Living Jazz – Fridays at Noon

This week’s “Living Jazz” show focuses on jazz standards, both the male-dominated traditional canon  and the 101 compositions by women that Terri Lyne Carrington proposes adding to the list. Carrington, an NEA Jazz Master drummer and head of the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, has recently published a collection of lead sheets of 101 “New Standards” by such women as Abbey Lincoln, Carla Bley and Lil Hardin Armstrong, as well as by youngsters such as Nubya Garcia and nearly forgotten composers such as Sara Cassey. Carrington also has issued a CD featuring eleven of the tunes, “New Standards Vol.1,” and hopes to eventually record all 101.

We’ll start off with a few really beautiful standards from the current canon and then explore a bunch of the tunes in Carrington’s list. As a 70-year-old, I recall that the standard art history text book when I entered college contained virtually no women artists and have marveled at how our cultural life has been enriched by the additional of many wonderful women (and black, Asian and other minority) artists to the canon. I expect something similar to happen in jazz.

“Living Jazz” airs Fridays from noon to 2 p.m. on WJFF, 90.5 F.M. and streams online at wjffradio.org.