Music

Young, female instrumentalists have been establishing a firmer footing in jazz, taking some of the music’s boldest creative steps and organizing for change on a structural level. But this isn’t an entirely new development.While we’re often taught to think of jazz’s history as a cavalcade of great men and their bands, from its beginnings in the early 20th century women played a range of important roles, including onstage. During World War II, right in the heart of the swing era, all-female bands became a sensation, filling the void left by men in the military. But in fact they were continuing a tradition that had begun in the vaudeville years and continued, albeit to a lesser degree, in jazz’s early decades.Prevented from taking center stage, many female instrumentalists became composers, arrangers or artists’ managers. Buffeted by sexism from venue owners and record companies in the United States, they often went abroad to pursue careers in Europe or even Asia. As was also true of their male counterparts, the African-American women who helped blaze some of jazz’s earliest trails had to innovate their way around additional roadblocks.“These jazz women were pioneers, and huge proponents in disseminating jazz and making it a global art form,” said Hannah Grantham, a musicologist at the National Museum of African American History and Culture who studies the work of female jazz musicians and contributed notes to this list. “I don’t think they’ve been given enough credit for that, because of their willingness to go everywhere.”The piano and organ were considered more socially acceptable instruments for young women to play, and few serious fans of jazz would be unfamiliar with the names Mary Lou Williams, Marian McPartland, Hazel Scott, Shirley Scott or Alice Coltrane. But the ranks of female jazz genius run much deeper than that. Here are 10 performers who made a big impression in their day, but are rarely as remembered as they should be in jazz’s popular history.Lovie Austin, pianist (1887-1972)Lovie Austin composed for and accompanied some of the greatest singers of the early recording era, including Ma Rainey and Ethel Waters. A number of her songs became hits, including “Down Hearted Blues,” a smash for Bessie Smith that sold close to 800,000 copies. Based in Chicago, Austin was also a frequent bandleader at some of the Harlem Renaissance’s most famous venues. Mary Lou Williams counted Austin as her largest inspiration. “My entire concept was based on the few times I was around Lovie Austin,” she later said.Lil Hardin Armstrong, pianist (1898-1971)Lil Hardin met her future husband Louis Armstrong in 1922, when he joined her as a member of King Oliver’s famed Creole Jazz Band. Hardin, who studied at Fisk University and had an entrepreneurial streak, helped bring Armstrong forward as a bandleader, serving as his first manager, pianist and frequent co-composer. After they split up around 1930, she found some success with her own big band, but stepped away from performing years later after determining that male promoters would never be willing to promote her on the same level as men.Valaida Snow, trumpeter (1904-1956)Valaida Snow’s career was a wildfire: a thing of great expanse and then rapid, wrenching exhaustion. She was a master of the trumpet but played a dozen other instruments, as well as singing, doing arrangements for orchestras, dancing, and appearing prominently in early Hollywood films. When the pioneering blues musician and composer W.C. Handy heard her play, he dubbed her “Queen of the Trumpet.” Denied a proper spotlight in Chicago and New York, Snow became a star abroad, touring for years in East Asia and Europe. She wound up stuck in Denmark during World War II, becoming ill while imprisoned there. She escaped in 1942 and spent the rest of her career back in the United States, although her health never recovered. More

Recently, The Times’s co-chief theater critics put together a musical cast recording starter kit for those of us stuck at home — 10 cast albums they’d take with them to a desert island. We asked some of their fellow critics to pick one cast album each and extol its pleasures.Few fixtures of a New York City summer are as enchanting as Shakespeare in the Park. So when the news arrived last week that its season, too, was canceled because of the pandemic — taking with it “Richard II,” and Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery’s delicious musical adaptation of “As You Like It” — there was only one sensible, self-salving thing to do: Put on some Taub music and revel in the not-so-distant past.At Shakespeare in the Park two summers ago, Taub’s adaptation of “Twelfth Night” (conceived with Kwame Kwei-Armah, and part of the Public Works program) was a dose of civic joy — inventive and playful, infectious in the pre-Covid sense of the word. With Nikki M. James as the shipwrecked Viola, Ato Blankson-Wood as Orsino, the count she loves, and Taub herself as the benevolent fool Feste, the cast album is full-on gorgeous.Taub is one of the most exciting composer-lyricists in the American theater, and I often listen to her solo albums on repeat. (Those include seriously delightful demos of both “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It,” extremely worth checking out on Bandcamp.) But the “Twelfth Night” cast album, with its warm, enveloping sound and friendly, whip-smart lyrics, is the most comforting choice right now. It is guaranteed to catapult you gently back to a time when we sat together in the gathering dark as actors and musicians told us a story.Until that time comes again, here are some standout songs to stage in your head.“Viola’s Soliloquy” This one is exquisite, for James’s vocals and the feminist insight of lyrics that make potent sense of Shakespeare’s cross-dressing shenanigans. Desperate for a job, Viola has been masquerading as a young man, and in doing so become more visible in the eyes of the world: “Why has this power in me never been given a chance? Is it as simple as putting on a pair of pants?” Spoiler: It is. More

Zsela has been in no rush to release her music. Her debut EP, “Ache of Victory,” is due on Friday, yet she has been tinkering with its five songs for years. It arrives not as a sampler of possibilities, but as a single-minded statement: a group of songs that are emotive yet elusive, slow but infused with undulating motion, at once earthy and otherworldly. Her voice clings to her melodies like liquefied amber, in a low, striking contralto range.“Even when I was a kid, people would be, like, ‘You sound old,’” she said via FaceTime from Los Angeles.Zsela, 25, came only hesitantly to performing her songs, although she grew up surrounded by music and the arts. Her father is Marc Anthony Thompson, a songwriter who has been recording since the 1980s under his own name and as Chocolate Genius (and with whom Zsela has lately been singing live on Instagram); the actress Tessa Thompson is her half sister. Her mother, the fine art photographer Kate Sterlin, came up with Zsela’s name, which is pronounced ZHAY-lah; she took the first syllable from the glamorous-sounding Zsa Zsa Gabor. When Zsela asks her mother what it means, “It’s always changing,” she said. “It just is.”Zsela was a shy child who avoided singing in front of anyone, though she wrote songs with a guitar. Her parents urged her to go to college, and she attended SUNY Purchase, where she studied studio composition and production before deciding to drop out. She moved to New York City and started writing and recording songs, collaging snippets of words and music. “I have this whole bank of lyrics, and they’re from different times and they’re from different things,” she said. “So drawing from it is telling a story that’s not like linear time at all.”For a while, she recalled, “I was not sharing them with anyone. None of my friends that I would hang out with knew that I could sing.”Still, her secret slipped out. One friend sent her demos to her future manager, who arranged for Zsela to meet a producer, Daniel Aged, who has also worked with Frank Ocean and FKA twigs. She visited his home studio, he started noodling on a baritone guitar and “eventually she started to sing,” he said by phone from Los Angeles.“I was immediately touched by the sound of her voice,” he said. “I heard a command, a certainty in her voice, a strength. Obviously she has an amazing tone, vocally and everything, but just the intention around the melodies and around the words is what really touched me. There’s certain singers, the tone of them — it feels good to my heart.”They began the lengthy process of refining Zsela’s songs into recordings, painstakingly constructing them from the top down. Zsela and Aged sought out the harmonies and instrumentation to cradle her melodies and lyrics. “He was giving me the space to take control and find my voice,” she said. “Through the whole process it was like, ‘Oh God, this is what I wanted to do.’ But I still was like slow and steady with the music, ’cause I was like, ‘If I’ve waited this long before I put something out, I’ll just dig into this and have it be the best that I can make it.’”The tracks they built rely on imperturbably sustained keyboards, layers of Zsela’s voice in unison and harmony, subdued electronic percussion and myriad near-subliminal sounds. They tried various tempos but eventually decided that the songs all worked best at an almost monolithically slow pace. In February 2019, they finally declared one finished, and released “Noise,” which contemplates “packing up the pieces of a broken love affair,” as a single and video.Zsela had also started playing her music live: at clubs like Joe’s Pub and Baby’s All Right, at fashion events, and at art museums including the Whitney and MoMA P.S. 1. Onstage, she said, “I channel a different kind of confidence or something.” She interspersed her own developing songs with favorites from Nina Simone, Tim Buckley and Madonna; she would often begin her sets with a deep electronic drone, and end them singing a cappella to the audience that she had brought to hushed attention. In fall of 2019, she toured as the opening act for Cat Power, another languidly pensive songwriter.“When I first met Zsela I didn’t know what was coming, what she was capable of,” Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power, said via text message. “When I finally heard her soothing timeless voice, her depth of frequencies and vocal toning were a healing unchained vibrant triumph.”Though it was by no means planned that way, “Ache of Victory” is fitting music for self-quarantine: a richly introspective, solitary reverie on connections made, lost and remembered. The music wells up around Zsela, mysteriously opening out from sparse beginnings to boundless depths, as her lyrics wander between the oblique and the starkly exposed: “I know how to lose/I taught myself when I found you,” she sings in “Earlier Days.”The album’s long gestation “taught me to take my time, taught me to be patient,” Zsela said. “It’s taught me to really let go of the fear.”“I in no way intend for this to box me in to ‘only slow,’” she added. “I can go places if I want to afterward — like, if I want to make a country album. I just needed this to be like this.” More