News & Updates — women in jazz

I want to give some birthday love to one of my favorite figures from the '60s soul scene, the underrated Fontella Bass! Fontella is most remembered for a song that everyone knows but many people think is by Aretha Franklin! "Rescue Me" was a #1 hit in 1965 for Chess Records, their biggest seller since Chuck Berry's mid-'50s reign. Bass was denied songwriting credit, despite her contribution as a co-author. The tune has lasted forever and has been covered many, many times, as well as used in movies, ads, etc. The song was banned from radio by Clear Channel after...

A birthday shout-out to one of the early female blues stars, Memphis Minnie. Guitarist, banjo player, singer, composer and a tobacco-chewing lady, she was born in Louisiana and spent her early years outside of Memphis. At 13 she was busking and turning tricks on Beale Street and for a while she joined the circus. Starting around '29 she recorded for a host of labels, including Columbia, Vocalion, Decca, Bluebird, Okeh and Checker, having a hit with "Bumble Bee". She found herself in Chicago by the mid '30s, winning cutting contests and working as a session musician. She often recorded with...

On February 14, 1920, Mamie Smith recorded two songs for Okeh Records and history was made as she was the first black blues singer to make an appearance on record. The label was threatened with a boycott if they recorded a black singer but they did so anyway and the Smith-Okeh partnership went on to sell MILLIONS of records, bringing a huge jump in sales to what was called at the time "race records". She came from the Midwest and started touring at 10 with a vaudeville act before moving to NYC in 1913. She became a big star of...

One of the most inventive vocal stylists in all of jazz, Betty Carter not only brought a gift for radical improvisation, a "breathy" artful style at times and a hip scatting flow, but she also brought an independent spirit with her own Bet-Car record label, where she sold albums direct to fans and stores out of the trunk of her car. She grew up in Detroit and was singing in the nightclubs as a teenager, due to possessing a fake ID. Early experience with Dizzy Gillespie was a huge influence on her, as well as early encounters with Charlie Parker,...

Happy birthday to the award-winning poet & spoken word performer Jayne Cortez. Her rhythmic and (anti)militant ways with words are captivating and inspiring. I see her as part of the take-no-shit, fire-as-spit population of radical and rhythmic poets of deep articulation like Amiri Baraka, Gil Scott-Heron, Nikki Giovanni, Last Poets, Suheir Hammad, Chuck D, Welfare Poets and others aligned with social justice, black power and fearless expression. She has written several books and made a bunch of records with funk & free-jazz musical backing, often times with Denardo Coleman (her son with Ornette Coleman) and associates called the Firespitters. She...