Back to It

After a summer spent realizing that my life will remain just as valuable as it does before saying “I actually don’t know that tune/record/person, can you tell me what it is?”, I came back to college this week feeling like I had overcome my clouded perception of my place in the jazz program. While bringing my bass from my car into the music building the day before classes started, I was fortunate to bump into my arranging professor who was eager to briefly catch up. I began bubbling over with how excited I was to have registered for his class the day before, explaining that I was no longer feeling intimidated to admit to the atmosphere that I was at school to learn. Controversial, I know.

I had taken a different music class he taught in the fall semester prior, but kept to myself and didn’t ask questions, and in the spring I had nearly pivoted away from jazz entirely. But in our brief conversation, the words I had unknowingly felt that whole year poured out of my lips while my mind congratulated itself for having made an actual useful connection. I told him, “even though last year was my sophomore year, it felt more like a second freshman year since it was my first year in the jazz program. I grew a lot and found my place this summer,” I had told him. He grinned and cheerfully affirmed that I was acting like a whole new person.

This “my place” I’ve newly defined for myself instead of letting anxiety and dread do it for me is made up of three concrete points which I plan to stand firmly upon. 

First, I know that playing is my least present priority, but has grown far more important than where it was before this summer. In July after freshman year and my acceptance into the program, I was briefly a music education major with a jazz bass concentration since I had been one in freshman year, but with a concentration on classical clarinet. But as my summer camp job turned me off from teaching, I backed away from education entirely and defaulted into being a bass performance major for a semester. I wasn’t going to back out of the program I worked the hardest I had ever worked in my life to get into, but I could already sense that the lifestyle of gigging indefinitely wasn’t going to be for me. I added an English major to feel academically productive while I waited for my epiphany to come (six major additions and changes later, it did!). My attitude towards playing and wanting to learn tunes because it’s extremely fun improved this summer, but it’s still certain for me that my own performance ability is not my main love within jazz.

Next, I know that music journalism is my second biggest priority. After my stint in English and discovering that I craved writing assignments with a business edge, I changed my second major to public relations. The combination of a prerequisite course in media writing and an honors journalism course completely threw me further into the valuable world of writing about real people, which is how I became involved with my campus paper The Beacon. But other aspects of these classes completely turned me off from what public relations actually is: the ability to manipulate perception. It’s cool, but not for me.

However, when I worked under a certain musician/businessman for eleven straight days before quitting, the one valuable note I walked away with was this: “the best writers about musicians are the ones that are musicians themselves.” Hearing that last August planted a seed in my brain, and I wish I wanted to give credit where credit is due for that. I switched my second major to journalism briefly but was also turned off by how the course names seemed to get less and less relevant to where I wanted to go down the line, even though by that point I wasn’t entirely sure where that meant going, either.

Finally, immersing myself in jazz history and especially my specific interest in women’s jazz history is my top priority. Although I’m more outwardly productive in producing content through the music journalism outlet, it occurred to me this summer that music journalism and music history are directly hand-in-hand, and your title as journalist or historian depends on your actions tipping the scale more towards content analysis versus content production. Yet these points — performance, journalism, and history — are the corners of my desire to actively contribute to all three worlds, which is really just one. Speaking with the chairman of the history department the other day, I requested that my newly added history major (in preparation for this pitching plan) could be fulfilled with music history courses, to which the chairman was delighted to allow. It took me five semesters, but I fully believe my majors are finally not going to change now…

So, with a newfound confidence for an openness to learn and a validity towards my unique experiences as being one of under fifteen women in a 90-person program, my ears and eyes noticed different things this past week than they had last year.

In the first few days of playing the “hi who are you” game with the 20-something newcomers to the program, I had to stop myself from feeling too offended by a handful of men who didn’t ask me for my name when I asked them theirs. It took a quick conversation with a trusted male friend to remind me that in general, some men just don’t excel at conversing with women regardless of their major or instrumentation (no offense). I also failed at asking some names this week even after making eye contact with people who I definitely sensed were new. Ah, being young and awkward (ah, being awkward and probably remaining awkward forever).

But speaking of instrumentation, there were a handful of men who admittedly assumed I was a vocalist. This is also a point that I don’t fault the individuals for thinking, nor would I want to perpetuate the long-existing issue that vocalists are not naturally considered instrumentalists. I don’t play an instrument that gets carried into a jam session, and of course, historically women jazz vocalists are actually common. Even within our own program, they make up the highest performer-to-instrument ratio for the women.

What was a concern for me though was a moment from our first arranging class, which is taught by a male vocalist (the same one I bombarded with my life updates in the parking lot of the music building). While we were talking about vocal techniques or something like that, a peer said “I don’t know if you’re hip to Betty Carter, but….”

I write about this here because it’s a half-sentence that instantly portrays a problem that ranges far and larger than the statement itself. It means nothing to me that it was said. It was an honest statement followed by an informative factoid, and if you think I bring this up to encourage making fun of a student, I failed at communicating where I stand on being open about our collective need to desperately want to learn instead of trying to finesse knowledge on each other. If you’re a fellow student, please don’t witch hunt the speaker.

Instead, I encourage you to hunt down the reason that they felt it had to be said, which is the actual concern as I’m sure you might agree. A Black woman so prominent in the history of jazz is somehow still not talked about enough among our crowd that my peer felt a need to preface her existence, and to a professional vocalist.

But these moments are exactly why I hope to be brave and knowledgeable enough one day to make a difference in women’s jazz history, which is my own history. The gears are turning for what this could look like, but I’ve got to slow down and take things one day at a time. To hint at my ambitions though, I think it’d be pretty neat to grow upon the work I want to do in a place that I am already connected to, and have already seen, needs more women musician figures badly.

Well, look at that. It took dancing around going into jazz education to make me realize I want to go into jazz education. Good one, Shyla.