Artemis: An All-Female Jazz Band That is Killing it

Jazz is known for its function in music as a “human art form”, defined by the emphasis on inclusion, diversity, and cultural acceptance it retains. However, there are still a few cases where jazz musicians are often underrepresented because of identity in gender, sexual background, and even ethnic identity as well. One thing that all of jazz history severely lacked is prominent, world-renowned female jazz instrumentalists- a lot of times in conversation about this one will hear female jazz vocalists being mentioned, or even tap dancers, but many of even the biggest jazz fanatics won’t be able to name a single female jazz instrumentalist. This is a recurring problem in the human art form that is often unrecognized, but to remedy this, a special group of musicians have created something amazing in response.

Artemis is an all-female jazz band led by the great jazz pianist Renee Rosnes, a sextet at heart that sometimes features world-renowned vocalist Cecil McLorin Salvant to form a powerful, fierce, and forceful septet. Each individual player in the group has a robust solo career, the band containing no weak links for the standard of the group. The band was named after the Olympian goddess of the hunt and wild, Artemis, and features female jazz instrumentalists from over the entire world. The group contains trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, the dean of the Manhattan School of Music Jazz Division, as well as a prominent faculty member at the school; Noriko Ueda, a jazz bassist from Japan and a graduate from the Berklee School of Music, touring with the Ted Rosenthal Trio for 11 consecutive years; Alexa Tarantino, a multi-instrumentalist, mainly playing alto saxophone that plays often with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, in addition to being a composer and educator; Anat Cohen, a grammy-nominated jazz clarinetist and saxophonist from Israel; Allison Miller, a jazz drummer that plays rhythms with grit, releasing her latest album “Rivers in Our Veins” with names like trumpeter Jason Palmer; last but not least, Nicole Glover, a jazz tenor saxophonist working with players such as Christian McBride, Al Foster, and more.

Subsequently after Artemis’s amazing performance at the Newport 2018 Jazz Festival, Artemis landed a record deal under Blue Note records for the ongoing legacy of the band. Their band, however, stands as a defying statement to the underrepresentation of female instrumentalists in jazz, breaking beyond the borders of “gendered music” with an amazing, dynamic band.

This is Artemis playing at MCG Jazz live this past February. Their sound is unique, modern, hip, and groovy.