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 Ivy Benson Band | |
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Beryl Bryden display cabinet 
Blanche Finlay 
Crissy Lee 
Paula Gardiner 
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18 A1 bi-lingual panels depicting the history and culture of women’s jazz in Wales which includes Black History panels. Discover the rich cultural diversity and heritage of jazz in Wales... the history of how jazz came to our music halls, theatres and chapels... the pioneers... the politics... the social history. HOW and WHY did Swansea Abolitionists run safe houses for fleeing slaves on the banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati? WHEN did freed slaves sing in Wales? Exhibition funded by Awards for All Wales, and City & County of Swansea. Available for hire. Stage gowns, memorabilia and musicians are also available with the Exhibition. Ring or email for hire rates. STEPPING OUT opened at Brecknock Museum & Gallery in August 2003 in time for the Brecon Jazz Festival; Visitor numbers 4500. STEPPING OUT has toured extensively ever since. The panels have been professionally designed and produced and are fully bi-lingual in content. Discrimination against women jazz musicians in the 1920s and 1930s was rife. Spike Hughes, band leader, composer, columnist on the Melody Maker, record reviewer, broadcaster for the BBC, continues to be revered in academia as the first learned authority on British Jazz and the first to theorise and publish articles. His views on British women jazz musicians effectively damaged women’s careers in the business. These are Spike Hughes’ views on British women jazz musicians which damaged our status in Britain for generations: I have always viewed with alarm the growing tendency of women to compose music; not merely because they do not compose very well, but because their presence in the company of a group of male musicians is embarrassing and unnatural. As men, we have our own language and our own codes of behaviour among ourselves; a woman who demands artistic, professional and social equality among us and insists that she is ‘one of the boys” is as acutely unwelcome and disturbing as anybody else wearing an inferiority complex on their sleeve. There can never be such a thing as true equality of the sexes. Economic equality, perhaps; I am married to a woman who, thank heavens, not only earns her own living, but often mine as well.” He described women who came to see his band at Huddersfield as “The Englishwoman is at her best only when she is dressed for the company of those horses and dogs which she so much resembles. It was not my place at Huddersfield to object too much if the dance floor was filled with inhabitants of stables and kennels. Spike Hughes has a panel all to himself in STEPPING OUT labelled SPIKED! |
Let Paul Robeson Sing ExhibitionWomen in Jazz researched 8 panels for this touring exhibition, funded by the Paul Robeson Wales Trust.
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WALES, SLAVERY AND ITS MUSICOur new exhibition is currently in research. | |