Leonard Feather (1914−1994) was one of the first (and only) prominent jazz critics to recognize gender discrimination within jazz and attempt to redress the issue. But even by the 1950s, Feather grew frustrated with his inability to effect meaningful change for women musicians. He could not understand why women like Beryl Booker, Melba Liston, Vi Redd, and others did not receive more attention, even after he arranged tours and produced record dates for them (Feather 1987). The privileged position he held within the music industry—a position he had cultivated and leveraged in support of other musicians he felt had been unfairly discriminated against—ultimately seemed to do little for many of the women he championed. Women jazz masters remain few and far between.

What does it mean to be a jazz master, and who determines modes of mastery? In this article, I examine some of the musicians for whom he advocated and how he advocated for them, including columns he authored, albums he produced, and Blindfold Tests he administered. To conclude, I follow Feather into the 1990s to examine how he dealt with who was to blame for jazz’s gender discrimination. In doing so, I reveal how jazz patriarchy maintained dominance over one of jazz’s most prominent decision-makers. I demonstrate how, despite his intentions, Feather’s embeddedness and investment in jazz patriarchy (in its ideological and commercial systems) resulted in a gender ignorant failure to critique the systems of mastery at the root of his connoisseurship.

In 1905, the Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor published his Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, a set of character pieces that includes arrangements of sixteen African American spirituals for piano solo. Despite this music's lasting popularity, scholars have done little to contextualize Coleridge-Taylor's statement that he wished to create a Black parallel to Brahms's Hungarian Dances or Dvořák's Slavonic Dances; most see the pieces as reflecting the influence of Dvořák. Yet these character pieces diverge from both Dvořák's and Brahms's precedent by including source citations with both melodies and lyrics. Coleridge-Taylor's compositional approach and his use of citations is much closer to Grieg and Stanford—two other role models whom scholars have regularly overlooked. The citations also rebalance the interpretative framework of the character piece as a genre, and, like W. E. B. Du Bois's use of spirituals in The Souls of Black Folk, can support several explanations. On one hand, they provide hidden texts for these instrumental pieces and provide a first line of defense against intentional (and bigoted) misunderstandings of the music. On the other hand, they also act as reference points for readers who want to learn more about the African American spiritual. Coleridge-Taylor's concern with cultural authenticity undoubtedly resulted from his close interactions with American spiritual singers, such as Frederick J. Loudin and Harry T. Burleigh. In this sense, the Negro Melodies served as Coleridge-Taylor's intervention in ongoing debates among Black Americans about the value and legacy of the spiritual.