Chloe Rowlands, who has thus far enjoyed a diverse career exploring jazz, pop and classical music as a trumpet player, composer, arranger and music educator, is also breaking boundaries in the industry as a proud queer, trans woman.
Chloe has collaborated with artists like Fleet Foxes, the GRAMMY Award-winning Manhattan Transfer, the GRAMMY Award-winning 8-Bit Big Band, Big Red Machine, Haley Heynderickx, and Theo Bleckmann.
She's also a member of the critically acclaimed brass quartet The Westerlies.
This Australian visit will see Chloe working with a gender-diverse cohort of young jazz students at both Sydney Conservatorium and WA Youth Jazz Orchestra's (WAYJO) Progressions programme catering to female and non-binary identifying instrumentalists.
It all culminates in concerts in both cities.
Ahead of the aforementioned performances in Sydney and Perth, we sat down with Chloe to chat all things US to AUS collaboration, her passion for music, commentary on her time in the industry as a queer, trans woman, and more.
Tell us a little bit about this cross-national partnership.
I'm thrilled to be coming to Sydney and Perth to work with the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the WA Youth Jazz Orchestra! The idea of the partnership was conceived by the director of WAYJO, Mace Francis, as a way to get the most out of a visiting musician from the US. In Sydney I'll be working with college students at the conservatorium, working with them on improvisation and chamber ensemble playing akin to what I do in The Westerlies. In Perth I'll be working with various ensembles in WAYJO, giving workshops and performing as a guest soloist with some of their big bands. I'll also be working with their Progressions programme which they say is all about young women and non-binary musicians getting together to learn about ensemble playing and basic improvisation. I'm so glad I have this opportunity to have a positive impact on young LGBTQ musicians in the area! This is also the first time I've ever traveled to Australia and I'm so excited to be able to get to see both of these cities.
You’ve already had quite a diverse career traversing jazz, pop, classical. . . Where do your roots in music begin?
Music has always been around in my house! My dad is a musician and most of my early exposure to music was from him. He was always singing and playing guitar around the house on a daily basis, usually Beatles songs. Both of my parents have great taste in music, so growing up there was always a wide range of good music playing, things like Miles Davis, the Beatles, Brahms, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, motown, Brazilian music, funk, etc etc. I have vivid memories of my parents giving me and my brother metal pot lids and wooden spoons and putting on John Phillip Sousa and having us march and play along. There's this photo of me when I was around four years old where I am sitting on my dad's lap with big headphones on, eyes closed, and smiling. He's playing me some Miles Davis, who years later became one of my greatest musical influences. My dad sang and played guitar, flute, and harmonica in a rock band in the late '70s early '80s called Merlin which had a pretty big following in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time. My parents actually met at a Merlin concert, so I like to think that I exist because of music.
When I was around seven or eight I was visiting my Uncle Don, who, like my dad, was a musician. He was a drummer living in Berkeley, California, and had this amazing quirky apartment with tons of tchotchkes and random instruments everywhere. On this particular visit, he was rummaging through this large bin of instruments and pulled out a bugle (the predecessor of the trumpet). He handed it to me and my whole family was standing around me, trying to hype me up to play it. I remember making a little sound on it and experiencing the feeling of my whole family cheering me on and celebrating me for what I did. I think that feeling was the moment that made me want to play the trumpet. I started playing the trumpet about a year later in fourth grade when I was nine years old. I knew immediately that I wanted to pursue it and became quite passionate about it early on. That same uncle who handed me the bugle started to send me packages of CDs every birthday and Christmas of all the greatest jazz trumpet players going in chronological order. I also had many great mentors in the Phoenix area who helped me excel at the trumpet and music in general. I moved to NYC shortly after graduating high school to attend The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music (now called The New School College of Performing Arts). This is where my music career started to flourish.
What has been the biggest reward of your career so far?
My dream growing up since the age of nine was to be a (successful) professional trumpet player, which is what I am doing now, so that's pretty cool. Sometimes I forget and have to remind myself. It's pretty amazing to get to travel around to play and teach music for a living. It's especially rewarding to be doing so as an out trans woman who before transitioning deeply believed that I would have no chance at being a professional musician if people 'figured out' I was trans. Pretty rewarding to have that notion shattered.
And what do you hope to achieve during your visit to Australia?
I hope to achieve a deep sense of community with Australia's music community and hopefully the queer community as well. The main purpose of my visit is for the students in these programmes, so I hope that my time with them will be worthwhile and inspiring to them!
In WA you’ll be working with WAYJO. Why is something like initiative this so important?
I was involved in a similar youth jazz programme in Phoenix, AZ called The Young Sounds of Arizona while in middle and high school. The experiences and lessons I got from that programme were some of the most formative in my life, and the friendships I made through it were the deepest I made while still living at home. To be able to work with a similar programme and have an impact on its students is so meaningful to me. WAYJO's initiative of bringing in more gender diversity is so great to see as well. I think it's so important for young women and young queer and trans kids to have someone to look up to, seeing someone like them being successful in the music world. Growing up I didn't have anyone like that as a closeted trans kid living in a pretty conservative area, so It is really rewarding to get to be that for someone else now.
In Sydney, you’ll be working with undergraduates at Sydney Conservatorium. What sorts of things do you hope to pass on to them?
I hope to give them the tools and confidence to more freely explore music and all of its many possibilities. I hope to get to connect with queer and trans students while there as well!
There will be concerts in both cities. How are you hoping audiences respond to each show?
I am more interested in how the students respond to being a part of these shows! If the students are excited to be there and passionate about what they are doing then the audience will feed off that energy. At the same time, I hope I can work with the students to be able to put on a good and thought-provoking concert
Tell us about being a part of this industry as a queer, trans woman. How has your identity played a role in the work you do in your industry?
Growing up in a more conservative part of the country in Phoenix, Arizona, I taught myself early on that I needed to hide who I was for people to like and accept me. This grew even more when I started getting into and pursuing jazz, which historically was and still is dominated by cis hetero guys and full of misogyny and anti-queer sentiments. My intense focus on practicing music while growing up also served as a way to distract myself from the ever-creeping questioning of my gender. I truly believed that it was an either-or decision between accepting my trans-ness or being a successful musician. I hid who I was from everyone for many years to focus on my music career. When a certain terrible someone got elected US president in 2016 I worried that if I didn't start transitioning now then maybe I wouldn't be able to soon, so I promptly booked an appointment with an endocrinologist and got started with HRT. I remained in the closet to the public for a year and a half while on hormones with no idea how I'd come out, and it wasn't until getting asked to join the brass group The Westerlies in 2018 that I developed a plan to come out publicly. They wanted to do a photo shoot and announce me as a member of the band, and I knew that if I didn't come out before that then it would be even harder and would be to even more people. They sensed my trepidation and sweetly offered to delay the announcement so that I could get my ducks in a row. We made a plan for me to come out on social media the day before they announced me so that they could announce me the next day as Chloe. Since then it feels like my music career has really started to take off. I travel all over with The Westerlies to work with brass and jazz programs in different colleges, and I love that I get to meet and work with young LGBTQ students in all of these different places. Sometimes it feels like I'm not doing much, but then I'll get a message on Instagram from a young trans/queer musician who says that I inspired them to come out or something like that. I think just by existing in my field as an out trans woman is doing a lot. I always want to make sure that people think of me as a trumpet player who happens to be trans, rather than a trans trumpet player, if that makes sense. I want to be defined by the music I create and not by my gender. It's a scary time right now with the intense amount of transphobia happening in the US and record numbers of anti-trans laws, but because of that, it feels more important than ever to be visible doing what I do and doing it well.
Do you have any commentary/observations on the current state of gender diversity in jazz/music?
Something that excites me is seeing how many badass young women and queer musicians are coming up in music these days. It's a good sign of where we are headed! It's inspiring for me to see. We're in great hands with these next generations. I think there is still a long way to go with where we are currently, but it seems like there is a growing desire by cis people to be more inclusive and progressive with gender diversity. It's at least being talked about more and people are being forced to confront the lack of diversity a bit more since. That being said, I'd say 99 per cent of the time I find myself working with all cis people, and 90 per cent of the time it's mostly men. Progress is happening but pretty slowly. I think as these younger generations get older we will start seeing a much bigger shift in this.
And any advice for young people, particularly who may be queer or trans, in the world of music who have dreams of making it big?
To always be yourself and to pursue what excites and inspires you the most with great intensity, utmost curiosity, and an open mind. Instead of trying to make it big in music, I think it's more important to make an impact and to be authentically you, through and through.
Chloe Rowlands plays a free concert at The Sydney Conservatorium on 5 September as well as two shows in Perth with WAYJO, the first at The Ellington Jazz Club on 14 September and the second at Lyric Lane's Underground on 15 September.
