Gay jazz musicians

In this post, we'll celebrate the best gay musicians of all time who have not only created unforgettable music but also broken barriers and inspired countless listeners around the world. While their contributions are celebrated and recognized, it’s still not a safe space for jazz artists to be out and proud today.

On Jazzcorner. The prevailing image of a jazz band involves a bunch of guys in tight quarters, holding their instruments like mighty swords, rarely letting anyone in too close. The male-dominated jazz community was hardly so open-minded. Playing creative jazz music with someone demands a certain intimacy.

These are topics most people in the business—Albertson aside—would rather ignore. I know gay musicians zedd gay are in the closet who gay become almost caricatures of the macho straight jazz musician—stylistically inhibited, emotionally constipated in their music-making.

What counts is the music, they argue, not who anyone is sleeping with. Where does he think homophobia in jazz starts? Imagine if I was really gay. They turn that on any target. One guy in the trumpet section makes some idiotic remark, they all collapse in laughter.

Since then, Hersch has used his musical prominence—he records frequently for Nonesuch, a prestigious classical label—to help numerous AIDS-related causes. He also brushed off a quote by the late bandleader Mercer Ellington, who told David Hajdu that his father, Duke, may well have had a sexual relationship with Billy Strayhorn.

The article infuriated Fred Hersch. This was one of my first interviews for a now-finished biography of his former employer, Chet Baker. After gorging himself, grunting and burping, on Chinese food, he listened with me to a vocal recording that Baker had made inwhen his singing suggested a shy little fawn.

This list is an introduction to musicians who have and are currently musician their mark in jazz today while celebrating all aspects of their identities. Who wants to be recognized by a bunch of assholes, anyway? But Strayhorn worked mostly behind the scenes, and until recently it was easy to think that jazz, like the Boy Scouts, had no gay element at all.

Bey went on to sing with such hard-bop leaders as Horace Silver and Gary Bartz. They were all straight, basically. Hajdu caught plenty of heat for it. Jazz has been known as "notoriously macho", but there were more openly gay and lesbian musicians by the s, such as Barber, Andy Bey, and Gary Burton, who have inspired later generations of LGBTQ performers.

What else? A group of fans debated the subject this year on Jazzcorner. First and foremost, let’s acknowledge that one of the greatest composer in Jazz was a gay man: Billy Strayhorn, November 29, – May 31, I’ve diaried about Strayhorn before when I. Some attention was drawn to the question in the ’90s, when three outstanding jazz musicians—pianist Fred Hersch, vibraphonist Gary Burton and singer/pianist Andy Bey—all came out publicly as gay men.

The jazz world is a microcosm of the real world. The jazz world is one of the last cultural frontiers of old-fashioned macho, and in it, homophobia runs rampant. So many contributors pounced on him that he withdrew his postings. In either case, the best defense is honesty, says Andy Bey.

Still boyish at 62, Bey is at a peak of acclaim after decades of obscurity.