Kristin A. McGee’s Some Liked It Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928–1959 focuses on women who performed as jazz instrumentalists or as popular musicians in the mass-mediated cultural forums of vaudeville, theater, radio, film, and television during the first half of the twentieth century. Through their participation and engagement with jazz culture, American culture, and mass culture, these women resisted sexist representations of female performers in the world of musical entertainment and established new gender ideologies throughout the pre-World War II and postwar years.
In her introduction, McGee informs the reader that the intention of the book is to provide a broader examination of the visual and audio technologies of radio, film, and television – products of the expanding mass culture industry—that “supported, sustained, or prohibited professional women’s performative and musical lives” (2). Drawing heavily from the disciplines of ethnomusicology, gender studies, and cultural studies, she also sheds light on the impact of race upon the musical performance and representation of women in jazz during these transformative years.
Following the introduction, the book is divided into four themes with a total of eleven chapters and a conclusion. McGee begins with an analysis of sound films and vaudeville during the Jazz Age and continues with the various cultural forums of theater, film, and television. Each theme of the book utilizes aural and visual media (recordings, films, and televised variety programs) of female musical performances, which McGee compares and contrasts to other gendered cultural phenomena, such as chorus-girl acts and Broadway revues. She primarily relies on the “historical texts” of all-girl performance reviews in newspapers and music magazines, jazz recordings, and jazz women’s own recollections to develop her hypotheses and draw conclusions about gendered female musicality in the aforementioned mass-mediated contexts. The book includes fifty-nine black-and-white photos that are relatively small and of poor quality, but serve to illustrate and describe her main points. Most of these photos are stills taken from soundies, film shorts, and television variety shows.
The jazz women McGee examines are predominately white, except for the brief discussions of two African American bands—the Harlem Playgirls and the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. Other female groups covered in the book include: The Ingenues, Phil Spitalny’s Musical Queens, Ina Ray Hutton and Her Melodears, Ada Leonard and Her All-American Band, Glamorettes, Thelma White and Her All-Girl Orchestra, and Dave Schooler and His 21 Swinghearts. These all-girl bands, which varied in musical repertoire and performance style, constantly resisted and challenged masculine ideologies when performing and touring the country, and encountered exploitative practices, unfair pay scales, and hostile philosophical and sexist attitudes from an American public that expected women to perform and behave in passive and subservient roles rather than as assertive and competent musicians.
McGee reserves special attention for the discussion of Hazel Scott and Lena Horne, two African American female performers who performed as “specialty acts” in predominately white Hollywood films. Scott, the first black female musician featured as a serious jazz instrumentalist in a major Hollywood film, was known for “swinging the classics” in which she performed “jazzed versions of classical themes” (113) on piano, and Horne was the first African American performer to sign a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio. Their performances represented a dignified, versatile, and sophisticated performance style that challenged aesthetic notions of jazz and classical music and helped to transform the “racial/gender/cultural matrix of American jazz” (133).
Overall, McGee’s book covers a lot of ground. Each chapter focuses on a different all-girl band or orchestra as case study and details the growing technological developments in the entertainment industry as new mediums evolved to reproduce the sounds and images of all-girl bands. I especially appreciated her discussion of vitaphone shorts and soundies as cultural forums for all-female performances, since I recently curated the John H. Baker Jazz Film Collection exhibition (2009) at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. Soundies, which are short films featuring jazz bands and musicians lasting about three minutes, provided a popular cultural forum during the 1940s for African American all-girl big band performances, such as the International Sweethearts of Rhythm (ISOR). Founded in 1939 in Mississippi, the ISOR was the first integrated all-women’s band in the United States. The name was given to the group due to its “international” flavor, as it consisted of members from different races, including Latina, Asian, Caucasian, Black, Indian, and Puerto Rican. Composed of fourteen- to nineteen-year olds, the women played swing and jazz on a national circuit that included the Apollo Theater in New York City, the Regal Theater in Chicago, and the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. In 1945, they embarked on a six-month European tour, making them the first black women to travel with the United Services Organization (USO). In their filmed performances, white and Asian members of the band are missing, as there were many theaters that would not show an integrated film. They may still be on the soundtrack, but they had to be kept off camera.
McGee’s book takes its place among the other scholarship related to female jazz performers, but with a unique focus on the musical recordings produced by all-girl bands and female jazz musicians on film and television during the twentieth century. Not only do readers learn about female musicians and bandleaders who performed over a three-decade period, but they also glean information about the mass media culture industry and the power of aural and visual images on the American public imagination. McGee concludes the book with a critical discussion of the eventual exclusion of women from the jazz canon, which she partially attributes to the concertization and canonization of the great jazz artists, composers, and performers who historically have been male.
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[Review length: 948 words • Review posted on November 3, 2009]