Improvised Spaces: The Intersections of Jazzwomen Communities and the Women's Music Cultural Movement in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

Traditional narratives mark jazz in the 1970s as insignificant to jazz history. The exclusion of this period from jazz scholarship makes invisible the immense musical contributions jazzwomen made during the 1970s, perpetuating the canonical and patriarchal understanding that jazz was and is developed by men. A closer look at jazz spaces in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as other related musical communities, reveals a narrative of jazzwomen’s success. In this thesis, I recover the intersections between jazzwomen communities and the Women’s Music Cultural Movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Combining analyses of archival materials, oral history interviews, and methods from queer ephemera studies, my thesis demonstrates how a focus on the ephemera of jazzwomen can offer a corrective to dominant jazz histories centered on recordings. Studying women’s music and jazzwomen communities side-by-side demonstrates how musical communities, particularly ones built by marginalized individuals, are not insular entities but complex musical networks. This thesis contributes to larger conversations on the importance of material cultures, feminist histories, and the inclusion and recovery of jazzwomen’s narratives.