KIND OF GOLDEN – Women in Jazz
Jazz Tour of the Twenties
Women the barn district! Let’s stroll past historic venues of jazz among other things, such as the Berlin Ensemble or Clärchens Ballhaus!
- starting in front of the Berliner Ensemble, Bertolt-Brecht-Platz 1, 10117 Berlin. The way to the culture of the barn district ends about 120 minutes later at Sophiensaele, Sophienstraße 18, 10178 Berlin
- Please contact me any time you are interested: +49/171/5483492 or anja@jazzgeschichten.de
- € 15/person
The Jazz Tours explore cultural and social histories related to jazz. Both in its musical characteristics and as an attitude towards its time.
When jazz conquered Berlin after the First World War, its opponents considered the music a sign of “unmanliness”, “effeminacy” and “feminisation”. So let’s take a closer look at some of the Women in Jazz themselves!
At that time, Berlin had a blatant surplus of women, it was a “city of women”! The musicians and consumers were predominantly female. The women’s bands, however, remain largely unmentioned because historiography has not documented them. A look at the library of the Berlin Lesbian Archive will help.
In 1923, the first American jazz band on German soil was a women’s band, the Bon John Girls, 11 musicians of Euro-American origin from New York, who did not appear in Berlin until 1929. The 12 Musical Ladies followed in 1930.
“Ladies’ bands were all the rage back then…In the early days of jazz in Germany…(the) piano duo Lil and Peggy Stone were successful on the cabaret stages of Berlin.” (Knauer, Wolfram, Play yourself, Man!)
Women in the Barn Quarter
n the Barn Quarter, allegedly so-called “light girls” had fun with the “heavy boys”, vice versa or even among themselves. Little stories turned into great theatre and grandiose cabaret! And what about the furious revue shows?
The Jazz Tour in the Barn Quarter takes us to 4 venues of jazz and other pleasures from the Weimar Republic. Berlin was the scene of a highly creative jumble of diverse international influences. And jazz provided the sound to match. Here we meet some important protagonists around the music and Berlin.
Who was Cläre Bühler? What really drove Rosa Valetti?
