Susan Gayle Abod | |
---|---|
Origin | Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States |
Occupations | Musician Activist Concert promoter |
Instruments | Vocals Bass guitar |
Formerly of | Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band |
Website | www |
Susan Gayle Abod is an American feminist activist and musician. She is the sister of fellow activist and musician, Jennifer Abod.
Susan Abod has a degree in music composition from DePaul University, and also studied at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. [1]
Abod was a member of the Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band, serving as lead singer, [1] songwriter and bass player. She would become a music concert promoter, having attended events such as the Champaign Women's Music Festival, after which she went on to produce women's only music concerts in the Chicago-area. She would serve as the music engineer for Casse Culver's 3 Gypsies album in 1976 and two albums by Willie Tyson: Debutante (1977) and Tyson's self-titled album (1979). [2] She also performed with Betsy Rose. [1] She'd perform with Tyson and Robin Flowers at the Michigan Womyn's Festival, and would tour the United States. By 1982 she had completed a solo tour of Europe, where she sang in women's crisis centers, bookstores, shelters and nightclubs focused around women. [2]
In the early 1980s she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. [3] Abod would eventually be diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome and told she had multiple chemical sensitivity, an unrecognized controversial diagnosis characterized by chronic symptoms attributed to exposure to low levels of commonly used chemicals, in 1986. Despite health struggles, she continued to make music. She'd go on to create an hour-long documentary about her and other women's illnesses, titled "Funny You Don't Look Sick: Autobiography of an Illness". The documentary was completed in three years and the premier was held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1995. [2] [4]
In 2004, she produced and recorded a solo CD of her original music, for which was nominated for an Outmusic award for Best Female Debut CD. [2] She lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. [1]
Keith Jarrett is an American pianist and composer. Jarrett started his career with Art Blakey and later moved on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s, he has also been a group leader and solo performer in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music. His improvisations draw from the traditions of jazz and other genres, including Western classical music, gospel, blues, and ethnic folk music.
Linda Shear is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and piano player.
Susanna Phillips (Huntington) is an American singer who has sung leading lyric soprano roles at leading American and international opera houses.
Lindsay Cooper was an English bassoon and oboe player and composer. Best known for her work with the band Henry Cow, she was also a member of Comus, National Health, News from Babel and David Thomas and the Pedestrians. She collaborated with a number of musicians, including Chris Cutler and Sally Potter, and co-founded the Feminist Improvising Group. She wrote scores for film and TV and a song cycle Oh Moscow which was performed live around the world in 1987. She also recorded a number of solo albums, including Rags (1980), The Gold Diggers (1983), and Music For Other Occasions (1986).
Women's music is a movement, chiefly in Western popular music, said to promote music "by women, for women, and about women". The genre emerged as a musical expression of the second-wave feminist movement as well as the labor, civil rights, and peace movements. The movement was started by lesbian performers such as Cris Williamson, Meg Christian and Margie Adam, African-American musicians including Linda Tillery, Mary Watkins, Gwen Avery and activists such as Bernice Johnson Reagon and her group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and peace activist Holly Near. Women's music also refers to the wider industry of women's music that goes beyond the performing artists to include studio musicians, producers, sound engineers, technicians, cover artists, distributors, promoters, and festival organizers who are also women.
Mavis Staples is an American rhythm and blues and gospel singer and civil rights activist. She rose to fame as a member of her family's band The Staple Singers, of which she is the last surviving member. During her time in the group, she recorded the hit singles "I'll Take You There" and "Let's Do It Again". In 1969, Staples released her self-titled debut solo album.
Sara Katherine Wooldridge, known professionally as Sara K., is an American singer-songwriter and acoustic guitarist. She withdrew from the music business in 2009.
Olivia Records is a women's music record label founded in 1973 by lesbian members of the Washington D.C. area. It was founded by Ginny Berson, Meg Christian, Judy Dlugacz, Jennifer Woodul, Kate Winter and five other women. Olivia Records sold two million records and produced about 40 albums during its twenty years of operation.
Susan Claire Cowsill is a musician, vocalist and songwriter. She rose to prominence as a member of the family band The Cowsills. After touring with Dwight Twilley for quite some time in the 1980s, she co-formed the band Continental Drifters. Since 1990, she has been with the Cowsills, along with brothers Bob and Paul.
Pura Fé (Tuscarora/Taino) was born Pura Fé Antonia "Toni" Crescioni) is singer-songwriter, musician, story teller, instructor, seamstress, artist and a founding member of the Native Women's a cappella trio Ulali.
Denise Djokic is a cellist from Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Strad magazine has called her instantly recognizable for her "arrestingly beautiful tone colour".
Teresa Trull is an American female singer, musician, songwriter, and record producer from Durham, North Carolina. She is recognized as a pioneer in Women's music, with her debut album The Ways a Woman Can Be released on Olivia Records in 1977.
Linda "Tui" Tillery is an American singer, percussionist, producer, songwriter, and music arranger. She began her professional singing career at age 19 with the Bay Area rock band The Loading Zone. She is recognized as a pioneer in women's music, with her second solo album titled Linda Tillery released on Olivia Records in 1977. In addition to performing, she was the producer on three of Olivia's first eight albums. Within the women's music genre, she has collaborated with June Millington, Deidre McCalla, Barbara Higbie, Holly Near, Margie Adam, and others. Tillery was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1997 for Best Musical Album for Children.
Jennifer Abod is an American feminist activist, musician, journalist, and filmmaker.
The Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band and the New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band (1969–1973) sought to challenge the genre of rock music by installing women's voices and feminist-type lyrics into the musical canon. "We loved to dance," stated bassist and vocalist Susan Abod, but referring to a song like The Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb", "we were dancing to songs that were degrading to us." The Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band was the self-described "agit-rock" arm of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, an umbrella organization, "rooted in principles that came to be identified as socialist feminism, and focusing on projects in education, service, and direct-action, by and for women." The Chicago chapter of the band's lineup included: Susan Abod, Sherry Jenkins, Patricia Miller, Linda Mitchell (manager), Fania Mantalvo (drums), Suzanne Prescott (drums), and Naomi Weisstein (keyboards). According to Weisstein, "she tired of hearing pop music glorify the subjugation and degradation of women.... [and] wanted to reach out to young women and at the same time, educate about the importance of feminist culture." She continued "Every time it played, the band summoned up the ecstasy of a utopian vision of a world without hierarchy and domination. Audience and performer, gay and straight, two-year-olds and eighty-two-year-olds, black teenage girls and Latino transvestites: for a moment in history as brief as a shiver, we were, all of us, transformed and astonished."
Lee Shaw, was an American jazz pianist and composer. Born Londa Lee Moore in Cushing, Oklahoma, but raised in Ada, Shaw would listen to the radio then play on the piano the songs she heard, as well as learn songs from the Great American Songbook.
Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP) is an American nonprofit publishing organization that was founded in Washington, D.C. in 1972. The organization works to increase media democracy and strengthen independent media.
Angela Bowen was an American dance teacher, English professor, writer, and a lesbian rights activist. She was also the subject of an award-winning 2016 documentary.
Bev Grant is an American musician, photographer, filmmaker, and activist based in New York City.
The Passionate Pursuits of Angela Bowen is a 2016 biographical documentary film by Jennifer Abod and Mary Duprey, depicting the life of Angela Bowen. Bowen grew up in Boston during the Jim Crow era, and grew up to become a classical ballerina, a noted dance teacher, a black lesbian feminist activist, a writer and a professor at Cal State Long Beach.