What brought you to the Bailey COE, and what kinds of contributions are you hoping to make here?
I’m officially here for the Bailey COE Think Tank, continuing the tradition to include cross-disciplinary contributors. This year the theme is agency, and the three faculty fellows wanted an artist or musician to complete the team. There’s a biologist [Sonia Sultan], an anthropologist and religion scholar [Justine Quijada], and an African American studies and literature scholar [Garry Bertholf] on the faculty.
Professor Bertholf is one of my former professors. He’s great.
Garry was the one that found me! He actually has a past in jazz saxophone, and so he knew about me and sought me out to say, “Hey, here’s this project.” I do a lot of work in academia, and I’ve never come across something like this, so I thought it was an amazing opportunity for me to get outside of the normal job world and think a little bit bigger. I’m a jazz saxophonist and composer––a traditional jazz musician––but I’m also an educator. I’m coming here from the Juilliard school, I’m co-artistic Director of the [Brubeck] Jazz Summit, which is a pre-college program for jazz students, and I do a lot of guest artist workshops with colleges and with all-star high school or middle school bands.
Then, the third arm of my career is advocacy and activism, and that’s where the intersection of agency comes in. I do try to reflect on real life issues going on in my music, and comment on that for the art, but in a more literal sense the Women in Jazz Organization (WIJO) is about trying to level the playing field in jazz. Jazz is a very traditionally misogynistic art form, and women are grossly underrepresented in every aspect of it. Whether we’re talking about musicians and performers, or composers, jazz critics, jazz writers, jazz educators, every single part of the industry is male dominated and there’s a lot of violence toward non-males. WIJO is trying to work on those issues by empowering and educating individuals, creating more strength in the community of women and non-binary artists, and then also addressing the external––how people perceive non-men in these spaces. So based on those three arms of my career, the Think Tank seemed like a really good fit, especially because we’re dealing with agency, we’re at a university, and I’ll be teaching a course in the spring on women in jazz.
So would you say that your motivation to make music is the same thing that drives you towards activism?
Yes and no. There’s definitely overlap, but maybe not so much in terms of why I originally set out to be a musician. There’s just sort of a natural calling when I play the saxophone, something happens in my own body, and I don’t get that feeling doing other things in my life. I have to do it; there’s this calling that I have to do. The most joy for me is performing my compositions in my band, where I feel like it’s an additional layer, or there’s an ability to express myself in a way that I can’t in the English language.
The activism came later as a result of, you know, trying to make music in this environment that is hostile towards women and therefore hostile towards me. After eight years of thinking, “That’s normal,” I started to realize that it’s not normal, it’s not okay, it’s not my fault, and it’s not specific to me. And through those realizations, I felt there was only one choice, which was to try to change it for the better. So that’s how the organization came to be: It came along with some personal development, and a real desire to create a healthier job environment. Especially as I became more of an educator, in a position of power, versus just a product of the system. I couldn’t be complicit in everything, but I also have to function and succeed.
I think the thing in common that drives me through art and activism comes back to jazz itself, like “Why did I pick that specific genre?” I think it’s improvisation, expression. Jazz as an art form is a tradition of commenting on society or mirroring society. It’s not just music for music’s sake; not just sounds. It actually means something, particularly as a composer.
Do you think that this misogynistic or male-dominated environment is signature to jazz? Because jazz mirrors society?
It’s not specific to jazz in that we live within a capitalistic, patriarchal, white supremacy. That’s what our society is based on. So you’re going to see that reflected in everything, in our country and in our world right now. But I think jazz is worse. Women in music is an issue, women in the arts is an issue, women in any career is an issue, right? But in jazz it’s worse. And I’m not a scholar on why, but I’ve dealt with the subject enough to comment on it. For one thing, jazz has these elder pedestals, and you don’t age out until you die. Nobody retires. There’s no HR and there’s nobody holding anyone accountable, so practices that were perfectly acceptable in the 1940s or 1950s are still active, and that’s unique to jazz. In orchestras, they have blind auditions now, and just the structure of an orchestra is different: there is a career, there is a leader. Jazz, by definition, is free form, and it’s freelance. Somebody’s always going to take that gig for less, right? Somebody’s going to be willing to put up with that type of treatment, if you’re not. So if you want to work in jazz you have to be willing to do those things too, and I think that creates a really toxic environment. Obviously you can set standards for yourself, but at the end of the day you want to work, you want to make music. So if you want to learn from the masters, you have to put up with whatever or however they choose to act.
That’s not all of it, for sure. Critics play into it, the labels play into it, even just making instruments. Instruments are gendered, and a lot of jazz instruments are gendered male. There are parts of it that are developmental too, right? The way that schools teach improvisation when middle school girls are starting to go through puberty, they’re super self conscious which is not great timing to learn to improvise, take risks, take a solo. All these sorts of things that we socialize as being male behaviors, like even raising your hand in class.
That’s so interesting because I grew up playing guitar, and I still struggle with the improvisation side of performing––I can’t “jam.”
Yeah, I think that girls also are socialized to always have the right answer. Unless they know they have the right answer, they’re never going to offer it. And in jazz, you never have the right answer, and that’s really uncomfortable.
Do you think that musicians or artists have a moral imperative to address social justice issues in their fields?
Not any more so than anyone. I think that’s a question for the individual. Even just my own physical response to jazz and how much I love it is enough for somebody to want to do it, I understand that. And I think when we’re dealing with privilege in any realm, unless you’ve experienced being the one without it, you don’t know what that is. You don’t have to care until you have to care. And so I think we see this a lot, where the burden is on the oppressed, right? It’s not necessarily the fault of any personal privilege, it’s just that they haven’t had to carry that weight.
How do you see the relationship between making art and the environment?
There’s many aspects of it. One of the things that drew me to this opportunity was how the COE seems like a place where, yes, we’re dealing with the literal environment, nature, science, biology, etc, but it’s actually separate from the environmental sciences, right? And so I’m thinking of it broadly as the environment of anything. We all function within different various environments. So my environment is music, and jazz education, all of that. I think that anybody who’s dealing with changing their field or questioning their field is dealing with the environment––the elements that alter the state of those around them, the things around them, the things they need.
I think it also feels empowering to realize, “Oh, the work that I’m doing is actually a lot bigger than just women in jazz,” because it can get really depressing sometimes when you’re in your own little world all the time, especially in academia, especially in jazz. It’s hard not to question, like “Does this really matter? What’s the point of this kind of thing?” Especially if you do all this work and then nobody comes to see the show, or you do all this work and you see the same toxic patterns in the next generation. To see that work being applied to different fields, I think it starts to feel you’re like a part of something bigger.