Honouring International Women’s Day, the WJO roster will be all-women and present music by several great women arrangers and composers.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “People ask me sometimes, ‘When will there be enough women on the (Supreme) court?’ My answer is: ‘When there are nine.’ People are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”
It would be ideal if gender did not play a role at all, but historically women have held a very low profile in the jazz history books. There have been important female contributors in every area of jazz history: composers, instrumentalists, singers, dancers, members of clubs, music teachers- but we were usually the exception, and we simply have not been documented to the extent of men. So, on International Women’s Day week, here is an all-woman jazz orchestra.