Author: George

The eighth Rhythm Changes Conference, Jazz Encounters, will take place at the Institute for Jazz Research (University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, Austria) from 3 to 6 April 2024. This conference is organised in conjunction with the fourteenth International Jazz Research Conference. 

Keynotes

• Keynote: Prof. George McKay (University of East Anglia, UK)
• Keynote: Maite Hontelé (trumpet player, the Netherlands)
• Closing address: Stephanie Vos (Stellenbosch University, South Africa)

We invite submissions for Jazz Encounters, a four-day multidisciplinary conference bringing together researchers, writers, musicians, critics, and others interested in jazz studies. The event will feature academic papers and panels.

Jazz is a music born of encounter. Jazz encounters are dynamic; they create synergies and frictions and have the power to reconfigure social and political spheres. To understand these encounters is to understand ongoing processes of identity-making and the history and meaning of jazz in the world. Jazz encounters have arisen from and are influenced by myriad factors, including histories and legacies of enslavement, cultural and creative exchanges, ideological contestation, technological change, new modes of communication, economic development, trade, war, occupation, and political consolidation. These processes of encounter and migration – of people, ideas, goods, and objects – shape understandings of the music and its impact on society, from the influence on the lives of individuals to the ideology of societal institutions.

We welcome papers addressing the conference theme from multiple perspectives, including cultural studies, musicology, cultural theory, music analysis, jazz history, media studies, and practice-based research. We particularly welcome contributors who identify as women or gender diverse and from other under-represented groups and communities within jazz studies and academia more generally. Within the general theme of Jazz Encounters, we have identified several sub-themes. Where relevant, please clearly specify which sub-theme you are referring to in your proposal.

Gendered Encounters

Gender has shaped every aspect of jazz, from social interactions between practitioners to how different gendered experiences affect and reproduce understandings of and participation in jazz cultures. This strand aims to challenge established gender narratives in jazz by deconstructing exclusionary, binary, cis-normative, and male-dominated models of practice and interaction. We invite papers investigating social inclusion, diversity, and gender roles in various aesthetic, performative, social and political contexts, including the role of gatekeepers and the relevance of intersectional power relations across multiple career stages. We furthermore welcome investigations that propose new paradigms for evaluating musical experiences. This strand was developed in collaboration with the Centre for Gender Studies and Diversity, University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.

Jazz in Times of Crisis

Jazz has often been created and experienced amid a sense of crisis, be it personal, organisational, economic, social, or political. Whilst crises can cause anxiety and distress, they can also serve as catalysts for change, resulting in creative actions, innovations, and reflections on existing practices. Equally, jazz has often been described as a music in crisis, generating hyperbolic writings that highlight an existential threat to the art form or the precarity of the music as a cultural practice. Within this strand, topics could include reflections on jazz in crisis, its relationship to war, the climate emergency, post-pandemic responses, economic crises, forced migration, and political extremism. 

Well-being

The relationship between jazz practices and their impact (both negative and positive) on well-being is rarely discussed, and yet, such explorations are needed now more than ever. Particularly since claims of jazz’s societal value and transformative potential are often made without evidence, and the mental and physical health of those involved in jazz is rarely considered. We are interested in evidence-based interventions that help gain a deeper understanding of jazz and well-being to better support the music in the future and to make improvements that are sustainable for different groups. Subjects for consideration may include jazz and mental health, disability, ageing, social inequalities, environmental challenges, working conditions, economic welfare, and work-life balance.

Digital Encounters

Digital technologies give rise to powerful new forms of communication and new ways of acquiring knowledge and distributing information. They transform cultural values and identities by enabling novel types of connectedness and amplifying social divisions and differences. Jazz has embraced and arguably sometimes resisted the transformative potential of the digital. This strand aims to help us consider how digital technologies have brought about social and cultural changes in jazz and how those changes have been influenced by society and culture. We are particularly interested in discussions of VR, XR, and AI and their impact on jazz cultures and practices, alongside broader discussions of the digital revolution in music, from recording technologies to live performance to social media. 

People and Places

There are strong links between music, senses of place, and people’s social and cultural identities, including race, ethnicity, class, and gender. From the evocative symbolism of Ellington’s ‘Harlem’ to the images of the post-industrial landscapes invoked by DJ Spooky, jazz has played an important role in the narrativisation of place. It has been central to how individuals and groups have defined their relationship to local, everyday contexts, as well as disrupting or even erasing those connections and challenging assumptions about homelands and origins. In this strand, we invite papers that map the relationship between music, place, and people, whether past, present, or future. We welcome discussions of scenes, communities, and networks from the perspective of placemaking, and belonging, memorialisation, and the imaginary. 

Further information

Please submit your proposal (max. 250 words), including a short biography (max. 50 words) and institutional affiliation, as a Word document to Christa Bruckner-Haring (Conference director): rhythmchanges@kug.ac.at.

The deadline for proposals is 15 September 2023; we will communicate outcomes to authors by mid-October 2023. The conference committee comprises Christa Bruckner-Haring, Christa Brüstle, André Doehring, Nicholas Gebhardt, George McKay, Sarah Raine, Loes Rusch, Walter van de Leur, and Tony Whyton.

Jazz Encounters is hosted by the Institute for Jazz Research and the Center for Gender Studies and Diversity at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz in cooperation with the International Society for Jazz Research. It continues to build on the legacy of the research project Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities (2010–2013), funded as part of the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Joint Research Programme. In the spirit of Rhythm Changes, the project team continues to develop networking opportunities and champion collaborative research in transnational jazz studies.

Updates on the conference will be available on the Institute for Jazz Research website, here on the Rhythm Changes website, Facebook, and Twitter.

The only jazz utopias we can know are the ones we have lost” – Krin Gabbard

More’s Utopia rests on an underclass, which resonates with jazz history, slavery” – Alyn Shipton

At the wonderfully rich and varied (as well layered, nuanced and intermittently Guelphian) 4^th Rhythm Changes international conference in jazz in Birmingham a number of different versions and glimpses of what might be thought of as the idea or problem of utopia in relation to jazz have been offered. Here are ones I heard and thought of from the four brilliant days. Others that you heard/spoke/glimpsed/played? There must be. Please do contribute! Together they give a sense of how utopian thinking can inform jazz studies, perhaps of the limits of utopia thinking, perhaps of the limits of utopian thinking in jazz and musicology.

• Space of jazz (especially in repressive regimes) for instance, jazz happening in underground clubs, multiracial spaces in racist societies, jazz dance floor as site of pleasure and freedom. Also jazz and festivals, and the utopian possibility of transformation at festival.
• Jazz challenges in its early days: the music’s reception in the early 20^th century in for example European countries to national categories of identity and national (cultural) institutions. Jazz changed what it meant to be German, French, British, say.
• Jazz as diasporic cultural practice and its relation to utopia (utopia = no place = transit culture, rooted in initially Atlantic middle passage). Also other later nomadic narratives.
• Related social cultural practices and metaphors of sociality (food, dancing, though I didn’t hear much about sex, which I thought strange).
• Jazz as music for social justice: the radical as well as liberal politics of the music. From civil rights to Breathless, as well as the music’s place in activism in countries outside the US.
• Jazz as transnational music, exploring and making dialogue between and across nations.
• Jazz and childhood: innocence (?), playfulness (we saw merry-go-rounds and swings at jazz festivals–yes, jazz swings!), toy pianos.
• Utopia not as perfect but as imperfect: flaunted imperfection of (instrumental) technique in some musics (some free improvisation, some trad jazz).
• Jazz as dystopian sound: one early reviewer described it as possessing ‘the buzzing rattle of a machine gun, only not so musical’.
• Utopian strands in the music itself? Something utopian in the sounds themselves, the dialogic process of the bandstand, the collective, and in the (live) music’s improvisational impermanence.
• & magic? Black magic?

And I thought of this too: what about the conference itself as a utopian intellectual (social, cultural) compressed time-space – we here at Rhythm Changes are in a “good place” for jazz research, one we thought up (dreamed) then made with you over the past 6-7 years. (OK, I am writing this at the very end of the conference so am both bleary-eyed and wearing rose-tinted glasses: such a view needs qualifying by reminding ourselves that utopia is also functionally exclusive; we need to acknowledge the event’s dominant whiteness and the notable male presence of delegates.)

The fourth Rhythm Changes conference, Jazz Utopia, will take place at Birmingham City University in the United Kingdom from 14 to 17 April 2016. The deadline for paper submissions is 1 September 2015; this is a reminder so you don’t miss the deadline!!

Keynote speakers
Prof Ingrid Monson (Harvard University)
Prof Raymond MacDonald (University of Edinburgh)

We invite paper submissions for Jazz Utopia, a four-day multi-disciplinary conference that brings together leading researchers across the arts and humanities. The event will feature academic papers, panels and poster sessions alongside an exciting programme of concerts delivered in partnership with the Birmingham Conservatoire and Jazzlines.

Jazz has long been a subject for utopian longing and hopes for a better future; it has also been the focus of deeply engrained cultural fears, visions of suffering and dystopian fantasies. In its urgency and presence jazz is now here. As improvisational and transitory, jazz is nowhere. Utopia is nowhere and now here. Jazz is utopia. Or: jazz is utopian desire. Jazz Utopia seeks to critically explore how the idea of utopia has shaped, and continues to shape, debates about jazz.

We welcome papers that address the conference theme from multiple perspectives, including cultural studies, musicology, cultural theory, music analysis, jazz history, media studies, and practice-based research. Within the general theme of Jazz Utopia, we have identified three sub-themes. Please clearly identify which theme you are speaking to in your proposal.

Jazz identities: Claims have always been made for jazz as a certain utopian practice, in which jazz has made possible a musical-social space where different, usually marginal, identities are expressed and confirmed. At the multiracial club, bandstand, or dance-floor race and ethnicity are acknowledged, difference is championed or erased. Musicians have used jazz to step out of their class. The dialogic qualities and queer sounds alike of jazz offer opportunity for the expression of gender and sexuality. New thinking around disability and music reads jazz as a crip-space. Equally, consider the way in which freedom in improvisation has been understood as a liberating utopian practice. Even in its diasporic invention jazz comes from a kind of no-place (ou-topia = no place). In utopia, jazz is the effort to sound another world into being, the only condition of which is that it must be better. Has jazz really been that good?

Inside / outside: jazz and its others What does jazz mean to its community of insiders and those that approach it from outside? For those who are deeply involved with jazz, whether musicians, critics, scholars, or fans, the genre often provides a utopian space for creative encounters. By definition, the articulation of this space through performance, writing, research and consumption also creates a community of outsiders who may seek ways to engage with the jazz community or observe it from afar. This strand invites papers that address the relationships between jazz and its “others”, defined in relation to music making, criticism, scholarship or reception, whether these interactions are antagonistic or collaborative in tone.

Heritage and archiving: This strand focuses on the different ways in which heritage practices and archival work contribute to the reconfiguration of jazz as a utopian space. Through its commitment to alternative ways of living and being, jazz offers imaginative variations on themes of history and preservation. It creates communities of collectors and music lovers, who refigure jazz as nostalgia and escape, as well as renewal and return. We welcome papers that explore all aspects of archiving practice and cultural heritage and the opportunities and tensions that present themselves for scholars, institutions and practitioners in these fields.

Proposals are invited for:

• Individual papers(20 minutes) – up to 350 words.
• Themed paper sessions of three individual (20 minute) papers – 350 words per paper plus 350 words outlining the rationale for the session.
• Seventy-five minute sessions in innovative formats – up to 1000 words outlining the form and content of the sessions.

Please submit proposals (including a short biography and institutional affiliation) by email in a word document attachment to: jazzutopia@bcu.ac.uk

The deadline for proposals is 1st September 2015; outcomes will be communicated to authors by 1st October 2015. All paper submissions will be considered by the conference committee:

• Dr Christa Bruckner-Haring (University of Music & Performing Arts, Graz),
• Dr Nicholas Gebhardt (chair; BCU),
• Prof George McKay (University of East Anglia),
• Loes Rusch (University of Amsterdam/BCU),
• Dr Catherine Tackley (Open University),
• Prof Walter van de Leur (University of Amsterdam/Amsterdam Conservatory),
• Prof Tony Whyton (BCU/Birmingham Conservatoire).

The conference builds on the legacy of the Rhythm Changes research project. Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities was funded as part of the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Joint Research Programme, which ran from 2010-2013. The project team continues to develop networking opportunities and champion collaborative research into transnational jazz studies.

Updates on the conference and information about travel and accommodation will be available on this site over the next few months.

A group of us from across Europe are meeting today to look back on the previous three Rhythm Changes conferences (Amsterdam 2012, Salford 2013, Amsterdam 2014) and to plan for our next conference in 2016 at, as we announced in Amsterdam last September, Birmingham City University (BCU). You coming to it? We hope so.

The organising committee is:

• Dr Nick Gebhardt, BCU (lead organiser)
• Prof Walter van de Leur, Amsterdam
• Dr Loes Rusch, Amsterdam
• Dr Christa Bruckner-Haring, Graz
• Prof Tony Whyton, Salford
• Prof George McKay, UEA
• Dr Catherine Tackley, Open University.

We are talking about the theme(s) for the 2016 conference, its structure, how to present jazz ideas in traditional and alternative ways, how BCUs disciplinary and intellectual identity (media – music – industry) could be reflected as host of the event, potential keynotes and invited speakers, and the specific dates of course. (Early-mid-April 2016 seems most favoured at the moment.)

Some ideas for our theme and key strands we are discussing are as follows (bear in mind these are in draft and need working up, but we thought you might like a sneak preview):

Jazz Utopia

• jazz identity/ies. Race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality (queering jazz, Sapphonics), disability and jazz.
• inside / outside: jazz and its others. What does jazz mean to its community of insiders and those that approach it from outside?
• heritage and archiving. The ways in which our relationship with the past enables us to imagine and construct jazz as an alternative space and practice.