My name is Amelia Nelson, and this website was created as a part of my senior project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Growing up as a jazz bassist, I was often the only girl in the band–and later as a Music Industry student, I saw that similar gender disparities existed across much of the music business. However, jazz in particular has many social and educational barriers to gender and racial equality, a fact which is discordant with its rich cultural heritage and participatory nature. This–along with cries heard about the waning of jazz–led me to wonder about the revival jazz could have without these socio-educational deterrents. Why aren’t we welcoming anyone and everyone holding even the slightest interest in jazz with open arms? How could jazz change with the introduction of so many new experiences, traditions, and points of view? I decided to dedicate my senior project to exploring the history of gender discrimination in jazz, the main ways in which this discrimination manifests today, and what solutions exist to combat it. From there, I explored how breaking barriers through improving the state of jazz education today could reinvigorate the genre.
The title of my project, A Thousand Times More, is derived from a Peggy Gilbert quote that was published in a 1938 copy of the jazz magazine Downbeat as a response to their article “Why Women Musicians Are Inferior.” Gilbert (pictured left in 1928), a fantastic saxophonist and bandleader, wrote “A woman has to be a thousand times more talented, has to have a thousand times more initiative even to be recognized as the peer of the least successful man. Why? Because of that age-old prejudice, that time-worn idea that women are the weaker sex, that women are inferior to men.” She went on, “You actually think that because men have centuries of musical education behind them, the present generation has inherited that knowledge, that talent? We expect better arguments than that, Father. Knowledge is not hereditary.”
Though Gilbert’s statement is unfortunately still relevant almost 100 years later, there has certainly been much progress made in the right direction for gender equality in jazz and the music industry as a whole. The networks, scholarships, and events listed on this page are all designed to uplift women in music and support them in their continued success. I hope that by implementing more equitable hiring and educational practices, there will be a thousand times more creativity, passion, and opportunity for women in music today, than ever before.
A THOUSAND TIMES MORE 