In the excellent essay “Almost like a real band”: Navigating a gendered jazz art world, the writers discuss the broader experiences of women in the jazz world, and how these experiences were shaped by jazz’s self-determined identity as a meritocracy, versus the lived experiences of women facing both blatant and obscured sexism throughout their music careers. The essay serves to validate the encounters many of the women we have chosen to focus on have faced, as it shows not only how women are discouraged from entering the jazz world at all (“the early jazz community embodied a complete assault on dominant moral and sexual norms of the age; a woman playing in the band at such a club would have been violating prevailing norms of propriety”) but also that when women force their way into the jazz world regardless, they are shepherded toward specific instruments and roles based on their gender (“Most women who managed professional careers through the 1960’s were singers, but even instrumentalists were obligated to sing, fulfilling a stereotyped role for women in the jazz art world and legitimizing their presence on the stage”). The essay covers both the masculine nature of the jazz world, but also the emphasis of inclusion based on talent, or the belief in a jazz “meritocracy”.
      
       For instance, when Ann Rabson was told by her male peers that, “women shouldn’t play guitar because a guitar is like a woman, it’s shaped like a woman,”(line 77) which was a blatant attempt to discourage her work as a musician, this was not an isolated event. Ellingson & student instead found that the, “binary coding of instruments persists today” and women are often ushered away from instruments perceived to be masculine, like the drums or the saxophone, by teachers, parents, or peers. Marian McPartland required the support of her husband in order to be given opportunities in the jazz world that may have been freely open to male musicians, which Ellingson et. al. found to be, “illustrative of a general pattern in which a male musician or jazz industry executive takes a woman under his wing, and in a somewhat paternalistic manner, introduces her to the right people, gets her gigs, promotes her…” which again emphasizes how the women who were successful in jazz were treated as inferior musicians because of their gender, unless a male musician openly supported them. Many, like Maria Schneider, were highly educated musicians that despite their institutionalized success still felt constantly, “the necessity to demonstrate that they were great musicians and belonged on stage.”
 
       Ellingson et al’s essay concludes with a clear, brilliant insight into the world of jazz that, “...midcentury gender norms may still be at work in American jazz, even as they become outdated in other cultural contexts. It also complicates the picture of jazz as a purely meritocratic sphere.” The essay questions the validity of the ‘meritocracy’ of jazz when women are discouraged from participating altogether, pushed into niche roles, assumed to be inferior, or viewed as a novelty act, an ‘exception’ to the male-dominated jazz world that currently exists.