Jezebel Rewritten Out Now

Rabiah Kabir is a Jazz flute player who uses her instrument, skill in storytelling and unique style to bend the expectations of what “Jazz” music really is. read more

Rabiah Kabir

Rabiah Kabir is a Jazz flute player who uses her instrument, skill in storytelling and unique style to bend the expectations of what “Jazz” music really is.

Born and raised in the East Bay, Rabiah draws from her lived experience as a mixed Black woman to create music that is meditative, contemplative and conceptual. For her, musical memory begins in the kitchen, with her dad playing the sounds of Charles Mingus, Phillip Glass, Erik B. & Rakim, Dead Can Dance, Toots and the Maytals, Compay Segundo and Natacha Atlas (to name a few), as he cooked dinner in their Berkeley home.

As she dived into the Bay Area Jazz scene, she noticed how few women surrounded her, a problem that has plagued Jazz since its inception at the turn of the 20th century. Her debut album, “Jezebel: Rewritten” and related Honors Thesis paper from Stanford University, “The Jezebel Flute”, explores themes of Black womanhood and feminism, a core part of Jazz history often overlooked. She hopes the project carves a new place for scholarship surrounding flute players, power and Black feminist artistic expression. Her thesis, winner of the 2025 Stanford University George Fredrickson award, is published on Stanford’s Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity department page. The album, “Jezebel: Rewritten” is available for streaming on October 24, 2025.

Rabiah has had the incredible opportunity to collaborate with artists like Marcus Shelby, Kurt Elling, Zheniia, Murray Low, José Andrés, Taleen, Jesús Díaz and Edgardo Cambon. She is unbelievably grateful for the vibrant and diverse musical community of the Bay Area and strives to celebrate its influence in her music.

In The Press

Photos

Artist Head Shot 1 press photo of Rabiah Kabir

Debut album

Jezebel Rewritten

Project Description

“Jezebel: Rewritten” is my debut album and the result of a year-long undergraduate thesis project at Stanford University. It is a project I am immensely proud of, and one that deals with a variety of complicated themes about sexism, racism and women in Jazz.

The summer before my senior year at Stanford, I conducted seven interviews with professional female flute players in order to gather original research to further the content of my project. My interviewees ranged in age and professional experience, providing me with a wide breadth of perspectives and personal stories. Guided by my peers and advisors, I reached several claims throughout the course of my paper, many on the specific experience of female flute players. I defined my own concept, “The Masculine Jazz Spectrum” which provided a necessary framework for arguments I made about hyper-feminity, hyper-sexualization and how one’s role within the Jazz ensemble is influenced by this spectrum.

Alongside this paper, I composed my debut album, Jezebel: Rewritten, which is a response to my own experience as a woman in Jazz, but also operates as a love letter to all women in Jazz, women of color in Jazz or gender non conforming musicians who continue to operate in a genre that can sometimes be exclusive.

My goal with this work is to remind listeners of the unique voice of Jazz’s virtuosic female players, and how there may not be one singular “women in Jazz experience” but that understanding and appreciation can be given for the collective work of women who make this music. The original work was recorded with a majority female and queer ensemble, an important goal of mine.

I am honored to say that this project was awarded the George Fredrickson Award for Excellence in Honors research, which honors the top thesis paper in Stanford’s racial/ethnic studies department yearly, and that KQED ranked the album amongst its top 20 Bay Area albums of 2025.

Thesis Abstract

This thesis explores concepts of Black feminism and sexism in Jazz, and the gendered perception of the flute. Historically, women instrumentalists have been excluded from the Jazz canon. While scholars have documented the lives and music of successful women Jazz instrumentalists, almost none have written about female flute players.

In order to understand the lived experiences of these musicians, I conducted seven interviews with professional female flute players from around the world. I examined primary sources from Linda Dahl’s interviews, as well as scholarly analysis from Nicole Rustin-Paschal, Sherrie Tucker, Sarah Pellegrinelli and Sally Placksin. The global context provided by my interviewees’ testimony created a new data set which I compared with current scholarship on women in Jazz.

This research led me to three conclusions. First, I developed the concept of “The Masculine Jazz Spectrum” which explains the perceived range of instrumental and artistic roles in the Jazz ensemble from most masculine to most feminine, the most feminine being the vocalist. Second, I find that the flute resides closest to the vocalist on this spectrum, as the flute is generally perceived as feminine due to its pitch and cultural association despite its history of being largely performed by men.

Finally, the flute’s proximity to the role of the vocalist exaggerates the hyperfeminization and hypersexualization of its player, and thus the kind of harassment female flute players experience in Jazz is based around those dynamics, rather than exclusion or competition, as is the case with women who play more masculine instruments, like the trombone.

This is an interdisciplinary thesis that responds to concepts analyzed through my debut album, “Jezebel: Rewritten”. This album attempts to encapsulate my experience as a Black female flute player, and draws inspiration from the testimony of the women I interviewed and my extensive research. It is passionate, unique and inquisitive.