Music: Viola Smith, the genius drummer forgotten in the history of jazz

Viola Smith had the sense of swing and the virtuosity of a drum pioneer. She took up the defense of female musicians, who are too often neglected in a very masculine world of jazz. In the golden age of American jazz in the 1930s, it was difficult to find a musician in Benny’s great orchestras GoodmanDuke Ellington or Glenn Miller. Jazz women are singers, like Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday. The musicians, they are relegated to the rank of attraction.

Viola Smith create Les Coquettes, but its image is reduced to charm and entertainment. His drumming is on par with drumstick star Gene Krupa. In 1940, she will also make the A from Billboard, a major music magazine. When the men went to war in 1942, she took up her pen to lecture the orchestra directors, who more readily recruited musicians. “mediocre” than women. “Why not let some of the greatest musicians in the country take their place?“she asks then. If she never put away her chopsticks until her death, in 2020, at the age of 107, her name has nevertheless been erased from the history of jazz.