Last year, the Columbus Youth Jazz Group Girls Project brought together girls from middle school to college to gain experience and confidence through Jazz music. Credit: Courtesy of Rachel Azbell
Jazz Arts Group of Columbus is encouraging young women to take charge in the male-dominated genre this March.
JAG is a local nonprofit organization that offers a variety of events, from traditional concerts to jazz jam sessions, according to its website. For Women’s History Month, Education Program Manager Rachel Azbell collaborated with other music educators to provide events centered on empowering girls in jazz, culminating in the inaugural Jazz Girls Day, an all-day event for female-identifying middle school to college-age students April 1. An itinerary of the day can be found at the event page.
Azbell became involved in JAG while still an undergraduate student at Denison University, she said.
“I’m very passionate about women in jazz because I’m a jazz musician myself,” Azbell said. “I was really excited to get involved in some of the women in jazz causes and create some programming that sort of reflected that.”
Other events include live performances from Kelly Delaveris Quintet March 16 and Sydney McSweeney March 23, both as a part of JAG’s Community Jazz Series, according to JAG’s event page.
Leading up to Girls Jazz Day, the Columbus Youth Jazz Girls project will play an open rehearsal March 28. A Community Jazz concert with Girls Jazz Day collaborators Azbell and Colleen Clark, a professor of music at the University of South Carolina with a doctorate in jazz performance, will take place March 31. Each event will take place at the Jazz Academy at 769 E. Long St. Columbus City Schools teacher and saxophonist Mercedes Chomos is joining Azbell’s efforts with CYJ Girls Project.
“We had had similar experiences as being the only female in a group of male musicians,” Chomos said. “When she moved back to town after graduating, she was doing work with Jazz Arts Group, and I was doing this work partnership with them, and we connected.”
The CYJ Girls Project was a culmination of the research Chomos did while getting her master’s in music education at Capital University, she said. Chomos said she was interested in seeing the benefits of an all-girls jazz class and said she saw girls taking ownership of solos and standing up for themselves.
“Last year was actually the first full year. We had a combination of middle schoolers, high schoolers and a bunch of college students that played along with us, which really made it a great dynamic because we had mentors,” Chomos said. “A lot of our student musicians have male directors. They don’t have role models of the same gender. It was great to just have those older students playing along with the younger students.”
The Jam Session series, a program spearheaded by Azbell, is another women-centered event taking place at the Jazz Academy this month. Azbell said due to jam sessions being historically competitive and male-dominated, her goal is to create an environment where girls are comfortable taking risks.
“The jam session in the history books is described as a cutting contest where all of these killin’ male musicians would come together and try to compete. So, you don’t often see a lot of women playing,” Azbell said. “Even in the jams in Columbus, they’re quite friendly and usually they’re not too competitive in nature, but I just felt like we need a jam that’s truly educational in nature, and not in a bar, but in our jazz academy.”
JAG is also collaborating with Cincinnati-based We Create Jazz Ensemble to put a Women’s History Month spin on their PBJ & Jazz event, Azbell said. PBJ & Jazz is a reoccurring event that provides interactive concerts to young children and their families, according to JAG’s website. The event is March 18 at the Lincoln Center Ballroom for $5 per person.
“This is like a long series for us that is for kids and families to come interact with essentially just diverse jazz groups,” Azbell said. “it’s a really fun experience for the kids and I was like, ‘For Women’s History Month, it’d be cool if we had a group that had a mission-oriented in that.’”
Chomos said encouraging girls to pursue jazz starts with recruiting young women to play instruments they may feel discouraged from picking up, a barrier she said she tries to break with the CYJ Girls project.
“The research has shown that instruments still are gendered, meaning that girls are picking flutes and clarinets and feminine instruments, you might say, where boys pick masculine instruments, the louder instruments, the bigger instruments,” Chomos said. “I tried to break that trend and encourage the girls to pick the instruments you would find in the jazz band, which traditionally, boys gravitate towards.”
Azbell said seeing diversity in leadership roles further encourages girls to step into the spotlight.
“It comes down to hiring people who represent the people you want to see in your space,” Azbell said. “That’s why I began hiring people who aren’t necessarily Columbus-based but offering them the opportunity to come up from Cincinnati or wherever and create a space where our teaching artists reflect the community.”
Azbell said in a genre as vulnerable as jazz, this support is crucial, especially as girls are conditioned to take fewer risks.
“You’re singing or you’re playing an instrument and improvising to some degree always in jazz,” Azbell said. “You have to feel supported by the people you’re around.”
