Jazz Today: Young Women Are Sounding the Horns

The story of 11th grade trumpeter and composer Summer Camargo and her inspiring success at the elite Essentially Ellington festival shows that the future of jazz will, finally, be more female. A great art form should invite brilliance from every corner of a culture. Excluding half the population for no good reason would choke half the creativity from literature or painting or music, would it not?

But jazz hasn’t been particularly welcoming to half of the population for the great bulk of its history, as events in 2017 started to expose. Women are speaking up (again) about the ways, explicit and otherwise, they have been excluded, abused, or discouraged. (See “The Future (of Jazz) Is Female: Interview with Saxophonist and Composer Roxy Coss”.) The historic stories of brilliant musicians like Melba Liston demonstrate talent, courage, and suppression. Jazz critics, including myself, have had to examine how we have overlooked music by women in real time, leaning back on age-old preferences and simply laziness and, thus, perpetuating the sense that women are not a vital part of the scene, not dynamic and innovative creative forces.