Gwen Rogers and Her Musical Dolls.

My jazz series is naturally dominated by the scene in the USA—with occasional forays to Poland, Germany, Turkey, Shanghai, Japan, and Ethiopia. A 2007 article by Catherine Parsonage and Kathy Dyson documents the history of women’s jazz in Britain; and in a BBC Radio 4 programme from 2014,

• The lost women of British jazz,

Janine H. Jones explores the early years—and “the tragic story of how a burgeoning musical equality was deliberately snuffed out”. Leading women musicians recall the times, with further contributions from pianist Jen Wilson and historian/photographer Val Wilmer. As singers, women have always been put on a pedestal; their early contributions as instrumentalists are less well-known.

After the end of World War One the UK became a hotbed of music, with bars, clubs, and bottle parties hosting bands every night and women jazzing alongside the men. An early black British performer was sax-player and multi-instrumentalist Sadie Crawford (1885–1965; see also here). By the early 1920s the white pianist Natalie Spencer (also 1885–1965?) (listed here) was playing with the visiting Southern Syncopated Orchestra and leading her own trio.

Left, Sadie Crawford, 1935; right, Valaida Snow for a 1945 advertisement.

Valaida Snow (1904–56) was a trumpet player (known as “Little Louis”) and singer from Tennessee who was popular in the UK. She toured throughout the USA, Europe, and China—from 1926 to 1929 she toured with Jack Carter’s Serenaders in Shanghai, Singapore, Calcutta, and Jakarta. On tour in Denmark during World War Two, when the Nazis invaded she was imprisoned for a period in a Copenhagen jail. Her recordings have been unearthed by Val Wilmer. Here’s High hat, trumpet, and rhythm:

and Poor butterfly (1936):

Another fine black musician on the Soho jazz scene was pianist Clare Deniz (1911–2002)—who married into a fine jazz lineage from Cardiff.

One of the leading early all-female bands was Gwen Rogers and Her Musical Dolls. This recording comes from 1928:

Here the broadcast offers a litany of disparaging sexist comments of the day, egged on by Spike Hughes at the Melody maker. The BBC took a similar line for many years, but in 1943 they made Ivy Benson (1913–93) and her All Girls Band their house band.

Benson’s band had a high turnover of musicians, as they frequently left to marry G.I.s they met while touring. She once commented, “I lost seven in one year to America. Only the other week a girl slipped away from the stage. I thought she was going to the lavatory but she went off with a G.I. Nobody’s seen her since.”

Here’s a 1947 recording of Not so quiet, please:

Gracie Cole (1924–2006) played trumpet in the band, and formed her own female band in the 1950s, in which Sheelagh Pearson played drums.

Women constantly had to wrestle with male prejudice. Having struggled to keep them in their place in the inter-war years, men reasserted their dominance after World War Two. By the 1950s the respected sax player Kathy Stobart (obituary here) was still having to fight for recognition. Here she is in 1958 with Humphrey Littleton:

The programme makes a fine introduction to a neglected aspect of British social and musical history.

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For early black musicians in Europe, click here. On the British jazz scene since the 1950s, note George Melly’s wonderful memoir Owning up. Women play a major role in the new British jazz (see also here). Cf. Women in early Irish music. And for WAM in wartime, note Myra Hess and her National Gallery concert series.