37 Female jazz composers

Frøy Aagre is a Norwegian jazz musician (saxophone).

Toshiko Akiyoshi is a Japanese-American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader.

Lina Allemano is a Canadian musician in the genre of jazz and free improvisation.

Geri Antoinette Allen was an American jazz pianist, composer, and educator. In addition to her career as a performer and bandleader, Allen was also an associate professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh and the director of the university's Jazz Studies program.

Brittany Anjou is a New York City-based musician, composer, pianist, vibraphonist and producer from Seattle, Washington. She performs with her own jazz groups, directs ensembles, works as a sideman and leads several projects as a composer, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter.

Maki Asakawa was a Japanese jazz and blues singer, lyricist and composer.

Dorothy Jeanne Thompson, better known as Dorothy Ashby, was an American jazz harpist and composer. Hailed as one of the most "unjustly under loved jazz greats of the 1950s" and the "most accomplished modern jazz harpist," Ashby established the harp as an improvising jazz instrument, beyond earlier use as a novelty or background orchestral instrument, proving the harp could play bebop as adeptly as the instruments commonly associated with jazz, such as the saxophone or piano.

Clarice Assad is a Brazilian-American composer, pianist, arranger and singer from Rio de Janeiro. She is influenced by popular Brazilian culture, Romanticism, world music, and jazz. She comes from a musical family, which includes her father, guitarist Sergio Assad, her uncle, guitarist Odair Assad, and her aunt, singer songwriter Badi Assad.

Carla Bley is an American jazz composer, pianist, organist and bandleader. An important figure in the free jazz movement of the 1960s, she is perhaps best known for her jazz opera Escalator over the Hill, as well as a book of compositions that have been performed by many other artists, including Gary Burton, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell, Art Farmer, John Scofield and her ex-husband Paul Bley.

Melanie Bong is a German jazz singer.

Lucia Cadotsch is a Swiss singer with jazz background.

Terri Lyne Carrington is an American jazz drummer, composer, producer, and educator. She has played with Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Clark Terry, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Joe Sample, Al Jarreau, Yellowjackets, and many others. She toured with each of Hancock's musical configurations between 1997 and 2007.

Liane Carroll is an English vocalist, pianist and keyboardist.

Maria Pia De Vito is an Italian jazz singer, composer, and arranger.

Amy Denio is a Seattle-based multi-instrumental composer of soundtracks for modern dance, film and theater, as well as a songwriter and music improviser. Her inspirations include world music, and is mainly known as a vocalist, accordionist and saxophone-player. Among her current musical involvements are The Tiptons Sax Quartet and Die Resonanz Stanonczi, a radical folk group based in Salzburg, Austria. She has also collaborated repeatedly with the Pat Graney Dance Company, David Dorfman Dance Company, Victoria Marks, and with many other choreographers.

Monica Dominique is a Swedish pianist, composer, and actress.

Charlotte Hall Dos Santos is a Brazilian-Norwegian jazz singer, composer, and arranger, currently based in Berlin.

Dalia Faitelson is a Denmark-based Israeli composer, vocalist, guitarist, and DJ DaFa.

Pamela Fleming is an American musician who composes and plays trumpet and flugelhorn. Born in New York City, her family moved to the suburb of New City, New York when she was a child. She grew up in New City and graduated from Clarkstown High School North before attending the Eastman School of Music. She graduated from Eastman in 1979 with a BM degree in music performance.

María Kim Grand is a tenor saxophonist, recording artist, bandleader, vocalist, composer, visual artist, and educator. She has been based in New York City since 2011.

Anke Helfrich is a German jazz pianist and composer.

Lisa Kristine Hilton is an American jazz pianist, bandleader, producer, and composer based in Southern California. Her compositions blend jazz and blues with minimalism, classical, and avant-garde music. Since the early 2000s she has recorded with Antonio Sánchez, Larry Grenadier, Christian McBride, and Sean Jones.

Julia Hülsmann is a German jazz pianist and composer. Her compositions are often based on literary works, especially poetry.

Susie Ibarra is a contemporary composer and percussionist who has worked and recorded with jazz, classical, world, and indigenous musicians. One of SPIN's "100 Greatest Drummers of Alternative Music," she is known for her work as a performer in avant-garde, jazz, world, and new music. As a composer, Ibarra incorporates diverse styles and the influences of Philippine Kulintang, jazz, classical, poetry, musical theater, opera, and electronic music. Ibarra remains active as a composer, performer, educator, and documentary filmmaker in the U.S., Philippines, and internationally. She is interested and involved in works that blend folkloric and indigenous tradition with avant-garde. In 2004, Ibarra began field recording indigenous Philippine music, and in 2009 she co-founded Song of the Bird King, an organization focusing on the preservation of Indigenous music and ecology.

Anne Mette Iversen is a Danish jazz bassist and composer. She leads and composes for the Anne Mette Iversen Quartet / Quartet +1 as well as the groups Double Life, Poetry of Earth, and the Ternion Quartet. She has released 9 albums as a leader.

Yoko Kanno is a Japanese composer, arranger and musician best known for her work on the soundtracks of anime films, television series, live-action films, video games, and advertisements. She was born in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. She has written scores for Cowboy Bebop, Darker than Black, Macross Plus, Turn A Gundam, The Vision of Escaflowne, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Wolf's Rain, Kids on the Slope, Genesis of Aquarion and Terror in Resonance, and has worked with the directors Hirokazu Kore-eda, Yoshiyuki Tomino, Shinichirō Watanabe and Shōji Kawamori. Kanno has also composed music for pop artists Maaya Sakamoto and Kyōko Koizumi. She is also a keyboardist, and is the frontwoman for the Seatbelts, who perform many of Kanno's compositions and soundtracks.

Melba Doretta Liston was an American jazz trombonist, arranger, and composer. Other than those playing in all-female bands she was the first woman trombonist to play in big bands during the 1940s and 1960s, but as her career progressed she became better known as an arranger, particularly in partnership with pianist Randy Weston. Other major artists with whom she worked include Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane and Count Basie.

Claire Ritter is an American composer and pianist working in a style that fuses jazz with classical, new music, and occasionally other world music cultures.

Ann Ronell was an American composer and lyricist. She was best known for the standards "Willow Weep for Me" (1932) and "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" (1933).

Kathy Sanborn is an American jazz vocalist and composer based in California. She won a 2015 American Songwriting Award for her song, "Fantasy."

Maria Lynn Schneider is an American composer and jazz orchestra leader who has won multiple Grammy Awards.

Simin Tander is a German jazz musician and composer.

Dara Tucker is an American singer and composer.

Hiromi Uehara , known professionally as Hiromi, is a Japanese jazz composer and pianist. She is known for her virtuosic technique, energetic live performances and blend of musical genres such as stride, post-bop, progressive rock, classical and fusion in her compositions.

Mariam Karolina Riahi Wallentin is a Swedish musician and voice actress.

Mary Lou Williams was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements and recorded more than one hundred records. Williams wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.

Brigitte Zarie is a Canadian-born American singer, songwriter and composer.