I've been thinking about girl jazzmen, to coin a phrase.   I sometimes work with schools and hear a lot of potentially great jazz musicianship amongst young girl players, particularly tenor sax for some reason.   Yet they don't seem to be making it onto the jazz scene in any numbers.

Is this a sexist thing, I wonder, or do they just always regard it as 'something best done alone in the bedroom'?   The number of women working in jazz today is still unbelievably small, and I know there are those who think this is as it should be, but I don't have any hang-ups on that front.

I think of Allison Neale, Nikki Iles, Ingrid Laubrock, Alyson Cawley (whatever happened to her?), Karen Sharpe (and her too?), Annie Whitehead of course and Zoe Rahman maybe!   And then I think of a million-and-one girl singers!   Of course I have fond memories of Kathy Stobart and even of Barbara Thompson before she became too funky for me!   They're just not in it for the long haul, it seems.   

I've met a couple of good working female bassists over the years and I fell madly in love with Ivy Benson's girl drummer, Paula Pike,  when I was sixteen, but the ladies could do better in the field, I think.   Any views on this?

Karen Sharp and Kathy Stobart? I've seen both (or do I mean each?) of them with Humph but not actually together.


(Whoops, sorry, just seen they have already been mentioned in Flattened Fifth's first post )

Does anyone remember the case of Billy Tipton the jazz pianist? It was only when he died they found out he was a woman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Tipton

Then there's the film Some Like It Hot.

There are lot of reasons that jazz was a predominately male career in the USA of the segregation era. Female musicians tended to either be married to the bandleader and/or be a singer with enough commercial value to be chaperoned etc. There is also the point about brass instruments (and drums) being seen as  boys instruments, this was even true in British brass bands until recently. In early jazz women tended to be pianists. 
The paucity of women these days is partly due to lack of role models, plus the overly competitive nature of some styles of instrumental jazz. All male groups tend to become macho by there very nature, add more than one or two women and they become less so.

Mary Lou Williams and Lil Hardin Armstrong were important early jazz women, both pianists

No darts Daniel but they are all still pianists / singers aren't they ?

Anyone have any figures on the percentages of women active in jazz compared to classical, folk, rock? Also, how does the situation compare in improv?

Not necessarily disagreeing here, but could you elaborate on this?

Surprised nobody's mentioned

Alice Coltrane

Her music certainly an acquired taste, but sublime if you're "in the mood," so to speak. Mad rushing psychadelic strings with weird queasy organ/rippling harp/strangely static piano - with alternately a sense of great drama or static, meditative timelesness (the static, timeless feel somethign I always felt came across in her solos with John Coltrane, unlike McCoy Tyner, who conveyed more of a sense of development, of moving things forward).

There's a section in Valerie Wilmer's quite brilliant guide to the 'new thing'/ 'new black music' (whatever you want to call it) of the 60s/70s about the role of women in the music, but, apart from that, I don't recall reading many serious attempts to address the issue. And it's only really a small part of Wilmer's book (though impeccably researched and thought-provoking, as you'd expect). Deserves a whole book of its own, really...

Interesting that free improv, which (you may disagree) essentialy grew out of free jazz, often seen as just as macho, if not more so, than 'straight' jazz - yet it seems much more egalitarian, open to women, as Richard suggests...