This week we’ve been taking a look at all-girl jazz bands of the 1930s and 1940s. Today we’re going to back to the 1920s where we will meet ‘The Ingenues’, a most adventurous and impressive ‘girl group’ that toured the United States and other countries from 1925 to 1937. They performed with great popularity around the world in variety theater, vaudeville and picture houses, often billed as “The Girl Paul Whitemans of Syncopation.” Above is ‘The Band Beautiful’, a Vitaphone sound-on-disk short they made in Los Angeles in 1928. I think they must have been the inspiration for ‘Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopaters’ in ‘Some Like it Hot’, though I fail to see anyone remotely resembling Monroe, Curtis or Lemmon.

The big gimmick with the band–aside from being all female–was the unexpected moments when the players put aside their instruments, grabbed duplicate instruments and played them imultaneously, thus showing off their dexterous multi instrumentalist capabilities.. (It works okay with the banjos, but not so well with the accordions).

The extent to which you’ll like ‘The Ingenues’ depends on your tolerance for music from the 1920s. Remember, there was no such thing as ‘swing’ yet. The oompah, one-two jazz of the era sounds little like jazz to us anymore. Personally, I find other reasons to like this music–more abstract ones, like using it to put your mind in that distant period and imagine what it was like to be in a Vaudeville House in Times Square watching ‘The Ingenues’. One way or another, I’m sure you’ll agree that the skillfulness of playing and sleekness of presentation (at least for the era) are to be much admired.