Stash Records' 1976 "Women in Jazz: All Women Groups" LP and Sexism in Jazz

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning I listened to the Stash Records LP from 1976, Women in Jazz: All Women Groups, one of a series of three Stash LP’s from 1976 to showcase jazz musicians of the female gender. Of course the liner-note writer, Art Napoleon (any relation to Bonaparte or Phil?), emphasized the institutionalized sexism of the jazz world that kept most women from achieving stardom unless they sang: “With a few notable exceptions – most of them pianists of determined and forceful ways – even the best female musicians have found that most of the time just being good wasn’t good enough. A woman remained an outsider, even an intruder, sometimes a threat.” I read a biography of Woody Herman that mentioned Billie Young, a woman trumpeter he hired in 1940, and the problems that caused both of them, particularly the knotty question of how she would dress. Eventually she wore a black skirt and a white top to match the white shirts and black pants Herman’s male musicians wore. Herman’s next woman musician was vibraphonist Margie Hyams, whose sister-in-law L’Ana Webster Hyams was also a major woman soloist on tenor saxophone. Alas, Stash Records programmed this LP in a helter-skelter fashion – unlike their two follow-up albums of women in jazz, The Pianists and Swingtime to Modern, which at least presented the sides in chronological order and grouped all the selections by a given band together.

All Women Groups opens both sides with songs by the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a racially mixed group that began as one of the house bands for the Piney Woods Country Life School, a boarding school for poor Black children, mostly orphans. After a decade touring to raise money for the school, the Sweethearts broke from it in 1941 and became a fully professional band, though they were still under the management of white men who paid them pittances. By the mid-1940’s they were a top-flight swing orchestra, comparable to many of the all-male ensembles of the day (they didn’t have a composer at the genius level of Duke Ellington, but then what other bands – male or female, Black or white – did?) and with a particularly aggressive tenor sax soloist, Vi Burnside, who was nicknamed “the female Coleman Hawkins” (quite appropriately, too). They hired outside the Piney Woods talent pool without regard to the racial or ethnic backgrounds of their musicians; at their peak in the mid-1940’s the Sweethearts were a wild mix of Black, white, Latina and Asian players. One of the white members, alto saxophonist Ros Cron, recalled, “We white girls were supposed to say, ‘My mother was Black and my father was white,’ because that was the way it was in the South. Well, I swore to the sheriff in El Paso that that's what I was. But he went through my wallet and there was a photo of my mother and father sitting before our little house in New England with the picket fence, and it just didn't jell. So I spent my night in jail.”

Aside from the three songs by the International Sweethearts of Rhythm (“Digging Dyke” – an irony given that at least two of the Sweethearts, trumpeter Ernestine “Tiny” Davis and guitarist Roxanna “Ruby” Lewis, were a Lesbian couple – “Vi Vigor” and “Don’t Get It Twisted”), all the other 13 tracks on this LP are by small groups playing the sort of “mainstream” jazz heard in the nightclubs on New York’s 52nd Street in the mid-1940’s. This club scene would be the nurturing ground for bebop, one of whose pioneers, Mary Lou Williams, was a woman and perhaps the greatest non-singing woman jazz player in history. Williams said later that bop’s acknowledged creators like Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk would come to her home, sit at her piano, and work out the altered chords at the root of the bebop style. Williams is featured on three tracks here, “Timme Time” (which I thought was from the same Continental Records session as “Bouncing with Barney,” an odd song I remember finding on a Remington Records reissue LP, with Marjorie Hyams, vibes; Mary Osborne, guitar; Bea Taylor, bass; and Bridget O’Flynn, drums, though “Bouncing for Barney” had a male drummer, J. C. Heard; “Timme” was Danish-born jazz critic and hanger-on Timme Rosenkrantz); an adaptation of Dvořák’s “Humoresque” with O’Flynn and bassist June Rotenberg (who in the liner notes boasts that eventually she got a job with the New York City Center Opera Orchestra and thus no longer had to play jazz: a pity, because she’s quite good); and “Boogie Misterioso” with Marjorie Hyams, Mary Osborne, June Rotenberg, and drummer Rose Gottesman. Alas, none of Williams’s tracks here feature horns and therefore we don’t get to hear any of her major talent as a composer and arranger for big bands.

Aside from Williams’s ensembles and the Sweethearts, the best band featured here was one that recorded a vocal version of “I Surrender, Dear” with singer Vivian Garry and three quite hot instrumentals, “Sergeant on a Furlough,” “Seven Riffs with the Right Woman,” and the marvelously punning title “Moonlight on Turhan Bay” (a riff on the name of the actor Turhan Bey, an Egyptian-born player who managed to avoid the rancid typecasting Hollywood subjected most actors of color to; in an otherwise awful film from 1943 called The Mad Ghoul he was the romantic lead and scored the love of Evelyn Ankers from David Bruce, a bland white actor who played the title role). The members were Jean Starr, trumpet; L’Ana Webster Hyams, tenor sax; her sister-in-law Margie Hyams, vibes; Marian Gange on guitar (her solo on “Moonlight on Turhan Bay” is especially beautiful and quite advanced for 1945); Vicki Zimmer on piano; Cecilia Zurl on bass; and Rose Gottesman on drums. It’s interesting that most of the bands featured here do not include horn players, though among the ones that do we get to hear trumpeters Jean Starr, Norma Carson, and Edna Williams, the last of whom is featured on “Body and Soul” and an original called “A Woman’s Place Is In the Groove” (great title!) with either Ginger Smock or Emma Colbert on violin. That sort of prejudice was something women had to deal with in the classical music field as well; women could have at least a toehold on a major career if they played piano, violin, or harp (one of the tracks here is a version of “The Man I Love” featuring a quite good jazz harp solo whose player is regrettably unidentified, though I suspect it’s guitarist Mary Osborne doubling), but not if they played any instrument that had to be blown through.