Music Essays
Jazz Band Carnival
This essay is based on the fieldwork I conducted on Jazz music as a genre. The research was conducted at a musical event in London and Mumbai. First I will give some background information on my research, here I will introduce the band members and how I gained entry. Secondly, I will look at some the historical issues about gender and women in India and here I will address the two main questions as posed by Ellen Koskoff. Thirdly, I will discuss the gender differences in Jazz. Fourthly, I will focus on the theoretical issues.
Zee carnival is a successful exhibition that takes place every year at the Grand Hall London Olympia. The 2008 exhibition was held for three days from 15th till 17th February. It exhibits the best of fashion, music, shopping, community, culture and the Bollywood. The whole Asian community gathered for enjoyment and to make the most of the opportunities offered e.g. property investment. The entertainment shows were presented by Bollywood celebrities like Shilpa Shetty and other musicians. Zee carnival is promoted by the Zee network the global television network, Zee Television provides entertainment to the global south Asian diasporas worldwide. There were over 30000 visitors (zee website) who attended the Zee carnival 2008. There were musical performances by solo artists, bands and Bollywood celebrities. Some of the talented British artists who performed on stage were Jay Sean and Rishi Rich. There were bands such as Soul Yatra (Indian Jazz band) and Dhol Blasters (traditional cultural folk music band from Punjab, North India).
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I conducted research with Soul Yatra (Indian Jazz Band) who perfomed at the Zee carnival. The band has five musicians and the audience at Zee carnival was screaming when they entered the stage to perform. Soul Yatra is a successful band it is based in Mumbai, India. The band rose to fame when they were invited to perform for international events supported by Hennessy cognac. Soul Yatra is among the very few of Indian jazz bands that has been successful. Comparisons between Indian classical and jazz music can be made as ‘improvisation’ is a key term for both. Jazz has always been evolving and mixing in with global cultures. I will now briefly introduce the 5 members of the band.
Merlin D’souza is the band leader she is herself a female instrumentalist. She is known for her keyboard skills. Merlin achieved her degree from Trinity College of Music, London. She has performed in many charity concerts and also composed music for Bollywood films. Bianca Gomes is the second member of the band and she pointed out to me that she began singing at the age of fifteen. Bianca is originally from Dubai, UAE. Bianca has performed in various concerts and she began singing in prestigious hotels like Mayfair Hotel in Dubai. Then she migrated to Mumbai here she became very integrated into the live and studio scene. Bianca has a strong interest in other musical genres like R&B, Soul, and funk. Her role in the band is primarily to sing and to play the Saxophone. Ashton Colaco is the main Saxophonist of the band. Ashton is strongly interested in Jazz and has also performed with other pop, rock and funk bands. Ashton plays tenor, soprano, Saxes and some concert flutes. Colin D’cruz is the fourth member of the band and he entered into music as a bass player at luxurious hotels in Mumbai. He has a remarkable experience in the music industry and his main interest is Jazz music but claims to have an interest in other music genres. When I asked him to tell me more about his experience he responded ‘I have been working for six nights a week in gigs for 10 years and this has equipped me with the skills to become a professional today’. Mukul Dogrey is the fifth member of the band, he is well known for playing drums and tabla. In UK he remains famous amongst the British Asian community for his talent in both Jazz and classical music. The band is comprises of 2 female and 3 male musicians.
Gaining Entry
This was the first stage of my research in Jazz music as a musical genre and the band that I became interested in, Soul Yatra. At this stage I was only observing the performance of Soul Yatra and their social interaction with the wider audience at Zee carnival. Fieldwork offcourse involves both participating and observing (Bernard 1998) and participant observation remains a hallmark for anthropological research methods. At this first stage I was recording information in my notebook. Soon after the performances were over I approached the event organizer and explained my role as a researcher and that I wanted to establish contact with Soul Yatra’s band leader. The event organizer took my details and passed it on to the agent of Soul Yatra, when he took my details he said ‘let me take your personal details but I cannot guarantee they will be in contact with you due to time constraints’. At this first stage I tried to be positive. Luckily, the UK agent contacted me the following week in February, he explained that to establish contact with them and to build rapport you need travel to Mumbai, where they reside, he also gave me the band leader’s email address. I contacted Merlin through email immediately; at first she thought I was a advertising sales assistant. In her reply I explained to her I was a researcher carrying out research on jazz music and gender. Merlin was delighted to hear that I was conducting a research on this subject and she invited me to a school in Mumbai where she was teaches music. She asked me a few questions before I went; what is the nature of your research; what musical activities will you be documenting; what kind of data will you be collecting; will I be publishing any research in Indian media; what was my own practical music experience?
In response to her questions I explained to her the time constraints I have in conducting this field research. I have experience in playing piano and the harmonium which she was happy to hear about. After answering all her questions I traveled to Mumbai for two weeks out and one of the weeks that I spent at Mumbai was a reading week at my home institution SOAS. In day two after arriving in Mumbai I met Merlin at her school and then at her office, she said to me that her band was doing an event at the hotel Orchid with an expected audience of 20000 people. This was a great chance to collect data for my fieldwork. We spent four days rehearsing I was going to be part of their first song ‘Amantran’ (translated as invitation), which lasted for about 5 minutes. It is a very smooth tune with a mixture of male and female vocals but the male vocals appear to be more hyper whereas the female vocals seem nice and slow, the instruments in the background are loud and fast.
We spent five days rehearsing with the band. I was only practicing to play on piano for their first song ‘Amantran’. We did hours of practice until I felt confident with their speed and style. On the sixth day we were ready for the performance. In the evening we went to the hotel which was overcrowded with long queues at the bar. There was a crowd of people because we were not the only performers there were other pop singers too. We were on stage for our first performance; I was feeling nervous as I have not performed in front of a huge audience before. I was playing the piano, Bianca was playing the Saxophone, there were vocals by Ashton and Merlin. Colin was the bassist and Mukul on drums.
In India there are not many female instrumentalists women usually dance or sing whereas men play the instruments (Qureshi 2001). There was a group of female and male dancers dancing to the tunes being played on stage. It was interesting to see how they performed to. The band or the musicians do not have any connection with these dancers they are just there to dance and are hired by the hotel to perform. This event was performed similarly to a concert or club where the audience interacts strongly with music being played on stage. After one minute of our performance I saw a young woman from the audience shouting ‘show them Bianca show them what we’re capable of’ and then a lady next to her ‘yes come on come on play that Sax and let the music flow’. A woman from the audience making such comments certainly tells us something about how gender is subverted. Merlin smiled at me as she knew what I was thinking about. There were two female instrumentalists in a Jazz band and this certainly does challenge traditional gender norms. It was clear that both Bianca and Merlin were getting support from the audience especially by the women.
In India music is dominated by men (Post in Koskoff 1987), and it is hard to find multi-talented musicians like Bianca and Merlin who have the capability to play instruments. After this performance I did a content analysis of ‘The Times of India’ newspaper and it was hard to find women instrumentalists working along with men therefore Soul Yatra sets a good example. I went to University of Mumbai library and I found a collection of old newspapers dating back to the year 2000 I attempted to read the entertainment pages of the last 2 years of the newspaper.
Many questions were raised after participating and observing the performances with Soul Yatra; why is it that women do not get a chance to perform in public? There is something about the power differences between men and women? Gender differences can also be found in other music genre e.g. African-American hip-hop. There has been competition for jobs in the music industry between the men and women. When I interviewed Bianca and Merlin it became clear to me that before their fame they were hardly given the chance to be interviewed by the media or researchers. They said ‘when they were young around eighteen they were strongly interested in taking up music as a career but Merlin emphasized that women in music were not respected or given much interest’.
Dance
The event manager at the Hotel Orchid invited a group of dancers. It is clear that in many cultures men play the instruments and women sing or dance but this was not the case with the Soul Yatra band. Dance remains an important performance art for women. Gender and Sex have always been part of dance (Hanna 1998). This is because performance is produced through bodily movements. At the hotel there were visible differences between male and female dancers, male dancers usually varied their steps in footwork and the way they were moving when they were dancing. When women were dancing their bodies were moving in a stiffer way and sometimes more freely. A point can be made here that women highlight modesty, propriety and grace in their dancing. Whereas men put more importance on their physical strength and sexual potency.
After the first performance was over the next song they played was Sodanco Samba by Antonio Jobim. Originally the vocals of this song are male but when Soul Yatra was performing Merlin was singing. The original song lyrics are:
Só danço samba
I only dance samba
Vai, vai, vai, vai, vai
It goes, it goes, it goes, it goes, it goes
Só danço samba
I only dance samba
Só danço samba, vai
I only dance samba, goes
Já dancei o twist até demais
Already I danced twist until excessively
Mas não sei
But I do not know
Me cansei
I got tired myself
Do calipso ao chá-chá-chá
Of calipso to the tea-tea-tea
(Só danço samba by Jobim, Antonio)
This song was sung by Merlin in really smooth way whereas the saxophones in the background were playing loudly. Only the first half of the song contains vocals the rest of it is just played by instruments. The dancers performed accordingly to the tune the women were dancing quickly with a symmetrical feet movement with each foot twisting on the heel. The movement was performed with a quick spinning of the hip and shoulder. Men performed a similar dance by without the sudden spinning.
Indianess and Women in India
Traditional Indian society is strongly tied to ideas about ‘Indianess’. I will be looking at some of the ideas surrounding the nineteenth century nationalist movement. Independent India’s first political party was the Congress party which was made up of upper-caste Hindu men. What was women’s role in the nationalist movement? During the late nineteenth century issues about child marriage, widow marriage and Devadasi (girls married to deities) dominated the debates on gender. Women were viewed as the sustainers of Indian traditions. Indian Hindu nationalism was gendered as it is discussed my many scholars (Chatterjee 1993). Focussing back on the idea of Indianness – womenhood was the base through which the ‘inner sphere’ representing Indianness was built.
For the Hindu nationalists who belonged to the upper castes, the ‘inner sphere’ of India was like an ideological tool that allowed the elites to view India as untouched by imperialism, economics and other western influences. The things in the ‘outer sphere’ may be influenced by the West and may also change or modernise the things in the ‘inner sphere’ like the arts, traditions and importantly women who were meant to be pure, religious and committed to their Indianness. How women speak, dress, look, sing and take part in was all shaped by the powerful notion of the ‘inner sphere’. This opposition between inner and outer sphere of India gave way to other dichotomies for example men-women, home-world, family woman-prostitute, lower class-upper class. These dichotomies are highly gendered.
These ideas are still present in some parts of India like some villages of West India, Gujarat. These ideas are challenged by Bollywood film songs. Merlin has composed and directed the song ‘Khullam Khulla’ (Open Openly) in movie Road. Koena Mitra is the performer and she is performing with a hypersexual text which is female centred. It is a good example of gender politics. This performance does challenge traditional restrictions placed on Indian women. The performer is half naked and such videos would be banned in India in 1990s. Ballinger discusses the constitution of political struggle and meaning in popular music. He ‘traces a definition of politics that moves from political structures to power structures in everyday life’ Ballinger mentions Antonio Gramsci and his concept of hegemony which ‘breaks the idea of rule as enacted through purely state and political forms because, in his view domination saturates the whole social process’ (Balliger 1999:57). This essay is focussing on Jazz but the theories applied to popular music can also be applied to Jazz.
Music and the differences
In an appropriate manner, battles have been fought on the division of labour in relation to jazz. Of course, there are many exceptions, there is a good reason to draw attention to the order of songs from jazz, and jazz music. Despite the top female stars of jazz, most were ‘canaries’ (Dahl 1984). These groups were people who did their job in a skillful way and caught the attention of other bands.
They were involved with interpreting lyrics but not improvising musically. Musicians did the improvisation, and this was the distinctive feature but on the other hand this also began ranking based on gender. Merlin and Bianca as they have worked with other bands they believe, Jazz focuses more on improvisation. They see the differences of gender in Jazz as a ‘historical issue’. Jazz has changed as a gendered discourse over a period of time. But changes that have been made in Jazz till now may be argued as the process being slow. Jazz compared to classical music to a certain extent maintains traditional gendered division of roles.
In short whether we are discussing Jazz music in India or U.S. it seems to be a field of men, there have been changes over the last twenty years in classical music but not much in Jazz. In this regard another question that arises is that what information can we get from Jazz which can help us to understand gender and sex in modern society? Jazz music is creative and has stunned and influenced many musicians like Bianca and Merlin.
Discourse of Jazz as gendered
Jazz gets its meanings from specific discourses of masculinity with a particular emphasis on improvisation. In his book Giddins (1998) describes Jazz as opportunistic and freedom loving. Jazz has unique features like vitality and innovation. Jazz also is very much influenced by other genres but when it borrows something Jazz integrates well in it (p.9). According to Giddins Jazz’s independence attracts more people into Jazz, because Jazz does exactly what it wants and when it wants. Giddins warns us against the trend he observes in America, which is the institutionalisation of Jazz through education. Giddins believes this will change how Jazz constituted as academia will be allowed to describe and analyse music and it will make suggestions of what is good (accepted truths).
There are many different ways through which Jazz can be narrated but there are no narratives which can be seen as telling ‘the truth’ about Jazz (Foucault 1976). These narratives should be viewed as discourses. They should be viewed as making of meanings which struggle against each other and try to convince each other.
Connell, Robert (1987, 1995) did a lot of work on Gender studies and masculinity and he introduces us to the concept of hegemonic masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity accompanies concepts of subordinate, marginalised and complicity masculinity (Connell 1995). This concept has been important in Gender studies over the last two decades. ‘Hegemonic masculinity is the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy—which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women’ (Oxford dictionary 2007). When we focus on the concept of hegemonic masculinity we deal with how masculinity is shaped. In some ways Jazz does tell us something about masculinity and what is identified as ‘necessary’ and ‘best’ in Jazz culture. In order to be successful in Jazz it is important to understand who you are and also how you are (Barrett 1998, Carby 1998). In addition, for women Jazz musicians and the ‘willingness to take risks’ should be seen as a statement of their own and others’ success. The ‘risk taking’ characteristic is strongly linked with men and masculinity. Men are seen as the ‘risk takers’ compared to women. But women can also be represented in the same way as men. So, women can then rely on masculine connotations, they can also individually attempt to alter the understandings of ‘risk taking’ as female characteristic. If a challenge to well established cultural understandings is made then the effect will be minor. The cultural narratives of how women ‘are’ will hardly change by negotiations made by an individual woman. ‘Jazz’ and ‘jazz musician’ are two well established categories in content. Likewise, there will be distance between the conceptual content of the two categories Women and Jazz musician.
Theoretical issues
Judith Butler is a post-structuralist feminist. Butler has done plenty of work on Gender, identity and sexuality. According to Butler (1990, 1993) the tabooing of homosexuality takes place in our culture from when the child takes birth. There will be implications with the production of the subject. To, Butler ‘identifications substitute for object relations, and identifications are the consequence of loss, gender identification is a kind of in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as prohibition (Butler 1993:63). Here she discusses gender in relation to melancholia. It is based on Freud’s findings on how lost desires live on as psyche identifications. To Freud, mourning was a process that had to work to release the losses one had suffered. ‘Freud isolates the mechanism of melancholia as essential to “ego formation” and “character” but only alludes to the centrality of melancholia to gender’ (Butler 1990:57). In the Ego and the Id (1923) Freud discusses the structure of mourning as the beginning structure of ego formation, this theory’s information can be found in the 1917 essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’(Butler 1990). So melancholia was the form whereby the lost but unmourned objects were combined. Freud has done influential work on the theory of personality, ideas about the role of sexuality in early human development and the role of the unconscious. Butler closely reads Freud’s work. The emphasis is put on incest taboo which remains important in generating heterosexuality.
Butler also uses the term ‘heterosexual matrix’ to explain the permanence of sexual orientation. This is like a linked group through which bodies, desires and identities are produced as natural and necessary. This helps us to understand how men and women become social individuals by the linking. The matrix that Butler mentions draws a kind of coercing boundary between desire, identity and body directed towards the opposite sex.
The connection between gender and sex in relation to human beings is linked with power strategies that maintain gender. Butler looks at Foucault’s work on regulatory ideals. Foucault discusses the different meanings of the word subject and one of the meaning is to submit. Therefore an individual is brought under meanings of terms like normality or sexuality, gender. The categorisation is understood as necessary in order to be oneself and to be recognisable subject for others. In many cultures the hegemonic power structures represent homosexuality as a taboo. It is ‘the other’ which is subordinate compared to normal heterosexuality. The power hegemonic structures contribute to the maintenance of normal gender identities based on attraction towards the opposite sex.
What Judith Butler is trying to explain to us as students of gender studies is that gender is articulated in our culture and time, goes beyond our understanding without the consideration of early repression. It is the unconscious which cannot be seen clearly. How expressions are made by the psyche depends on the extent to which limits are set by the unconscious which is opaque. The is point is what is performed can be understood by what is hidden ‘what is exteriorized or performed can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier and from the domain of corporeal legibility’ (Butler 1993:234). In the closed doors we find desires and objects which are not accepted by the dominant culture.
We now have to discuss some ideas about Drag as pointed out by Butler (1993). Drag ‘fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity’ So performing gender ‘subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space’ (Butler in Price 1998:417). Drag can be understood as a hidden performance or a picture over heterosexual masculinity. It can be read as an acknowledgement of being normal as in loving the opposite sex rather then the same sex. ‘What does seem useful in this analysis, however, is that drag exposes or allegorizes the mundane psychic and performative practices by which heterosexualised genders form themselves through renouncing the possibility of homosexuality, a fore-closure which produces both a field of heterosexual objects and a domain of those it would be impossible to love’(146). Can improvisation be interpreted as allegory over heterosexual feminity or masculinity? Understanding, closeness and identification are important to good Jazz.
Grooving in Jazz is tied to the body Monson (1996). Grooving is like a great happiness or a ‘buzz’ as Merlin puts it. The musicians get this kind of feeling when they play good music. According to Monson, the instruments that are being played bring a lot of physical pleasures. Therefore language and bodily experience go together in the satisfaction of pleasures. Mukul and Colin both agree that playing together as a band is very intimate. Bianca says ‘the communication is unique in the team. You stand up infront of the audience which is kind of thirsty for the music. So it is offcourse something bodily as you actively perform, the body also speaks if good Jazz is to be made’. This suggests there are bonds in between musicians that allow them to work as a team to create good music. Understandings, devotion, euphoria all come together in Jazz improvisation.
In conclusion, I have focused on how gender can be understood by how it is experienced and also how it is expressed. I have attempted to understand how gender is represented in Jazz. I have also discussed some of the lyrics which Merlin sang at the musical event. It was important to discuss the historical issues surrounding women and nationalist movement as this has helped us to picture traditional ideas about gender roles. I have focused on some of the major theoretical issues as put forward by Butler and other theorists to analyse how gender is constructed.
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