"Colorado's Carmen Sandim releases new LP "Play Doh" 10/13/2019
"Paying Tribute to the Women In Jazz" 4/14/2017
Hard-living ’80s jazz guitarist and bandleader Emily Remler, who died at age 32, was once asked how she wanted to be remembered.
“The music is everything, and it has nothing to do with politics or the women’s liberation movement. . . . You have to rise above it all by being good. You get so damn good that they’ll forget about all that garbage.”
Get good is just what female jazz musicians did — and what they have done, in fact, for decades before and after Remler.
That talent will be showcased as Denver’s Dazzle Jazz hosts the Women in Jazz Week concert series Sunday through March 20. Jazz89 KUVO is also presenting a Celebration of Notable Jazz Women each day of the month on its website, kuvo.org.
“I think the main reason the question of women in jazz is still out there is because there aren’t that many women who play it,” said local pianist Carmen Sandim, whose Denver-based all-female group, Jasmine, kicks off the week at Dazzle on Sunday.
“I teach Jazz Styles and Intro to Music at Metro, and I read in one of the textbooks we use that women were discouraged from playing instruments where their face would become distorted when they played, such as woodwinds and horns, for example,” she said.
Sandim, a native of Sao Paulo, Brazil, finds that while she has never experienced problems finding work as a bandleader, she still harbors almost subconscious prejudices about women’s musical capabilities herself.
“When I go to a jazz concert and hear female instrumentalists that I don’t know, there’s this worry that, ‘Oh, I hope they play great.’ “
Pianist Lynne Arriale sees Women in Jazz Week as a chance to “acknowledge the women jazz artists before us who have broken down barriers, made it easier for us to have professional careers. . . . There are now so many brilliant group leaders it’s no longer a rarity to see a group that is led by a female jazz musician.”
Arriale is a lynchpin of the festival. Her trio plays March 19 and 20 at Dazzle.
She’ll also conduct two fan Q&A sessions before those performances; singer Renee Marie will conduct a vocal workshop Tuesday.
“Jazz has always been about one generation mentoring the next,” said Steven Denny, music director at Dazzle Jazz.
It’s through such mentoring that, ironically, a Women in Jazz Week may someday no longer be necessary.
“My wish is that there won’t need to be this ‘community’ of women jazz musicians, that were just seen as musicians. And when there are more of us, I think we will,” said Sandim.
KUVO Women In Jazz 5/29/2019
Q & A time with Carmen Sandim during Women’s History Month
Carmen Sandim started taking piano lessons in Brazil as a little girl and as a teenager played for Chick Corea. In 2005 she moved to Colorado and pretty much hit the ground running. This talented lady opened a piano teaching school, obtained a Master’s Degree from C.U., and a Bachelor’s Degree from Berklee College and currently teaches at Metro, UCD, and Naropa University.
She recently was kind enough to share with me some answers to questions that I have been recently asking Colorado women who are part of the jazz scene.
Carmen who are some of your Shero’s in Jazz?
Maria Schneider is my no. 1 Shero composer! I hear the entire gamut of human experience in her writing!
Esperanza Spalding’s fearlessness as a performer and artist
Cassandra Wilson’s unique voice and style
Local Shero’s
Emily Takahashi – daring composer
Tenia Nelson – unique pianist
Annie Booth – entrepreneur spirit and mastery
Jill Friedericksen and Amy Shelley – amazing drummers and collaborators
Anisha Rush – beautiful tone
So many more, I could keep going for pages…
What got you interested in jazz?
When I was 16 years old, I was a participant of a music festival in Brazil (Campos de Jordao Winter Festival), and by chance ended up playing for CHICK COREA during a workshop. I actually did not know who he was until after the workshop, when a fellow festival participant asked me if I knew who that was. That interaction opened up my ears to new ways of interacting with music both as a listener and as a musician. I was taking classical piano lessons at the time, and much to my piano teacher’s disapproval, my interest in playing strictly what was on the page dwindled, as my desire to exercise musical freedom flourished…
What is your favorite jazz song and why?
It would be impossible to pick one favorite jazz song… here are my top 5
Schneider’s “Hang Gliding”
Wayne Shorter’s “Infant Eyes”
Jobim’s “Passarim”
Ellington’s “Transbluecency”
Corea’s “Three Quartets”
What inspires you about Jazz?
I am inspired by the values that have shaped the jazz legacy for the past 100 years – creation, curiosity, innovation, and collaboration. I am grateful and proud to be a part of this legacy, and I strive to honor it with my most authentic music expression.
"Staying Up Late" 11/30/2017
Each week, Carmen Sandim voluntarily forgoes sleep for two nights. Not back to back, of course, because that would be crazy. Still, two nights a week she slips off to her home studio after her two children — still wee ones, just two and four — have gone to bed, sits at her piano and works.
It’s taken a few years after the birth of her children to get back into the swing of writing and performing and, though she knows some might think she’s nuts, the sleepless nights were critical to her rebound.
Of course it’s got to do with the life-changing, schedule-rearranging work it takes to raise two children, but there’s also something (scientific, actually) about the wee hours of the night that sparks creative flames; Prince and Bob Dylan were proud night owls.
“I feel like the inner critic goes to sleep around 3 a.m. and it’s just me left,” Sandim says. “I think we just do what we have to do. To me, right now, it feels vital. That’s the solution I’m willing to do with.”
The work has paid off: Sandim is set to head to the studio in mid-December to record an album with the Carmen Sandim Septet, made possible with a grant from Pathways to Jazz, the Boulder-based program that has provided local jazz musicians with grants to further their artistic vision since 2014.
Sandim is a jazz composer, pianist and professor at Naropa, Metropolitan State University and CU Denver. That’s the way it is for jazz musicians; wearing many hats is the only way to stay afloat.
“I think it is an interesting situation being a jazz musician,” Sandim says. “I know one vocal jazz musician that does not teach, he only plays — and he’s very young,” Sandim says with a laugh. “Teaching is a large part of our lives. Making a living as a musician, as a jazz musician, is not a very realistic goal. At the same time you can only teach if you are a working jazz musician. It’s a bit of a catch-22. [W]here I teach, I feel like I’m not relevant to my students if I’m not engaged in pushing jazz into the next thing, an active participant in what the context of contemporary jazz is.”
And that’s exactly what she wrote in her proposal to Pathways to Jazz. The grant money helped her secure not only studio time (the band will be recording at Mighty Fine Productions in Denver), but also covers the travel expenses necessary to bring in three other musicians to turn her regular quartet into a septet.
Joining Sandim on the album are her quartet members — Khabu Doug Young on guitar, Bill McCrossen on bass and Dru Heller on drums — as well as Shane Endsley on trumpet, Bruce Williamson on reeds and Alex Heitlinger on trombone. (Sandim, always one to laugh, admits she hasn’t sent the arrangements yet: “I am planning to start sending the arrangements tomorrow. I’ve been saying tomorrow for two months, but now it really has to be tomorrow.”)
Rather than having a theme, Sandim sees the new album shaping up to be a collection of portraits: songs inspired by bandmates, jazz heroes and of course, her children.
“One of the toughest things about being a musician parent is that kids like to repeat the same song, like, 70 times. They came up with this little melody: ‘Play-doh… ‘Play-doh,’” she sing-songs in a childlike voice, “and they repeat it for, like, 40 minutes.”
Ultimately, the kids wrote a song for her.
“They wrote the song and I just arranged it. I think that’s the one right now I’m enjoying playing the most, the only song I’ve been able to compose in the living room when I’m ‘supposedly’ taking care of them. I was able to write that song in one afternoon and they were playing Legos. Every time I play it I get the image of them there.”
Play-doh inspiration aside, this is real jazz music, no collection of easily digested standards.
“My first album was so simple. The music was so simple and now that I’m so much busier, the material for this… I don’t know how this came to be really complicated.”
But complicated in a good way, in a way that reflects the many hats Sandim wears each day as a mother, musician and educator.
The Carmen Sandim Septet will be providing a sneak peak of their new work on Dec. 17 at Grace Lutheran Church in Boulder. Sandim expects the album will be released in February.
Caitlin Rocket