Facing racism, sexism, exclusion and just plain dismissal from a male dominant music establishment, The Girls in the Band, a documentary directed by Judy Chaikin, is about female big band and jazz instrumentalists whose stories and experiences as women overcame social and gender repressive obstacles to just wanting to play their music– in bands, in clubs, on the road, on stage –with passion.
The film opens centered on a famous group shot of 57 notable jazz musicians in front of a brownstone in Harlem in the summer of 1958. Organized by an Esquire magazine layout published in 1959, it eventually became a feature documentary, A Great Day in Harlem, nominated in 1995 for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The photo remains an important study of jazz history with the familiar jazz cats, Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Count Basie, all recognizable giants in music history.
Conspicuously, while there were only three women in the photo, two are recognized musicians, Marian McPartland and Mary Lou Williams, who were invited to the photo shoot. Consequently, using this photo as the opening for The Girls in the Band, it opened the door and from that moment on, we step into a world I knew nothing about– an amazing legacy of female jazz and big band intrumentalists from the 1930s to the present.
It’s about time we hear their stories fifty years after that famous photo was taken. Eight years in the making, The Girls in the Band is a well made feature documentary for women to finally own a platform where they can tell their stories in an entertaining and eye-opening way, culled out of over 300 hours of interviews, archival footage and documented sources from all over the world.
Telling it like it was such as denigrating references like not wanting a bitch come in and arrange their music, humiliating statements that rated their looks and having had to wear outrageous costumes (pink poufy, sailor suits, frilly ballroom gowns) during their performances.
Chaikin expertly intertwines the timelines of the day as women players reminisced about the good moments playing with the best players of the times as well as the hard and dangerous times during the Civil Rights movement along with negative female bashing of the Women’s Liberation years in the 1970s. Funny anecdotes interjected throughout moves the documentary along showing that a sense of humor and high self esteem often was the mainstay of their survival. The final scene with a reunion photo on the very same brownstone as the one fifty-five years ago was emotional. It choked me up.
The Girls in the Band pays homage to the women who paved the way for the next generation of female musicians– to follow their musical destinies, not imitating their male counterparts, but making it their own. It is a universal story and a definitive legacy for the new breed of talented women taking their place in the music world.
05/17/2013
Film Review