Jazzwomen: Conversations with Twenty-One Musicians

Karl Coulthard
2008 Critical Studies in Improvisation  
In Jazzwomen, Wayne Enstice and Janis Stockhouse have assembled a colourful collage of perspectives, opinions, and anecdotes from a diverse selection of musicians, ranging widely across racial, national, and socio-economic boundaries. Their interviewees include women from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Germany and encompass both those who had the privilege of stable, and often musical, families and those who struggled through great poverty, illness, and discrimination (both
more » ... and racial) as children and adults. This book also provides the reader with a wide number of musical perspectives, containing, in addition to several vocalists and pianists, interviews with two trumpet players, two saxophonists, two drummers, two Hammond B3 organists, a jazz violinist, and a composer/arranger. Enstice and Stockhouse, through their interviewing and editorial practices, prove to be engaging storytellers. Taking advantage of the broad swath of life experiences presented to them, they encourage their subjects to discuss their artistic philosophies and to share some of the amusing and often bizarre occurrences that seem to characterize life as a musician, thus providing for readers a more nuanced portrait than would have been afforded by a simple polemic against the state of women in jazz.
doi:10.21083/csieci.v4i2.895 fatcat:4pdclpy33jhhbkre2mjbqnlvza