ABSTRACT
The masculinization of jazz has become axiomatic: “jazz has remained, since its earliest days, an overwhelmingly male domain” (Ake, 2002, p. 64). This chapter challenges that assumption, arguing that during the interwar period, particularly the 1920s, jazz was the domain of the independent-minded “New Woman” emancipated to explore enlarged horizons of public and sexual space. The chapter takes as a case study a scandal in Australia in 1928, where the Musicians’ Union of Australia had resisted the importation of foreign musicians on grounds they were depriving local musicians of employment. This posture was hardened by racism in the case of a visiting US African American revue, The Colored Idea. In collaboration with various state agencies and the yellow press, the union succeed in securing the deportation of the Revue’s band, not, however on grounds of protectionism, nor even primarily of race politics, though the latter were harnessed. The lever for the deportation was a public “moral panic” exploitation of the widely perceived association between African American jazz and the modern girl, of women as the conduit through which jazz entered and threatened the local culture. In the 1920s, jazz was a feminine domain.
