Book description
Women have been involved with jazz since its inception, but all too
often their achievements were not as well known as those of their male
counterparts. Some Liked It Hot looks at all-girl bands and jazz women
from the 1920s through the 1950s and how they fit into the nascent mass
culture, particularly film and television, to uncover some of the
historical motivations for excluding women from the now firmly
established jazz canon. This well-illustrated book chronicles who
appeared where and when in over 80 performances, captured in both
popular Hollywood productions and in relatively unknown films and
television shows.
As McGee shows, these performances reflected complex racial attitudes
emerging in American culture during the first half of the twentieth
century. Her analysis illuminates the heavily mediated representational
strategies that jazz women adopted, highlighting the role that race
played in constituting public performances of various styles of jazz
from "swing" to "hot" and "sweet." The
International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Hazel Scott, the Ingenues, Peggy
Lee, and Paul Whiteman are just a few of the performers covered in the
book, which also includes a detailed filmography. "In her engaged
style, McGee has provided a clear examination and analysis of
recordings, early film and television, and other source material,
producing a convincing and compelling addition to musicology, jazz and
feminist performance scholarship."--Monica Mays, Pacific Review of
Ethnomusicology KRISTIN A. McGEE is an assistant professor of popular
music at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
