Feminist Improvising Group
| Feminist Improvising Group | |
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| Background information | |
| Origin | London, England |
| Genres | Avant-garde jazz, free improvisation, experimental music |
| Years active | 1977–1982 |
| Associated acts | Henry Cow, European Women's Improvising Group, Les Diaboliques |
| Past members | |
| Maggie Nicols Lindsay Cooper Georgie Born Corinne Liensol Cathy Williams Irène Schweizer Sally Potter Annemarie Roelofs Frankie Armstrong Angèle Veltmeijer Françoise Dupety |
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The Feminist Improvising Group (FIG) were a five- to eight-piece English free improvising avant-garde jazz and avant-rock ensemble formed in London in 1977. They were the first women-only group of improvisers[1][2] and challenged the hitherto male-dominated musical improvisation scene.[3]
FIG performed live in London and toured Europe several times, where they played at music festivals in various venues, including Paris, Berlin, Rome, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Reykjavík.[4] In 1983 FIG evolved into the European Women's Improvising Group (EWIG).[5]
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[edit] History
The Feminist Improvising Group (FIG) was founded in 1977 in London by Scottish vocalist Maggie Nicols from Centipede, and English bassoonist/composer Lindsay Cooper from Henry Cow.[6] The other members of the five-piece ensemble were cellist/bassist Georgie Born, also from Henry Cow, vocalist/pianist Cathy Williams from the British duo Rag Doll, and trumpeter Corinne Liensol.[7] They had originally intended calling themselves the "Women's Improvising Group", but at their first engagement they discovered that the organisers had billed them as the "Feminist Improvising Group".[2][8] Nicols said that the "political statement of the band's name never even came from us! But we just thought, 'OK, they've called us feminist, we'll work with that' ".[9]
FIG's debut performance was at a "Music for Socialism" festival at the Almost Free Theatre in London. Their act was a combination of music and comedy, and focused on "women's experience" and "mundane daily things".[9] Nicols described it as "quite anarchic. It had elements of theatre; we had props, we were chopping onions, I was rushing around with perfume, it was completely improvised."[1]
FIG were the first women-only improvising group,[1][2] and they challenged the established improvising community with performances that were theatrical, with politics and farce supplementing their music.[1] They staged parodies around the role of women in society and incorporated domestic "found objects" in their performances, "vacuum cleaners, brooms, dustpans, pots and pans, and egg slicers".[10] Their performances often had some of the women cleaning the stage, while the others huddled in a group to "explore the sonic possibilities of household items."[10] They also broke down the barriers that traditionally existed between the performer and the audience by engaging in "antiphonal exchange[s]" with them, and promoting the notion that "anyone can do it".[11] This antagonised the purists who valued "technical virtuosity" and "improvisational competence".[11] FIG redefined free improvisation by introducing "social virtuosity", the ability to communicate with the other musicians and the audience.[12]
FIG toured Europe several times, where they played at festivals in various venues, including Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Reykjavík.[4] When Cooper and Born were performing with Henry Cow in Zurich in January 1978,[13] Cooper invited Swiss pianist Irène Schweizer to join FIG.[14][15] English filmmaker Sally Potter, who played saxophone and sang, joined the group in April 1978. Dutch trombonist Annemarie Roelofs, English singer Frankie Armstrong, Dutch woodwind player Angèle Veltmeijer, and French saxophonist and guitarist Françoise Dupety, also played intermittently with the group. Some of FIG's performances consisted of up to eight women.[2]
Nicols left FIG in 1980 to form another all-women group called Contradictions.[16] In 1983, under the helm of Schweizer, FIG evolved into the European Women's Improvising Group (EWIG), bowing to pressure that their name was "too political".[5][16][17] EWIG included Schweizer, Cooper, Roelofs, French double bassist Joëlle Léandre, and French singer Annick Nozati.[16]
[edit] Reception and analysis
In the 1970s there was a view that the free improvisation music space was largely the domain of male heterosexuals, and women were marginalized.[3][18][19] Julie Dawn Smith wrote in her 2004 essay, "Playing Like a Girl: The Queer Laughter of the Feminist Improvising Group", that "The opportunity for freedom in relation to sexual difference, gender, and sexuality for women improvisers was strangely absent from the discourses and practices of free jazz and free improvisation".[7] When FIG made their appearance in 1977, they challenged the established improvising community.[1] Because part of their act was to parody men, some male improvisers felt "threatened" and complained about "these women who can't play their instruments", and their "irreverent approach to technique and tradition".[9]
FIG was a mixture of white, black, lesbian, straight, working- and middle-class women.[20] Maggie Nicols wanted it to be open to all women of different backgrounds and different levels of musicianship, even those who had not improvised before.[21] She saw these differing abilities, which gave rise to unexpected results, as a strength, and not a weakness.[9] "The result was a music that had to be taken on its own terms, as music that decidedly and consciously included the politics of being women, musicians, improvisers, and members of a society."[22]
While some of the members lacked conventional musical skills, they were "politically very right" and quickly adapted to improvising.[23] Because of the nature of free improvisation, the women were able to perform together without concerns about competency.[23] They used free jazz's "extreme timbres" to enhance their live performances, which David G. Pier described as "in-your-face queer sexuality and feminist shock politics."[24]
Critics of FIG were always either very positive, or very negative; there was never any middle-ground.[23] They received little support from male improvisers, who criticised the technical ability of the group and referred to them as "women" and not musicians.[23] Men generally felt threatened by the "spectacle of so many unsupervised and unpredictable women on the stage".[25] Irène Schweizer recalled that FIG were invited to perform at the Total Music Meeting in Berlin in November 1979 because she had played at the festival before (in all-men groups). But after seeing FIG perform, the organiser asked Schweizer, "how come you brought such a group, they can't play, and they are not good enough."[26] Avant-garde musician Alexander von Schlippenbach also complained about FIG being there, saying that they "couldn't play [their] instruments" and that he could have found "loads of men that would have played a lot better".[25]
Guitarist Eugene Chadbourne said that "gendered style as well as sexual difference factored into the critical assessment of FIG's performances."[25] Schweizer believed that many male improvisers felt threatened by FIG because of their use of humour, "We were not that serious, like men, [...] they take [improvising] so seriously".[27] Georgie Born described FIG's humour as "very iconoclastic and very surreal, or very silly. There were no big boys there standing judging."[21] On the issue of FIG being a women-only group, Nicols remarked, "It's amazing the number of men that were saying, 'Why are there no men?' And yet nobody had ever dreamed to think of asking why there were men only [groups]."[4]
Some feminist audiences were also critical of FIG, saying that they were "too virtuosic and abstract".[4] At a Women's Festival at the Drill Hall in London, many women in the audience were unfamiliar with "free music" and accused FIG of being "elitist" and "inaccessible".[4] This was a bitter pill for the members of FIG to swallow who expected support from such quarters.[4]
But FIG also received positive reactions from both men and women at concerts.[4] Nicols recalled the "dykes" in the audience who had come to see them at FIG's first performance: they were into disco and soul and sat patiently through the other improvisers, but when FIG came on, "They laughed their heads off."[9] Improvisers Steve Beresford and David Toop were also in the audience and responded positively to FIG's performance.[9] Lindsay Cooper recalled a comment made to her by a female artist working in film: "I don't know what on earth you're doing but I like it."[4]
[edit] Influence
FIG spawned a number of women-only improvising groups and events. In 1980 Contradictions was formed by Maggie Nicols, who modelled it in the same vein as FIG. The founding members included Nicols, Jackie Lansley and Sylvia Hallett, with Irène Schweizer and Joëlle Léandre participating in their first concert. Contradictions went to become a women's workshop run by Nicols in which "anyone could participate".[16] Schweizer was one of the organisers of the Canaille festivals that staged the first International Women's Jazz Festival for Improvised Music in 1986 in Frankfurt.[17][28] In the early 1990s, Nicols, Schweizer and Leandre formed the "highly theatrical and often satirical"[29] improvising trio, Les Diaboliques, releasing three albums between 1994 and 1998.[17]
Nicols said that FIG was "tremendously influential" on the second-generation improvisation scene that developed in its wake,[9] including the improvisational group Alterations.[4] FIG was also educational in that it exposed free improvisation to women unfamiliar with the genre, and it introduced feminism to uninitiated men.[4]
[edit] Recordings
- Feminist Improvising Group (1979) – a cassette release of extracts from live performances in Copenhagen (29 April 1978), Stockholm (20 August 1978) and Reykjavík (18 November 1978).[30][31]
[edit] Members
- Maggie Nicols – vocals
- Lindsay Cooper – bassoon, oboe, sopranino sax, piano
- Georgie Born – cello, bass guitar
- Corinne Liensol – trumpet
- Cathy Williams – keyboards, vocals
- Irène Schweizer – piano, drums
- Sally Potter – vocals, alto saxophone
- Annemarie Roelofs – trombone, violin
- Frankie Armstrong – vocals
- Angèle Veltmeijer – flute, tenor sax, soprano saxophone
- Françoise Dupety – alto saxophone, guitar
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ a b c d e Myers 2002, p.38
- ^ a b c d Smith 2004, p.232
- ^ a b Smith 2004, pp.229–230
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Smith 2004, p.239
- ^ a b Jenkins, p.305
- ^ Myers 2002, p.36
- ^ a b Smith 2004, p.229
- ^ Myers 2002, p.37
- ^ a b c d e f g McKay, George. "Interview with Maggie Nicols". Jazz in Britain. p. 20. http://www.ccm.salford.ac.uk/ccm/resources/uploads/File/Jazz%20interviews%20with%20images.pdf. Retrieved 2009-05-27.
- ^ a b Smith 2004, p.235
- ^ a b Smith 2004, p.226
- ^ Smith 2004, p.236
- ^ "Henry Cow Chronology". The Canterbury Website. http://calyx.perso.neuf.fr/bands/chrono/henrycow.html. Retrieved 2009-06-05.
- ^ "Irène Schweizer". NME. http://www.nme.com/artists/irene-schweizer. Retrieved 2009-06-04.
- ^ Allen, Clifford. "Irene Schweizer: Ramifications". All About Jazz. http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=27393. Retrieved 2009-06-05.
- ^ a b c d Myers 2002, p.39
- ^ a b c "Irène Schweizer". European Free Improvisation Pages. http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/mschweiz.html. Retrieved 2009-05-28.
- ^ Smith 2004, p.228
- ^ Robinson, Jason. "Book Review – The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation and Communities in Dialogue". Critical Studies in Improvisation. http://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/csieci/article/view/12/37. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
- ^ Smith 2004, p.234
- ^ a b Myers 2002, p.77
- ^ Myers 2002, p.78
- ^ a b c d Smith 2004, p.237
- ^ Pier, David G.. "More News from Nowhere". Institute for Studies In American Music. http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/isam/ISAMF04.pdf. Retrieved 2009-06-15.
- ^ a b c Smith 2004, p.238
- ^ Myers 2002, p.74
- ^ Myers 2002, p.76
- ^ Sterneck, Wolfgang. "Die Freie Musik: Free Jazz und Improvisierte Musik" (in German). Sterneck.net. http://sterneck.net/musik/free-jazz/index.php. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
- ^ Myers 2002, p.118
- ^ "COOPER, Lindsay". Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular Music. http://www.donaldclarkemusicbox.com/encyclopedia/detail.php?s=751. Retrieved 2009-06-09.
- ^ "Feminist Improvising Group". Rate Your Music. http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/the_feminist_improvising_group/feminist_improvising_group/. Retrieved 2009-06-09.
[edit] References
- Jenkins, Todd S. (2004). Free Jazz and Free Improvisation: An Encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 304–305. ISBN 0313333149. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=o1Kt_12xofIC&pg=PA304.
- Myers, Dana Reason (2002). "The Myth of Absence: Representation, Reception and the Music of Experimental Women Improvisors". Jazz Studies Online. http://jazzstudiesonline.org/files/Dana%20Reason%20Myers%20Dissertation.pdf. Retrieved 2009-06-05.
- Smith, Julie Dawn (2004). "Playing Like a Girl: The Queer Laughter of the Feminist Improvising Group". In Fischlin, Daniel; Heble, Ajay. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. Wesleyan University Press. pp. 224–243. ISBN 0819566829. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ae4BeqeYSGkC&printsec=frontcover#PPA224.
