It all started innocently enough, with the receipt of an e-mail from someone in which they described having seen an amazing young female bassist playing in Jeff Beck’s band. She was on public television, at the Crossroads Festival, and there were a couple of You Tube links. Her name is Tal Wilkenfeld, and here’s a short video of her with Jeff Beck:

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Pretty good, huh?

Now normally I don’t care for combining conversations of music with discussions of gender, preferring to think that we as human beings share more similarities than dissimilarity, but there is no doubt that it is somewhat rare to find women exhibiting the same obsessive virtuosity as is displayed by so many men. Personally, I am a great fan of obsessive virtuosity, and it does strike me as odd that this is virtually the exclusive domain of those with the male defining Y-chromosome. I tend to be, in the great heredity versus environment debate, more prone to think that the environment is a larger factor in these matters, and I believe that our culture does not encourage young women to achieve the type of (competitive?) mastery exhibited by so many males. It may be that the whole idea of such blatent proficiency is based on a particularly macho male desire for control, or ownership, or some such penis-size related motivation. About that I do not know — but I do know that it does seem rare to see women, particularly in rock and jazz, who have achieved the highest level of technical excellence on their instruments. But not unheard of — I almost immediately thought of several amazing, smoking, virtuoso women — several of whom are located right here in Buffalo. And that led me to do a little bit of research, the results of which I would like to share with you here now! I am agoing to put the majority of this post on other pages, because there are so many videos, so click the links below and check out an amazing collection of women who rule: (Start on page 1 to see videos by Nori Bucci, Julie Slick, Kaki King, Ruyter Suys, Jennifer Batten, Maria Aurigema, Emily Remler, Desiree Bassett, Liona Boyd, Elizabeth Cotten, Rachelle Van Zanten, KT Tunstall, The Great Kat, Rasputina, Ana Popovich, Deborah Henson-Conant, Jo Shaw Taylor, Lori Linstruth, Meredith Brooks, Christina Riley, Kathryn Koch, Mary Ramsey, Rory Block, Ruyter Suys, Nickel Creek, Eva Cassidy, & Ani DiFranco)

The woman that came immediately to mind for me is Buffalo’s own Nori Bucci. Frail in appearance and mild in demeanor, Nori has ultra stupendous monster chops! she played for a while in Gamalon, and seems lately to have settled down to a life of teaching. Check this out:

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If you like that here is a link to an entire show with Nori: Gamalon

Next I recalled seeing Julie Slick, and her brother Chris, playing with Adrian Belew’s power trio. I saw them at the Icon a few months back, and was really blown away. Talk about an auspicious beginning to a career! She didn’t seem particularly comfortable on stage, but there wasn’t a single misplaced note all night.

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And another:

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Here’s someone who I missed when she was in Buffalo, although Brad tells me that she was amazing. This is Kaki King, and she does some things on the guitar that are truly unique to herself:

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Keep going, there is lots more on the next page!

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