Swing Out Sister
WOMEN IN JAZZ
REDHOTRECORDS.COM
OVER THE COURSE of 22 years, eight tours of Japan and five tours of Europe, the Kit McClure Band and their range of swing, soul and blues have included hundreds of women musicians. Alto and tenor saxophonist Kit McClure played with an all-women jazz band in college, then came to New York and worked with famed musicians like Barry White, Robert Palmer and Cab Calloway, as well as Latin bands and Broadway bands. McClure laughs: "In 1982 I looked around and said, it's rough out here! I'm going to go back to my premise: Women can make great music together."
Some of her musicians have moved on to found their own labels or play with other prestigious bands, while others still play with hers. "What we have is a stable base of musicians who have stayed in the business," says McClure. "There's a young talent that comes in, and they get a chance too. Ages range from 20s to 50s, and occasionally the 80s. That's the point-to be cross-generational. The young kids have energy, but might be a little raw; the people who have been in it for decades help them learn. I don't know where you could have this other than NYC."
In the early 90s, McClure founded Women in Jazz as a non-profit dedicated to promoting women's roles in jazz: performance, recording and history. The group has developed a range of educational lectures and clinics adaptable to all age groups. The aim is to expose students to women composers whose work has been neglected by jazz historians and left out of the jazz canon. Students learn how to recreate music from limited or damaged archival materials, as well as how to transcribe them for performance. Other issues include ways to rearrange and reinterpret historic music for modern audiences.
Recently, Women in Jazz and the Kit McClure Band have focused energies on unearthing and promoting a piece of jazz history: the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. Formed in 1937 at the Piney Woods Country Life School for poor and orphaned children of color in Mississippi, the all-girl band was established as a money-making venture for the school. But in 1941, the band set off on its own, moving to Virginia and recruiting established musicians. Soon enough, they'd reached 17 members and attained national popularity; at one point Louis Armstrong offered trumpeter/vocalist Tiny Davis 10 times her salary to join his band. She stuck with the Sweethearts.
At the time, women had more success finding work in an integrated band than playing in a band with men. Groundbreaking and inspirational as the Sweethearts were, defying social conventions-as well as the Jim Crow laws-presented logistical headaches. Though they toured throughout the U.S., playing clubs like New York's Apollo, Chicago's Regal and DC's Howard, they had to avoid the Deep South, and some white members attempted to pass as black at all times: Getting pulled off the stage or arrested by law enforcement was a risk. In the late 1940s, the group disbanded. As male musicians returned from war, they got first consideration for jobs, and the opportunities for the Sweethearts and female musicians waned.
While the Sweethearts were extremely popular, their mix of black, white, Mexican and Asian women limited the venues where they could appear, and they mainly played for African-American audiences. Sixty years later, the people who remember the Sweethearts are dwindling, and the 2002 Oxford Companion to Jazz makes no mention of them (or the Kit McClure Band, for that matter). "This band was popular like Count Basie and Duke Ellington, was up there with the great big bands," says McClure. "But they were all women, and didn't get recorded. The few recordings made were poor; for the most part, even that library had been lost."
In a collective transcription by one all-women band of another, the Kit McClure Band took what scratchy recordings they could find, sampled soundtracks from films, and recreated the Sweethearts' library. The result-The Sweethearts Project-is 10 fiery, swinging Sweethearts tracks that McClure's band researched and transcribed, and an eleventh track added in tribute to jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams. Two of the tracks feature Carline Ray, a Sweetheart in 1946 and 1947, who has also played with Erskine Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Marian McPartland and others. Now in her 80s, Ray is still an active musician, and recently sang with Winton Marsalis.
"Now that the CD is out, the next step is to do workshops in schools to bring arrangements to school bands," says McClure. "Students currently learn from Ellington and Basie, but they can now learn from the Sweethearts, too. It's very difficult music. This will be a very important way to help foster a new generation of young women to go into jazz in numbers proportional to what they are in the population."