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Promoting Affect and Desire in theInternational Industrial World ofSmooth Jazz: The Case of Candy DulferKristin McGeePublished online: 12 May 2014.

To cite this article: Kristin McGee (2014): Promoting Affect and Desire in the InternationalIndustrial World of Smooth Jazz: The Case of Candy Dulfer, Jazz Perspectives, DOI:10.1080/17494060.2014.914017

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Promoting Affect and Desire in theInternational Industrial World ofSmooth Jazz: The Case of CandyDulferKristin McGee

The association of the body with the female works along magical relations of recipro-city whereby the female sex becomes restricted to its body, and the male body, fullydisavowed, becomes, paradoxically, the incorporeal instrument of an ostensiblyradical freedom.

Judith Butler in Gender Trouble1

There are many things to dislike about smooth jazz—for example, everything. Jazzhas always depended on real-time interaction, live or in the studio…We can’tblame technology per se:… But technology aside, jazz of every school and era isabout spontaneous expression, risk-taking, improvisational resourcefulness, rhyth-mic excitement, and the promise of the unforeseen, all of which is absent fromsmooth jazz…

Garry Giddins and Scott DeVeaux in Jazz2

Introduction—Smooth Jazz’s Gendered Technologies

Since jazz’s early mass-mediation, the naming of jazz genres, a seemingly innocuousact, has encapsulated the stakes connected to race, gender, and class affiliations.3 Criti-cal theorists once decried jazz’s mass (mechanical) reproduction, standardization, and“false differentiation;” others gradually legitimized cherished streams as “authenticart.”4 The Jazz Age in particular proved a germinal period of industry mediated

1Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 12.2Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux, Jazz (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009), 560. The quote is fromthe original, hardcover edition. The selection from the paperback version, published the same year, steps back apace from its provocative sound-bite opening: “There are many things to dislike about smooth jazz – for example,its use of some of the worst aspects of pop recording.” Though the language is revised, the message is not. See GaryGiddins and Scott DeVeaux, Jazz (New York: W. W. Norton and Company [pbk.], 2009): 499.3I would like to thank Kevin Fellezs and Steve Pond for their insightful reviews of this article as well as the reviewersof Jazz Perspectives who offered guidance for further structuring the project’s main arguments.4I refer her to Adorno’s famous protestations against jazz and popular music in Theodor Adorno, “On Jazz,” Essayson Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press [1936] 2002) pp. 470–495. See also JohnGenneri’s work for an overview of the discursive processes guiding the conceptualization of jazz as authentic art:

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musical promotion, even as musicians and music corporations exhibited capriciousattitudes concerning the hotly debated artistic and aesthetic conceptions of culturalpundits and specialist jazz critics.5 During the prosperous postwar era, new pro-motional techniques for popular music attempted to attract the important femaleand suburban demographic by drawing from the science of psychoanalysis and the rela-tively new field of demographic marketing research, which itself evolved from the adap-tation of WWII-era propaganda techniques.6 The focus group, a technique partlyinspired by Freud’s influential work, probed the role of the subconscious for condition-ing psychological and sexual desires.7 In response to these new techniques, advertisersshifted their focus from broadcasting the “use-value” of cultural products to emphasiz-ing “exchange values” by highlighting their abstract and ephemeral emotional qualities.As a marketing tool, the focus group, in particular, rapidly altered the methods adoptedby firms for producing and promoting popular music commodities including instru-mental jazz recordings and live performances.

In subsequent decades, with the cosmopolitanism and expansion of musical citiesalongside the growing consolidation of the culture industries, jazz’s popularizationand diversification increasingly reflected the wins and losses of both powerful and per-ipheral groups connected to these debates. More recently, digital networks haveenabled musicians, record labels, and fans to participate more actively in evaluatingand influencing the collective values connected to industry-driven promotional strat-egies; however, these new distribution mechanisms have also aided the industry in mar-keting its most commercial of jazz styles.8 As the voices of 1940s jazz traditionalists

John Gennari, “Jazz criticism: Its development and ideology,” Black American Literature Forum, 25/3 (1991),pp. 449–523.5During the Jazz Age, jazz began to appear in both experimental and established media from sound films to 78RPM recordings and from vaudeville to networked radio. The rise and prestige of the culture industriesensured that jazz was internationally promoted through these successful media, which profited from the sure inge-nuity and will of prolific and mobile jazz musicians traveling Black Atlantic routes and establishing reputations inEurope, Latin American, and eventually Asia and Africa. For a more complete review of jazz’s mediation duringthis important decade see Lewis Erenberg, Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Kristin McGee, Some Like it Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009); Burton Peretti, The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race and Culture inUrban America (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992); David Stowe, Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in NewDeal America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).6The successful adaptation of these techniques accompanied increased domestic consumption of mass-producedcultural products, especially through the audio-visual medium of television. See Denise Mann, Private Screenings:Television and the Private Female Consumer edited by Lynn Spiegel and Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1992).7The excellent BBC documentary series the Century of the Self (2002) provides compelling argumentation for thewide-reaching consequences of Freud’s work in the United States as applied by both political organizations and thecultural industries and especially through marketing research focus groups and in advertising and propagandacampaigns pioneered by such figures as the “father of public relations” Edward Bernays who assisted bothmusical stars and corporations alike from Enrico Caruso to Lucky Strikes.8Adorno and Benjamin’s well-cited debates concerning the deleterious consequences of mass-mediated popularculture underlie such anxieties as jazz music came to be associated with popular music and the overly formulaicmechanisms associated with its production, distribution, and public reception. Recent debates challenging theauthenticity of smooth jazz betray traces of both fascist-era Frankfurt School theory and more recent anxietiesexpressed by globalization theorists during the 1980s and 1990s who worried that the international dominance

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(“moldy figs”)9 and modernists eventually gave way, during the 1980s, to debatesbetween neo-conservatives (WyntonMarsalis et al.) and those representing increasinglyfragmented musical worlds (from crossover to experimental jazz), a new set of transna-tional relations emerged (economic, political, cultural, and technological). These newcategories facilitated the rising popularity of smooth jazz, the most popular andcommercial of jazz styles of the late-twentieth century.10 Paramount to smooth jazz’scommercial domination of the jazz industry during the 1990s was its promised fulfill-ment of elusive emotional and sexual desires. Such strategies of desire keenly reflectedthe predominance of a persistent gendered matrix. In her well-cited work, Judith Butlerargues that expressions of desire are not biologically pre-determined. Rather, “whichpleasures shall live and which shall die is often a matter of which serve the legitimatingpractices of identity formation that take place within the matrix of gender norms.”11

Consequently, in this dominant heterosexual matrix, the binary object relation ofbody as feminine and mind as masculine continued to foreground notions ofmusical autonomy and artistic freedom in the late twentieth century.12

Since smooth jazz first emerged as a radio format, the industry simultaneouslyconnected “soothing” musical soundtracks to both affective and bodily concerns bypromoting heavily gendered musical tropes and more general erotic lifestyle activities(romantic vacations or intimate encounters, for example).13 These representationsrelied upon historically established images, which were once powerfully assertedwithin the popular culture industry. The industry’s marketing of smooth jazz extendedthe surplus value of prior, culturally mediated articulations within the context of blackmusic representations. Smooth jazz, in particular, profited equally from its reconfigura-tion of racialized essentialisms as from its adoption of potent sexual iconographies andpsycho-sexual fantasies while, paradoxically, promoting female contemporary jazz starswho created both aesthetically rigorous and/or heavily formulaic contemporary jazzrecording projects.14

of mainstream trends would yield further homogenization and/or cultural grey-out; see Reebee Garofalo, “Whoseworld, what beat: transnational music industry, identity and cultural imperialism,”World of Music 35/2, 1993, 16–32; Steven Feld, “The Poetics and Politics of Pygmy Pop,” Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representationand Appropriation in Music, edited by Georgia Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2000); Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992).9Bernard Gendron,“Moldy Figs and Modernists: Jazz at War (1942–1946),” Jazz among the Discourses (Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 31–56.10During a period characterizes by trickle-down economics, hyper-globalization, and the rise of the black middleclass, the confluence of economic measures, multiculturalism’s transformative race conceptualizations, and reifiedgender representations conditioned the unprecedented distribution of hybridized jazz musical productionsthrough both traditional media such as radio and newer transnational outlets including cable (MTV) and theInternet.11Butler 1990, 70.12I’ll return to this notion of desire in my analyses of smooth jazz as a musical category, which profited from thereification of such gendered performativities.13Images of erotic desire and escape had been visually represented however, in various forms, on album covers ofjazz and popular music since the 1940s. In the context of contemporary jazz, Wes Montgomery’s CaliforniaDreaming (Verve 1966) is representative.14This article resists any justification of the artistic legitimacy of this creative output, but rather aims to unpack theheavily gendered and sexualized discourse attached to smooth jazz’s reception during its heyday in the 1990s.

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Debates decrying smooth jazz’s formulaic production and popular receptionfrequently betrayed the reinvention of oft-repeated protestations marking popularjazz as excessively sexualized and effeminate, a gendered strategy previously adoptedby cultural critics in order to dismantle the aesthetic worth of a particularly popularstyle of jazz. As jazz scholar Steven Pond points out, this reaction partly entailed a his-torically-entrenched masculinist defensiveness to larger social misgivings about thesexual identities or perceived homosexuality of male popular musicians. Jelly RollMorton’s ambivalence about playing the piano and its “sissy” implications werealready widely apparent in his interviews during the 1930s.15 Further, the genderedtechnology (in Foucault’s terms), which gave way to the persistence of rock/pop bin-aries during the 1960s—as rock came to be understood as authentic, masculine andindividualized, while pop was increasingly conceptualized as feminine, artificial, andcollective—is powerfully projected into this gendered jazz critique.16 In her reviewof the dominant gendered rock/pop binary, popular music scholar Norma Coatescharacterized this dichotomy as one continuing to exert influence upon the relationsbetween men and women as fans and performers in popular music, where notionsof “masculinity and authenticity remain discursively hegemonic.”17

Despite great strides in the field of cultural studies towards productively highlightingthese ideological as well as performative cultural values, often jazz critics have contin-ued to equate overly essentialized reductions of jazz practices to notions of genderedcontamination and racial hybridity, concepts traceable to modernist articulations.18

Similarly, in the twentieth century, the subtexts underlying conservative protestationsagainst contamination and hybridization rarely acknowledged prior discourse, whichchanneled similar sexual fantasies about gendered bodies, as if racial constructionswere the only generative force guiding or prohibiting jazz creativity and performativityin American culture. These characterizations in turn disguised a masculine entitlemententangled within race and jazz theory (as well as a commitment to highlight male jazzicons exclusively), while reifying normative values connected to “authentic” jazz acts.Smooth jazz, whose racial, gendered, and sexual authenticity is constantly put intoquestion, begs a broader cultural contestation of its heavily gendered discursiverepresentation.

15Email correspondence from Steven Pond, 29 April 2013.16Norma Coates, “(R)evolution Now?” Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, edited by Sheila Whiteley(London: Routledge, 1997), 50–64; Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, edited by Nichole T. Rustinand Sherrie Tucker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); and McGee 2009.17Coates 1997, 53.18See in particular: Butler 1990 and Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (London: Palgrave Basing-stoke, 1990/2000). Andreas Huyssen elegantly historicizes this discourse in his review of nineteenth century mod-ernist formulations of artistic autonomy, in which prominent thinkers including Nietzsche conceptualizedauthentic art as directly opposed to the commodification and cooptation of mass culture. In this discursivedomain, mass culture was persistently conceptualized as feminine. For example, he interprets Nietzsche’s critiqueof popular theater to foreground modernism’s emerging gendered cultural hierarchies: “And the Wagner, thetheater, the mass, women – all become a web of signification outside of, and in opposition to true art… In thetheater one becomes people, herd, female, Pharisee, voting cattle, patron, idiot-Wagnerian” (Nietzsche quotedin Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other” After the Great Divide: Mass Culture,Modernism and Postmodernism, edited by Heath, MacCabe and Riley (London: MacMillan Press, 1988), 51.

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In this article, I suggest that the gendered and sexualized discourse surrounding thereception of smooth jazz during its rise to prominence eventually contributed to itsvitriolic denouncement by cultural pundits and jazz performers in recent decades. Inparticular, I uncover the affective, sexual, and gendered significance surroundingsmooth jazz’s reception to highlight the industrial complex precipitating its commer-cial ascent. For theoretical focus, I draw from both gender and critical theory tocompare the ideological values reflective of the institutions of dominant culture(including various facets of the music industry) to those highly symbolic sexualizedarticulations surrounding this particularly mobile musical culture’s reception (thevalues expressed by musicians, critics, scholars, and journalists). By interrogatingsuch underlying values as well as the persistence of binary object relations in thecontext of desire and affect, I’ll argue that smooth jazz (from this period) merely per-petuated a seemingly durable gendered industrial matrix, one which sought to assignfemale artistry to the realm of the body and male artistry to notions of the mindand intellectual freedom. Finally, I concretely uncover these values by highlightingthe work of Dutch saxophonist Candy Dulfer, emphasizing the industrial dimensionsundergirding her reception as a highly successful 1990s instrumentalist whose workwas often promoted as smooth jazz, despite the stylistic diversity of her recordings.Here I contrast industry discourse to those performative values expressed by Dulfer,while also recognizing the larger historical and cultural reception of jazz as a highly gen-dered, racialized, and sexualized cultural phenomenon. I reflect upon Dulfer’s 1990scollaborations to examine how her popular reception continued to profit from thislabel even as her larger oeuvre transgressed smooth jazz’s putative stylistic boundaries.A review of her work during the height of smooth jazz’s international expansioncogently highlights the issues at stake when demonstrating the persistence of genderedand sexualized assumptions in the (jazz) music industry. Ultimately, I show how CandyDulfer both participated in and disrupted the feminized and sexualized associations ofsmooth jazz to artfully side-step the bonds of anxiety over legitimacy that might other-wise have confined her in an increasingly fragmented and international jazz world.

By uncovering the semiotic significance attached to smooth jazz’s promotion andreception, my analysis indirectly critiques dominant scholarly debates, which cumulat-ively and exclusively emphasize race and ethnicity (over gender or sexuality) as essentialconceptions influencing jazz’s broader cultural significance. These biases have led tounder-developed conceptualizations of jazz’s complex popularization and professiona-lization during the late-twentieth century. In highlighting politically and economicallysanctioned racist structures as well as epistemological and culturally constructednotions of black musicality, these overly-determined analyses consistently connectjazz culture to America’s convoluted relationship to race.19 Within the scholarly

19Since the re-evaluation of critical theory within music and cultural studies during the 1980s, the engaged socio-logical and cultural analysis of jazz set the stage for more nuanced discussions of jazz’s cultural and social context aswell as its heavily mediated constituency. See important examples of this work on race and music see: KrinGabbard, Representing Jazz (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995); Gennari 1991; Peretti1992; Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1998); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and Working-Class Culture (New York:

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world, these debates overshadow if not disavow the equally problematic relationsinvolving expectations regarding gender and sexuality within both experimental andmainstream streams of jazz performance and reception. Motivated by this imbalance,this article argues for a more comprehensive investigation of jazz’s gendered andsexualized dimensions within the world of musical representation and reception.Fortunately, there exists a body of important literature on gender and popular (jazz)music.20 While I’ve extensively reviewed this body of scholarship in my priorwork,21 for this article, I’ll concentrate more generally upon the post-structuralistgender postulations first theorized by Judith Butler in her most famous book,Gender Theory. Within the discourse of black music, preoccupations with the perform-ing body as a sexualized conduit for dominant racial fantasies clearly impacts thereception of later popular jazz developments, even at the height of multiculturalismand globalization during the 1980s and 1990s. However, drawing more closely fromButler’s concept of the constructed and rehearsed dimensions of gender identifications,I’ll suggest that the female body, as situated in this binary matrix, motivatedits own particular set of affective (mis)readings and desires within the context of

Oxford University Press, 1995). When theorizing the discursive foundations for the fascination and interpretivegestures surrounding the nineteenth century category race music, Ron Radano reflects upon writing as aprocess of inscribing Otherness. Radano’s critical project investigates the modern conception of black rhythmby “undertaking a critical genealogy that reaches into the historical depths of American language structures inorder to trace the contours of a peculiar musical sensibility bound up with modern notions of race.”His excavationholds potent insights for recognizing those spheres of influence upon both promotional and reception discoursessurrounding contemporary jazz and its continued connection to historical fantasies underpinning black music’sreception and mediation by a dominant American culture. Yet eliding the gendered and sexualized dimensionsof this discourse as well as the performative power of musicians to decenter such debates leaves such projectsincomplete. See Ronald Radano, Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago,2003), 233.20I’ll list only a few works that are widely cited in the gender and jazz or popular music scholarship including SheilaWhiteley et al, Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (London: Routledge, 1997); Jayna Brown, BabylonGirls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press 2008); SherrieTucker, Swing Shift: All-girl Bands of the 1940s (Durham, Duke University Press, 2000); Angela Y. Davis, BluesLegacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: VintageBooks, 1998); Sally Placksin, Jazzwomen: 1900 to the Present (London: Pluto Press, 1982); Leslie Gourse,Madame Jazz: Contemporary Women Instrumentalists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Kristin McGee,Some Like it Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009). Forexample, Sherrie Tucker’s work uncovers the performative expectations and gendered tropes guiding the receptionof important women jazz musicians active during the 1940s. In a period when female musicians were often dis-missed as mere substitutes for male war workers, Tucker reveals how such images as the “cult of the white woman-hood” or racist characterizations of black theatrical types (e.g. jezebels and mammies) later influenced womenmusicians who toured theatrical circuits in racially prohibitive spaces. Other writers including Monson, Brownand McGee stress the prominence of the body in the discourse surrounding black music’s reception. IngridMonson links the American modernist fascination with black expressive culture through an analysis of a dominantprimitivism, which most forcefully promoted sexual fantasies (the black phallus) within depictions connectingmusic to the body of the black male jazz musician. In her work on early black theatrical women, Jayna Browntoo theorizes a cultural hegemony (of an earlier moment), which mapped both colonial and exoticist, primitivistdesires (within the project of modernity) upon transatlantic black women’s performing bodies in the context ofearly black musical theater and touring female theatrical stars. Kristin McGee uncovers how the process ofmediation within the cultural industries and especially through the powerful media of film and televisionfurther streamlined and guided gendered performativities for popular music and jazz artists as they navigatedboth highly mediated and local music performance spaces.21McGee 2009.

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contemporary jazz, a series of responses which in turn influenced the performativechoices and representational strategies adopted by various leading smooth jazz record-ing artists.

Before examining the musical and cultural hybridity underlying Candy Dulfer’s1990s era musical output, I’ll first provide an admittedly brief overview of the largerand related genre of contemporary jazz as both a performative style and an industrycategory to contextualize smooth jazz’s subsequent prominence. Here I elucidate theconfluence of relevant aesthetic and musical values and practices, which eventuallyled to both innovative and formulaic musical and technological reconfigurationsapplied to the term smooth jazz during the 1990s. By highlighting the discursivedebates of the 1960s and 1970s surrounding fusion and then contemporary jazz as anew performative, recording, and industry category, I aim to reveal the varyingvalues and hierarchies connected to different streams of jazz hybridity, which first wit-nessed the transplantation of jazz activity from the small jazz club to the recordingstudio.22

Fusion and the Classificatory Crisis of “Contemporary Jazz”

To understand the industry’s successful promotional strategies for contemporary jazzin the 1980s, it’s important to recognize this music’s aesthetic and cultural predeces-sors. During the 1960s and 1970s, musicians as well as radio deejays and record com-panies began referring to the musical output of those few commercially successful jazzmusicians includingWes Montgomery, Miles Davis, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock,and later Pat Metheny, Keith Jarrett, and George Benson, as jazz fusion, jazz rock, orsimply fusion artists.23 Steve Pond underscores the ideological weight of these termswhen articulated by jazz instrumentalists who grappled with the emerging artisticstatus of rock musicians because of the serious reception of 1960s concept albumssuch as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).24 Jazz musicians’recently acquired status as legitimate American artists was quickly undermined bythe growing body of journalists promoting the artistic merits of rock music inyouth-oriented music magazines such as Rolling Stone and Creem. The serious recep-tion of rock albums and their consequent promotion on FM radio repositioned thehierarchies connected to various American musics and contributed to these classifica-tory wars. In this matrix, jazz-rock was frequently disparaged as most closely aligned tothe commodified and commercial output of the music industry, while fusion, as con-ceptualized by musicians, facilitated both the performative conventions of jazz

22These transformations parallel the increasingly prominent role of the album producer who increasingly incor-porated analog, then digital production techniques to influence the sound of album recordings, innovations thatsignificantly influenced the promotion and creation of smooth jazz during the 1990s.23For a review of works which trace the development and artistic significance of fusion and contemporary jazz seethe works of Steven Pond, Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 2005); Stuart Nicholson, Jazz Rock: A History (New York: Schirmer Books 1998); and KevinFellezs, Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).24Pond 2005.

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improvisation and the required distancing of the rock and (more importantly) pop cat-egory.25 Despite the inter-racial make-up of several projects (including the MahavishnuOrchestra), both musicians and jazz critics also expressed ambivalence about the racialcoding of so-called crossover jazz projects, which for them often signified the white-washing of black culture for mainstream audiences.26 Even rock musicians sought aes-thetic distance from popular music, for the lingering connotations of Adorno’s earliercultural critique, which envisioned commodified, gendered musical genres (read pop)as both contaminated and inauthentic, and connected their popular reception tonotions of passive consumerism.27 Pond identifies the racial anxieties attached tosuch naming processes. He also indirectly confirms gendered conceptions when para-phrasing classificatory debates surrounding Hancock’s Head Hunters album; citingwell-worn phrases such as “fusion-the prostitute” levied to castigate the style or“fusion-the-artist” to uphold its cultural legitimacy. For Pond, whose insightful narra-tive avoids unpacking fusion’s semiotic relation to sexualized labor (prostitution), suchlabels proved misdirected, as an album’s artistic merit could outlive its mass popularityand heavily sexualized representation.28

Other jazz scholars, including Garry Giddins, Scott DeVeaux, and Stuart Nicholson,also point to the instrumental recordings of Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and JohnScofield as pioneers of 1960s and 1970s fusion, but these authors provide historicaloverviews of the creative contributions of a few important groups in order to canonizetheir recorded output.29 In his in-depth research of the important fusion artists TonyWilliams, John McLaughlin, Joni Mitchell, and Herbie Hancock, Kevin Fellezs resistsany monolithic stylistic categorization, but views some form of hybridity as thecentral driving aesthetic that motivated fusion artists to breach musical boundariesand cultural hierarchies.30 Fellezs borrows Isobel Armstrong’s “broken middle” con-ceptualization to point to the aesthetic and cultural space inhabited by fusion musicianssuch as Joni Mitchell, whose creative vision, coupled with her contested gendered,national, and racialized reception by both popular and jazz critics, pointed to a thirdspace (not pop, not jazz): a musical and cultural liminality, which empowered thesemusicians with an aesthetic freedom while also stigmatizing them as racially contami-nated, culturally outside, or commercially fabricated.31 Significantly, beyond Fellezs’thoughtful analysis of Mitchell’s jazz period reception, serious examinations of theracial connotations of these historical terms always supersede any discussion of theirgendered associations. Despite their eloquence and cultural insight, jazz scholars ofthis period problematically avoid examining the gendered dimensions of fusion prac-tice, representation, and reception.32 Moreover, with the exception of Fellezs’ work on

25Pond 2005: 10–13.26Pond 2005: 14–15.27Adorno 1936.28Pond 2008, 20.29Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux, Jazz (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009); Nicholson 1998.30Fellezs 2011.31Fellezs 2011, 8. See also Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000).32In her oft-cited text, “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in JazzHistorical Discourse,” Ingrid Monson provides a compelling analysis of the dominant forms of cultural

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Joni Mitchell and Tony William’s vocal performances, they also resist any significantinvestigation of either female instrumentalists and/or jazz artists, such as GeorgeBenson, who were engaged with feminine-identified musical practices such assinging. Jazz scholarship generally reifies masculinist ideologies that position instru-mentalism a priori as central to understandings of jazz artistry. I’ll return to thispoint in my analysis of Candy Dulfer’s popular reception.

During the 1970s, a decade sometimes dismissed by jazz historians as musicallyinsignificant, the jazz recording industry witnessed a period of major transition andexpansion into new markets, which included both international audiences and morewomen participants. In previous decades, jazz companies often released recordingsfocused on capturing live performances from well-known clubs where the jamsession format predominated. Young, “straight ahead” jazz musicians (e.g., CannonballAdderley, Horace Silver) preferred recording in jazz club settings in an attempt tocapture the spontaneity and interactivity of performing before live audiences even astheir music began to incorporate new musical trends, from modal and “world”musics to electrified rhythm and blues.

Collaborations between jazz musicians and record producers/composers, notablyBob James and Dave Grusin, introduced the second rock- and funk-inflected varietyto support instrumental improvisation within rock-based performance and recordingcontexts (and with considerable influence from prior Afro-Caribbean and Brazilianinspired musics such as Stan Getz and João Gilberto’s bossa nova recordings).33

Weather Report, the Yellowjackets, and Spyro Gyra remain pivotal groups in the devel-opment of this latter rock-funk jazz style.

Following the crossover recording projects of Creed Taylor with CTI records duringthe 1970s, a number of popular recordings featuring jazz musicians such as GeorgeBenson or Grover Washington Jr. displayed influences from new trends in popularand rock music. These included editing techniques gleaned from the studio-manipu-lated albums of rock groups, as well as the more formulaic song forms of 1970spopular music ballads. Here studio record producers cultivated experimental pro-duction techniques for jazz records within the controlled environment of the recordingstudio.34 This transitional period encouraged producers to seek progressive jazz musi-cians, including guitarist George Benson, to collaborate with film and television music

appropriation, interpretation and psychological and sexual projection in American musical cultures of the mid-twentieth century. Her dialogical sources are connected to a racial and artistic discourse with roots in nineteenthcentury minstrelsy and the utopian project of early bohemians. Yet her work too avoids unpacking the feminizedassociations of women jazz musicians, who both actively participated in this dominant discourse about race,gender and sex as well as contributed as jazz artists and popular musicians within the context of jazz andpopular music. She simply suggests that the symbol of the “black phallus” appealed largely to white men as pre-dominating among “those who have crossed the racial divide through music” and whose sexual fantasies acted asconduits for expressions of cultural depth (405). I believe that such a dismissal too easily disavows the profoundinfluence of a feminized subjectivity as well as racial fascination with women as artists within the longer history ofjazz writing and evaluation during the twentieth century, whose reception and performance strategies cannot besimply subsumed into a generalized black vernacular nexus.33Email correspondence from Steve Pond, 29 April 2013.34Charles D. Carson, “Bridging the Gap”: Creed Taylor, Grover Washington Jr., and the Crossover Roots ofSmooth Jazz,” Black Music Research Journal 28/1 (2008), 6–8.

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arrangers, including Don Sebesky, and, later, Bob James. Taylor’s concept was so suc-cessful that a decade later, in 1982, Dave Grusin and Larry Rosen launched GRPRecords with a similar aesthetic goal.

Since the early 1980s, musicians and engineers have eagerly exploited new technol-ogies to modernize and revive a struggling jazz culture and recording industry. The“contemporary jazz” evolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s transformed varioustrends in pop and black music to reposition the place of jazz performance and inno-vation from the nightclub to the digital recording studio. This particular transitionfurther accelerated the processes of musical hybridity that would later characterizedigital musical productions. Jazz recordings first released under the moniker contem-porary jazz by GRP records, for example, highlighted the eclectic elements of 1970sdisco, the “soothing” sonic imagery of New Age and the “soulful grooves” of R & Bwhile also incorporating improvised instrumentals inspired by international musicalcurrents. Before smooth jazz emerged as the industry’s preferred label, two types of“crossover,” or “contemporary” jazz influenced radio formats during the 1980s,especially those combining styles from R & B, funk and jazz, or rock and jazz. Priorcollaborations between experimental producers, including Tommy LiPuma (nowchair of Verve Music Group) and Creed Taylor (with A & M and then CTIRecords), and jazz musicians Benson and Washington accentuated musical currentsfrom R & B and funk.35 Dave Grusin’s background as composer and arranger, com-bined with Rosen’s interest in new recording technologies and distribution formats,inspired an approach to jazz recording that promoted new sonic textures, builtthrough digital sequences. These formats’ success afforded some of the few commercialrecording opportunities for struggling jazz artists, many of them recently dropped bythe major labels’ jazz divisions during the 1980s economic recession. By the 1990s,industry professionals equated GRP Records with the contemporary and smooth jazzgenre. Sold to LiPuma in 1995, the label is now one of the most successful divisionsof the Verve media conglomerate.36

Eventually the “lighter” and, as I will argue, sexualized associations of contemporaryjazz, such as those recordings made by Kenny G and GroverWashington, Jr., became soprized by the music industry that several radio stations programmed this sweeter,melodic style almost exclusively. By the early 1990s, “smooth jazz” replaced “contem-porary jazz” as an established radio format. This industry-mediated format promotedpop and fusion instrumental pieces and inculcated an arguably streamlined and formu-laic approach towards improvisation. Even so, smooth jazz managed to successfullycombine eclectic musical elements from light rock and pop, 1970s jazz fusion, funk,R & B, and various black and groove-based musics that had been popularizedduring the 1980s.37 By the millennium, smooth jazz’s firmly codified status inspiredrecord labels to release compilations of now iconic artists, including Bob James and

35Carson 2008, Fellezs 2011, 33–64.36“Vault,” Verve Music Group Website (accessed 5 September 2007) http://www.vervemusicgroup.com/vault/.

37Eliot Tiegel, “Smooth Moves on the Air,” Down Beat, vol. 63 no. 12 (1996), 10.

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saxophonist Candy Dulfer; Bob James: The Essential Collection: 24 Smooth Jazz Classics(2002) and The Best of Candy Dulfer (1998) are representative releases.

By the twenty-first century, smooth jazz’s significance expanded beyond its hybridperformative dimensions to inspire a whole range of cultural affiliations. For mobilecultural travelers, to claim smooth jazz tastes was to embrace the acquisition ofvarious material symbols, and to intimate a particularly cosmopolitan cultural status.Smooth jazz record reviews, for example, were regularly featured in auto magazines.The 2006 Lexus GS 300 appropriated the term as a metaphor for the car’s performance,handling, and comfort.38 Moreover, smooth jazz festivals, cruises, and travel desti-nations emerged as part of the expanding global travel industry, aided by the efficiencyof computer networks to effectively advertise to a digitally-savvy, upper class, andhighly mobile audience, whose cultural backgrounds reached beyond the boundariesof race, ethnicity, or region. Through both hyper-globalization and the expanding net-works of digital media, smooth jazz gradually inherited some of the criticisms levied bycultural theorists who decried the soft cosmopolitanisms of global tourists. Even thoseartists most widely dismissed and frequently satirized for “New Age” artifice (forexample, Kenny G) paradoxically continued to evoke masculinized notions of malesophistication, hipness, technology, luxury, and sexual virility. However, in recentdecades the immense popularity of smooth jazz materialized at the same time thatjazz writing increasingly disparaged its commercial, visual, and musical constructionsby decrying its overly feminized and sexualized constituency, or by denouncing it asracially contaminated.

Naming Smooth Jazz

Most music professionals involved in programming smooth jazz point to its culmina-tion as a form during the mid-1980s, as featured by independent radio deejays through-out the West Coast of the United States. In the retelling of the cultural forces that led toits wide-spread circulation, many point to the influence of 1960s counter-culturalexplorations, traces of which resided in the spiritual and sensual dimensions of minim-alism and New Age music during the 1970s and early 1980s. Bob O’Conner, program-mer at KIFM (San Diego), the so-named first smooth jazz radio station, describes theinitial phase of their successful nighttime programming of jazz and rock fusion withallusions to affective dimensions:

It really took off. It was sexy music, and spiritual, and it spread by word of mouth.Remember that it was really free-form radio, with a lot of freedom and not muchpressure on the D.J.’s. It was adult music for adults who were smart… 39

Other sources claim that smooth jazz radio began in Los Angeles in late-1980s onstation KTWV. New York Times correspondent Peter Watrous describes California

38“First Test: 2006 Lexus GS 300 – Smooth Jazz: Lexus Retunes the 2006 Lexus GS 300 and 430. How Do They

Play?,” MotorTrend.com (accessed 5 March 2013) http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/sedans/112_0505_2006_lexus_gs_300/.39Peter Watrous, “The Jazz is ‘Lite,’ the Profits Heavy,” New York Times, 5 June 1997 (146/50814), C13.

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radio during the early-1980s as mildly experimental: “It mixed instrumental music,by people like the guitarists George Benson and Pat Metheny and the saxophonistGrover Washington with vocalists like Sade Adu (known commonly as Sade),Luther Vandross or Vanessa Williams, and finally, the innocuousness of New Agemusic.”40

Another frequently cited anecdote dispels the myth attributing the term to the tena-city and invention of radio deejays and instead suggests that “smooth jazz” gained cur-rency once a group of pre-selected listeners coined the term during focus groupsessions funded by Broadcast Architecture. More commonly known as BA, BroadcastArchitecture remains the most influential radio and television marketing consultationfirm in the United States. In the late-1980s, BA implemented the format of the focusgroup to help radio stations identify popular musical formats. During these sessions,BA asked listeners to describe seven- to fifteen-second segments of music.41 Afterhearing cuts by Kenny G, John Tesh, and others, they responded with words like“smooth,” “jazzy” and “relaxing.”42 Frank Cody, a former radio consultant for Broad-cast Architecture, conducted focus groups in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s. Accord-ing to Cody, “One Chicago woman strung together the infamous words whengrappling for a description of a song snippet. At that moment, light bulbs went offover everybody’s heads. A format was born.”43

By the late-1980s, radio stations increasingly chose the label smooth jazz over con-temporary jazz to increase their listenership, yet both terms persisted. Advertisers,radio stations, and record companies eagerly embraced the appellation because ofthe extensive economic support exhibited by its fans. Cody depicted the averagesmooth jazz record buyer as adult and affluent: “They have sophisticated, reallyhigh-end stereo systems and they’ll go into a record store with a long list of thingsthey heard on the radio or read about and walk out with a stack of 10 CD’s everymonth. Kids can’t afford that.”44 Clearly the boom in smooth jazz record sales indi-cated that its fans’ commercial habits were driven by both aesthetic and materialconsiderations.

By the mid-1980s, the growing number of urban adult radio stations also began pro-gramming “contemporary jazz” artists into their mix of light soul, R & B, and other late

40Watrous 1997.41Broadcast Architecture (BA) is a radio consultancy firm established in 1988 to advise radio stations in successfulradio programming strategies. BA provides suggested playlists based upon Broadcast Architecture’s marketresearch. They also offer analyses of a station’s musical mixes, programming content, and “talk-time” by examin-ing listeners “real time” feelings and responses to a station’s content. BA’s research strategies were consideredespecially innovative in the 1980s because of their use of focus groups and digital music tests. Their patentedMix-Master introduced in 1988 provided electronic analyses of a station’s music titles based upon an evolvingdata-base of listener preferences (or TSL) upon limited listening sessions of up to ten to fifteen seconds ofmusic. They claim their research can determine which programmed songs “drive passion” and which cause“tune-out.” See “Call-Out” on Broadcast Architecture’s website for these particular claims (accessed 6 December2012) http://www.broadcastarchitecture.com/products_callout.html.42Frank Ahrens, “It’s not just Jazz, It’s Smooth Jazz. Zzzzzzz,” Washington Post, 16 October 2001, C01.43Cody quoted in Sarah Rodman, “Resistance is Futile!; Love it or Hate it, Smooth Jazz is Here to Stay. And evenMusicians who Reject the Label are Benefiting,” Boston Globe, 16 July 2006, N1.44Watrous 1997.

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night “quiet storm” mixes.45 Smooth jazz’s growing popularity via the radio formats“contemporary jazz” and “urban AC” (adult contemporary) spawned new hybridsbetween light rock, jazz, and R & B. Reflective of this successful musical hybridization,AC stations also increasingly programed a growing predominance of light R & B andsoft rock. Billboard recognized the trend as early as 1991 claiming: “Contemporaryjazz, once a secondary element in the mix of adult alternative and black AC stations,has taken on increased prominence both in name and in sound.”46 According toBillboard, “jazz as commercial stations is a change from several years ago, when boththe burgeoning black AC and adult alternative formats wanted to be known asalmost anything but jazz-based.”47 In the early 1990s, more stations programmedsmooth jazz, including WJZZ of Detroit, which altered its format from instrumentaljazz to a contemporary jazz and black adult mix, resulting in an increase in stationratings for listeners 24–54, from 1.4 per cent to a “four share.”48 In a period ofmusical fragmentation and diversification from “alternative” subcultural sounds andworld music collaborations, smooth and contemporary jazz stations fortuitouslyembraced stylistic eclecticism, enabling smooth jazz to supplant or merge with NewAge formats; its up-tempo music was seemingly more suitable for daytime radio pro-gramming and working adults who required stimulating musical soundscapes. More-over, the image often associated with New Age during its heyday (the 1980s) had by the1990s become passé and culturally connected to an out-moded, commodified vestige ofthe by-gone (white) hippie movement.

Continuing through the 1990s, as radio programs diversified, those styles promotedunder the terms smooth (and occasionally contemporary) jazz also incorporated newmusical currents, which led to unprecedented rating increases.49 Billboard reportedthat smooth jazz and adult contemporary formats impinged upon the growth of R &B and adult urban radio stations.50 From 1993 to 1995, smooth jazz experienced itsgreatest growth in the radio market, boosting revenues by more than 75 per cent. Inthe mid-1990s even more radio stations were switching to smooth jazz formats, some-times from genres so diverse as country and hard rock.

With the rapid growth and consequential success of the smooth jazz formula in the1990s, media consulting groups arose to meet the demands of this profitable format,continuing to exert considerable influence upon contemporary and adult urban

45“Quiet storm” quickly emerged in radio jockey lingo to refer to late night musical sets intended to promote relax-

ation and romance. The term itself was inspired by the band Sade’s popular 1985 hit “Sweetest Taboo” from theiralbum Promise (Epic).46Craig Rosen, “Jazz Tags & Tunes Finding New Flavor,” Billboard, vol 103 no. 17 (1991), 2.47Rosen 1991.48Rosen 1991. These are percentages of radio listeners at a particular time. A share of 1.4 means that 1.4% of allpotential listeners are listening to a particular program at a particular time and “four share” is then 4% of alllisteners.49In the early 1990s, some stations had switched from the contemporary jazz moniker to smooth jazz while otherscontinued with contemporary jazz. But the programming content of many smooth and contemporary jazz stationsin the early 1990s was very similar.50“Billboard Charts,” Billboard.com (accessed 25 July 2007) http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/charts/albums_

index.jsp

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radio programming. Since then, Broadcast Architecture has borne frequent criticismsfrom both crossover jazz musicians and radio programmers who failed to conform totheir standardized model. Editorials in Down Beat during the 1990s, for example,bemoaned the monopoly that BA exerted over commercial radio playlists, claimingthat emerging jazz musicians stood little chance of gaining entry into the artificiallydefined musical format of contemporary jazz set by BA. Nevertheless, BA continuedto extend influence by initiating research techniques such as the Mix-Master fornewer media, including Internet radio and international cable television.

Legitimizing Smooth Jazz

In his book Genre in Popular Music, Fabian Holt posits the inherently collective natureof genre practices.51 He examines the sometimes conflicting definitions attached togenres when articulated by performers, industry mediators, and fans. For Holt,groups negotiate shared priorities that relate variously to the conventions of perform-ance practice, the cohesion of a musical repertoire, the musical representation ofmusical cultures, and the historically mediated mechanisms for promoting musical cat-egories. These varying discourses in turn point to the powerful forces that identifi-cations of race, class, gender, and sexuality continue to exert when codifying valueswithin discrete musical communities. Musicians may more likely point to a set of per-formance conventions for articulating genre; alternatively, industry promoters maypoint to visual, emotional, regional, and historical notions of genre as connected toa line of musical stars.

In the heavily masculinized world of jazz performativity, gender ideologies contin-ued to exert powerful influence upon the careers, performance modes, and professionalchoices of jazz instrumentalists. National institutions are not immune to such con-ceptions, as they distribute awards to performers within particular musical categories,categories sometimes expressly created by the industry. Nearly two decades ago, in1979, the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), the organiz-ation that confers Grammy awards, initiated the category “Jazz Fusion” to account forcontemporary jazz artists who crossed over into popular genres and regularly featuredon popular, R & B, and rock radio stations. Since then, male artists have dominated therecipient list.52 Not surprisingly, only a few contemporary jazz women have beennominated for Grammys, and usually under the category “Best Jazz Vocalist.” DianaKrall and Candy Dulfer, two artists heavily featured on smooth jazz radio, have beennominated for Grammys as “Best Jazz Vocalist” and “Best Instrumental Pop Perform-ance” respectively.53 Since the Grammys’ inauguration in 1958, female jazz nomineeshave figured prominently in the “Best Jazz Vocal Performance” category. Ella Fitzgerald

51Fabian Holt, Genre in Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).52The Pat Metheny Group won six times. Other notable 1980’s recipients include Bob James, David Sanborn, andthe Yellowjackets.53Smooth jazz record producer Tommy LiPuma produced Krall’s second Grammy album Live in Paris. See“Grammy Award Winners – Diana Krall,” Grammy.com (accessed 25 July 2007) http://www.grammy.com/GRAMMY_Awards/Winners/Results.aspx. Other female jazz artists to win vocal jazz awards include Diane

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first won in 1958 and later received seven additional vocal jazz Grammys during hercareer.54 Only three male artists have won the jazz vocal category: Al Jarreau, HarryConnick Jr., and Bobby McFerrin. No female jazz instrumentalist has ever won inthe more general jazz category (although Esperanza Spalding won the 2011 Grammyfor “Best New Artist”—the first for any jazz performer). In the twenty-first century,crossover female jazz artists Diana Krall and Norah Jones have been nominated forGrammys but never in the contemporary jazz category.55 Sade, whose single “QuietStorm” became something of a synonym for smooth jazz, won three Grammysoutside the jazz categories: in 1985 (“Best New Artist”), 1993 (“Best R&B Performancewith Vocal”), and 2001 (“Best Pop Vocal Album”). In radio formats, however, Sade isrelentlessly promoted on smooth jazz and urban adult stations. Norah Jones, whoserecorded output features prominently on smooth jazz and adult urban radio, wonseven times, five times in 2002 and twice in 2004 in both “pop” and “general” categoriesfor “Best Album of the Year” and for “Best Pop Vocal Performance”—never in a jazzcategory.

These statistics suggest that the Grammy awards remain highly segregated, not onlyin their estimation of jazz ingenuity, but also in their gendered construction of jazz per-formativity; women gain access via vocal jazz performances while those who alsoperform instrumentally (Diana Krall, Norah Jones, and Esperanza Spalding) are alsorelegated to vocal categories, a less prestigious conception in the critical jazz paradigm.Lara Pellegrinelli’s chapter “Separated at Birth: Singing and the History of Jazz” adeptlyencapsulates some of the processes of exclusion, which led to a bifurcation of these twocategories of jazz performativity—jazz singing and jazz instrumentalism—whereby jazzinstrumentalism became the privileged model for canonical work and assertions ofauthenticity.56 These historical divisions extended to such musical ranking institutionseven as female contemporary jazz artists remained central to smooth jazz radio’ssuccess during these two decades.

Within the industry, the label “contemporary jazz” was not officially recognized byBillboard’s chart rankings until some twenty years after a number of jazz artists hadgained significant musical success and acquired awards with contemporary jazz record-ings. According to Boston Globe correspondent Sarah Rodman, Billboard aimed to dis-tinguish pop and fusion-oriented jazz artists from more traditional, “straight-ahead”performers.57 Still later, the term “smooth jazz” surfaced in Billboard’s ratings in2001 and then only as a singles label. Since the mid-1950s, Billboard’s charts have gen-erally incorporated musical genres promoted by record companies only when represen-tative artists have acquired substantial sales. Currently Billboard’s “Top 100 Albums”

Reeves, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Diana Krall, Nancy Wilson, Cassandra Wilson, Lena Horne, Natalie Cole, DianeShuur, Ruth Brown, Betty Carter, and Esperanza Spalding.54Fitzgerald won a total of 14 Grammy awards over her career, including my albumtegories.55There are a number of female instrumentalists including Joyce Cooling and Keiko Matsui to record contempor-ary and smooth jazz albums, but neither has received a Grammy.56See Lara Pellegrinelli, “Separated at ‘Birth’: Singing and the History of Jazz,” Big Ears: Listening for Jazz Studies,ed. Nicole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 31–47.57Rodman 2006.

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charts feature specific categories, including contemporary jazz, classical, digital album,R & B, adult contemporary, hip hop, gospel, electronic, heatseekers (which is theirmetal category), and Christian, among others (“Billboard Charts”). These titlesreflect the increasing diversity of musical tastes as well as the growing influence ofnew technologies and media platforms (such as mobile phones, computers, andvideo games) within which music fans acquire and identify with popular music. Asdigital social platforms facilitate even greater involvement by everyday music partici-pants in promoting music categories, the industry has responded with such opaquecharacterizations as “digital,” “heatseekers”, “adult contemporary” and now“YouTube” charts—titles that increasingly reference new technologies and mass gen-erational groups over specific performance aesthetics. Despite these seeminglyoblique terms, genre naming remains the subject of passionate discussion within theInternet’s hybrid economies and niche markets, even as the industry resists suchspecialist discourse.58

At the turn of the century, smooth jazz artists typically outsold “straight ahead” jazzartists by more than tens of thousands. According to smooth jazz star Brian Culbertson,smooth jazz artists may sell 100,000 units or more while a “traditional” artist would belucky to sell 15,000 (Rodman 2006). Kevin Gore, head of jazz marketing at ColumbiaRecords, describes the enthusiasm expressed by twenty-first century record companiesfor smooth jazz recording artists: “We’re very happy about the success of our smoothjazz artists. If an average jazz album sells around 5,000 copies, a smooth jazz artist willbe selling 125,000. So the signing and release of a new record by Gato Barbieri for usmeans big business.”59 Warner Brothers became highly successful with its contempor-ary jazz division in the mid-1990s. In 1997, Warner Brothers ranked highest of themajor record companies in the division, “dominating” half of the top ten positionson the Billboard “contemporary jazz” album charts. Despite their commercialsuccess, smooth jazz artists sometimes resented the term’s narrowness, lobbying for“hipper” and less limiting descriptions. Nevertheless, the enormous branding and mar-keting forces of the last twenty years have proved a formidable obstacle for such analteration.

Commensurate with current trends in the global culture industries, contemporaryjazz labels (e.g., Windham Hill) currently maintain profitable and symbiotic relation-ships with major record labels.60 Many explicitly define their smooth jazz divisions andartists while others prefer the more diversified “contemporary jazz” moniker to avoidclaims of inauthenticity now connected to smooth jazz. Blue Note, for example, simplypresents a variety of “contemporary jazz” artists within their rosters, promoting their

58Also featured on Billboard is a new, user-friendly, multi-media, interactive service, in which users listen to tracksvia Pandora, watch music videos, log on to blogs about particular charts and artists and read music industryarticles. These additions reveal the industry’s interest in adopting some of the contemporary activities first devel-oped by “Rewrite” entrepreneurs. See Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the HybridEconomy (New York: Penguin Books, 2008) for grounding in the culture of “Remix and Rewrite”.59Watrous 1997.60These record labels, Warner Bros, Windham Hill, Atlantic, Columbia, GRP/Impulse and Shanachie Records, allhave smooth jazz rosters. See “Jazz Labels,” JazzConcerts.com (accessed 15 September 2013) http://www.jazzconcerts.com/links.

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most successful artists Norah Jones and Amos Lee amongst more current or historical“straight ahead” artists such as Wynton Marsalis and Charlie Parker.61 WarnerBrothers promotes a smooth jazz series entitled simply Smooth Jazz and an annualcompilation entitled Best of Smooth Jazz. Verve Records (now the Verve MusicGroup) acquired the first smooth jazz recording company, GRP Records, in the1990s. By 2002, GRP Records accounted for more than twenty percent of the VerveMusic Group’s sales.62 GRP Records’ particular path towards economic prestige reflectsthe increasingly complex and transnational relation of music entities, especially thosemusic corporations subsumed under the current music oligopoly (the so-called BigThree).63 Throughout this consolidation process, specialist jazz record labels remainedcognizant of, if not directly influential in, canonical work, through their assertions ofartistic legitimacy and their promotion of “straight ahead” jazz instrumentalists con-nected to historically-codified national jazz narratives. Yet some contemporary jazzlabels also adopted popular crossover jazz artists as their commercial lifeblood,artists like Norah Jones, whose charming visual appeal and genre-mixing recordingsdefied more traditional associations of a virile, male, instrumental jazz culture.

As smooth jazz emerged as the most profitable jazz format of the 1990s, the authen-ticity debates incorporated perspectives from more commercial networks, as recordcompany agents, smooth jazz consulting firms, jazz artists, and music historians allwaxed ideologically about the genre’s merits and limits. Bob Parlocha, music directorfor non-profit San Francisco jazz station KJAZ, likened these debates to “an all-outwar.” Even mainstream magazines like Newsweek weighed in, citing both proponentsand critics of smooth jazz.64 While smooth jazz continued to provide the most com-mercially viable format for performing jazz musicians, its concomitant evaluation byjazz journalists and prominent musicians led to its disparaging representation as mind-less, escapist drivel in non-music centered discourse. A common gambit was to couchcontemporary or smooth jazz in unflattering feminized terms. Pianist Ellis Marsalis and“patriarch of jazz’s ruling family” for example, once described smooth jazz as “a hookerin an evening gown.”65 Marsalis’s proclamation displayed traces of Adorno’s massculture critiques (especially “On Jazz”), which proclaimed the negative effects of theubiquity of jazz hits, such as “regressive” listening and “castrated” jazz audiences,fears betraying larger gendered anxieties surrounding the emergence of a feminizedand heavily sexualized popular culture.66 Similarly, jazz traditionalist Stanley Crouchnot only detested the genre but also blamed record companies and radio execs forincorporating it into their ever-expanding pantheon of jazz styles. Crouch dismissed

61“Blue Note Artists,” Blue Note Records (accessed 25 July 2007) http://www.bluenote.com/Artists.asp?AlphaID=P.

62Pat Cole and Jason Koransky, “In Search of Integrity,” Down Beat, vol. 69 no. 11 (2002), 47–51.63GRP Records was first distributed by Arista, then MCA and later Impulse and is now an established sub-group ofThe Verve Music Group. Verve recently merged with Universal to form the Universal Music Group. However,Grusin and Rosin, the company’s founders, left in 1995 when the company was taken over by record executiveand contemporary jazz producer Tommy LiPuma (of George Benson’s Breezin’ fame).64Tom Mosland and Yahlin Chang, “Jazz for drive time,” Newsweek, vol. 127 no. 21 (1996), 76.65Watrous 1997.66Kristin McGee, “The Feminization of Mass Culture and the Novelty of All-Girl Bands: The Case of the Inge-nues,” Popular Music and Society, vol. 31 no. 5 (2008), 629–662.

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the music by linking it to the “contaminated” fusion projects of the 1960s, such asworks by artists Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, two artists severely criticized by tra-ditional critics for their jazz/funk fusion creations.67 Crouch depicted the problem asone of hybridization:

The problem emerged with fusion music in the 1960’s, which made it difficult forpeople to tell the difference between jazz and instrumental pop music. Now,because of the title, some people are led to believe that jazz is anything with a poprhythm section and an instrumental improvisation. Smooth jazz makes it more dif-ficult to know what jazz is for the average person, and when people finally hear realjazz, they always say, “Why did I spend so much time listening to garbage?”68

While critics likened smooth jazz to contaminated hybrids, “elevator music,” and “jazzfor dummies,” its champions responded by portraying critics as elitist, out-of-touchtraditionalists.69

Younger music critics of the genre praised the output of early fusion projects, iden-tifying these early recordings and live performances as the progenitors of the currentstyle. New York Times critic Nate Chinen reviewed a concert by the Yellowjacketsand described the group’s lineage to various generational labels, including fusionand smooth jazz:

Fusion has long been an ugly stepchild in jazz circles; it appears in most official his-tories as the byproduct of compromise and contamination. That critique has seriousflaws, starting with the premise that jazz possessed a fundamental purity in the firstplace. But it’s largely true that fusion, born in the late 1960’s as an intrepid hybrid ofjazz, rock and soul, produced a glut of music that was bombastic and bathetic, andsometimes both at once.70

Contamination, the ugly (presumably female) “stepchild,” provided a familiar semioticrefrain to these historically persistent debates. Younger journalists including Chinentended to foreground descriptive terms of masculinity, as they extol contemporaryjazz’s “authentic” beginnings. Images of “athleticism” and “muscularity” conflatedwith “ingenuity” continued to promote the dominant mind/body binary. Indeed,Chinen praised the Yellowjackets for their “standards of musicianship and athleticism[which] have always smacked of something more serious, and lately, more straight-ahead” (Chinen 2006). Yet in relation to the group’s fusion (and eventually, smoothjazz) denomination, Chinen also depicts their smooth jazz inclinations as somethingmore nuanced than those essentialized notions of masculinity; their music is presentedas “a guitarless fusion that’s much more sinewy than steroidal, with infusions of gospel,funk and rhythm and blues. Often the results have crept in the direction of smooth jazz,a format that Yellowjackets inadvertently helped to create.”71 His various affectivedescriptors, however, might suggest that more complex forms of jazz masculinity

67Watrous 1997.68Crouch, quoted in Watrous 1997.69Tom Mosland and Yahlin Chang, “Jazz for drive time,” Newsweek, vol. 127 no. 21 (1996), 76.70Nate Chinen, “Smooth jazz with nice rough edges,” New York Times 9 June 2006, 25.71Chinen 2006.

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were beginning to emerge in part because of the hybrid experimentations of fusion andlater contemporary jazz.

Other jazz critics, while favoring smooth jazz’s 1960s fusion and jazz-rock roots, dis-paraged the choice of artists that record divisions prioritized. Bob Blumenthal of theBoston Globe legitimized the roots of the genre, yet critiqued the style for its reductiveaffective connotations:

Jazz has trimmed its more unfettered impulses at various historical moments, in aneffort to reach a wider audience. Big bands purveyed the smooth jazz circa 1940 in theminds of those who felt that the rules developed in New Orleans were sacrosanct, andfusion was dismissed 30 years later by fans equally sure that the music had to berooted in acoustic instruments and chin-a-ding swing. Yet the leeway provided forcreative interpretation in these styles, each of which involved a certain “smoothing”of jazz conventions, ultimately made such arguments moot; or, as I once heard Chris-tian McBride put it, Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” wasn’t jazz when it was recordedin 1973, but it is now. When “smooth” becomes the focal point, though, we haveentered a territory in which the jazz content is fossilized and will ultimately beextinguished.72

In these evocations equating social and artistic values to the ephemeral qualities of jazz,one might argue that “smooth” as a stylistic musical category indirectly references amore feminine-identified conception of musical production, reception and appreci-ation, dating from the soothing musical arrangements of pop ballads in the 1970s,or further back to the sweet arrangements of orchestral jazz from the 1920s to the1950s. “Sweet jazz,” for example, relied heavily upon gendered associations with thefeminine–sweet orchestrations which implemented feminine-identified instrumenta-tions (strings, harps, pianos), slower and lyrical arrangements and lush visualdesigns of ornate and fashionable dance halls, to name a few—while bebop’s masculi-nity as normative jazz practice arose from its explicit denial of such essentializednotions of femininity (commerciality, collaboration, feminine instrumentation, beau-tiful settings) through its emphasis upon notions of complexity, individuality, andformal musicological developments such as small-group improvisation, the leadershiprole of the saxophone and trumpet, the increased technique of soloists, a dislike ofaccessible popular arrangements, and a particular improvising vocabulary, whichhelped to inculcate virtuosity, technique, and the exceptional soloist as normative per-formance values in the late twentieth century.

Contemporary jazz musicians, including Bob James and Kirk Whalum, alsoexpressed differing opinions about the smooth jazz phenomenon. When quoted inDown Beat in 2002, James, a pioneer of the 1970s fusion movement, expressed hisambivalence about the naming of smooth jazz:

By sticking the word smooth in front of it, it brings listeners to the station… And theyuse all these kinds of phrases, that the music is palatable. And for all of us musicians,you don’t want your music reduced to it. The fact that some music works for their

72Bob Blumenthal, “Smooth jazz lacks the bite and humanity of the real thing,” Boston Globe, 30 November 1997,B8.

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format is a good thing as long as the artist or the record company doesn’t think aboutrecording it down to that formula.73

The persistent journalistic interest in defining and legitimating jazz categoriesbelied residual concerns over music’s power to convey notions of time andplace and gender and race. Musical authenticities, when articulated throughboth social and dominant networks of commerce and mass media, point tojazz’s seemingly timeless identity crisis. Since the 1990s, Down Beat’s investigationof the effects of smooth jazz radio upon jazz musicians’ performing careers spokenot only to concerns for musicians’ livelihood but also to the powerful symbolicfunction of musical categories for negotiating cultural hierarchies and genderedperformative modes.74

Industry professionals had long sought musical styles that appeal to diverse cul-tures, generations, and nationalities. Although critics bemoaned the formulaicsounds of smooth jazz programming in the 1990s, industry moguls praised theformat’s relative flexibility as well as its attractiveness for mixed-race audiences,claiming: “In cities like New York and Chicago, with larger black populations,the stations program more black vocal pop, pulling audiences away from stationsthat play rap. On the West Coast, New Age and even Hispanic-influenced musiclures listeners away from their niche radio stations.”75 Washington Post staffwriter Frank Ahrens even claimed that the city’s smooth jazz station, 105.9, whichprogrammed classic rock until 1994, caters to folks of “all stripes.” Bill Clinton,Anthony Williams, and Michael Jordan all acknowledged to station programmerKenny King that they listened to his station (Ahrens 2001). Arbitron, the mostwidely cited radio rating agency, claimed smooth jazz fans to be middle to upperclass, 35 to 50 years old, men and women and white and black. Pierre Bouvard,general manager of Arbitron, likened smooth jazz to “one of the success stories ofthe 1990s,” and further asserted “[i]t’s rare to find a format that’s even slightly multi-ethnic.”76 New York Times writer Peter Watrous described smooth jazz listeners as“solid citizens… people with disposable income who are tired of listening tooldies” and that “class, education, and affluence are powerful bonds that cancreate subcultures that move beyond racial boundaries.” He compared smoothjazz’s broad appeal to the success of the Oprah Winfrey Show, as something“beyond ethnicity.” Led by an African American cultural commentator whose popu-larity extended boundaries of gender, class, and race (and now nationality), Win-frey’s show early exemplified this trend. Through this connection, Watrous also

73James, quoted in Cole and Koransky, 50.74During the mid-1990s, Down Beat writers and jazz journalists Charles Levin, Eliot Tiegel (1996), Pat Cole, JasonKoransky, and Mark Ruffin published a series of investigations into the consequences of BA’s media research andconsultation upon listening tastes. Charles Levin, “You can’t do that… or can you? – Part 1: Servants of Mix-Master,” Down Beat, vol. 66 no. 3 (1999), 36; Charles Levin, “Reconfiguring the Public Radio Puzzle,” DownBeat, vol. 66 no. 4 (1999), 42–46; Mark Ruffin, “Smooth Jazz’s Dirty Little Secret,” Down Beat 70/6 2003, 21;Cole and Koransky 2002.75Watrous 1997.76Watrous 1997.

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pointed to the prominent role of women as cultural mediators and consumers in thisnew economic climate.

In the late-Capitalist era, racism, gender, and genre discrimination remained bypro-ducts of the larger economic processes of increasing transnational media concentration,formulaic cultural production, and flexible accumulation.77 Despite smooth jazz’s inter-national reach, during the 1990’s the genre’s heavily produced recordings and adaptationof popular styles led to such accusations of its gendered artifice and fabrication. Never-theless, proponents of the genre continued to praise its multicultural constituency, andcontinually drew on this rhetoric to pacify cynical critics who lambasted the style’s gen-trification, contamination, feminization, and formulaic musical production. Jazz puristsdenounced such celebratory proclamations, especially when fortified by the reductivemusical preferences of consumers who were identified through corporate marketingresearch. Yet, surprisingly, these studies were some of the few investigations that con-sciously recognized the role performed by gender and sexuality in marking particularmusical styles as popular, and it is to the gendered representation of smooth jazz market-ing that I now turn. I’ll do so by highlighting the reception and contemporary jazz outputof an internationally established contemporary jazz instrumentalist, Candy Dulfer. Herreception by the journalistic community in particular sheds light on the gendered, racia-lized, and sexualized climate in which female instrumentalists were represented duringthe rise of smooth jazz.

Candy Dulfer—Smooth, Contemporary, Pop Jazz Star

By age twenty, Dutch saxophonist Candy Dulfer had acquired a reputation as an inter-national performing artist. Her commercial success was triggered by two importantcollaborations with pop music celebrities. First, her 1989 co-composition “Lily wasHere” with Eurhythmics’ Dave Stewart reached number one on European charts.78

“Lily was Here” appeared several times in Billboard’s Top 20 Singles lists from 1989until 1991 and in various categories including “Adult Contemporary” and “AdultSingles.” Second, also in 1989, Dulfer recorded an extended solo on the track “Party-man” for Prince’s multi-platinum soundtrack album Batman (the second release).Both radio hits were quickly transformed into music videos.79 Dulfer would joinPrince several times for international tours including New Power Soul (1998), One

77See for example Krims’ excellent book, which connects newmusical aesthetics to the changing demographics andarchitectural design of cities like New York and Chicago from the 1980s and 1990s. He suggests that, as cities tran-sitioned from Fordist manufacturing centers, privileging mass-mediated cultural products, to the economic pat-terns of flexible accumulation and transnational media consolidation enabled by new technologies and forms ofintegration in the 1990s, music and the arts became powerful symbolic sites for enacting the values of a newly prof-itable cosmopolitan urban class. Krims sketches the ways that music and culture were profoundly impacted bythese transformations while also intimately being connected to the rise of creative cities and the gentrificationof city centers and cultural architectural sites during the 1990s and early twenty-first century. Adam Krims,Music and Urban Geography (London: Routledge, 2007).78“Lily was Here” was part of the soundtrack to the Dutch film De Klassière (1989 Movies Film Productions) and

subsequently released as a recorded single and music video.79Media critics subsequently praised “Partyman” as a pioneering work in music video aesthetics.

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Nite Alone (2002), and Musicology (2004).80 During the 1990s, she concentrated onseveral popular instrumental jazz projects and was twice nominated for a Grammy.Since then, she has recorded a staple of solo recordings in the broader contemporaryjazz style, in addition to her many guest appearances with artists including Tower ofPower, Van Morrison, Maceo Parker, Aretha Franklin, Pink Floyd, Beyoncé, andDutch pop artists Blöf and Trijntje Oosterhuis. After these successful collaborations,she has been featured in a variety of media, including music television videos andlate-night television programs (Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show with JayLeno). She has also contributed to film soundtracks including Robert Altman’sCookie’s Fortune (Polygram 1999). To date, she has sold more than two and a halfmillion CDs worldwide, making her the most commercially successful femaleinstrumentalist.81

With respect to musical categories, the dominant binary gender constructionearly influenced Dulfer’s reception within the music industry. In the early 1990s,for example, Dulfer’s Saxuality was nominated for a Grammy for “Best Adult Con-temporary Album” and “Best Pop Instrumental Performance”, two categories thatside-stepped her jazz affiliation.82 Eventually by the late 1990s, the jazz industryreluctantly accepted her as a jazz performer, at which point she evolved into oneof the most prominent artists of contemporary jazz (and related styles of fusionand funk); yet her recordings and performances were frequently marketed in theUS under the smooth jazz category. During this period, her reception by thepress betrayed the inherently ideological debates connected to these varyinglabels. AllMusic.com includes several contemporaneous reviews of these albums;each constitutes philosophical justifications of the gendered dimensions guidingher reception. For example, when reviewing Dulfer’s (1997) For the Love of You,journalist Jonathan Widron inserted well-worn clichés about feminine beauty andmasculine performativity:

Dressed in a white jumpsuit, legs crossed, sandy blond hair perfectly coiffed, andsitting in a comfy tan chair with her trusty alto sax, Candy Dulfer looks perfectlyangelic on the cover of her third album, For the Love of You. Some of the goofyshots on the inside sleeve cast her in the more mischievous light of her almost looka-like Jenny McCarthy, but the overall packaging—and that dazzling smile—caressesthe eyes with femininity. But her deeper musical dimensions are decidedly masculine.Once she starts to blow, Dulfer is as aggressive, gritty, and boisterous as her primaryalto inspirations, David Sanborn and Maceo Parker...83

80Two of these tours supported Prince’s studio albums New Power Soul, Legacy 94448 (2008 [1998]) andMusicol-ogy, Columbia / NPG/Columbia 92560 (2004). One Nite Alone- Live! (NPG 7070, 2002) is a 3-CD set of live per-formances, in which Dulfer appears as a featured performer.81“Candy Dulfer Bio,” Candy Dulfer Home Page (accessed 3 March 2014) http://www.candydulfer.nl/candy/ and

“Biography – Candy Dulfer,” Dutch Rock and Pop Institute Encyclopedia of Dutch Rock Music (accessed 1 Aug2007) http://www.hollandrocks.com/jump/bio/bz878.html.82“Grammy Award Winners – 1992,” Grammy.com (accessed 1 August 2007) http://www.grammy.com/

GRAMMY_Awards/Winners/Results.aspx.83“For the Love of You” under “Candy Dulfer,” AllMusic.com (accessed 27 February 2013) http://www.allmusic.

com/album/for-the-love-of-you-mw0000645844.

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As reflected in this review, Dulfer’s journalistic reception consistently intimated thegendered dimensions guiding jazz promotion and production in which perceived fem-inine attributes (beauty, domesticity, passivity) stand in as artistic lack against the morehighly valued, yet essentialized, notions of jazz masculinity (aggression, grit, power) astruer expressions of artistic authenticity. Other reviews inserted vitriolic attacks on herimprovisational skills (which are considerable, despite these reviewers’ protestations),seemingly to compensate for her commercial success. This review by Alex Hendersonof Saxuality even claims that she refused to improvise on the recording, the mostpointed criticism imaginable for any self-respecting jazz instrumentalist:

In the early ’90s, Arista Records marketed Candy Dulfer in much the same way itwould market a pop or rock singer and did everything it could to exploit theDutch saxophonist’s great looks. Unfortunately, the sexy publicity shots Arista sentout with her debut effort, Saxuality, were more impressive than the album itself—a forgettable R&B/pop/jazz recording that’s smothered by excessive production.Though the R&B-ish compositions (many written by producer Ulco Bed) aren’tbad, the highly predictable Dulfer consistently comes across as a poor man’s DavidSanborn and does very little improvising. A funk-influenced version of MilesDavis’ “SoWhat”might have been worthwhile, but is destroyed by its stiff productionand Dulfer’s refusal to improvise.84

In these and many other reviews of Dulfer’s recorded output, music journalists perpe-tuated the pop-star-as-imitator versus rock-as-authentic-original frame. Here suchrepresentations led to more general accusations of Dulfer’s work as an impoverishedimitation of real contemporary jazz stars, a well-worn critique pinned upon attractivefemale artists of prior decades. Notwithstanding the review’s dismissive tone, others ofthe time rightfully highlighted the role performed by the industry in fabricating thisinstrumentalist’s highly feminine and sexually appealing image.

Consistent with the industry’s promotion of prior musical stars, Dulfer’s inter-national reputation was partly predicated by the effective promotion of her as asensual, international, pop celebrity—a strategy suggesting that even when workingin the established masculine values of jazz performance, women were more likely pro-moted as pop stars than as jazz instrumentalists. Despite the disparaging of her sex-ualized image, through promotional images on posters and record sleeves andthrough a variety of media, Dulfer projected alternating images of power, femininityand eroticism. Various expressions of these affective stances contributed to her mostsuccessful videos “Lily was Here,” “Partyman,” and “Saxuality.” The video “Lily wasHere” received heavy airplay on MTV and VH1 in 1989 and the early 1990s and typi-fied the style and aesthetic of late-eighties music videos, which also drew from avariety of earlier audio-visual media from, soundies and musical films of the 1930sand ’40s to live televised music performances in more recent years. In this video,chiaroscuro lighting is interspersed with close-ups of the musicians and backgroundfootage of nonchalant women lounging in night-clubs or wandering damp city streets.

84“Saxuality” under “Candy Dulfer,” AllMusic.com (accessed 28 February 2013) http://www.allmusic.com/album/

saxuality-mw0000262954.

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Dulfer offers a number of blues riffs and R & B phrases in response to Stewart’s simple,unembellished two-bar theme. The sonic backdrop betrays its historic stamp, with thecharacteristic electronic drum sequences, extensive reverb on both guitar and saxo-phone, and the sequenced bass line.

In 1989 Dulfer also appeared in MTV’s heavily-rotated video “Partyman,” a videothat featured new footage in combination with scenes from the feature film Batman(Tim Burton, dir. [Warner Bros, 1989]). In this video, early in Dulfer’s career, the sax-ophonist’s physical mannerisms contrast with the pin-up persona she would soonadopt. Here she adorns a relatively androgynous, loosely-tailored tuxedo, a commonsartorial statement of 1980s videos wherein transgressive gendered performativities,previously contested in earlier audio-visual media (such as cross-dressing), eventuallybecame normalized by their mainstream circulation through pop star performances ofMichael Jackson, Madonna and Annie Lennox. Dulfer’s rather generic costume por-trays her as a typical (and unremarkable) musician in the band, in stark contrast tothe other women in the scene who saunter through the club fashioned in redspandex dresses and dramatic make-up, a 1980s revivalist nod to the classic Hollywoodfemme fatale and the privileging of the male gaze.

As a band member, she performs intermittent short solos, a seemingly minor detail,but significant in the history of representing female instrumentalists in music televisionformats.85 In addition to a number of short blues riffs, she delivers a sixteen-bar solopunctuated with both short melodic lines and percussive funk breaks. Here Dulferexhibits impeccable funk timing and articulation, a well-structured exploration ofher instrumental range and an expressive variety of blues-based riffs:

Figure 1. Candy Dulfer and Dave Stewart in the video “Lily was Here” (RCA 1989).

85Think for example of the characterization of female instrumentalists (as masquerades) on Robert Palmer’s“Simply Irresistible” (1988), where women are posed as passive femmes fatales.

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After Prince famously calls out “When I need trombone my dog is handy, but when Iwant sax—I. Call. Candy.” By according hipness to her musical ideas and presence, this“shout-out” provided the single most important verbal affirmation of her young career.In Gayle Wald’s conception, white artists (typically male) sought to imitate or acquirethe praise of black artists as authenticating acts where black sanctioning justified notonly one’s aesthetic technique and sexual prowess, but their subcultural capital—apractice of appropriating black culture, which dates back to the “love and theft”relations of blackface minstrelsy.86 Prince’s recognition of Dulfer’s musical style,however, altered the normative conditions of such relations, convening hipness onEuropean female artistry in the context of transnational, mass-mediated audio-visualpopular culture.

To promote her first solo LP, RCA sponsored a second video for the title track ofSaxuality. Pop journalist Stewart MacLean referenced the heavily sexualized image ofwomen featured in Dulfer’s “Saxuality” video:

Behind her beguiling grin lies a realistic, calculating pop star. “Nothing goes outwithout my consent,” she says of her relationship with RCA. The quick fire imagesof scantily dressed women in the Saxuality video were her idea, but she denies theyare sexist, citing Sheila E. from Prince’s band as a sexy woman who still looksstylish and in control.87

Through her audio-visual work, Dulfer began to fashion a gendered promotionalimage, which recontextualized historically established sexual archetypes from femmefatales to pin-ups and cross-dressers. In this video, RCA incorporated such archetypesinto these video’s mise-en-scène under her close supervision, a facet of the video’s pro-duction that foregrounds Dulfer’s postmodern inclination to cite, sample, and reviveprior cultural images with reflexive agency and irony. Yet even in their postmodern(post-feminist) iteration, the playful enactment of such stereotypes limited women’sperformative spectrum to sexualized notions of the body.

Figure 2. Transcription of Dulfer’s 16-bar solo on “Partyman” (Warner Bros. 1989).

86Gayle Wald, Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century: U.S. Literature and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press,2000).87Stewart MacLean, “Pop’s Professor: a Spiritual Soul,” The Sunday Mail, 5 March 1990.

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In her many interviews, Dulfer consistently acknowledged those most influentialupon her contemporary jazz and fusion style. Instrumentalists Maceo Parker, GeorgeBenson, and David Sanborn influenced her timbral and soloing vocabulary andinspired her general preference for artists who deliver a funky and/or rock-orientedapproach towards improvisation. Further, Dulfer claimed that because she was bornin 1969, an era in which jazz “wasn’t really happening anymore,” she chose to adopther parent’s eclectic interest in a variety of musics, from black popular musics, suchas the psychedelic rock of Jimi Hendrix, to the mainstream white rock of the Eagles.She was also greatly influenced by her father’s (Dutch saxophonist Hans Dulfer)unique approach towards performing, as he frequently mixed improvised jazz with arange of popular musics. Music journalist Jeff Kaliss depicted Candy Dulfer’s fusionmix as a result of “parental guidance” enabling “the young Dulfer” to find “a territorybetween jazz and rock, occupied by the funky Maceo Parker and the fusion-esqueOrnette Coleman, Miles Davis and David Sanborn.”88 In Dulfer’s personal narratives,her relationship to fusion and rock (and not smooth jazz or pop) guided her musicalgrowth as an artist, a facet overshadowed by the industry’s promotional practice of situ-ating her within the feminized worlds of popular music stars and the perceived femin-ized artifice and erotics attached to smooth jazz. Despite its smooth jazz context,Dulfer’s first solo effort in 1991 incorporated influences from the instrumentally-based funk and R & B groups of the 1970s, including P-funk, Sly and the FamilyStone, and Tower of Power, musical affiliations that clearly connect her to themusical proclivities of earlier fusion groups. Yet, as if to legitimize her jazz skills,some reviewers would indirectly refer to her preference for authentic black musicstyles, such as this review of Saxuality, which highlighted her predilection for funkover smooth jazz or jazz fusion:

Figure 3. Dulfer solo in the video “Partyman” (Warner Bros. 1989).

88Jeff Kaliss, “Candy Dulfer’s Saxuality/Sax Player isn’t Just One of the Boys/Debut Album Goes Gold for DutchBlonde,” The San Francisco Chronicle, 3 Nov. 1991, 41.

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This album veers between a Weather Report-ish and electric jazz approach (“Jazzid,”“Heavenly City”). But the heart of Dulfer’s approach is funk, as on a cover of MilesDavis’ “So What” that forsakes the tune’s cool beginnings and turns it into a steamystrut. Likewise, the line “It doesn’t matter where you get the funk, just be sure that thefunk gets you,” from the tune “Get the Funk” shows Dulfer’s orientation. Saxuality ispop with grit, and Dulfer’s witty confidence makes this a promising debut.89

In interviews with the press, Dulfer further situated her proclivity for combining blackmusic styles such as funk with rock (and its perceived masculine authenticity) as a con-nection to the music of her generation, conditioned by the ecstatic live performances of1970s soul, funk, and rock groups. In the following excerpt, she stresses how thesemusical recollections influenced her desire to move away from both the “over-pro-duced sounds” and digital confines of popular music and the smooth jazz recordingstudio as the 1990s progressed:

I’m a very aggressive person and I feel like music should have a wild edge. I like somecontemporary jazz but I see a lot of yuppiness in it, and that makes me back away…When I think of all the concerts I’ve loved, the bands always went over the top. That’swhat I try to do. Make people get up and dance, and then maybe next do an inter-esting solo…What I want to do in the next couple of years is to become a reallygood jazz player, but still do my own stuff. I want to have the Parker and BenWebster stuff down, but not play it… 90

Dulfer’s assertion pointed to the cultural weight of a dominant American jazz myth,especially for European jazz artists, which continually prioritizes African Americanmale icons as exemplars of authenticity and musical rigor.91 The pervasive culturalmyth of (African) American exceptionalism permeated Dulfer’s defense of hermusical value even as she set herself up against it. Yet she demurred in her unwilling-ness to situate her own skills on par with other “good jazz players.”

Connected to the eclecticism of her repertoire, Dulfer’s recorded output also sym-bolically positioned her instrumental skills in a racially- and gender-coded process oflegitimization. Dulfer’s title track to Saxuality, for example, sampled a male (black-coded) voice posturing: “I know she looks good but can she play?” Dulfer confirmedthat the voice was recorded by her studio manager who’d spontaneously imitated anAmerican voice and then digitally detuned it for greater effect.92 The insertion wasintended to spoof many of those “hotshot” American record producers who commonlyquestioned the abilities of female players, especially when those skills were pessimisti-cally prejudged because of stereotypes about attractive women (dumb blondes beingthe obvious extension of such tropes). Although Dulfer explained that the voice wasnot intended to sound black, the use of popular urban samples, drum sequences,and, in this case, “urban”-inspired vocals, indicated a growing trend during the

89Elain Guregian, “Sax 4 Moderns,” Down Beat, vol. 58 no. 9 (1991), 36.90Dulfer quoted in Robert Baranello,“Riffs – Candy Dulfer,” Down Beat, vol. 58 no. 10 (1991), 12.91Monson 1995; TonyWhyton, Jazz Icons: Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2010); Kristin McGee, “New York Comes to Groningen: Jazz Star Circuits in the Netherlands,” MigratingMusics: Media, Politics and Style, edited by Byron Dueck and Jason Toynbee (London: Routledge, 2011).92Interview with Candy Dulfer, 15 November 2007.

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1990s for international popular music acts to incorporate hip hop digital recordingtechniques (sampling and sequencing) as black sonic signifiers. The reception ofsuch digitally manipulated recorded projects would lead to a mode of pleasure and(mis)recognition theorized as “schizophonic mimesis” in Steve Feld’s famous formu-lation.93 Indeed smooth jazz’s massive popular expansion during the 1990s similarlyprofited from the citation of black American cultural sources mediated through theprocesses of cultural globalization. Her success, then, can be situated within theseglobal developments as her mass-mediated recorded work was positively evaluatedfor its hybridity and lineage to black American popular musics.

Sometime in the early 1990s when smooth jazz acquired international status, Dulferwas contacted by Broadcast Architecture to discuss their new research apparatus, theMix-Master. During one conversation, the firm’s consultants attempted to persuadeher of the Mix-Master’s benefits. Dubious, she opposed such techniques for promotingeasily digestible musics. For emphasis, she argued that given twenty seconds of JimiHendrix or Miles Davis that she may have dismissed them. For her “some of thebest music confuses you at first, then grows on you and requires repeated listeningfor full appreciation.”94 In 2007, Dulfer claimed that Broadcast Architecture contactedrecord producers and radio stations to request that contemporary jazz musicians stopplaying difficult passages or things that may not fit well into an average businesscommute—things like “too many high notes, or screechy parts or over-indulgentsolos…”

95 These attempts by the industry to condition international, commercialjazz recordings by excising the very attributes that had come to be associated with auth-entic masculine jazz (long demanding solos, technical virtuosity) hastened the negativeevaluation of smooth and later contemporary jazz recordings as essentially artificialmusical fabrications designed for easy digestion.

Conscious of her reputation as a smooth jazz artist, Dulfer connected the develop-ment of the genre, and the subsequent reaction by the industry, to larger trends in thetransnational corporate world. She complained, “I’m not against smooth jazz, but Ihate the labels. Once you give something a label you kill it.” She then told the storyof a rather typical form of American entrepreneurship:

It’s like when you go to Italy and you taste this special coffee which is strong and withlots of milk and then you bring it back home—and you name it something like CaféLatte and I’m not saying I’m against Starbucks, but then you shut down and kill all ofthe little cafes and all you have is Starbucks.96

In other words, for Dulfer, the process of branding music, conditioning its circulationfor mass production, ultimately reduced it to a formula; it became devalued, commo-dified, and devoid of its initial creativity and personality. In a personal conversation,she characterized her relationship to the smooth jazz industry as complex, claiming

93Steven Feld, “The Poetics and Politics of Pygmy Pop,”Western Music and Its Others, edited by Georgina Born andDavid Hesmondhalgh, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 254–279.94Interview with Candy Dulfer, 15 November 2007.95Ibid.96Ibid.

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that recording consultants and producers had once encouraged her to follow musicalformulas, yet given the chance to work with the most commercially successful produ-cer, Dulfer claimed she would refuse if it meant relinquishing control of the musicalproduct.97

Dulfer’s Emerging Performativity

From a young age, the public and journalistic reception of Dulfer’s performances pre-disposed her to reflect critically upon the gendered paradigm surrounding femaleartists. She remembers that, as one of her first groups, Funky Stuff, acquired moregigs, she “saw a lot of girls playing, and they were not using their femininity. Theywere dressed like men, looking very grumpy . . . They were trying to be one of theguys.”98 She cites Sheila E. (Escovedo) as an important role model whose sexy perform-ances motivated Dulfer’s own current feminized and sexualized self-presentation. Sherecounted seeing Escovedo when she was just 13 at Amsterdam’s famous Paradiso club.The experience radically “opened her eyes” and provided an alternative image of how tobe feminine, confident, and “totally in control” of one’s audience. Until then, she hadonly seen women playing instruments in a manner which she described as “feminist,”which for her implied “trying really hard to fit in and be masculine, not at all sexy, andlooking really serious in turtle neck sweaters…”

99 When enacted by female instru-mentalists, these mechanisms point to what feminist historian Ariel Levy calls “loop-hole women,” women who survive and even thrive in male-dominated domains byappropriating masculine behavior and eschewing normative feminine semanticcodes.100 Despite the trend of “bringing sexy back” in the twenty-first century, adoptinga sexy and confident performance style during the 1990s provided a means to counterdominant masculinist strategies adopted by prior female jazz instrumentalists of the1960s and 1970s.

In 1994, Dulfer modeled for photographer Marco Bakker (resulting in theNederlandFoto Trophy). Shortly after, she was interviewed by the Dutch edition of Playboy toreflect upon how her gender and marketed sexuality had influenced her initial com-mercial success: “In the beginning, many people bought my CD thinking, how cute,a girl playing saxophone and then they found out that I actually play fusion music, akind of music that they might not have bought otherwise.”101 In the United States,since the 1950s, Playboy magazine had consistently integrated interviews and reviewsof prestigious jazz musicians alongside pin-ups of beautiful female models. Historically,and despite the magazine’s sexualized content, these features signaled an artist’s pre-eminence in the jazz world. However, rarely did female jazz musicians occupy a pos-ition in the magazine (as either pin-ups or jazz artists), for as Barbara Ehrenreichpoints out, the journal provided an exclusively male voice for rebellion against

97Ibid.98Kaliss 1991.99Interview with author, 15 November 2007.100Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2006).101Dulfer quoted from Playboy 1996 in Roel Janssen, “Profile of a Dutch Saxophonist,” Europe 355 (1996), 40.

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domesticity and the bonds of breadwinning and marriage. By envisioning the livingspace as male and urbane, the journal sought to refashion a familial-identified spacewith images of commodified female sexuality to reassure its readers of its heterosexualcapitalist aspirations (erotic fun for single men).102 Such objectification of the femalebody necessarily undermined women’s agency (since this was not a goal of thejournal). Therefore, in light of the journal’s established readership and sexualized con-notations, Dulfer formulated an image and narrative that would temper its gendereddivision. For one, in the issue she candidly discussed her close relationship with herparents, as well as “her total rejection of drugs, and her desire for children.”103 Inher photographs and public performances of the time, she paradoxically cultivatedboth the image of a sexy young woman and that of the ideal daughter-in-law. In thisparticular issue, the tenuous presentation of both her public professional lifethrough sexy images of her body and her private gendered life (through avowingsuch domestic values as loyalty and aspirations towards motherhood) betrayed publi-city challenges that most male jazz musicians seldom faced.

Early in the 1990s, Dulfer duplicated the pin-up poses of 1950s era jazz recordssleeves to promote her fun and humorous side. She recalled that she wanted to contrastthe very aggressive, physical, and sometimes unattractive side of live playing with anattractive photo because, as she quipped, when you play “you can’t even smile,because your face is resting on a mouthpiece and you are blowing really hard” andwith a photograph, “at least you can take a nice photo which looks good.”104 Toachieve this, she re-enacted vintage images from album covers, which often featuredgorgeous models holding saxophones in such a way (which she comically imitatedduring the interview—lip muscles misplaced and fingers askance) that made itobvious that these women didn’t play. Dialogically engaging with this legacy, Dulferoffered a beautiful, sexy photo in which she held the saxophone “as a real playerdoes.”105

Paradoxically, Dulfer resented the persistent allusions to her sex and gender (above hermusicality) by the journalistic community. She articulated her frustrations as early as1991 in The San Francisco Chronicle:

It’s just a way of saying, “Think about this . . . don’t just take me as somebody in apicture,…” “If you don’t like my playing, that’s cool, but not if you don’t like itbecause I’m a girl or because I’m making nice pictures on the album sleeve.”106

Despite her choice to portray her visual style as feminine and sexy, she further resentedthe facile labeling of her good looks in combination with the feminized musical associ-ations of the smooth jazz formula: “Funky Stuff leaned towards heavy funk. Then Imade “Lily was Here” and I was immediately portrayed as the “pretty-girl-with-the-

102Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: AnchorBooks, 1983).103Janssen 1996.104Interview with Candy Dulfer, 15 November 2007.105Ibid.106Kaliss 1991.

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sax.” I couldn’t do anything about it – just be myself.”107 More frequently, however,Dulfer’s live appearances markedly contrasted with those publicity shots featured onCD covers, an incongruity often noted by entertainment journalists during the early1990s. The Straits Times articulated the disappointment felt by “heat seeking males”at Dulfer’s “sober” appearance at a nightclub in 1993 in Singapore.108

In their approach to gendered performativity, 1990s journalists differed from their1940s and 1950s era predecessors in their ironic and playful approach towards sexu-ality. By 1993, Dulfer fully acknowledged her potent conflation of sexuality withmusical agency as a clever business model:

You must understand that before my albums came out, I was a nobody; I was justplaying clubs in Holland. So, what I’m basically doing is making sure that I remainin the limelight. But I see it as a joke, really. The cover with me in a bra is just ahumorous take-off from 50s jazz album covers where you see a pretty girl clingingon to the star.109

In this self-reflection, she aspired towards greater agency in designing and redirectingthe semantic and symbolic significance of prior female models (non-instrumentalists)positioned in sexy pin-up poses. Yet, throughout the 1990s she continued to concep-tualize her playing in established gendered terms. First, she often downplayed her tech-nical skills (despite her vast technical abilities) and instead highlighted her emotional

Figure 4. Album cover for Sax-A-Go-Go (RCA 1993).

107Passage translated by the author from “Candy Dulfer – ‘Een minimum aan inzet, een maximum aan geluk’” Fret 8(2001), 22–23.108

“Sax Symbol Dulfer heats up Zouk,” Straits Times 34 Aug 1993, 14 (Lexus Nexus).109Dulfer, quoted in Loh Keng Fatt, “Don’t expect Candy to be sweet,” The Straits Times 5 Sept 1993, no pagenumber – factiva (Singapore).

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and melodic approach towards improvisation—long established concepts in the historyof representing feminine performativities within jazz culture.

The dominant gendered binary conditioned the reception of women musicians andextended beyond the visual to the musical. For example, in addition to playing, Dulferoften sang on her many jazz/funk recordings. Her vocal utterances revealed influencesfrom P-funk’s free-flowing, interactive vocal chants. Her decision to include lead vocalsmay also evidence historically situated gendered conventions, as women instrumental-ists have often resorted to adopting established feminine roles, much in the way thatwomen who played in all-girl bands during the 1920s to the 1950s also sang orformed choirs to reinforce normative gendered expectations.110 However, she viewedsinging in both commercial and affective terms, arguing that her voice provided amore immediate and intimate connection with audiences. In Los Angeles Dulferonce claimed: “I’m not the next Mariah Carey… I have good timing and I can carrya tune. Besides, it’s easier to make contact with a crowd and express yourself withyour voice than it is with a horn in your face…”

111

In conversations with journalists, Dulfer often relied upon gendered conceptions inher own estimation of her musical attributes. She alluded to the preferences of estab-lished musicians like Van Morrison who valued her playing for its “spontaneous” and“not very technical” style. She further argued that, while these artists could have recruited“the most advanced players,” instead they chose her “emotional” and “simple” style.112

Similarly, Dave Stewart recently praised Dulfer’s fluid musical style for her ability adaptto other musicians’ needs, claiming: “She so naturally gets into the composer’s or musi-cian’s head and just immediately works within it and she can do it instantly, which is sortof unusual for a lot of musicians” (Candy Meets – Dave Stewart NPS 2007). Clearly, herparticular talent for musically enhancing a particular musician’s approach elevated herartistic attributes for both live and recorded projects.113

In 2007, she exuded a certain confidence about her relevance in the music world.When probed about her view about the current jazz authenticity debates, she firmlydefended her position, describing the essence of her music as deeply rooted in a jazzaesthetic—one that prioritizes improvisation and the transformation of musicalsources into new contexts:

Jazz is seeking improvisation and freedom. I do that constantly. Call it fusion. I makepopular music from a jazz point of view. It sounds nothing like jazz, but it is actually.I want to make songs that people remember and that is difficult in instrumentalmusic. Miles Davis can do it, I try to do it. Still – I’ll never become a Charlie Parker.114

Dulfer’s desire to situate herself alongside other prominent fusion musicians, especiallythose both heralded and criticized for their liminal or “broken middle” positionality

110Tucker 2000; McGee 2009.111

“People and Places,” Associated Press Newswire 6 October 1997, no page number (factiva).112Kaliss 1991.113More recently, she identified having experienced little sexism in the industry. However, she claimed that over 75per cent of interviews focused solely upon this topic, protesting, “With male musicians, interviews go right to themusic” (Interview with Candy Dulfer, 15 November 2007).114HugoCamps, “Interview: HugoCamps in gesprekmet saxofoniste CandyDulfer,” Elsevier, vol 63 no. 28 (2007), 30.

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between jazz and popular culture, betrayed the broader context within which fusion andcontemporary jazz musicians labored during a period of global expansion and the emer-gence of a visually and digitally mediated promotional jazz world. In this context, smoothjazz musicians experienced constant pressure to defend their musics against claims ofinauthenticity, commercial artifice, and formulaic simplicity. Despite these insecurities,Dulfer’s attitude evinced not arrogance but a mature confidence in her skills. Forexample, when pressed for details about her creative process, she stated plainly “Youknow I am lucky… I have a really good ear, I always did. I can hear something onceor twice, and then I write down what I hear, I have my own system since I don’t readmusic, and so I write down the notes… ., and then I never forget it.”115

During her recent television series Candy Meets, Dave Stewart praised Dulfer’s artistictalent and her “encyclopedic” memory for musical riffs (Candy Meets – Dave Stewart2007). Throughout the various episodes, she re-traced her musical roots by re-visitinginfluential musicians in their professional worlds. Filmed in California (Los Angeles),North Carolina, and North Holland, these scenes interwove various professional and per-sonal settings from recording studios and nightclubs to urban playgrounds and reclusivelandscapes in which Dulfer initiated intimate conversations and casual jam sessions withguests Sheila E., Maceo Parker, Hans Dulfer, Dave Stewart, Mavis Staples, and Van Mor-rison. The series’ opening and closing credits promoted a range of vivid and appropriatesettings in which she gracefully traveled through Amsterdam’s international airport—saxophone slung over her shoulder, to contemplative scenes riding her bike amongstrustic wind mills and wide-open fields swallowed up by Holland’s characteristicsomber skies. These images were juxtaposed against her more cosmopolitan image—as an international pop star performing on famous Hollywood stages, riding in luxuryconvertible cars, and wearing sexy, glittery couture with American music icons,British/Irish rock stars, and European jazz artists. The series’ cosmopolitan/rural projec-tions fundamentally inscribed those tensions surrounding Dulfer’s national and inter-national reception. In the world of global media-scapes, she simultaneously andgracefully performed various roles: the cosmopolitan Dutch citizen, the erotic popmusic icon, the female jazz instrumentalist and the international cultural mediator.Here she effortlessly transformed herself from various aesthetic dispositions and perfor-mative roles in a manner, which Stewart rightfully portrayed as “fluid—like water.”116

Conclusion

During the 1990s, the growing industry of smooth jazz gathered multiculturalism’soriginal momentum and its coveted cosmopolitan audiences by conditioning someof its diverse musical impulses into homogeneous, streamlined formulas. Smoothjazz arose to meet the affective and sexual desires of an upwardly mobile, multi-racial, multi-gendered, and eventually international music public, which increasinglyaccessed new music through corporate sponsored radio networks to establish their

115Interview with Candy Dulfer, 15 November 2007.116

“Candy Meets – Dave Stewart” episode produced by NPO and broadcast on Nederland 2 on 4 November 2007.

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music tastes. Simultaneously, smooth jazz’s heterogeneous fragmentation via its incor-poration of a variety of popular music styles from light rock to hip hop, funk, and R & Bfacilitated its promotion within a variety of media from digital networks to film andfrom music television to multi-genre music festivals. During the height of smoothjazz’s popularity, and through nationally organized demographic and psychologicalresearch techniques such as BA’s Mix-Master, the industry increasingly promoted ahistorically informed feminized and sexualized representation of this style to under-score its potential to fulfill erotic, sensual desires. By reconfiguring popular jazz’sprior cultural significance through a reformulation of dominant gender dichotomiesfeatured on mainstream platforms, smooth jazz stars profited from their multi-mediated, sexualized representations, and especially within music television and film.

The journalistic and scholarly reception of smooth jazz’s popular promotion and for-mulaic production incited a veritable war of words denigrating its aesthetic worth. Thisdiscursive backlash deeply implicated prior gendered discursive tropes and relied upontraditional musical binaries, notably the mind/body disparity as projected onto theblack “phallic” jazz subject and the rock-as-art and pop-as-artifice conception projectedonto female instrumentalists. Contemporary female jazz performer Candy Dulfer adeptlynavigated this eclectic musical and gendered industrial terrain by carefully and variouslyconstructing herself as an artist offering sexual appeal, femininity, and gritty funk instru-mentals within hybrid musical projects that were influenced by a broad variety of popularmusical styles. Within her recorded output, her arrangements and production techniquesborrowed from genres conceptualized as masculine and authentic—rock, funk, fusion—while others highlighted normative feminized performative strategies, from singingbetween instrumental parts to performing catchy, memorable pop musical melodiesarranged in collaboration with other hybrid jazz artists (as in “Lily was Here”).

As older networks of music production and reception succumbed to powerful adver-tising companies and consolidated media corporations such as Broadcast Architecture,those original independent contemporary jazz divisions and radio deejays either pro-fessionalized their output or gave way to corporate research dictates. Yet, by thetwenty-first century, as digital networks provided unexpected platforms for musicalcollaboration, creativity, and reception, the industry sponsored smooth jazz projectsthat extended the boundaries between current and older styles of popular music, asepitomized by Candy Dulfer’s eclectic collaborations and musical output during the1990s, recordings which were internationally circulated during the height of smoothjazz’s commercial appeal. This period eventually yielded more diversified audiencesand heterogeneous modes of performativity, indicated by the variety of “contemporaryjazz” and/or smooth jazz artists to be promoted by the jazz majors and within thegrowing number of diversified international jazz performance spaces from festivalsto cruises. As smooth jazz outsold other, less accessible styles of jazz, the patriarchsof jazz culture increasingly protested smooth jazz’s perceived contaminated (and, byassociation, feminized and sexualized) constituency as well as its massive popularityamong an increasingly multi-generational and multi-cultural international public.Such jazz purists may not have exerted the most influence in the transnationalmedia industry or within the commercial realms of contemporary jazz performativity,

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but their words continued to sting as they railed again and again against the infiltrationof mass culture’s perennial other—“the hooker in an evening gown.” Always cognizantof such ideological debates, Dulfer’s complex self-representation as a sexy, attractive,yet confident, talented instrumentalist committed to the cosmopolitan project offusion and musical hybridity in the context of global musical developments compli-cates our understanding of such persistent gendered binaries. Yet, her positioning asa postmodern artist only partially accounts for how and why successful internationalwomen instrumentalists choose such sexualized self-representational strategies whilesimultaneously protesting the inevitable “women in jazz” question frommusic journal-ists. Dulfer’s 1990s contemporary jazz output, claiming postmodernism’s ironic recon-figuration of dominant subject–object relations, inherent in the masculinizedconception of the autonomous artist, provided a means of engaging with the gendered,sexualized past. Yet, when such performances are mis-read without recognition of theirhistorical specificity, the burden to always be beautiful and sexy can contribute tounending frustrations for aspiring women musicians who desire bodily pleasureswithout being reduced by them as they seek multifaceted affective stances as well asthe intellectual freedom to test new musical terrain in their performative musical lives.

Abstract

In this article, I suggest that the feminized and sexualized associations of smooth jazz asfashioned by the industry during the 1990s have since contributed to its vitriolic andsometimes hysterical denouncement by jazz performers and scholars. In particular, Iuncover the affective, sexual, and gendered significance surrounding smooth jazz’sreception to highlight the industrial complex precipitating its commercial ascent.Finally, I concretely interrogate these values by highlighting the work of Dutch saxo-phonist Candy Dulfer, emphasizing the industrial dimensions undergirding her recep-tion as a highly successful 1990s instrumentalist whose work was often promoted assmooth jazz, despite the stylistic diversity of her recordings. Here I contrast industrydiscourse to those performative values expressed by Dulfer, while also recognizingthe larger historical and cultural reception of jazz as a highly gendered, racialized,and sexualized cultural phenomenon. Ultimately I show how Dulfer both participatedin and disrupted the feminized and sexualized associations of smooth jazz to artfullyside-step the bonds of anxiety over legitimacy that might otherwise have confinedher in an increasingly fragmented and international jazz world. By uncovering thesemiotic significance attached to smooth jazz’s promotion and reception, my analysisindirectly critiques dominant scholarly debates, which cumulatively and exclusivelyemphasize race and ethnicity (over gender or sexuality) as essential constructs influen-cing jazz’s broader cultural significance. These biases have led to under-developed con-ceptualizations of jazz’s complex professionalization during the late-twentieth century.

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