Mondo Jazz

WHERE ARE THE FEMALE JAZZ CRITICS ?

Bella domanda, a porsela è Nate Chinen su Jazztimes. Chinen è uno scrittore e critico musicale che spazia dal New York Times al proprio blog, oltre naturalmente ai magazine di jazz.

La domanda comunque ha una valenza mondiale, e, a dispetto dei nomi che il giornalista americano esplica nel suo articolo, il problema è reale.

Manca ed è mancato nel tempo uno sguardo femminile acuto e competente in grado di donare una visione da un angolo diverso della materia musicale. Anche in Italia la mancanza è evidente, solo grazie all'avvento dei blog si comincia a respirare aria nuova.

Qualche settimana fa ho segnalato all'attenzione dei miei lettori il bel blog Jazzdaniels, gestito da Daniela Floris per i testi e Daniela Crevena per le fotografie.

Aggiungo la segnalazione del blog di Cinzia Guidetti, recentemente rinnovato con la collaborazione del fotografo Francesco Truono con ricchi reportage sull'ultima edizione di Umbria Jazz.

Planet Jazz da anni opera con segnalazioni di concerti e festival, poi ci sono altri blog al femminile che però trattano di jazz non in maniera esclusiva oppure sono aggiornati raramente. 

Ecco comunque il testo di Nate Chinen:

Pardon me for propping up an old grievance, but the perpetual shortage of influential female jazz critics has been really bothering me of late. It should bother you too. Not simply for reasons of gender parity; not because of the dictates and quotas of political correctness. You should care because our discourse lacks an illuminating perspective. Without prominent women working visibly and steadily in jazz criticism, the field has long been intractably imbalanced. If you believe as I do that robust criticism is crucial to the life of any art form, this is a deficiency with implications for all of jazz.

Thankfully we do have a (very) small handful of exceptions today, like Lara Pellegrinelli at NPR and Jennifer Odell at DownBeat and the Times-Picayune—informed, perceptive journalists with an aim to reach both the cognoscenti and the hoi polloi. And academia now presents a more heartening picture: There’s no way to inhabit the discipline of jazz studies without absorbing the work of Ingrid Monson, Farah Jasmine Griffin and Penny Von Eschen. But Pellegrinelli, an academic herself, mostly sticks to profile and feature writing, and Odell doesn’t get nearly enough space as a critic.

Consider what might have been, with even just one excellent female critic in an enfranchised position over the last 60 years. What would such a figure have made of the “soft” perceptions of 1950s West Coast jazz? What about Miles Davis, and his journey from “Someday My Prince Will Come” to “Back Seat Betty”? What new, non-worshipful insights might have coalesced around divas like Betty Carter and Sarah Vaughan? How might such a critic have interrogated the masculinist undercurrent of the Young Lions movement—or, for that matter, the alpha-heroic aura of Wynton Marsalis?

For an illustrative contrast, look at the current landscape of pop criticism, which has produced plenty of compelling female voices, including Ann Powers, former chief pop critic for the Los Angeles Times, now filing for NPR; Maura Johnston, music editor at the Village Voice; and Jessica Hopper, Chicago Reader critic. These and other writers bring a clear intelligence to their task, along with a distinctly female perspective.

Some would argue that the nature of pop lends itself to this angle more than jazz. In the introduction to his important 2006 book Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (University of Chicago), John Gennari bemoans the omission of women therein, noting that jazz culture has always favored “a concept of criticism that stresses taut discipline, rationality, and judiciousness—qualities assumed to be part of a masculine intellectual seriousness set off from the infantilized and feminized emotional realm of mass popular culture.”

Then he mentions two pioneering outliers: Helen Oakley Dance, who wrote for DownBeat in the 1930s, even as she produced Duke Ellington’s small-group recordings; and Valerie Wilmer, who chronicled the 1960s avant-garde. “It’s important to recognize the work produced by these women as quality work, not just as women’s work,” Gennari writes. “But it’s also important to recognize how such work might be different because it has been produced by women working in a realm dominated by men and by patriarchal ideologies.”

Links: 

http://jazzdanielsblog.blogspot.com/

http://cinziaguidetti.wordpress.com/author/cinziaguidetti/

http://www.planetjazz.it/2011/10/busto-arsizio-eventi-in-jazz-2011/

http://jazztimes.com/articles/28521-where-are-the-female-jazz-critics