[narrator] You know, you look at this picture and it’s just amazing.
This was the Golden Era of jazz.
That photo was the pinnacle of jazz in the 50’s.
There are all these guys, these famous jazz musicians.
Count Basie, Sonny Rollins,
Horace Silver, Dizzy Gillespie,
Gene Krupa, Gerry Mulligan,
Lester Young, Charles Mingus,
Thelonius Monk and Coleman Hawkins.
That’s a good combination, Monk and Hawk.
And then there’s these two women.
But who are they?
Hardly anybody knows.
[jazz music playing]
[Clora] There is nothing like the joy of playing music
My name is Clora Bryant.
I’m a trumpetiste.
[Viola] Oh, yes, it’s always a surprise to have girl musicians.
I’m Viola Smith. I'm a drummer.
[Billie] There were no women with any of the big bands.
I was the first one as far as I know.
My name is Billie Rogers and I played the trumpet.
[Rosalind] I played with the greatest female band ever, ever.
Hi, I’m Rosalind Cron and I play alto sax, clarinet and flute.
[Peggy ] Well, if you don’t feel it, forget it. Because you can’t play jazz
unless you feel it in here.
My name is Peggy Gilbert and I play saxophone.
I knew I was going to play the trumpet.
My mother played piano and my father played violin.
My mother played the greatest old ragtime jazz piano you’d ever want to hear.
Every one of us had to be... just think of nothing but music, music.
We used to sit by the Atwater Kent radio
and listen to the music coming out of the hotels around Boston.
My dad would take us to the dances
and stand outside the dance hall with me on his shoulder.
And I would look through the window and see the trumpet players
and they would be playing the trumpet, you know, and do wah, do wah, do wah,
do way and I liked that.
And my father wanted me to find a sound that I liked and that’s
what I would learn to play. So we listened and one night I said, "Oh, I like that."
And that was the saxophone.
I started to play saxophone
when I was a senior in high school.
They didn’t have many girls on instruments.
They were violins, harpists, pianists.
[Billie] When I was about 9
we started a family band
with mother on piano and dad on his instruments,
my older brother on his,
and I did the vocals and played my trumpet.
They wanted me to play violin. Well, I’m kind of lazy.
I said, "No, I don’t feel like holding a violin on my shoulder all day long.
I want to play something else."
He said, "Well, what do you want to play?"
I said, "I’d like to play trombone. I like to see that slide go up and down."
[Viola] I was one of eight sisters in a family orchestra.
I happened to be the sixth one in the family. It was time for a drum to be added.
so I was very fortunate.
It was the easiest thing in the world, rather than play an instrument all night long
like the rest of the girls had to do.
In high school, I wanted to get to the football games,
and I thought that was a good way to do it, so I joined.
And they said, "How about this, do you want to play this?"
And I said," I don’t care, what is it?
It was a trombone.
[Billie] I never, ever saw another girl do what I did.
I was in my twenties before I even saw another girl play a trumpet.
I saw women saxophone players
once when I was about 11 or 12 years old.
My dad read in the paper that at the Metropolitan Theater where they had vaudeville,
they had a new act.
And because they played the saxophone he probably thought
I would really get a kick out of this.
There were the Siamese twins joined at the back
all the time on roller skates
playing the saxophone.
This is a picture I’ve never forgotten in my entire life.
When I was coming up,
it was way back in the vaudeville era, I had an eight-piece girl band.
I was the bandleader and in those days there were little or no girl musicians.
There was Phil Spitalny and a couple of big bands that people today never heard of.
[jazz music playing]
It was difficult for the individual musicians to get booked by the male bands.
There was just an unwritten law
that they wouldn’t hire the women.
Well I was substituting for a man one time
and they called me and asked me if I could jump in and I said, "Certainly."
So I did.
and the leader wanted to keep me,
and all the men in the band got together and talked the leader out of it, because he said,
"We don’t want a girl around, we can’t talk the way we want to talk,
and we can’t do things we want to do,
and we just don’t want girl musicians. And besides they can’t play very well.
[piano music playing]
[Carline] You put a bunch of musicians behind a curtain
and who’s going to tell me who's the female playing or who’s the male playing.
You can’t do that. The music is the thing.
That’s the important thing.
Piano players yes,
bassists maybe, guitar maybe.
But mostly piano. They would not...
When you put the horn up to your lip or in your mouth,
that was it.
They would not call you.
[Peggy] I knew then
I had to get a girl band, because there was no chance otherwise.
And I had many wonderful musicians
to work with out here. The place was loaded with ’em.
There were a lot of girl bands. Ina Ray Hutton,
Sweethearts of Rhythm, Ada Leonard...
[jazz music playing]
[Peggy] Ada Leonard I worked with on TV
for a year at the same time that Ina Ray Hutton was
at another studio.
And so I just played with those bands
until I got the lay of the land and knew what was going on.
Many of the brilliant stars of stage,
screen and radio are graduates of the Broadway night clubs.
One of the most glamorous of these is that pretty little spitfire of syncopation,
Ina Ray Hutton.
["Truckin’" playing]
[Jessie] Ina had really good arrangers, always.
She admired Ellington and Basie
and we had good musicians, and it was a good band.
Here’s me playing in front of the Ina Ray band.
She had great rhythm and knew what she wanted,
but she was not a musician. There was nothing that she could play.
But she was a great dancer.
She was really a good dancer.
[jazz music playing]
We had this band that allowed us to go and play at the different fraternities
and sorority dances for blacks in those days.
Piney Woods School was a place for underprivileged black children,
they got a better education.
Mr. Jones saw Phil Spitalny’s group and said,
"Well I have enough girls here that play instruments.
Why don’t I start a girls’ band too?"
Mr. Jones,
had some Mexican girls that he let come to Piney Woods to go to school.
We also had a Chinese girl there, and so
one of the people that worked there said,
"So why don’t you call it The International Sweethearts of Rhythm?
Because you got different nationalities."
So that’s how we got the name International Sweethearts of Rhythm.
["Jump Children" playing]
[Carline] Anna Mae Winburn was the director of the band.
She was like a front for the orchestra,
for the band. She looked great all the time.
[Anna Mae] I had a male band in Omaha, Nebraska
called Anna Mae Winburn and the Cotton Club Boys.
Then here come the Sweethearts to Omaha and I said, oh gee, aren’t they cute?
You know, these beautiful, little innocent girls, you know.
So they said, "Rae Lee Jones
wants somebody to direct the Sweethearts of Rhythm."
I said, "Gee, I don’t know if I can get along with that many women or not."
[Willie Mae] Anna Mae Winburn was like a mother figure to us.
She helped us in meeting the public,
mainly keeping away from the men.
And the fact of the matter, she taught us the facts of life.
["The Lady Who Swings the Band" playing]
[Dr. Taylor] I knew Mary Lou Williams very well.
She was a wonderful human being
and I admired her because she was one of the best players.
Her style covered from ragtime to bebop and beyond that.
I mean, she was with Andy Kirk’s band.
That was a fine band of that period, and she arranged for them, she played for them.
She was marvelous.
By the time Mary Lou was 15 and 16, she is the consummate professional.
She is playing with some of the top bands of that time. McKinney Cotton Pickers,
which was one of the top groups to come out of that Midwest experience.
When Mary Lou comes into the whole Andy Kirk Organization,
she is caught between two worlds in many ways.
Because Mary Lou has come out of this Black urban experience that is rooted
very much in this Southern vernacular culture,
and she moves to this Midwest environment,
where the concepts of racial consciousness are very different for Blacks.
So you get someone like Andy Kirk whose aspirations were to be the black Guy Lombardo,
He didn’t want to be stigmatized and marginalized in the way that
Black bands were being at that time.
He wanted to do the full range of Big Band music.
Without Mary Lou’s arrangements,
and without Mary Lou kind of serving as the engine of the rhythm section,
Andy Kirk’s sound would not have moved outside of those regional circles of the Midwest.
[Dr. Taylor] She was literally the lady who swung the band.
["The Lady Who Swings the Band" playing]
My junior year in high school is when they got,
when they brought in the new innovations with the bands,
the marching band and the swing band.
So that is the way I started. My band director
had gone to college with a man who was teaching Band
at Prairie View College.
And they had an all-girl band, and he needed a trumpet player.
So, that’s where I went.
[jazz music playing]
And here’s a great picture of me taken in a hotel room. This was a publicity thing.
When I was playing trombone, Tommy Dorsey was it.
And then I met him.
I had a one-nighter with Tommy Dorsey.
How about that?
Not the best I ever had.
[Peggy] That was an exciting time. But you always had that one thing
to confront you.
The agent would come up to me and say, "We can’t use that girl.
She’s - you gotta get somebody that looks better.
And don’t forget to smile at the women."
How could you smile
with a horn in your mouth?
[jazz music playing]
[Rosalind] I did get a call from the Ada Leonard Orchestra
which was rehearsing and going to open at the Oriental Theater in Chicago,
and I said, "Yes, yes," and I was so excited.
After some rehearsals that week we were shown our costume,
and out comes this
God-awful pink thing with flounces.
And it had all these flares and pink ruffles and I was mortified.
I’m a professional. I wear a skirt, a sweater or a blouse,
a white blouse with a little black tie. I don’t wear
pink ruffles. And I, I hated that gown with a passion.
Females were not looked on in the same, with the same attitude -
shall we use the word "attitude"?
...as male musicians were.
Well,most of them treated us as novelties.
Unusual, and people thought it was cute, you know.
On our first show when the curtain went up
the audience went insane.
They were clapping and stomping and carrying on and whistling.
We hadn’t really played much. We’d only played a couple of notes.
And so after it died down and then an act came on,
I sort of whispered to the girl next to me,
"Why the big reception?" And she told me,"Well, Ada was a striptease artist."
Oh, I thought that was hilarious.
[Viola] We all had to have long hair, and we could not be seen with saddle shoes.
To be wearing saddle shoes meant we must be gay.
Men’s bands always wore the same uniforms.
The guys can have white hair and glasses and weigh 300 pounds,
but if they can play, great. The girls they want to look like a bunch of young starlets.
And the things they put on us were unbelievable.
[jazz music playing]
I played for a short time with Georgie Graham’s Big Band
and he was playing in New York when he heard about
the International Sweethearts of Rhythm
and the manager, Mrs. Raley Jones, asked if he knew of a saxophone player
and so he thought of me immediately. He called me up.
He introduced me to Mrs. Jones on the phone and, and
she did mention that it was a Colored big band,
and would I have any problems? No problems.
I told my mom and dad. And I didn’t ask them, I more or less told them.
They knew I was chomping at the bit. I just had to go back on the road.
I walked in and there was everybody in the band, getting ready for the night’s gig.
And I was going to wear
a skirt and a white blouse and a jacket.
and there was this magnificent brass section behind me and rhythm section,
and I just knew I -
I was in the right place.
[jazz music playing]
[Rosalind] It was a lot of fun.
The fun lasted until we started doing one-nighters
in the South.
Anna Mae mentioned something to the effect
that we’re going to Jim Crow country.
I had been in the south with Ada Leonard.
Nobody had mentioned this man’s name.
Of course I’d never met him. So, I guess I’m going to meet him now.
And then I learned that Jim Crow is a set of laws
that was set up to keep Black people
as far removed from whites as humanly possible.
[Peggy] They wouldn’t stand for us mixing.
I was dying to get hold of a girl one time that was a trumpet player
and she was just great.
and I wanted to put her in the band, you know?
And they said, "We can’t do it because there are a lot of people
that would object to a mixed racial band."
Well, traveling through the South was something you’d really like to forget,
some of the experiences you had, you know. Like
we’d pull into a service station and the guy would come out with his gun and say we don’t
have any Black toilets. You need to go out in the field and squat.
[Carline] The band had its own bus,
upper and lower berths like a Pullman car.
And that was our home on wheels.
Had a little bathroom in the back.
There was great danger for the band, for everybody in the band, for our bus driver.
We all found it was much easier if I just stayed, in very dangerous places, in the bus.
I also remember some places they would accept you,
some places didn’t have room for you, you know.
If we didn’t sleep on the bus, we wouldn’t have a place to stay.
[Carline] We played theaters, we played dance halls.
If we were in a theater,
the white folks would be downstairs
and the ropes would be dividing the Blacks and the Whites.
[Rosalind] Everything was segregated. Everything.
There could be no fraternization between the races.
The problems of traveling in the South were the same
for male bands as they were for female bands.
But the women had it a lot rougher, just because they were women.
[Rosalind] There were always a group of women who would open their homes
to traveling musicians, and they were saints.
There was never a question
that I couldn’t stay in their homes, even though it was putting them
in grave danger.
Real jeopardy.
There were times on bandstands when it became
pretty tricky because I was right there
in the front row playing alto.
There was no way to hide my face.
Well, in those days there was a lot of bedroom integration.
And there were a lot of black girls that had white parents, you know, I mean,
so - I’m black,
my mother’s black. You wanna go see her? And they said, "No, we don’t want to go see
your mother, we want to know, you know, what nationality you are."
Mrs. Jones thought that possibly the girls could come up with a way to
either darken my skin, or make it a shade that would be -
not be off-putting to sheriffs
who were sniffing around, trying to determine if I was white or not.
Ah, and we tried different face powders and really
it - I just turned orange for the most part.
See, we had so many mixed girls in the band, you know.
The police came and he says to my husband - my husband was manager at that time -
and he says,
"You have white girls in this band."
And my husband said, "If you can pick out the one that’s white and you arrest them."
And the one he picked out was the mulatto.
[laughter]
He never did pick out the white one, you know.
[Rosalind] Soon we’re heading back to the Williams house for sweet potato pie.
"We get lots of hugs from Mrs. Williams, and a bag of food for each of us.
As we climb aboard the bus she calls, "Bye, chillen.
Y’all take care of each other and we’ll pray to the good Lord to look after you."
I reach out through the open bus window,
grab Mrs. Williams’ hand and say, "I know how much courage it took for you to take me into your home
and I will never forget you."
And I’ve not forgotten."
Those were rough days.
Rough times. Scary times.
I was surrounded by the girls with so much love
and then so many times I felt so embarrassed for my race,
so humiliated by them. I wanted to lash out at them.
And of course I couldn’t.
Well, why don’t you and the girls warm up for the jam session.
Okay, suits me. Let’s take it, girls.
[Rosalind] The white world was completely unaware of us.
Not only were we told, but we knew, we were the best.
But we couldn’t get that point across
because we couldn’t play the places that we wanted to play.
I played with the Ada Leonard band
one show, and then
after that, the next day,
they said the studio had gotten all these calls.
This TV show that was doing real good,
they had gotten calls to get the nigger off the show.
I didn’t have a solo,
but they didn’t want me up there in the band.
That was a hurting thing.
[President Roosevelt] Yesterday,
December 7,
1941,
a date which will live in infamy.
When the war came along, and all the men were gone practically,
the musicians were
scarce to find then
I got a lot of work.
We have a right to be proud of the part American women are playing in this war.
We found that the hand that rocks the cradle can build bombers, make ammunition,
can turn every kitchen into a salvage station
for vitally needed war materials.
There is a job for each and every one of us and it is our duty to find that job.
I remember during the war there were a lot of girl musicians
with the male bands. Billie Rogers was with Woody Herman.
In 1941, I headed down toward California.
And some friends of mine had put a band together,
three other gals out at a club in Culver City.
In a very short period of time,
we were practically packing the joint every night.
One night Woody Herman’s road manager came into the club.
And he invited me over to his table for a drink during intermission,
and told me Woody was looking for some kind of special attraction
to take on the road with him when they headed East.
Arrangements were made for me to go to the recording studio
and audition in front of Woody and the band.
I just sang a couple of songs, and played my horn
and Woody hired me.
Surprise, Woody hired me.
[jazz music playing]
[Peggy] All of us were playing ballrooms and theaters and everything.
[Announcer]On my left are the Sweethearts of Rhythm, one of America’s top all-girl bands,
directed by Anna Mae Winburn. Jack, they are ready.
- Are you ready girls? - [women] Yeah!
[Rosalind] The black servicemen heard us
all over the Far East and Europe,
and they were so excited about hearing a black female band,
that they wanted us. They just bombarded the USO.
[Willie Mae] We played a lot of USO camps for the Armed Service.
[Rosalind] We got to Le Havre, France.
We played the Olympia Theater in Paris.
Then we went on for five and a half months.
We drove through snow and rain and what have you.
And we met the most wonderful men,
white and Black.
That’s when we discovered Quartermasters.
They really outfitted us. They gave us long johns,
underwear, mittens and wool caps.
Everything we needed to get through a German winter.
[Clora] We played all the military bases,
but when we played Tuskegee,
we played for the Tuskegee Airmen.
And they had just become selected as the ones who would escort
the white fliers in Italy.
It had rained, and so we couldn’t walk in the mud, you know,
with the high heel shoes and stuff like that.
And so we had to be picked up by these guys.
I had never been in a man’s arms. Oh, my goodness.
I can’t explain to you how I felt. That felt so good.
[Rosalind] It was the most exciting time ever, ever.
[Willie Mae] I felt like a sweetheart.
[jazz music playing]
[Marian] I joined USO
and everybody would say, oh, you’re going to love working with the Americans
and I did. That’s where I met my husband, Jimmy McPartland.
[music continues]
[Marian] Finally the war ended and we came to The States.
[Rosalind] We went overseas on a liberty ship
and came back on a victory ship.
We came back with 3,000 GI’s.
The war was over.
[jazz music playing]
Seven of us left the Sweethearts the day we embarked
on the ship taking us back to New York.
The band was together for over 15 years,
and after we came back from Germany
and everything the girls wanted to do something different.
Our, our drummer got married.
And different girls wanted to do different things, you know.
They thought, "Well, it’s time for us to move on."
[Rosalind] When I returned home there was really no work for me because the young soldiers were coming back.
[Peggy] We were playing the Figueroa Ballroom
and one time we came back to work
and all our instruments and music and everything was in disarray.
And I said, I went to the boss and said, "What’s happened here?"
And he said, "Well, the band’s coming back.
"They were here today and they had a rehearsal."
And he said Peg, "You know how it is.
I told them when they got out of service they could come back to work."
I said, "You mean we don’t even get a two week notice?" And he said,"No."
And that’s what happened in a lot of places.
[Viola] This was the end of that wonderful era.
Some of them continued with the girls,
but it seems that a lot of girls had to go back to the kitchen.
["San Fernando Valley" playing]
[jazz music playing]
[Marian] Mary Osborne is one of the best guitarists of all time.
Wonderful guitarist.
She gave up a wonderful television show she had in New York,
moved to Bakersfield of all things because her husband got a job there.
And she looked after her two kids
and never did receive the acclaim she should have.
[Peggy] There was a fellow that wrote a big, long, almost full-page letter
about how bad girl musicians were.
And I read that article, and I couldn’t stand it.
You know from a physical standpoint it would seem that women in music
do best when they play the piano
and this is probably because it takes less physical effort to play the piano
than, say, a wind instrument or for that matter, the drums.
That’s just a theory, of course, but the fact remains that
there are quite a few girls playing mighty good piano,
but almost none that play good trumpet.
Tonight’s special guest star of jazz
is probably just about the best of the whole lot.
Her name is Marian McPartland.
There was a lot of music on the BBC, and I would just sit down and play everything.
I know millions of tunes that I’ve never seen the music to.
I was about four, I suppose,
and they made a great fuss of me that I could play
and I played from then on. I played in kindergarten for the kids.
I became a real ham.
I was offered a job by
a man named Billy Mayo who wanted me to join his four piano vaudeville act.
And of course I was thrilled to do that
And I went and told my mother, and father and they hated
the idea that I would do anything so low down.
And think of the terrible people you’ll meet.
And you’ll marry a musician and live in an attic. my mother sobbed.
And of course, that’s what I did do much later on.
My husband Jimmy was a well known
trumpet player in Chicago. When we arrived in New York,
Jimmy wanted to show me all the jazz places.
And I sat in, to let everybody know I knew all the tunes.
[Marian] When I was at The Hickory House
I could see I was in the middle of this
kind of male chauvinism thing,
where male musicians didn’t want to work with women.
They had the idea that their playing was
delicate and frilly and all that ridiculous stuff. In fact,
people used to pay me a compliment, they thought it was:
"You play well for a girl."
I said, "I know some men that sound like girls."
I didn’t name any names,
- but there were some. - We have to understand that
the men felt that they, this was their domain.
["Loneliness Ends with Love" playing]
Now first of all, to them, a woman, if she’s going to do anything in the band, should have been a singer.
Go out front, be cute and sing a song.
And if you were a musician, you were a man.
If you were a woman anywhere around the band you were a singer.
To be an instrumentalist?
No, no, no, no. You don’t belong in that world.
[Billy ] Vi Redd was a woman I admired greatly.
A lot of people said that she was the female Charlie Parker.
She wasn’t the female anything. She was a very, very excellent player.
She had her own identity that didn’t get a chance to develop
so that she could make the same kind of contribution that many of her male counterparts
were doing at that time.
And that had to be frustrating for her.
Some of the most powerful players that I’ve ever heard
were women jazz players.
For anyone to say that they are not playing -
not swinging as hard, or have the same kind of force
in their playing, it’s not true.
It’s simply not true.
[Gene Norman] Honestly, did you consider that you’re working under a handicap
to try to make a profession as a jazz pianist as a woman?
Well, it has never been a handicap Gene, truly. And I really don’t think about it.
I think of myself as a musician working with other musicians.
I’ve never -
[Gene] As a matter of fact, now that I consider it myself, I think it’s a great advantage since you’re so decorative.
["Chicago" playing]
Lil Armstrong and I were pretty good friends at that time.
She was married to Louis Armstrong. Even she had a tough time.
[Marian] We went to live in Chicago
and she invited me to her house.
She played for me and I played for her.
And she wrote some very good tunes, one of which was
a standard tune that everybody plays, "Just for a Thrill".
["Just for a Thrill playing]
Lil Hardin was a very important influence for, for you know, the whole history of music.
The Hot Five, that was her group
that she really had conceptualized, in terms of how the band functioned.
And Louis Armstrong, as her very innovative,
brilliant husband, became the leader of that group. But that was her group first.
[Hardin singing "Just for a Thrill"]
[Marian ] I don’t know why Lil Armstrong didn’t get as much
recognition as Louis did.
Amazingly enough, she died while playing.
She just fell off the bench and died.
And I must say it’s a wonderful way to die, if you have to die.
[Billie] In those days you traveled by train
or by car, by bus.
We eventually made our way to New York.
My whole life had just changed so much, practically overnight.
Going into New York, let me tell you about that.
I knew the reputation of the Apollo Theater.
And to be backstage,
and then I had a solo. The first number
was called "Back Beat Boogie".
Harry James’ recording of it.
We did stock arrangements, and you played it note for note.
Rat dat dat dat, dat dat dat dat, I had to walk downstage
with this long dress on.
My knees were shaking, you know, but I had a long dress on so they couldn’t see it.
Dah dah dah deed ah, dah dee dah dee dah.
You know, I knew it note for note. And I still remember the whole solo.
[Viola] 52nd Street in New York was really wild.
[Billie] It was a legendary time with legendary musicians in almost
every, every joint in town.
[Viola] And Art Tatum was there,
Joe Venutti, Billie Holiday was in one of the places.
Dizzy Gillespie was working in one of those little nightclubs in New York at the time,
and he invited me Uptown to a jam session at Minton’s, which was
where everybody went after work every night.
New York was an exciting town.
There wasn’t anything that you couldn’t, you couldn't hear.
You could find jazz of any kind or any place in town.
We were working the Hotel New Yorker,
and Woody came to me during the intermission
and asked if I would like to sit up in the trumpet section.
Well, needless to say, I wasn’t about to turn that down.
Well, the lead trumpet player decided, I think, that he was going to get rid of me but fast.
He set up this ridiculous riff,
you know, using the derby hat
and the derby hat was going up, it was going down, it was going sideways
and everything he could think of.
Well, surprise, surprise. I kept up with him.
And from that day on, I sat in the trumpet section.
I never, ever went down in front of the band again.
We all owe a debt to Woody Herman for opening the door to women in jazz.
[Carline] Sy Oliver, who was one of our old, well known musicians
and composers, his orchestra was the house band up at the Rainbow Room.
Now he was looking for someone to sub for his regular bass player after the first set.
Sy called me and said, "Carline, come here a minute, I want to talk to you."
And I said to myself, "Uh oh, he’s firing me."
He said to me, "You know I’m known to
not like women musicians. But, I have to say that you’ve changed my mind about that."
[Clora] Charlie Parker came to the Lighthouse to see Max Roach.
My club was right next door where I was working, so
I would always go on my intermission, I would go over there to the Lighthouse and check on the guys.
And this day Charlie was there and I spoke to him that afternoon, and I went back to my job.
Next thing I know, here he comes in the club
and he looked like the Pied Piper because he’s bringing the whole audience from the Lighthouse behind him.
When he came up on the stage he was saying,
"Clora, he said, "you know I love you and I love the way you play.
What do you want to play, Clora?"
And they were surprised that he knew who I was.
I said, "Well, let’s play some ’Now's the Time’."
So we played that, you know, and I got through and I played. Oh yeah, I could play.
This picture was the first picture I ever took with Dizzy Gillespie.
I met him in person. This was 1957
’cause I had made my album then.
As a mentor, Dizzy was the best because
I could ask him anything.
He wants to see me learn this music
and get out there.
[Billie] After I’d been with the band,
oh, probably about half a year, there was an incident involving
a married man on the band and another woman.
And when all this finally came to light,
one of the guys in the band came to me and said,
"How long have you known about this?"
And I said, "I knew about it from the very beginning."
And their attitude changed.
I think they finally realized that they could trust me.
That boys could be boys out on the road, and I wasn’t going to go back and blab to their wives
about what they were doing.
And from then on it was pretty easy sailing.
[Marian] I guess you remember that picture, a great day in Harlem.
Nat Hentoff invited me. He came running in
and said there’s this great photo shoot tomorrow up in Harlem.
And he gave me the address and he ran out.
And Jimmy, I could kill him, he laid in bed, he did not get up.
I couldn’t get him up.
He said,
"It’s too fucking early."
Mary Lou and I somehow gravitated together.
We hadn’t seen each other in quite a while
and she was telling me about a gig or something she had done.
I used to go and see her at a place called The Cookery.
And I always knew I would hear something new and different. She always wanted to
kind of have an edge that nobody else had reached yet.
[Clora] Mary Lou Williams, she went through some things
that woman had to do,
but by being a good writer and composer
I think she was able to overcome
a little bit more than what I was able to overcome.
She would write for Tommy Dorsey and for Benny Goodman and for whomever.
[Geri] All of these great musicians would all go to her apartment.
It was like a laboratory, a salon.
She was a centerpiece for the music.
What she represents is a fierce sense of self
and being able to hold onto that,
but then transcend era at the same time.
So this is a woman who worked consistently
in a punishing, unforgiving environment
of one-nights, of people wanting you to be on,
people wanting you to be what they wanted you to be,
that really took a toll on her.
[Billy ] She gave up the music. Here was one of the great musicians in jazz
and nobody was paying any attention to her. She was working, of course,
because she was good and people wanted to hear her.
But that wasn’t enough for her, and it shouldn’t have been enough for the public.
[Geri ] She walked out of this Parisian nightclub
and for three years, no one knew where Mary Lou was.
[Marian] I can’t imagine why we were the only women in that picture, because
there were scads of them around.
There was Melba Liston - I don’t know where she was.
[Billy] Melba Liston was a remarkable musician, because what she did was so musical
and what she did was done so well.
You want to talk about great... She was a great trombone player
and a great arranger.
[Billy] I’ve been a band leader on many occasions
and it really was a disappointing thing to me
to have musicians who I respected not respect
some of the women that I hired to play.
[James] Dizzy Gillespie told me that one time his big band was doing a show
and he sent for Melba Liston to do the arrangements.
And he wanted her to do the arrangements because he knew of her brilliance.
But when he told the cats in the band that he had sent out to the West Coast to bring in
Melba Liston to arrange the music.
They said, "Man, what you gotta send out all the way to the West Coast to get some bitch
to arrange our music for, man? Come on."
He didn’t say another word to them.
He just waited until the day that she arrived
and dropped the charts in front of them,
and their mouths dropped open when they started to look at them
because Melba Liston had the uncanny ability to make a section player feel like a soloist.
They then understood why he had sent out to the west coast to get that lady, that woman,
into New York to arrange that music.
[Billy] She had the respect of many male players,
but she just couldn’t seem to find whatever it was
necessary to make a career.
So she finally gave up and went to teach music in Jamaica.
[narrator] When rock and roll came along that changed everything.
It was really the end of big bands and even the smaller jazz groups were struggling.
And of course the women found themselves swimming in an even shallower pool.
I was one of the ones that reduced my big bands to groups.
The women bands were, you know, falling apart and couldn’t get gigs.
And I knew I was going to play my trumpet someway.
Well, I started impersonating Louis Armstrong.
[impersonating Louis Armstrong]
you know, I’d do my Louis impression.
When I went to Canada I was a hit, they loved me.
I made much more money by myself than I could
playing in somebody’s band. So that’s what I did.
[Geri] In 1957 Mary Lou finally reemerges
and at that point in time, you know, she was
really adamant about not wanting to perform again.
Dizzy Gillespie. Probably one of the only people who have, could have gotten Mary Lou
to actually come out of this hiatus at the time.
You know, he convinced her, you know, that her greatest gift to the world was, was jazz.
This wasn’t somebody who just gave up on the music.
She converts to Catholicism. You look at everything after that point
and it’s very different from everything that was before that.
[Billy] She met a Catholic priest who convinced her
that she should not give up, but rather use that talent.
You know, if He gave you that then you should do something with it.
[Mary Lou] I work with these kids at the community center.
I teach them jazz singing and they really love it.
[singing "I Have a Dream"]
[Father Peter] I met Mary Lou Williams in the pages of Time magazine.
And this article talked about two things, her reemergence on the jazz scene
playing at The Hickory House,
and her conversion to Roman Catholicism, which sort of made that possible.
I met her when she released the great album
"Mary Lou Williams Presents Black Christ of the Andes."
I wrote her a letter, she wrote me back, I went down and I met her.
I met her at the Hickory House. She spoke barely a word, barely a word.
One was, "Are you a priest?" I said - I’m dressed like this,
seminaries were dressed -
So she had begun composing again before I met her.
She was writing all during the period I knew her.
I had to encourage her to face crowds.
[Betty Friedan] Wear a bra or not to wear a bra. It’s hardly the most essential question
of, of, of this movement. That’s not where the action is, you see.
The action is to change society, to restructure society. That I am free
to wear a bra, or not to wear a bra is my business.
[Host] Why don’t you shack up and say look, "You wash the dishes today and I’ll wash them tomorrow?"
- Well, that’s what I’ve been saying. - [Host ] Well, you shack up. Go ahead.
But you seem to think this is repulsive.
I think it’s repulsive, of course.
You seem to think women should get married this way and be under their husband’s tutelage so -
- Well, I think it’s very natural,you know - - Let the women tell you what’s natural.
They’re trying to tell you all the time.
Well, you certainly aren’t speaking for them because the woman I talk to don’t want to be liberated in a fashion
that women’s liberation are talking about.
But there is something different about tonight. There is something special about tonight.
What is different? What is special?
I, Barbara Jordan, am a keynote speaker.
[Jane] It’s interesting because at that period of time in the 70’s
there was this vibe, you know, women could do, we could do anything.
You could have a career, you could, you could succeed in whatever you wanted to do, you know.
It was no holds barred. Everything was opening up for women.
[Patrice] I think it was about the 1970’s
that women started asserting themselves in all fields,
and therefore things opened up in jazz.
[Dianne] We were driving back from the Wichita Jazz Festival
and we were lamenting the fact that Kansas City had nothing comparable, Kansas City being the cradle of jazz.
We thought that was kind of sad and
so Carol said, "I have a radical idea
Why don’t we put on a women’s jazz festival in Kansas City?"
That came out of the fact that women very rarely get featured at jazz festivals anywhere in the world.
We called Marian McPartland.
She was very excited about it. She said, "I don’t think it’s ever been done.
Let me know what I can do to help. I would love to be a part of it."
[Carol] We co-founded the Women’s Jazz Festival in 1977,
- A way long time ago. That’s right - Way back when.
And it was the first time that had ever happened. Leonard Feather was our
Master of Ceremonies, God rest his soul.
Leonard Feather had done more for women in jazz. He produced them,
he traveled with them, he booked them. He wrote books about them.
So we came up with this idea just of the concert. We were going to do this great concert
that featured women.
And so it would be like a 4 or 5 hour concert on a Sunday.
- [Carol] That would be our gift to the world. - [Dianne] That was it.
Boy, we were excited about that. That would be great.
We started hearing from people all over the world. "We’re coming in...
[Carol] You’re going to have more than just the concert, aren’t you?" And we went, "Oh."
It turned into a 3-day festival and then it ended up having a 5-day festival
for the last 3 years.
[Host] I heard this band for the first time in Hollywood.
I wrote them up for the Los Angeles Times and said, "This is the best all-female orchestra
possibly that I’ve ever heard," Maiden Voyage.
In 1980, when Maiden Voyage
was playing the Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival.
So they had a tribute to the International Sweethearts of Rhythm
and they invited all of the still living members of that band to come.
And they asked us to play for that tribute,
and it was just an amazing experience to meet them
and to play with them. We had a jam session.
I mean, if you just think about who was on that first concert.
Marian McPartland with her trio...
- [Carol] Dynamite, dynamite. - [Dianne] Mary Lou Williams.
[Leonard] And completing the group is a wonderful musician who
gave up the American music scene to take up a post
as teacher at the Jamaica School of Music in the West Indies.
The one and only Miss Melba Liston.
[Carol] We can say that we were the ones that had gotten Melba Liston out of retirement.
Her playing on that concert would melt steel.
[Carol] She was so incredible.
[Dianne] And she played for several years after that.
She went back to New York and revived her career.
If I’m not involved with anything else in my life,
the two things that were so exciting were bringing Melba Liston out of retirement
and reuniting the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.
It really brought some attention
to some women that I don’t think had ever gotten their just desserts.
I remember the women who were really visible to me at that time. It was like Darla Blay,
Toshiko,
Joanne Brackeen,
Laurie Frink.
These were women who I saw who, were out there,
who were playing, uh, and were doing what I wanted to do.
I was a woman in a man’s world, I was a woman playing a brass instrument,
I was a woman who’s leading an ensemble. In other words,
I wasn’t going the track of being a side person.
On some level of course I knew it was hard for women, but you know I,
at the time I think I was walking around like with blinders on.
I was all of, I don’t know, 21 or 22 and you know,
I thought I could conquer the world.
["Forget me Nots" playing]
[Patrice] Well, although a lot of people may know me as an R & B singer,
which I totally consider myself not to be,
that’s not really where my roots are.
My roots are in jazz.
[Herbie] Well, when I first had a chance to hear Patrice, I noticed
the daring and the courage she had to reach out beyond the barrier.
It was unusual for any musician of that age.
And so, the fact that she was a female
made, was, was even more unusual because there were so, so few instrumentalists.
I think I was just really, really fortunate.
By the time I got serious about the music and really wanted to involve myself in playing jazz
I didn’t have to deal with anything other than playing the music.
And I think when your purpose and your goal
is in front of you and you’re doing something that you feel strongly about and something that you love,
all the stuff you might have to encounter is just stuff you have to encounter.
But The Women’s Movement and the fact that by the time I was out there,
there was this consciousness about possibilities.
And that, in all facets of life
and all facets of business,
you were beginning to see that the idea about what a woman could or couldn’t do, be broken down.
So it really knocks me out
when the women come and really come with it.
I met Terry Lynne when she was about 9 or 10 years old.
I heard her play and I was like, "Oh, my goodness"
because such a command and a maturity.
And I said, "Oh, this is great."
My father plays saxophone and my grandfather was a drummer.
People like Cannonball Adderley and Nat Adderley,
Pappa Joe Jones and Clark Terry
and all kinds of people would come to our house for dinner.
So it was very much in me
even before I knew that’s what I was going to do.
I got my union card when I was 10 and my first
gig out of town was with Clark Terry when I was 10.
And I had really nothing but support
from the jazz community, the men in the jazz community.
So it was a very different experience for me.
[Herbie] Terry Lynne Carrington
is not a drummer that you can say,
"Oh, she’s a great drummer for a girl." No. She’s at that upper level.
Well, when I came up I was hard pressed to see any women playing drums.
[Herbie] It was almost like a given that you wouldn’t dare to hire a female drummer.
Because a drummer has to have that testosterone in the sound.
Because there were a few women that played drums before, but I don’t think there were really any people that
did the diverse things that I did, as far as playing with legends like Dizzy Gillespie and then Stan Getz,
and contemporary legends like Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock.
Then I had the experience of playing with Herbie which was really pretty amazing to me
because when I grew up I felt like if I ever play with these guys, you know, I really made it.
Because she was a pioneer
female drummers now don’t have to sound just like men.
They can have a feminine aspect to the way they play.
You know, I didn’t really have role models in that regard, but I felt so embraced
that I didn’t see it as a problem.
[Sherrie] I moved to New York in 1985
to pursue a career to be a jazz star, to play jazz drums.
All I wanted to do was to just be one of the guys. That was my fantasy.
So just, you know, just fit in and blend in and hopefully people would just pay attention to my drumming.
I go to a jam session in New York City
of which I went to many, many, many every single night.
And I would sign up on the list and get such a rough time, "Take your shirt off,"
"I’ll let you sit in," "Can you handle this tempo, honey?"
And it would make me seethe in fury. Like inside I would feel like a volcano
about to explode. It was so infuriating
and stupid ’cause I, you know,
I did everything that I could possibly think to do to be a good player and, you know,
just because of my gender to hear these dumb comments was
so aggravating and sort of, you know,
fueled, fueled me to go, to go forward.
[Sherrie] I never thought about all girl projects or all women projects
and it wasn’t something that I was ever interested in because
traditionally and historically everything that
I knew about at the time that women were involved in was, was not as
excellent musically as the other things I heard from our male counterparts.
[Patrice] I am so enthusiastic about the state of female jazz musicians.
You can go from
the tradition of Big Band, and its growth with Diva
to amazing instrumentalists, amazing players- Ingrid Jensen,
Terry Lynne Carrington...
to composer pianists like Geri Allen.
I love Geri Allen.
[Geri] I mean jazz is a real
clear metaphor for what is best about humanity.
The way we improvise,
the way we share,
the way we trust,
and those things that happen in the best moments of music.
- [jazz music playing] - [inaudible dialogue]
[Anat] Those moments on stage
where you play music and you just...
connect with the other musicians
you connect with the audience,
and you’re just being yourself, you’re just playing
and, and everything, those moments that everything just gets calm.
[Herbie] I don’t know of any men that are doing what Maria Schneider’s doing.
She really has created her own sound and she’s
a person that’s carving out the future of larger group
music in jazz.
I never, ever thought of myself as being a woman doing what I’m doing.
When I put out my first record, Evanescence, I still remember a journalist came over and said
"What’s it like to be a woman composer?"
And I just, I said,
"What’s it like to be a male journalist?"
[Ingrid] In retrospect to all the things I’ve done to get to where I am in music,
very little of it has had anything to do with being a woman.
The only thing I can honestly say that has gotten me from point A to point B
is being in love with music, all kinds of music
and wanting to play music with people that want to play music with me.
[Nedra] I did show up to a gig and I was up for elderly gentlemen
and like one guy didn’t put his dentures in
and so anyway they were telling me that they wouldn’t pay me.
Actually they said they were going to cut my pay.
And they said, this one guy said,
"Well, so and so didn’t tell me they were sending a girl."
And I thought, "I still want my money."
"Well, so we’re going to cut you 5 dollars."
And somebody with their dentures like that,
"We going to cut you 5 dollars,"
I thought, okay, I just wanted to laugh.
[Patrice] One of the things that I think is the biggest change is the women themselves.
We don’t walk into the situation concerned about somebody else’s
baggage about whether we can or we can’t. We, our focus is
in being good about what we do,
and more and more,
it’s becoming ah, just a mindset on women’s part that,
that’s not a hurdle that we have to deal with anymore.
[Anat] I only realized it that
you know, a few years ago all my idols have been men.
No teacher ever talked to me about Mary Lou Williams
or Marian McPartland.
I didn’t know who the Sweethearts of Rhythm were,
I didn’t know who Vi Redd was, I didn’t know
I didn’t know any of that.
The first pianist that I saw,
jazz pianist, was Terry Pollard.
And she was playing with Terry Gibbs at the time.
And I’ll just never forget the intensity of seeing her
on stage and how fierce she was.
And it was like, "Wow. There’s a place for me in this music." From seeing her.
I’ve seen some stunning young women coming up.
[skatting]
And I have to admit to you, one of the things I love
about them is that there isn’t even the inkling
that there’s anything they can’t do.
There’s just complete
confidence and comfort with themselves about who they are as women and what they’re going to do in the world.
Yeah, I think we’re going to see the music grow immensely
and instead of trying to approach it,
women coming to a man’s world - maybe that’s the difference.
We kind of all realize like this is not a man’s game.
If you really look at the facts,
it’s our game, you know.
You know, we’re creators, we are creators.
[Maria] I think it was a Women in Jazz Festival
and I was really excited because Terry Lynn Carrington was playing drums.
Ingrid Jensen who plays in my band, Joanne Brackeen was playing piano
and then the band, all the horns were all men.
So we were playing the concert and it was just killing. I mean, Ingrid was playing her butt off
and Terry Lynn - it was amazing and I was
standing to the side watching Ingrid’s solo
and watching the rhythm section play. All the guys who were the horn players
were just looking on.
and they were all just like leaning forward and totally grooving
on the, how heavy the music was.
And it got me kind of choked up because I was thinking, "Wow.
That’s not something you see very often.
Quincy Jones told me something when I was in high school
and he came up to me and he says, "What do you want to do?"
And I said, "Oh, sir, I’m gonna write and I’m gonna play,"
and he just looked right in my face, "You know,
you’re going to have to be very, very good.
You want to be good anyway,
but if you’re the girl in the band you have to be."
I hope we get to the day soon where
that’s not something that people think about and,and categorize us.
A lot of men had a very specific and very
limited view of what women did,
and their roles in society, their roles in the family.
And it’s important to give them a little leeway in saying that
that had never seen or understood how a woman could do
what some of these women musicians were trying to do.
They were limited in their ability to understand it.
The women that came before us were so diligent
and so brave to continue pressing and to continue to be an example
of what the life as a female jazz musician could be and could look like.
I would say to the Clora Bryants,
the Dorothy Donegans, Mary Lou, Marian McPartland,
I want to say,
Thank you.
Um, I knew about it because some of them told me about it.
My mom told me about it.
And um,
I, hopefully every note that I play represents. "Hey,
I know that you had to maybe, you know,
go to, upstairs to someone’s room to collect your paycheck."
Um, I’m grateful I've not had to do that.
Great guys, good timing.
[jazz music playing]