All-Female Jazz Jubilee

Insight on the News, June 11, 2001 by Christian Toto

The Kennedy Center celebrates the contribution of women to jazz every yap with an annual festival, but women still have a tough time getting recognized in a very male world.

Ken Burns made a common mistake when creating his Jazz documentary series, according to maestro Billy Taylor. The lauded documentary mostly ignored the women who helped forge the art form -- a misstep Taylor would know not to make. For the last six years, Taylor has served as the overseer of the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. The annual program, held this year in May, invites a wealth of female musicians for three days of unbridled musical celebration, from jazz seminars to jam sessions.

"I'm very proud of the fact that we're giving credit to people who have been overlooked for far too long," says Taylor, who created the program to right a musical wrong -- that is, to give female jazz players their due.

The effort is taking root in the hippest of all jazz hot spots, New York, where female jazz musicians are starting their own festivals and networks. Still, female jazz players, from composers to saxophonists, labor in obscurity. Taylor likes to quiz music fans on their top five jazz performers. These informal lists, he says, never include women. What's more, many fans have trouble naming just one, yet alone five, "top" female players. "It's a problem of exposure" Taylor says with a sigh.

Take singer and saxophonist Vi Redd, age 72, who won this year's Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award. "She's a classic example of someone who should have been up there [with the greats], " Taylor says. "It's not fair. We want to salute her." Redd, still an active performer, has served on the National Endowment for the Arts' jazz panel and spent a lifetime sharing the stage with jazz's great names, from Count Basie to Earl Hines.

Yet more than a few female jazz musicians work so hard at their craft they rarely notice that jazz remains a man's world. Pianist Joyce DiCamillo says her 20-plus years as a working musician left little time for her to brood about unfairness or inequality.

"I didn't care that I was the only girl playing. ... I was one of the guys" says DiCamillo, a veteran of such high-profile New York venues as the Blue Note, Freddy's and Birdland. "If you pay your dues, there's never much of a problem." One reason she avoided the slings and arrows of narrow-minded jazz enthusiasts is that she calls the shots in her long-standing trio, which includes Rick Petrone on bass and Joe Corsello on drums. "I didn't spend all that long as a sideman" she says.

Taylor is hopeful that public opinion will shift dramatically enough to break down remaining barriers to female musicians. "All the Duke Ellington School [in Washington], I've heard women drummers and trumpet players," he says. "Gender has nothing to do with it. Women can play, and they can write."