional time-keeping cul-de-sac for this drummer. Instead, her fearless, four-limbed, polyrhythmic groove assault on the skins and cymbals catapults the drummer’s role beyond simple rhythm-section support for a sax, trumpet or piano soloist.
‘In the past, there were a lot of stigmas attached to women playing certain instruments,” Blackman told the Toronto Star a few years back. ‘A lot of women stick to particular instruments, like piano, that are acceptable, so that lessens the playing field in terms of how many women are out there. And let’s face it, boys’ clubs still exist. But I care nothing about that. I’m going to do what I’m going to do, musically anyway.”
Free space-funk fusion
On the intimate Moses Molelekwa stage on Saturday evening, this means leading her quartet through a special tribute to legendary jazz fusion drummer, Tony Williams’ band, Lifetime. Expect a retro-futurist homage to her mentor that romps from electric swing and heavy progressive rock workouts to spontaneously free space-funk fusions. In a nutshell: it’s sure to be dynamically sexy, but also dynamically smart.
Speaking of which, it takes even more smarts to compete and win in a field exclusively dominated by pop pin-ups or R&B booty babes. Which is precisely what 26-year-old bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding did when she became the first jazz artist in the history of the Grammy Awards to win the ‘best new artist” category this year. Perusing her CV, it’s easy to see how she upstaged the likes of teen pop heartthrob Justin Bieber and upwardly mobile rapper Drake.
Sweet 16
She first heard the creative call at age four after tuning into a performance by classical cellist Yo Yo Ma on TV. ‘That was when I realised that I wanted to do something musical,” she says. ‘It was definitely the thing that hipped me to the whole idea of music as a creative pursuit.” At five, her self-taught violin skills secured her place in Oregon’s Chamber Music Society. By 15, she was the community orchestra’s concert master. Meanwhile, she’d fallen in love with the bass. Jazz, blues, funk and hip-hop gigs helped her score a scholarship on Portland State University’s music programme at sweet 16.
‘I was definitely the youngest bass player in the program,” she says. ‘I had been playing the bass for about a year and a half. Most of the cats in the programme had already had at least eight years of training under their belts and I was trying to play in these orchestras and do these Bach cello suites. It wasn’t really flying, but if nothing else, my teachers were saying, ‘Okay, she does have talent.’”
It was this talent that really blossomed when she enrolled at the prestigious Berklee College of Music. She networked with jazz luminaries including bassist Stanley Clarke, guitarist Pat Metheny and saxophonist Donald Harrison. At 20, she became the youngest faculty member in the history of the college. She toured with singer Patti Austin. She honed her instrumental chops with smooth jazzers Fourplay and neo-fusion trumpet stylist Christian Scott. She stretched herself in hard-bop saxophonist Joe Lovano’s Us 5 quartet.
Prodigy-turned-pro
At 21, she released her debut trio album, Junjo. New York Times jazz scribe Ben Ratliff was bewitched by her angelic vocals, hailing Spalding’s invention of ‘her own feminine space, a different sound from top to bottom”. On 2008’s Esperanza, she fleshed out this femininity, filtering improvisation and multilingual Anglo-Portuguese-Spanish scats into a heady Latin jazz-hop fusion. The album catapulted to the top of Billboard’s contemporary jazz chart, where it remained for more than 70 weeks. Media opportunities followed: David Letterman’s Late Show, invites from President Barack Obama to perform at the White House and Nobel Peace Prize, New Yorker and Oprah Magazine profiles and more.
Phew, where to next for the prodigy-turned-pro? Full circle, if her latest Billboard contemporary jazz chart-topping album Chamber Music Society is any indication.
Inspired by her classical training, Spalding has created a modern chamber music group that blends spontaneous improvisation with sophisticated string trio arrangements. Serious jazz listeners attending her performance at Rosies on Saturday can expect an ear-opening fusion that weaves jazz, folk and world-music flavours into the enduring foundations of classical chamber-music traditions.
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