by Pico
Maybe you’ve noticed the trend and maybe you haven’t, but there sure seems to be a whole lot more of the fairer sex among up-and-coming jazz players. I’ve found myself covering a lot more jazz records by female artists lately, and it hasn’t been by design; there are simply more records by women artists that deserve—and sometimes demand—discussion. Our “Women of Jazz” category is literally exploding of late. A genre whose presence by women has been predominantly via the way of torch singing is now finding serious competition for the guys who are instrumentalists. We as jazz lovers are the primary beneficiaries of this.
This was such a strongly-felt trend with me that I felt compelled to write about that for premier jazz webzine jazz.com. You can find reviews of many of these whom I’ve selected for special notice right here. Just to make it easy for you, here are the links:
Sharel Cassity
Kait Dunton
Hiromi
Anne Mette Iversen
Hailey Niswanger
Ada Rovatti
Another one of the Terrific Ten, Linda Oh, will be covered here around the time her debut album comes out in early October.
Suffice to say, the face of jazz is literally changing, even as the quality of it remains high. It will interesting to see in five or ten years time how many of these will be mentioned at the same level of esteem as, say, Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau are today. Maybe they’ll be some misses here, too, but it won’t be for lack of talent, if you ask me. Many of these have already “made it” artistically, in my mind. When I put together my year-end All-Star lists in about four months, I will very likely be referring to many of those artists with records being touted with a “Ms.” at the front of their names.
Get ahead of the curve and check out these ladies for yourselves.
- Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock + Paul Motian – ‘The Old Country’ (1992; 2024 release) - November 7, 2024
- Devin Gray – ‘Melt All The Guns II’ (2024) - November 5, 2024
- David Cain – ‘Variations’ (2024) - November 1, 2024
