New York & New Orleans: A Cross-cultural Analysis of Women in Jazz

Group Process

This project aims to highlight the environmental and social influences on the music of select women in jazz. From the outset, given the broad nature of the project’s focus, we aimed to narrow the scope of our research. Given our group’s relative musical histories with jazz - Wes from previous classes and Kelan from past experience playing and analyzing music - slowly, the idea of a cross-cultural analysis between northern and southern women in jazz began to take shape, culminating with our selection of New Orleans and New York as our areas of focus due to their rich jazz histories. Based on the differing political and social landscapes of these areas, we hoped to be able to distinguish the effects of these influences on the lyrical, tonal, or thematic elements of our selected women’s music.

Our first order of business focused on division of labor, where past technological experience played a deciding role. An in-depth understanding of Adobe Premiere cemented Jesse and Wes’ roles as our primary video editors, while Kelan and Jesse focused on developing a working knowledge of Scalar and its (sometimes frustrating) intricacies. From there, we perused the Filius Jazz Archive in our search for female jazz musicians with relevant relationships to our cities, eventually deciding to focus on four main artists: Jackie Cain & Roy Krall, and Etta Jones for New York, as well as Germaine Bazzle and Jackie Harris from New Orleans.

As for the actual information contained within this book, each member took on the research and information collection tasks for specific pages. Rich focused on our introduction, as well as our spotlight section for New York, briefly providing some cultural background on the area as well as an outline of jazz’s development within the area, while Jesse produced the various biographies of our highlighted women. Wes focused on the jazz history sections, both general and women-specific, and Kelan assembled the pages focusing on racial influences, our cross-analysis, and spatial humanities pages. With our separated research method came the challenge of information maintenance; that is, physically being able to keep track of everyone’s contributions. A shared Google Drive folder was quickly created, with all of our research being stored there before being uploaded in its entirety to the project.

Upon completion of the research phase, our project finally had developed some tangible form. Now in the home stretch, our final step was the implementation of other technologies, from the various interview clips we had selected and parsed together, to an interactive timeline created in javascript, to the spatial technologies found on our mapping page, tasks we worked collaboratively on to ensure their seamless addition to our book. All in all, although the medium and nature of the project presented various trials, we were able to collectively work past them in our efforts to produce this work, a small look at the invaluable work done by women in jazz, as well as how their music was shaped by their environment.

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