In my early years of living in New York, I spent a lot of time attending jazz gigs by myself. At the Village Vanguard, the 55 Bar and Smalls, mainly, a short stroll from each other along Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village. Sometimes I’d have company, but the lack of it never stopped me attending a gig by a musician I really wanted to hear play.
One of the greatest aspects of the live jazz scene in New York is the sense of being among a community of kindred spirits. As a woman, I found the clubs to be an incredibly liberating environment. You can sit at the bar or stand at the back nursing your drink, and enjoy the music without having to keep your peripheral vision alert for the approach of unsolicited company. You can chat with the bartender if you want to, but there’s no obligation to socialise. As a woman by yourself, you will be left alone unless you initiate conversation. And those times when I did smile back at a friendly stranger or initiate a conversation, I usually found the interactions to be worth having.
After more than two decades of listening to live jazz performances, my enjoyment has not dimmed. I love watching the musicians respond to each other, fearlessly open in the moment of performance; unselfconscious so that they can react spontaneously, creating improvised lines of melody and accompaniment that are instantaneous but informed by years of listening, knowledge and practice under the heat of spotlights without a safety net. It’s fun, it’s inspiring, and at times it feels almost sacred. A transporting live jazz performance feeds that part of me not nourished by reading or friendship or travel or sex. The playful part that needs connection to others through music-making. And the desire to feel that connection is what, finally, drove me to seek out the opportunity to play again with others.
The fact that I’m the only woman instrumentalist in the jazz ensemble sometimes bothers me. It was the same in Freddy Wilson’s workshops, all those years ago. The only thing that has changed in the interim is that we now use an app to access music charts. Is this passion of mine really so gendered? Are there so few other women interested in playing jazz with others? I guess that other women my age have less flexible schedules—careers that demand long hours at the office, and children who demand long hours everywhere else. And perhaps young musical women are more interested in being singer-songwriters or are too busy either finishing a degree or paying off student debt. It’s a shame, though, because despite the ratio of men to women, I find the jazz workshop one of the most gender-neutral group settings I’ve ever experienced. In the moment of playing, each musician is equally engaged in the act of creation; their gender makes no difference.
In the workshops, nobody has a last name. Nobody has a past. Nobody wants to know what I do before or after the workshop, how I earn a living, or where I live. There’s no judgement, just constructive feedback on how to improve my ensemble playing and my solos; no goal greater than self-expression. There are no deadlines, no scaffolding of centuries of pedagogy, no examiners to assess my version of a work against generations of interpretations. It’s quite the opposite: the workshop actively encourages me to be myself at the piano, trying to express how I hear the world, within the harmonic, melodic and rhythmic constraints of an ensemble of players who accept them. This interplay of individual expression and group dynamics is why I’ve always regarded a jazz ensemble as the best expression of democracy in action: freedom of individual expression, facilitated and supported by a framework of musical conventions agreed by consensus.
And now, with Ron’s eyebrow raised at me to make sure I know it’s my turn, I take my solo. Use an element of the melody, use a rhythmic motif of the preceding soloist, use a musical idea that comes into my head in the moment. Double it, halve it, vary it higher and lower—experiment, fail, try again, fail better. Leave some space. Don’t fill every bar with notes; it’s okay not to play.
The experience of playing a 32-bar solo with a band is thrilling—playing with the knowledge that there is no meaning in it other than this dense and visceral moment in which time does its peculiar thing of expanding even as it goes by incredibly fast. A microcosm of life, really. There will be no final exam. There will be no recording for posterity—thank goodness. Just performance in the moment. To play like this is to embrace meaninglessness, in its best possible sense.
In 1895, in the last months of her long life, Clara Schumann’s daughters insisted she write down some of the preludes she improvised daily before she practised her scales. She did so, but described the difficult work of notating them: ‘[I]t is so hard because I do it differently each time, as it occurs to me as I sit at the piano.’59 She had abandoned formal composition at twenty, but improvised new music every day for decades. The demands of the former
