Gendered Interventions in European Jazz Festivals: Programming Inclusivity and Alternative Networks

The Keychange Initiative, introduced in 2017 encouraged music festivals to pledge 50/50 gender parity by 2022, an ambitious goal seeking to overturn male-dominated festival programs. Considering the entrenched gendered ideologies of particular music cultures, festivals have reproduced patterns of visibility, remuneration, and exclusion connected to their featured music genres. As sites performing jazz’s hegemonic masculinity, jazz festivals have generally scored low in gender diversity rankings. This presentation investigates the impact of Keychange upon European jazz festivals. Examination of four festivals, the North Sea Jazz Festival, Montreux Jazz Festival, JazzFest Berlin, and the Katowice JazzArt Festival, reveals not only the dominance of a New York-based star network, but a cross-cultural aesthetic cosmopolitanism promoted by early jazz impresarios who valorized especially jazz fusion alongside other popular musics connected to the counterculture and the Black arts movements of the 1960s and 70s. Jazz’s gendered and Americanist hierarchies continued to determine music festival programs until around 2018, when some festivals adopted the Keychange pledge. A focused analysis of programs between 2015-2020 therefore identifies an alternative ideology of inclusivity precipitated by recent initiatives and debates; such approaches impacted not only gender ratios of festival stages but other intersecting criteria such as the numbers of national versus American stars. Ultimately, by comparing pledging programmers’ alternative strategies to non-pledging jazz festivals, this presentation identifies beneficial relationships for women musicians and European artists, whose profiles were ‘stitched’ into alternative networks by pioneering female jazz festival programmers. 

Kristin McGee is Senior Lecturer in Jazz and Contemporary Music Performance within the School of Music at the Australia National University. She is also a saxophonist and author of jazz-related publications including Some Liked it Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television (Wesleyan University Press 2009) and Remixing European Jazz Culture (Routledge 2019).