This month’s guest is documentary filmmaker, Kay D Ray. Kay is the producer and director of the award-winning documentary Lady Be Good: Instrumental Women in Jazz, which features interviews with artists like Marianne McPartland, Vi Redd, Carline Ray, Roz Cron and Quincy Jones. She is also the producer and director of its more recent counterpart, In Her Hands: Key Changes in Jazz, which looks at women’s experiences in jazz today in the United States, and features artists like Anat Cohen, Grace Kelly and Ellen Seeling. Kay has also had decades of experience researching and producing content for museums, including her work as the senior film producer for Experience Music Project in Seattle, Washington, and as the co-curator and filmmaker for the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture’s 2010 project Jumpin' With The Big Bands.
Kay and I caught up via Zoom in February to discuss what led her to filmmaking, and specifically to researching Women in Jazz; her experiences interviewing greats of the swing era like Marianne McPartland, Jane Sager and Lucille Dixon; what making her films taught her about the experiences of Women in Jazz in the 30s, 40s and 50s versus today; and some of the other great projects she’s had a chance to work on through her filmmaking career.
For distribution of Lady Be Good: Instrumental Women in Jazz and In Her Hands: Key Changes in Jazz, you can contact Kay via her website (or Passion River Films for Lady Be Good: http://www.passionriver.com/)
The majority of Kay’s museum work is archived, but if you’re stopping by Hawaii and are interested in submarines, you can check out some films she created in 2019 at the Pacific Submarine Museum in Honolulu! 😉
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