Despite her impressive jazz abilities, the trumpeter Norma Carson seems to have decided to lay fairly low in the music business. She was associated with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female band including players such as Hadda Brooks and Vi Burnside that took up some of the slack left by male musicians shouldering rifles in the second World War. Later there would be a few high-profile appearances such as a Verve project entitled Cats Vs. Chicks in which Carson is heard in tandem with trumpet great Clark Terry. Yet Carson, who married tenor saxophone player Bob Newman in the '50s, may have simply gotten discouraged by a perceived sexual bias in jazz. "I've never found it an advantage to be a girl," she is quoted in the book Stormy Weather, a history of female involvement in swinging music. "If a trumpet player is wanted for a job and somebody suggests me, they'll say 'What, a chick?' and put me down without even hearing me," Carson says. "I don't want to be a girl musician. I just want to be a musician." She freelanced as such in the '50s out of Philadelphia and was living in Clark, New Jersey, in the following decade when Leonard Feather deemed her worthy of inclusion in his Encyclopedia of Jazz. ~ Eugene Chadbourne