Žiga Koritnik has been capturing
images of musicians since 1987. He lives and works in Ljubljana,
Slovenia, where he is a regular guest on the music scene and
documents the Ljubljana jazz festival, the Druga godba festival,
concerts in Cankarjev dom and various other events across Europe,
both large and small, including Saalfelden jazz festival,
Konrontationen in Nickelsdorf, Vienna jazz festival in Austria,
Musique Mettisses in Angouleme, France, Womad in Reading, England and
the Talos Festival in Ruvo di Puglia, Musica Sulle Bocche,
Sardegna-Italy, and the Vision festival in New York. Since 1996 he
has been a resident photographer of the Skopje jazz festival in
Macedonia, where each year a calendar with his photos is published.
In 2001 he held a major exhibition at the Skopje City Museum to
celebrate the 20th anniversary of the festival, which was accompanied
by a book predominantly featuring Koritnik's photographs. In 2001 he
spent seven weeks in New York, where he documented the Vision
Festival and became acquainted with the musical and artistic events
in the city. He was afforded the opportunity to exhibit in the
Kavehaz Gallery in Soho. In June 2006 he was invited back to New York
to exhibit his work at the Vision jazz festival, at the Angel
Orensanz Center. His photographs are regularly published in Slovene
newspapers and magazines (including Delo, Mladina, Muska, and
Fotografija) as well as in international publications (Time Out, Jazz
Times, Jazziz, Signal to Noise, Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, Ballett
Internationale, Village Voice, All About Jazz, Downbeat, Jazznyt,
etc.).
He is also involved in theater photography and has regularly
collaborated with Mladinsko gledališče Ljubljana. He has worked
with Iztok's Kovač's En-Knap dance company, documenting
performances, and shooting an accompanying film of their performance
Daleč od spečih psov (Far from Sleeping Dogs), as well as a film
about composer Vinko Globokar, Krotilci časa (The Time Tamers) and
Metod Pevec’s film Beneath Her Window, which got many awards at the
Slovenian Film Festival and was the Slovenian candidate for the
Academy Awards in 2005. From 1989 until August of 2006 he has been
employed by the Slovenia’s national television station, Televizija
Slovenija, as a TV and film cameraman, and has worked with directors
Maja Weiss, Peter Braatz, Amir Muratović, Sašo Podgoršek and
Michael Benson, and others. In 2001 he documented the making of Peter
Greenaway's Map to Paradise exhibition in Ljubljana, which was later
that year followed by the publication of a book with extracts from
his documentation of Greenaway's film, the creation of which is still
underway. In 1996 he self-published a book of photographs entitled
Jazzyga! (Jazz-It!). To mark the occasion, he held an exhibition at a
major European jazz festival in Saalfelden, Austria. He was invited
back to the festival in 2003.
His photos have also appeared in many
books by other authors, including a book on the sculptor Jakov Brdar,
whose sculpting of general Rudolf Meister he documented, and Colours
of Music, published on the 20th anniversary of the Saalfelden Jazz
Festival. Žiga Koritnik also created the cover of the Slovene
translation of Miles Davis’ autobiography. He invited photographers
Mauro D'Agati, Raffaella Cavalieri, Matthiass Creutziger, Manfred
Rinderspacher, Jak Kilby, Luca D'Agostino and Enid Farber to exhibit
at the Ljubljana Jazz Festival in Slovenia. In 2004 he made a joint
photography exhibition featuring the works of Slovenian music
photographers. He has collaborated with the publishers of Mladinska
knjiga magazines, and the company Hit Nova Gorica. He is a member of
the Jazz Journalists Association. His photographs were included with
CDs released by labels such as Tzadik, Intuition Music, Nika Records,
Trost Records, The Thing Records and Leo Records. In 1997 the Italian
photo magazine Zoom featured a presentation article on Žiga
Koritnik. In 2005, his work was presented on 16 pages in Jazznin, a
Japanese jazz magazine. He held more than 60 solo and 40 group
exhibitions at home and abroad (Slovenia, Italy, USA, Austria,
Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Germany, France, Croatia, Serbia,
Macedonia, Monte Negro, Ireland, Japan...). Since 2005, he is a
regular visitor of Sardinia, Italy, where he documented the Musica
Sulle Bocche Festival, Ai Confini tra Sardegna E Jazz Festival, and
the Isola delle Storie Festival of Literature several times. In
collaboration with Tumbarinos di Gavoi and Jana Project, he published
their book about the Sardinian carnival in 2009. He still documents
the carnival every year. In 2009 he published a book of black and
white photo impressions of Lake Bohinj, Slovenia. He regularly
organizes music and landscape photography workshops at home and
abroad. He has received the Special Recognition Award at the Olympus
photo competition in Japan, and the Zlata diploma (Golden diploma)
award for the annual report by HIT Nova Gorica. The internet edition
of Encyclopaedia Britannica has an entry on Koritnik’s first
website, created in 1996 ( www.ljudmila.org/scca/koritnik/), under
The Web's Best Sites.
The Exibition will be held from October
31 to November 6
My reflection about this problem
started quite some years ago. I was going to a concert with a friend,
a trumpet player, who told me that 'women cannot play saxophone
because their rib cage is smaller than that of a man'. Curiously
enough, in that period a woman saxophone player was emerging, Matana
Roberts, and the media dedicated to improvised music were praising
her for the freshness of her sound and vision.
The result was that I started asking
myself: 'is the avant-garde sexist?'. After all, what we needed was
Peter Brotzmann heavy blowing, Cecil Taylor strumming, Han Bennink
hammering. What about hues and shades? Obviously there was Marylin
Crispell playng piano in many records by the Anthony Braxton quartet,
there was Susie Ibarra playing drums with William Parker band 'In
Order To Survive', and the concert me and my friend trumpet player
were attending to was that of Joelle
Leandre.
But that assertion about women's rib
cage was so impressed in my mind that I started aking myself if the
seed of mysoginy was in some way present in my environment. After
all, when I was in London for six months, I attended many gigs and
festivals and I noticed only few women. To be honest, I remember four
of them – and only one from outside the Eu/US. And only few titles
in my CD collection were attributed to women.
At a certain point, I started searching
the web for articles about the subject. I read that women were mostly
hired by the music business in jazz as pianists or singers, while all
the other instruments were taken as instruments for male performers,
as an example. This is mostly true also for improvised music. Then, I
found a dissertation by Dana Reason Myers titled “The Myth of
Absence: Representation, Reception and the Music of Experimental
Women Improvisors” (2002).
Pauline Oliveros
I will talk about this thesis for all
the lenght of this article, since it's really interesting if you want
to deepen the problem of women musicians in a male-dominated world as
the one of jazz and particularly the avant-garde scene of improvised
music. The thesis of D.R. Myers starts with drawing the life and art
of seven women improvisors: Pauline Oliveros, Marylin Crispell,
Maggie Nichols, Joelle Leandre, Miya Masaoka and Susie Ibarra.
Since all these women are very well
acknowledged nowadays and are well known to my readers, I will omit
their achievements and I'll pass to the rest of the discussion. D.R.
Myers starts analyzing how Down Beat
magazine covers women in jazz from 1960 to 2000. Down Beat doesn't
cover free jazz or avant garde music in general, and his columns are
seen more as an opportunity to sell records of the concerned styles
of music (bebop, fusion, classical jazz, etc.) more than discussing
about issues of interest from the musicians themselves.
Nonetheless, Down Beat sometimes pays
hommage to the masters of free jazz and avant garde music, favoring
male participants: Cecil Taylor, Julius Hemphill, Anthony Braxton,
Anthony Davis, and Ornette Coleman among others. Occasionally a
review of a CD by Marylin Crispell appears. In addition, some
journalists, such as John Corbett, have written about male and female
improvisors. Despite his contributions, prominent American women
improvisors has been very limited.
While the magazine tends to profile
American musicians, on occasion European improvisors appear,
including Barry Guy, Evan Parker, Han Bennink and Alex Von
Schlippenbach. European women from the same generation and field are
not featured: only three have been featured in articles and only five
have received reviews in Down Beat. We obtain similar results
consulting the database of the magazine Cadence,
where, from 1976 to 2000, there are 686 articles about male musicians
and only 30 featuring women musicians.
Myra Melford
As far as the magazine Jazziz,
a special number was issued in 2000 dedicated to women artists. Only
two women, Myra Melford and Carla Bley, are involved in both creative
music and jazz music. Women instrumentalists remain marginalized, and
experimental women remain even more marginalized. Things don't get
better if we consider books. D.R. Myers analyzes the following
titles: Robert Walser's Keeping Time (1999), Ingrid Monson's Saying
Something (1996), Krin Gabbard's Jazz Among The Discourses (1995),
Paul Berliner's Thinking in Jazz (1994), John Corbett's Extended Play
(1994) and the famous book by Derek Bailey Improvisation: Its Nature
and Practice in Music (revised 1992).
All these books provide little mention
of the contributions of women improvisors, and even less on
cross-cultural aspects of the role of women in music. In contrast,
Val Wilmer's As Serious As Your Life (1977) dedicates an entire
chapter titled “You sound Good – For a Woman” in which Wilmer
discusses attitudes towards women musicians and how creative women
improvisors have helped support the male musicians they maintained
personal relationship with (Alice and John Coltrane, Fontella Bass
and Lester Bowie, Linda and Sonny Sharrock).
At this point D.R. Myers ask to herself
if the statement “sound good for a woman” necessarily imply the
notion of a woman who plays like a man, or if the comparison of
creative women's abilities to creative men's abilities engender
notions of the women being understudies of 'big brother' either
directly of indirectly.
Amina Claudine Myers answers in an
interview: “I don't recall actually hearing that statement [“sound
good for a woman”] in reference to me, but I have heard it …
years back when I was playing organ with Gene Ammons, I heard someone
saying 'she plays like a man'. One time I was referred to as a female
Mc Coy Tyner, or Cecil Taylor”. Amina Claudine Myers believes that
statements like “'she plays like a man' means being strong and
aggressive on the piano, but it's been proven that women have done
heavy work and stood up under it.”
Susie Ibarra
It is perhaps safe to assume that the
most valued physical standard would be gendered masculine. In an
article issued on Times, a newspaper from New York, of May 30, 1999,
David Yaffe describes the music of drummer Susie Ibarra depicting her
as an 'exceptional' woman. Susie Ibarra can surely physically handle
the drums differently from what many critics of the past were
thinking about women – as my friend trumpet player – but the
discussion of physicality leads readers to assume that there is a
standard by which physical qualities are to be measured and compared
in order to play the drums.
Yaffe discussion of Susie Ibarra
creates distance between her and other women drummers or women
improvisors. Allan G. Johnson makes an additional claim suggesting
that what makes some women exceptional “is their ability to embody
values culturally defined as masculine” (1997). In addition, many
reviews of women musicians call attention to personal traits,
physical attributes, or compare their music to other male musicians
obscuring why these women's voices are important to be heard.
Coverage by media is not the only
problem women approach through their journey in music. Joelle Leandre
recalls that “as a woman, it is certainly more difficult to enter
the musical 'machine'. We are the minority and it is therefore
difficult to find one's language as an artist while remaining
faithful to ourselves”. Other women have experienced a mixed
reaction to their work, as it happened to Miya Masaoka and her piece
Ritual.
Ikue Mori talks about the feeling of
being displaced in both the improvised music field and technology:
“They see the technology and they don't really consider me a
musician playing an instrument. So I feel that they don't understand.
But then I go to electronic music people's concerts. It's all male
dominated. My music made by machine is not electronic enough, like I
am too female for them”.
Maggie Nichols
Public criticism made by other
musicians or participating colleagues can also alienate women
improvisors. Maggie Nichols and Irene Schweizer, from the Feminist
Improvising Group, recount how they were ostracized at one of the
early important performances at the Total Music Meeting in Berlin in
the late 1970s. Perhaps the discontent expressed by other musicians
towards the ability of the musicians in the Feminist Improvising
Group indicates not only gender bias, but also latent gendered
conceptions of how music ought to sound or be created.
“We could be very iconoclastic and
very surreal, or very silly – recalls cellist Georgina Born – I
am sure there were good moments of music and moments of real
hilarity. Only video would do justice to the character of what we
did”. Born elaborates on how this use of humor could have led other
musicians to perceive the Feminist Improvising Group to be not a
serious band. “I am sure that humor is always a weapon from the
margins. We were also using parody and probably the grotesque”.
It's time to have a look at various
festivals of improvised music and its policies. Total Music Meeting
(Berlin) has hired only a small number of women since 1968. Peter
Brotzmann has appeared fifteen times, Evan Parker thirteen times, and
Alex Von Schlippenback twelve. Twenty-eight different women performed
at TMM. No African-American women were presented, and only three
Asians have performed (Aki Takase, Jin Hi Kim and Sainkho Namchylak).
The most women ever presented during a single festival was in 1979
with the Feminist Improvising Group (seven members).
At the Vancouver Jazz Festival, the
number of creative improvisors, both male and female, totaled 45 on
1600 artists represented from 1986, equaling 2.8%. Creative women
improvisors made up only 0.37% (six on 1600). Compared with other
festivals, Taklos (Zurich) includes a large number of women who are
not pianists and singers. This is important, since the festival more
accurately represents the diversity of creative women improvisors.
The number of women presented at this festival ranges from a minimum
of three out of thirty-tree (9%) in 2000, to a maximum of ten out of
thirty-four (29%) in 1996.
Jin Hi Kim
The festival has featured six Asian
performers and two African American women. The programming
demonstrates that there are more women who are not just pianists and
singers which should be hired. The Guelph Jazz Festival (Guelph,
Ontario) began in 1994 run by Dr. Ajay Heble, a professor of
comparative literature at the University of Guelph specializing in
post-colonial studies, and he has been the festival's founder and
artistic director.
Up until 2000, the festival has
concentrated on bringing women improvisors from Canada or the United
States and has presented a handful of women improvisers that were not
presented at the Vancouver festival, including Maggie Nichols, Amina
Claudine Myers, Pauline Olveros and percussionist Gayle Young. The
Festival de Musique Actuelle Victoriaville has programmed a variety
of Asian women improvisors and European women improvisors. The
percentage of creative women improvisors varies from 15.7% in 1985 to
7.8% in 1990, to 5.5% in 2000.
A close examination of the number of
women hired to perform at all those festivals reveals that women are
hired substantially less than their male colleagues. The attention
placed on singers and pianists in festivals and the media over other
istruments may be examined in terms of historical notions of women in
music. In her study of girls' musical education in British schools,
Lucy Green points that teachers tended to identify particular
istruments with girls.
Recent musicological studies address
the history of women pianists and singers in Western classical music,
a tradition that still has enormous influence on music industry and
social practices. During the 19th century the piano was
associated with the bourgeoisie and was almost exclusively an
instrument for females of amateur rank. Many artists used women
pianists as subjects for their paintings and drawings, capturing many
of the dominant culture attitudes towards women.
Mary Lou Williams
“The piano served as an object to be
looked at besides being heard or played … the looking was
insistently gendered, driven by the instrument's extra-musical
function within the home as the visual-sonoric simulacrum of family,
wife and mother” (Leppert, 1993). The notion of women as pianists
and singers is widespread even in contemporary jazz music. The most
famous women in jazz before the 1960s were pianists (Lil Harding,
Mary Lou Williams, Dorothy Donegan, Marian McPartland, Hazel Scott).
The prominence of women pianists still
dominates women's contribution in jazz today. But if a girl is
conditioned and trained on one instrument from elementary school, it
may be difficult to switch instruments once a certain proficiency is
achieved on one instrument. And certainly a visit to any Western
music conservatory will clearly reveal that the majority of women
tend to major in piano and voice. Many traditional music programs
foster the continuation of this kind of gendered construction in
their students and curricula.
One way for women artists to counter
some of the dominant hiring practices at festivals is to produce
their own festivals. Festivals such the Canaille Festival (Frankfurt)
co founded by trombonist Annemarie Roeflos and Irene Schweizer has
created a space for many women improviors. Joelle Leandre, Elvira
Plenar, Maggie Nichols, violinist Maartje Ten Hoorn and Marylin Mazur
have played there.
City of Women, a festival held in
Ljubljana, was started in 1995 with the specific goal of providing
space for women artists, musicians and theorists. The 2001 call for
artists posted by the organizers is especially telling: “City of
Women's main theme for the first edition of the new millennium is
inspired by an in 1989 written, unpublished poem by Audre Lord: 'Most
people in the world are Yellow, Black, Brown, Poor, Female,
Non-Christian and do not speak English.
Joelle Leandre
By the year 2000 the 20 largest cities
in the world will have one thing in common: none of them will be in
Europe none in the United States'. In addition to this we also want
to stress that a large percentage of the European and North-American
population is not 'white'. 'Western society' is multi-ethnic and
multi-cultural. In this new global contest it is not surprising that
the main creative centers, the contemporary art talent is less and
less to be found in 'white' cultural fortresses.
With this in mind we have decided to
call the 7th edition: YEAR ONE, and select only artists
and theoreticians 'of colors'”. However, the women programmed by
the festival still legitimizes the most famous women (Marylin
Crispell, Lindsay Cooper, Ikue Mori, Tenko, Meredith Monk and Zeena
Parkins) and is not committed to the younger generation of
improvisors.
Another festival, Kosmos Frauenraum, is
held in Vienna. There, in 1997 a group of women formed LINK. Part of
its mission was to raise awereness for the need of women-centered
performance space in Austria. They obtained from the governement a
space, a cinema called 'Rondell' as their homebase. After a while,
the governement retracted their promise and so LINK squatted the
'Rondell' for the next months.
Performances, readings, concerts as
well as actions of protest took place not only at the 'Rondell' but
all over Vienna. Finally LINK found the cinema 'Kosmos' suitable to
substitute the 'Rondell' and the space was named 'frauen.raum' and
opened in 2000. In 2002 Kosmos presented an international festival of
music entitled 'Here I am': artists invited included trombone player
and violinist Annemarie Roelofs, The United Women's Orchestra, Joelle
Leandre, sound artist Gabriele Proy, Susie Ibarra, trombonist Abbie
Conant and Sylvie Courvoisier.
Another example of a festival open to
women is the Vision Festival, based in New York and founded by
bassist William Parker and her wife Patricia Nicholson. The 2002
Vision Festival reveals a much stronger commitment to
African-American improvisors and featured women include Joelle
Leandre, bassoonist Karen Borca, and the vocalists Ellen Christi and
Jayne Cortez.
Ellen Christi
In March 2002 the San Francisco Jazz
Festival presented “Women and Jazz: A Panel Discussion” featuring
writer and activist Angela Davis, musicologist Sherri Tucker,
composer Maria Schneider, pianist Mary Watkins and Susie Ibarra. One
would argue that in the near future things will go better for women
improvisors, but the path is still long and full of obstacles.
The lesson we can learn is that the
world of art is not ripped apart from society, and that it reflects
the same dynamics. This means that the music we all listen to
reflects the dynamics of power we all live through our society and
that a music that reflects change and committment is still far from
us. This is also an explanation to the problem I raised up with my
last reviews.
The records I reviewed, all by male
musicians, are records of 'post avant garde' music. A music that
takes improvisation mixing it with other styles of music from the
20th century. A music that has its reference in the past,
that doesn't look at the future. A music that reflects a period of
stagnation. Maybe if in the future men and women will collaborate
together, there will be a new music, reflecting new values and new
musical ideas – think about the Feminist Improvising Group as an
example.
Until that moment, I expect to
encounter music that reflects the past and the status quo, as the
records I reviewed in the past months. It is necessary to include
different genders and races in our culture if we want it to be
renewed. If we fail this target, we will listen to music created
following old schemes and old dreams, a music that is far from being
near to us, a music that will be conservative.
If you want to read Dana Reason Myers
dissertation in its entirety, follow this
link.
