Best jazzmen

Every year, Alla and I go to the annual jazz concert of the State Concert Orchestra, a group of talented and well-trained musicians. They play jazz with discipline and rigorous accuracy. The director, Michael Finberg, wants everybody to know that they rehearse up to eight hours a day and they work really hard. This year he decided to reward the musicians in his group. (Actually, it’s called a collective. This is, after all, a socialist republic.) For a reward, he asked the collective to nominate and choose the five best jazzmen of the year. Coincidentally, all five came from the collective.

Two very curvaceous assistants brought the awards out one at a time for the director to hand over to the musicians. The assistant with the bigger boobs brought out three awards and the other one brought out two. The recipients didn’t have boobs: They were all men. This makes sense. How can the best jazzman of the year be a woman? Especially when there are no women at all in the collective.

I loved the music, even as I pined for gender balance. As Alla pointed out, however, most American jazz musicians are male too.