MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Discordant notes on jazz
PAUL WIDDOP and SIOBHAN McANDREW report on the gender imbalance in the music and how it’s holding women back
POWER TRIO: Geri Allen, Esperanza Spalding and Terri Lyne Carrington (ACS) at Marciac Jazz Festival in France
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
THERE are relatively few female musicians in jazz. In the US, recordings led by women made up only one fifth of the top 50 albums in the National Public Radio jazz critics’ poll from 2017 to 2019 and this seems to be a long-term trend — a survey of British jazz musicians in 2004 suggested that only 14 per cent were female.
Rather than there being explicit barriers to entry, gender differences in preferences and socialisation are significant.
Men see concerts as a male space and male musicians are more likely to be encouraged to continue following early experience of playing with others, particularly in terms of learning improvisation and taking a solo from a young age.
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