Restaging ‘A Great Day in Harlem’: Representations of Gender in Jazz Historiography Through Photographs
Our project looks at a shifting representation of gender in jazz, through two photographs: “A Great Day in Harlem,” (1958), and a re-staging of that photograph, “The Girls in the Band Harlem” (2008). The re-staging of “A Great Day in Harlem” was created in conjunction with the Documentary, The Girls in the Band, which used a mixture of new interviews and archival footage and photographs of women jazz instrumentalists throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. This documentary traces a history that is often left untold in standard jazz historiographies, of women working against systems that actively discriminated against and excluded them, in order to work as performing jazz instrumentalists. Footage of these women jazz musicians, retelling in their own words, reveals how they had to either fit themselves into, or pushed back against stereotypical notions of presenting as a woman in jazz. The documentary is bookended by these two photographs – first by an interactive zoom-in of “A Great Day in Harlem” that identifies some of the musicians present in the image, and closes with the live footage of the women jazz musicians posing for the re-staging of the photograph in the same location in Harlem, exactly fifty years later.
Our project will be broken down as follows:
1. We will outline what standard jazz historiography entails for gender representation, and analyze “A Great Day in Harlem” as a commonly used aesthetic object for teaching jazz history.
2. We will look at the documentary The Girls in the Band as an example of how alternative jazz historiographies can correct the erasure of women, and address why women were (are) commonly left out of this history.
3. We will analyze the restaged photograph, “The Girls in the Band Harlem,” in order to ask, how does re-staging this photograph change the conditions for gender representation in jazz, and how can we critique this re-staging?
Standard Jazz Historiography, and "A Great Day in Harlem"
Straight, linear lines of the conservative jazz canon (progress: from body to intellect)
references: Ken burns documentary series, jazz history books taught at jazz institutions
How does the photograph reflect the construction of the jazz canon?
The Girls in the Band
- "Too often retrospectives on women and jazz willingly disavow the contributions of prior collectors and advocates, as if each new generation must excavate, once again, the activities and contributions of such innovative and singular musicians in a process of reversing our cultural amnesia." (McGee 2015, 96)
- this is not the first document(ary) on women in jazz, but it collects multigenerational perspectives and is an accessible resource; though it should be more well known in jazz pedagogy spaces
- Through archival footage and first-person testimonies, the documentary shares about womens' experiences both on and off the bandstand, including the discrimination they faced in order to receive and maintain their work as jazz musicians
- a main theme was the way women jazz musicians had to dress and present themselves, and the way the public and media prioritized how they looked more than how they played
- one example is of Marian McPartland on late night TV, host says how great she looks after she performs
- a main theme was the way women jazz musicians had to dress and present themselves, and the way the public and media prioritized how they looked more than how they played
Big Ears (Eds. Rustin and Tucker)
the documentary heavily contextualized the 1950s -- "an intriguing period of jazz history, one in which race, gender, and politics informed aesthetic and intellectual arguments about the music and the mark it made on American identity and culture." (Rustin and Tucker, 4-5)
"New Jazz Studies" focus less on narratives of individual geniuses, and pays more attention to the complex worlds in which they moved (Rustin and Tucker, 8)
"Asking 'where are the women' has also been an important route toward finding the gendered spheres of fields thought to be gender-neutral meritocracies" (Rustin and Tucker, 15)
A Restaged Photograph
"Is the gaze male?" (Kaplan)
“When women are in the dominant position, are they in the masculine position? Can we envisage a female dominant position that would differ qualitatively from the male form of dominance?” (Kaplan, 28)
→ how can this question be applied to this restaging in which the gender representation is reversed, but the women in the photograph are taking up the same orientation / position as the men in the original photograph? Does this actually change gender dynamics and equity, or does it just put women in the dominant and therefore 'masculine' position?
"Why have there been no great women artists?" (Nochlin)
The easy answer to this question as posed by the article is to show all the great women jazz musicians that do/did exist, and this is partially how the documentary attempts to answer this question - but it doesn't actually solve the problem, it just shows the exceptions to the norm.
The way the question is framed illustrates the extent of which our understanding or our consciousness has been misled regarding the way questions are posed
“The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education, “education” understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals."
The documentary is attempting to show the conditions that existed that created and sustained gender inequity in jazz. How is this shown in the restaged photograph? There is a history and a context behind the restaging and the fact that we see this as an unusual event shows how the photograph does indirectly illustrate the inequity.
"Civil Imagination" (Azoulay)
“I seek to differentiate between the event of photography and the photographed event that the photographer seeks to capture in his frame” (21)
Azoulay invites us to use the restaged photograph to consider the event that created this photograph, rather than just the residue that the photograph itself leaves us with
- viewing so many women in jazz gathered together is an unusual image, and invites the viewer to ask how this took place. It leads the viewer to the context behind the photograph
Chaikin, Judy, director. The Girls in the Band. 2011
Kane, Art. "A Great Day in Harlem" (photograph), Esquire, 1958.
Azoulay, Ariella Aisha. 2015. Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. Verso.
Nochlin, Linda. 1971. "Why have there been no great women artists?" ARTnews.
Kaplan, E. Ann. 1983. "Is the gaze male?" in Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, Edited Kaplan. Routledge, 119-138.
Rustin, Nicole, and Tucker, Sherrie. 2008. "Introduction" in Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, Edited by Tucker and Rustin, Duke University Press.
McGee, Kristin. 2015. "The Girls in the Band (Media Review)" Jazz Perspectives, 9:1, 95-101.