Feminist Improvising Group

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The Feminist Improvising Group was an international band project by feminist improvisation musicians and is considered to be the first public female ensemble in freely improvised music .

history

The Feminist Improvising Group was founded in 1977 by the singer Maggie Nicols and the Henry Cow musicians Lindsay Cooper (woodwind instruments) and Georgie Born (cello, bass guitar), the vocalist and pianist Cathy Williams and the trumpeter Corinne Liensol as an initially British band; At the beginning of 1979 the ensemble was expanded to include the pianist Irène Schweizer (who also played drums) and the trombonist and violist Annemarie Roelofs . The filmmaker Sally Potter was also part of the core of the band, played alto saxophone and appeared as the second singer.

The Feminist Improvising Group was innovative and completely unusual in the concert business at the time, because it often included theatrical elements in its performances and in particular addressed women's everyday life in different facets. Maggie Nicols therefore emphasized the momentum associated with the performances and the specific reference to the everyday life of the musicians and viewers involved: “The people were totally shocked. Because they suddenly felt the power that emanated from women. But we hadn't planned this at all. We ourselves no longer realized what was actually happening. We improvised our own lives, our biographies. We ironized our situation, perverted the addictions, threw everything up in the air. "

In doing so, they developed their own musical language in order to counteract the elements of expression traditionally assigned to women via gender roles . Cooper analyzed, “Men use rhythm, technology and improvisation to express the same power and sexual dominance that oppress women. When women react to this in such a way that they limit themselves to melodic and acoustic forms instead of using other elements in a non-suppressive way (...), then they are merely perpetuating the old definition of femininity ”(and also the claims to power of masculinity ).

The group has toured Europe several times. Especially at the FMP Festival 1979 in West Berlin, the audience was totally enthusiastic, while the music colleagues were very divided and z. Some reacted violently negatively.

effect

The feminist improvising group acted as a symbol of the breakout from the patriarchal structures of the jazz scene. Irène Schweizer described the developments around the Feminist Improvising Group as follows: “The goal was an all-women group. The reverse: There were thousands of men's groups, but no women's groups. We wanted to show that it was possible, and that was quite provocative. Male musicians in particular did not eat that easily. The musical level was very different. But we didn't want to show performance, it was about the mood among the women, to show what is possible in an all-women band. "

The effect went beyond just the new presence as women: “The Feminist Improvising Group challenged the gender constructions of improvised music in several ways , which marginalized women and coded the space of improvisation as male and heterosexual.” The Feminist Improvising Group opened Thus both musicians and improvisational music itself a significant expansion of their space, because "the possibility of freedom with regard to gender differences, gender and sexuality for improvised musicians was strangely non-existent both in the discourse and in the practice of free jazz and free improvisation" .

In 1983 the Feminist Improvising Group developed into the European Women Improvising Group (EWIG), which was expanded to include Annick Nozati and Joëlle Léandre . “The name Feminist Improvising Group was chosen because we were all active in the women's movement; in the 1980s people started criticizing the name, saying it was too political ... So we renamed the group to open up and internationalize it. ”EWIG was the core of the Canaille festivals, to which improvising musicians could be brought together again and again: In April 1986, on the initiative of Katharina Goth, who was already active in culture in the ghetto and at the independent Arena-Theater Frankfurt am Main , and Annemarie Roelofs with the cooperation of Christiane Spieler with four founding concerts in the Arena , Free Theater in der Krebsmühle, and in the Jazzkeller Frankfurt under the title Canaille the first "International Women Jazz Festival for Improvised Music" takes place. Although the initiative for this first major public festival of feminist jazz and improvisation musicians was immediately confronted with devaluation and trivialization, followed in Zurich, Lyon, Moers, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam and later repeatedly in Frankfurt - here still under the artistic direction of Katharina Goth - further festivals and events of this open project.

The Feminist Improvising Group thus represented the starting point for further projects by women - which transcend political, stylistic and media boundaries. a. also Les Diaboliques (Swiss / Nicols / Léandre). Significantly, despite its great influence on improvised music and especially on the understanding of female musicians within jazz , the group is almost consistently ignored in specialist literature up to the present day. With the exception of a hardly accessible Swedish record, there are no officially published sound carriers, although there are corresponding recordings (for example in the archive of Free Music Production ).

literature

  • Wolfgang Sterneck: The fight for dreams - music and society. KomistA-Verlag, Hanau, 1998. ISBN 3-928988-03-4
  • Patrik Landolt, Ruedi Wyss (ed.): The laughing outsiders. Musicians between jazz, rock and new music. Zurich 1993 (A book from the weekly newspaper WOZ published by Rotpunktverlag). ISBN 3-85869-156-9
  • Julie Dawn Smith (2004): Playing like a girl - The queer laughter of the Feminist Improvising Group. In: Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Editors): The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, ISBN 0819566829 , pp. 224-243.
  • Dita von Szadkowski : Crossing Borders. Jazz and its musical environment from the 80s. Frankfurt am Main 1986. ISBN 3-596-22977-4

Discography

  • International Women's Festival of Improvised Music - Rote Fabrik Zurich ( Intakt Records , 1986)
  • Canaille 91 - Festival for Improvised Music in Frankfurt a. M. (1991)
  • Derek Bailey / Coum / Max Eastley / The Feminist Improvising Group Another Evening at Logos ( Sub Rosa 2015, rec. 1979)

Web links

swell

  1. ^ "Up in the air" interview with Maggie Nicols and Irène Schweizer. In: Landolt / Wyss 1993, pp. 275f
  2. ↑ Lindsay Cooper, improvisation does not fall from the sky. In: Landolt / Wyss, outsider ... 1993, pp. 333–337, here p. 337
  3. ^ "Up in the air" interview with Maggie Nicols and Irène Schweizer. In: Landolt / Wyss 1993, pp. 275f
  4. ^ From a conversation between Wolfgang Sterneck and Irène Schweizer on October 15, 1993 in Zurich
  5. ^ Jason Robinson, University of California, San Diego: Review - The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. In: Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol 1, No 1 (2004). Retrieved October 8, 2011.
  6. ↑ “The opportunity for freedom in relation to sexual difference, gender, and sexuality for women improvisors was strangely absent from the discourses and practices of free jazz and free improvisation” - Julie Dawn Smith (2004): Playing like a girl - The queer laughter of the Feminist Improvising Group. In: Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Eds.): The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, ISBN 0819566829 , p. 229.
  7. ^ I. Schweizer after http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/mschweiz.html “The name Feminist Improvising Group was chosen because we were all so involved in the women's movement, but in the '80s people began to criticize the name and say it was too political ... So we renamed it to make it more international and open ".
  8. ↑ Abendpost (night edition) of April 10, 1986, Frankfurter Rundschau of April 10, 1986; in Schwab 2004 the founding is shown distorted, see: Jürgen Schwab: Der Frankfurt Sound. A city and its jazz history (s). Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 227f
  9. ↑ Werner Petermann "Fine, that you are a canaille" in: Frankfurter Rundschau of April 10, 1986, which also criticizes the "fig leaf reference to the woman" of the HR Jazz Festival, as well as Hans-Hugo Schildberg "fear of the Wohlklang "in: Frankfurter Rundschau from April 15, 1986; also with regard to the devaluation of the feminist festival initiative, Schwab passed on a less than objective historiography in 2004, see: Jürgen Schwab: Der Frankfurt Sound. A city and its jazz history (s). Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 228