Feminist Voices

She became "starved to talk about music" and returned to school. "It was like Eden. Delicious. I loved it," she says. She got her masters degree in 1990 and last year got her doctorate in music in Columbia University. Besides working with daDadah and doing other music (from Madison she went to Minnesota, where an opera she wrote was performed), she teaches music to school children through the Lincoln Center: She says that the power balance in daDadah is different than it was with other groups. "In daDadah we don't have the problem of me being a woman. Plus, I make sure that I include other women in the band. I'm never the only one."

Some of Brazelton's work is purely musical; in some of it the lyrics are just as important. She wrote "The Night is Mine" (see side bar) when George Bush invaded the Persian Gulf and declared war on Iraq. "It is about the fictions of power that we live with," she says, "the fiction that men are stronger than women. The fictions of power affect what people do, the decisions they make. There is a relation between the way George Bush treated another country and the relationships between women and men. [The war] wouldn't have been dealt with that way by women. Bombing! What good does bombing do?"

The piece is also about the relationship between women and men and alludes to her being raped at the age of 18, which "made me follow 'much better' the rules of walking on the street; how I dress, walk. I started wearing a bra. I felt that I had been too provocative and that's why I was raped."

Brazelton, who is 43 years old, says that in the 1970's, "there were times when I would find myself at odds with some feminist, or what was called "feminist" approaches... it felt narrow. I was very interested in radical politics. I was trying to be an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), but I was a little too round, I didn't fit. I found that at least the people I was with had a language that was very proscribed, very defined, and from that, the thinking was very defined, and if you didn't think that way–I actually was called "Stalinistic" one time. It just felt like if you didn't use the right jargon you didn't belong And, as feminist as many of the women that I was with were–and aggressive, too–when I stood back, I saw that there were two SDS cells in the school I was in, and they were different factions and had different politics, but the structure was the same; there was one man and there were several women, all of whom had been his lovers at one time or another, and there was incredible feminist language going on but what was actually happening is it was this harem structure, and I was like, 'something's wrong here.'"

It was also "un-cool" at the time to play music. "That was counter-cultural, counter-counter. It wasn't cool SDS-wise... I don't know why. I didn't understand the thinking, but somehow we ended up being "disgustingly bourgeois," the rock group I was in.

For 13 years, Kitty Brazelton lived in communes, once getting busted by the FBI, who were looking for a fugitive that had hid in the house. She now lives with her husband, a jazz critic, and their 2.5-year old daughter, who joined them just at the right time. "I was afraid that [as a mother] I wouldn't be able to do music, but it has been exactly the opposite. When you're a mother, you're not the center of the world, and you find out that things can be done easier and faster. This probably wouldn't have been the case if it happened when I was younger and still fighting for my identity as a musician. Now I'm concerned about whether I’m a good enough mom, not a good enough musician.

And standing there on stage,' doing a wild duo with her guitarist, calling, screaming, taunting as her musicians and audience sink deeper and deeper into the music, Kitty Brazelton seems to me like a good enough musician. She is good indeed, and her music is unique. I expect she'll continue doing interesting music. I hope she comes back to Madison.

The day before the performance, Kitty and I sit at a cafe and she has another surprise for me: She tells me that she's a rock musician. Oh, I say with some astonishment, I was thinking of your music as progressive jazz. She doesn't object; in fact, the idea seems to please her. She identifies John Coltrane's music as the most influential on her work. Some of the people in her band are jazz musicians and Brazelton says that even though she has not pursued

that musical form the fact that they have makes a difference in the way she works with them. She has to listen to them carefully, find the pulse of each one, and get them to "step out." They improvise a lot, and the challenge is to be able to write for them in a way that will fit their musical personae. It's different when she works with classical musicians–then she writes each note on the page, and that's what they play.

Later she says that she wishes rock freed itself from the dictates of the music industry and let itself be art. "I wish that people allowed themselves to be original instead of all this cloning that's going on," she says. As for herself, "I'm a rock musician, my roots are in acid rock, in improvisational music.

Okay, we'll call it rock. But it's not like any rock I've ever listened to.

Kitty Brazelton has been doing music for the last 25 years. She joined the first rock band as "the girlfriend" of one of the guys and sang back up vocals, but the boys got uncomfortable when her talent showed itself. She left them, and in 1972 started her own band, Musica Orbis, an underground group which received some recognition on the national level and stayed together for seven years. The name of the band means Music of the Spheres, which refers to a Medieval concept of the essence of music: Each planet has its own song, its own note, and all together they make the cosmic music.

In the 1980s Brazelton decided to become "all-American. Main stream." She was fascinated by pop music and joined several bands, usually being the only woman and the only one who could read music. "I usually ended up being the leader, but I had to be careful. The men didn't like to admit it," she says.

The suddenness and smoothness with which Kitty Brazelton shifts into The House of the Rising Sun makes the guy sitting next to me jump slightly and shake his head with disbelief. I had a similar reaction the first time I heard that title track of daDadah's album, "Rise Up." I heard it in bed sometime just before midnight. I should have been sleeping, what with the next day being a work day for me and school day for the kids. Instead, I got out of bed and called the radio station to find out where I can buy this music. I lucked out; Kitty Brazelton and daDadah performed in Madison on April 7, and I was at the Paramount to hear them.