COLUMBIA — In 2021, the University of South Carolina jazz program saw a changing of the guard. Pianist Bert Ligon, who taught at the university for the last 30 years and quite literally built the program, was retiring. Three new faculty members were hired over a short period of time — trumpeter Matt White, saxophonist Lauren Meccia and drummer Colleen Clark.
That’s a small crew, but it’s also something rare — a female-majority faculty in a genre and area of study dominated by men. According to a recent study from the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, only 15 percent of jazz faculty in the United States identified as female, with that number dropping to just 8 percent when considering only instrumental faculty.
That reality is something Clark knows all too well. She was one of only four women in her 300-person jazz department at the University of North Texas, widely considered the most preeminent graduate jazz program in America. She would go on to become both the first woman and the first drummer to ever receive a Ph.D. from the program.
“I was typically one of maybe two or three girls, at most, in the jazz band growing up,” said Clark. “So I didn’t really care at the time in the sense that, ‘I’m just going to go in and do my job.’ I’m a real straight-ahead person. But at the same time, I’m looking around and I’m like, ‘whoa, this is troubling.’”
Clark ended up working with the other women in the departments to create a women and jazz student club during her years of graduate study, and upon joining the University of South Carolina program in 2021, immediately pitched the idea of “Jazz Girls Day.”
“I pitched it to Matt (White) almost immediately,” said Clark. “And he’s like ‘absolutely, we have to do it! Let’s figure out what we need to do to do that.’ And it’s really been a team effort with Matt and Lauren (Meccia) since then.”
The idea behind Jazz Girls Day is to gather high school jazz girls from a given region for a one-day intensive workshop preparing them for their All-State jazz auditions, although any girl musician interested in playing jazz is welcome to attend.
“It’s really about bringing together these girls and music educators who can encourage and inspire them to continue playing jazz,” Clark explained. “We want to create a nurturing environment that tells them, ‘I can do this.’”
Since the first edition of Jazz Girls Day in January 2021, Clark and various educators have hosted six events in every region of South Carolina, as well as five different events in states across the country. Clark hopes to continue expanding the effort, with the goal of being in all 50 states by 2030.
“It’s not going to change overnight, but it matters when people stand up for you,” she said. “I still remember how much my middle school and high school band directors (made a difference). My high school band director is retiring this year after 37 years, and I brought him to see me play on Seth Meyers because that’s how much he means to me, you know? So we have to do that for others.”
The jazz department is crowdfunding to raise money for the program. Funds go towards things like participant t-shirts and lunches, travel funds and marketing the program.
The rapid growth of Jazz Girls Day is also in keeping with the program’s larger goal of doing more community outreach and grassroots effort to recruit more musicians and keep the jazz tradition alive. Only about 10 percent of South Carolina high schools currently have a jazz band program, so USC jazz faculty has been working with high school band directors to provide resources and assistance to start them.
“Our music is about collaboration, so we’re just to translate to the next generation that includes everybody,” said Clark. “We just got back from an event in Hampton County where we played a concert for 300 elementary, middle and high school kids, and they heard a whole concert and asked a bunch of questions after.
“If we change even one life because of that event, it will have been worth it. It’s a very tight group of people that play our music, and yet it is the most important cultural export that the United States has ever had.”
