Book Spotlights Women in Jazz

Jazz, like most musical genres, boasts a larger number of male artists than female ones. This skewed female to male ratio means that the ladies who do syncopate and sing the blues can sometimes go unrecognized. Now, authors Wayne Enstice and Janis Stockhouse have placed the spotlight on 21 female jazz musicians in Jazzwomen: Conversations with Twenty-One Musicians, which was released on May 17.

Jazzwomen, published by Indiana University Press, features interviews with musicians like singer-pianists Shirley Horn and Diana Krall, pianist Marian McPartland, composer-arranger Maria Schneider, violinist Regina Carter, trumpeter Clora Bryant and many more. The book also comes with a CD featuring 10 original tracks by a selection of the artists interviewed in the book, including McPartland, saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom and organist Barbara Dennerlein.

Enstice explained in a press release that “for each book written annually on a woman jazz player, you could fill a phone booth with the tomes on men,” inspiring him and Stockhouse to compile this book. The 392-page book contains loads of insight on the joys and frustrations these women have faced as female musicians in a male-dominated field.

Enstice is the co-author of Jazz Spoken Here along with Paul Rubin and is a professor at the University of Cincinnati. Stockhouse is a member of the Young Talent Resource Team of the International Association for Jazz Education and has been the Director of Bands at Bloomington High School North in Bloomington, Indiana since 1981.

Jazzwomen is available in hardback for $39.95. To order, visit http://iupress.indiana.edu or call 1-800-842-6796.

Originally Published June 7, 2004