New York’s jazz scene is a male-dominated geography. Nonetheless, male jazz musicians and their masculinities are rarely discussed as such. Although gender and sexuality are now important analytics in jazz scholarship, masculinities remain elusive and undertheorized. In my fieldwork in jazz’s predominantly homosocial spaces in NYC, I often find that cishet men struggle to articulate their feelings about masculinity and patriarchy in their community. For bell hooks (2004), “most men never think about patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained…and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences.” Consequently, hegemonic masculinities—as categories of power within patriarchy—may hide in plain sight (Connell & Messerschmidt 2005). This presents a methodological challenge: how to have our interlocutors remark on the unmarked?

Masculinities are relational; their definitions are typically reactive to material and discursive shifts experienced by subordinated groups (Kimmel 1987). Today, masculinities in jazz are undergoing change, partly in response to gender-justice initiatives at major jazz institutions designed to support women and gender-expansive performers. These projects ask us to imagine ‘jazz without patriarchy,’ but what does it mean when this structure of domination isn’t recognized by most men? Moreover, as ethnographers we’re trained to construct analyses from our interlocutors’ statements, but what happens when our research questions are embedded in what is taken for granted and omitted? Based on data from my dissertation research, this paper reflects on this ethnographic quandary by analyzing the messy, indirect, and intersectional ways musicians interpret masculinities in jazz’s contemporary gender landscape.