Jazz is dominated by men. So what?

I’d recommend any aspiring writer to marry a jazz drummer. It’s done wonders for my powers of concentration. If I can write while my husband is practising rolls, or rehearsing with his quartet loudly enough that I don’t know why they didn’t just set up in my study, or worst of all tuning his drums (Bam. Bam. Bam. ‘Nooooo!’ Bam. Bam. Bam. ‘Nooooo!’), then I could knock off novels amid shock and awe in 2003 Iraq.

As part-requirement, part-perquisite, over the years I’ve attended a range of jazz clubs, festivals, and concerts. So I can testify: the musicians are nearly all men.

Jazz and jazz education make up a small world, but gender disparity has become a mighty tempest in this teacup. In September, the majority of members at a Europe Jazz Network conference endorsed a ‘-Manifesto on Gender Balance in Jazz and Creative Music’. Last month, the prestigious Berklee College of Music launched an Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice (dig that alliteration).

I’m a little torn on whether to regard this curious incidence of the penis in the nighttime as a problem. But plenty of folks in the field do see the preponderance of men in jazz as a problem — the fashionable solution to which is definitely a problem.

An outfit called Keychange has convinced more than 100 music festivals to sign up to a ‘50:50 gender balance pledge’ by 2022, including the major UK jazz festivals in Cheltenham, Manchester and London (which ends this weekend). The musical powers that be may prefer to regard this target as an ‘aspiration’, but ‘50:50’ is an arithmetic formulation. It’s a quota.

My anecdotal impression of hairy–chestedness in jazz is quantifiable.   Although female vocalists are common, the saxophonist Issie Barratt calculated in 2016 that women constitute a scant 5 per cent of jazz instrumentalists.