This Is A Movement (TIAM) is an initiative seeking to create a more equitable music industry with a specific focus on gender justice and Jazz/Black American/Creative Music. The project was conceived in 2021 by a set of musicians, scholars and leaders who often crossed paths and noticed a fragmentation in the field. The #MeToo movement had activated conversations and actions around gender justice, but the efforts were more disparate – artists were organizing, gathering, and taking action on the bandstand, educators were creating curriculum and writings within the academic space, and producers and presenters were raising standards and focusing on diversity. TIAM was launched with the hope that it could be a centralized place for this community to discuss different perspectives, share resources, and advance conversations around equitable representation. The name – This Is A Movement – was chosen to signal that a larger movement is happening in the field and to hold the organizers accountable to the mentality and long-term commitment that movement-building requires.

Mission

This Is A Movement will ask what transformation looks like, with the goal of creating a robust community network that will work to cultivate a liberated music industry, placing equity at the forefront.

Together we will work to:

▸ Affirm the work that has been done and has yet to be done around gender equity in the music industry

▸ Generate a shared commitment to working toward equity through listening, exchanging experience, and community building

▸ Create space to bring together the disparate groups and individuals already building gender equity to share their ideas and visions

▸ Build upon a legacy of work toward social equity

▸ Interrogate the role of the individual and the institution in regard to equity and liberation

▸ Be always guided and informed by black feminist ideology and nonhierarchical structural & interpersonal models

▸ Be a catalyst for creating and implementing change

▸ Create a robust network of committed advocates who will continue working with and for each other’s liberation

▸ Establish structural and effective models of change making

This Is A Movement Toward Liberation

Women, those of underrepresented gender identities and their allies are claiming a space that challenges the status quo of the jazz and creative music scene. This movement is changing ways of thinking, ways of working, and ways of living while confronting structural inequities based on gender, age, race, and culture. It is asking the essential question: What does a freer, fairer and more representative music industry look like? To reimagine and remake our ecosystem, we invite numerous organizations, institutions and individuals, bringing together artists, activists, organizers and creatives to share their experience, their dreams and their plans.

This Is A Movement will offer historical context, academic data studies, relevant dialogues, and special guest speakers to an engaged and diverse audience of industry professionals, educators, students, performers, and the general public.

This Is A Movement will invite those leading change in the field as well as those for whom these conversations are difficult. We hope to create an incubator for new ideas that will bring about the future change we need in our cultural spaces.

This Is A Movement

The 2022 convening focused on three tracks

Gender discrimination and the imbalance of gender representation are widespread in festival lineups, staffing, venues’ programming and on the bandstand. What can we do to broaden this musical landscape to ensure that every musician contributing to the ecosystem has equitable access? This track acknowledges this imbalance and will bring panoramic perspectives from musicians, managers, curators/producers and venue directors in relation to pay inequity, patriarchy, nepotism, lazy curating, allyship, and consent culture.

The Bandstand

This track will serve as a gateway toward sharing personal matters that affect our community. When a significant life event takes place, freelancers are in a vulnerable position due to the precariousness of their work. Through the eyes of a broad spectrum of individuals in the industry, we will explore the often unspoken and non-glamorous aspects of the personal realm, from balancing the responsibilities of the working parent/caregiver, to cultivating a spiritually engaged creative space, to maintaining inspiration, to self-identity and mental health.

The Personal

The Community

Conversations around the gendered and hierarchical nature of jazz/creative musical environments have opened up significantly in the past decade. This track will focus on the different relationships that exist in the music community with an emphasis on accountability. We will ask the following questions: How do we see each other? What are the spaces that we move through and how do we show up in rehearsals, gigs, hangs, travel, etc.? What behaviors do we see as appropriate or inappropriate? In an industry that naturally blurs the line between the personal and the professional, what power do we have to enact change while maintaining the integrity of what makes this music great?