Author: tony
Rethinking Jazz Cultures schedule
The provisional schedule for the Rethinking Jazz Cultures Conference can be downloaded here:
Rhythm Changes II draft schedule
The cross-disciplinary event will be the largest jazz research conference ever hosted, featuring c.90 presentations across a four-day period. The Conference will kick off with a reception at The CUBE gallery in Manchester on Thursday 11 April which showcases Paul Floyd Blake’s Rhythm Changes photography exhibition.
Visit the conference pages on this site or click here to register for the event.
Rethinking Jazz Cultures – Conference registration
Registration
Registration for the 2013 Rhythm Changes II: Rethinking Jazz Cultures Conference is now open. There is an early bird rate and discounted rate for student delegates. Please note that the early bird deadline expires on 28 February. Click here to visit the online registration pages.
Visit the Conference pages of the website for information about travel and accommodation.
If you have submitted a proposal for the event, you will shortly be receiving feedback on your abstract. The Conference Committee received a record number of proposals for the event and Rethinking Jazz Cultures promises to break new ground, being the largest international jazz research conference to date.
Jazz in the New Europe/London Jazz Festival
There is a strong European theme at the London Jazz Festival this year. The Festival has been awarded a grant from the EU Culture Fund to expand its commitment to European programming. The Festival will feature several leading European artists and collaborations including a commission for Henri Texier to create new music for a transnational, mixed generational octet. John Cumming, Director of Serious and the London Jazz Festival (and Rhythm Changes project partner), comments on the importance of this initiative:
“Thanks to support from the Culture Programme of the European Union, this year’s London Jazz Festival presents an exciting programme of international collaboration, featuring the jazz giants and rising stars of the European jazz scene. The Festival will see musicians from across the continent working together to develop new music that breaks through frontiers whilst retaining the individual creativity of each participant. This spirit of exchange and collaboration is at the heart of the Jazz in the New Europe.”
The London Jazz Festival initiative builds on the work carried out by Serious over recent years, including the development of Take Five Europe and and numerous collaborations with European partners, including work with the Rhythm Changes team.
Questions which are central to the Rhythm Changes project are also embedded within the festival programme. Project Leader Tony Whyton will be chairing the first of two public debates at the Royal Festival Hall on Tuesday 13 November on the theme of ‘Jazz in the New Europe’ which will include contributions from leading European musicians and journalists. Jonathan Scheele, Head of the European Commission Representation in the UK states:
“It is terrific that the Culture Programme of the European Union is supporting the London Jazz Festival, enabling this internationally renowned celebration of jazz to welcome even more European talent and to showcase exciting collaborations between European artists.”
Rhythm Changes commissioned photographer, Paul Floyd Blake, will also be capturing events at the Festival this year, the results of which will be included in the Rhythm Changes exhibition in 2013.
To find out more about the EU Culture Fund and the London Jazz Festival initiative click here
For details of the ‘Jazz in the New Europe’ panel click here
Rhythm Changes Conference 2013
Call for Papers
Rhythm Changes II: Rethinking Jazz Cultures
11-14 April 2013, Media City UK/University of Salford
An international conference hosted by the Rhythm Changes research project at the University of Salford.
Keynote Speakers
E. Taylor Atkins, Northern Illinois University
David Ake, University of Nevada, Reno
“From its beginnings, jazz has presented a somewhat contradictory social world: Jazz musicians have worked diligently to tear down old boundaries, but they have just as resolutely constructed new ones; jazz provided one of the first locations of successful interracial cooperation in America, yet it has also served to perpetuate negative stereotypes and to incite racial unrest.” Read More
Europe Jazz Network Report
Europe Jazz Network has recently published an evaluative research study of its membership. Two documents have been published – an executive summary document outlining the main findings from the research, and an extensive research study displaying both qualitative and quantitative data on the network and its membership. As a member of the research steering group, Rhythm Changes Project leader Tony Whyton was invited to write a foreword for the full report and to share Rhythm Changes’ interviews and case study materials gathered over the last year.
The report provides crucial financial and structural information about jazz organisations across Europe and the report will be used by national agencies, promoters, festivals and policy makers to highlight the impact of jazz in different contexts, as well as the value of collaboration and transnational working.
The report also features case studies on organisations based in our partner countries and showcases the work of Rhythm Changes researcher Christophe de Bezenac’s group Trio VD (who are quoted as part of a case study on the 12 Points! festival. There’s also a photo of the group on page 15!). Over the past year, Christophe was selected to participate in the UK’s Take 5 scheme, and the EJN report includes a case study of the way in which this professional development programme has been extended to the European level.
This is a significant collaborative output for Rhythm Changes and a fantastic example of how Knowledge Exchange is embedded in the research ethos of the project. The full report and Executive Summary can also be downloaded via the EJN website (www.europejazz.net).
Rhythm Changes commission
Award-winning photographer Paul Floyd Blake has been commissioned to undertake a project that feeds into the core themes of Rhythm Changes. Floyd Blake describes himself as a mixed race, Jamaican-English photographer who explores identity through documentary and portraiture. He won the prestigious Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in 2009 for his picture of Rosie Bancroft (pictured above) and, over the past few years, has been working on several projects linked to the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. In undertaking the Rhythm Changes commission, Floyd Blake will attend a number of festivals and events throughout 2012 in order to engage with the cultural dynamics of jazz and the relationship between music and its social settings. Floyd Blake’s work will be exhibited as part of the next Rhythm Changes conference in March/April 2013, and the team hopes to secure an additional exhibition in London in June 2013. Watch this space!
Music and Nationalism
With the first Rhythm Changes conference just around the corner, I’ve been reading a range of texts which feed into the event theme of Jazz and National Identities, ranging from Roberto M. Dainottoa’s Europe (In Theory) to the latest edition of Philip V. Bohlmana??s Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe published this year. Bohlman describes the interplay between music and nationalism as a type of love-hate relationship and suggests there are three general reasons why the impact of nationalism on music leaves many people feeling uncomfortable – here’s my paraphrase of his hypothesis:
1. There is an unwillingness to accept that music can or should be used in service of the nation-state. Audiences like to believe that music is apolitical and so, by tying music to the nation state, the mystery or autonomy of art is challenged.
2. Nationalism trivialises music, as a type of levelling occurs where individual, local or regional difference is eradicated and music becomes stereotypically kitsch. Music that takes on markers of the state inevitably becomes embarrassing, ugly and repulsive.
3. Music that is used in service of the nation-state feeds into all that is dangerous and destructive. Nationalist music has a ritualistic nature that serves to erase the voice of difference; effectively, it can come to represent racism and prejudice. (Bohlman: 2011, 11-12)
During the conference, I will be keen to see how jazz feeds into these debates and how the music has been framed in relation to different national settings. This could range from discussions of jazz as America’s “Secret Sonic Weapon” during the Cold War to European jazz sounding like the embodiment of Scandinavian landscapes. The programme promises an array of perspectives and some fascinating discussions. Bohlman concludes:
“It would be almost easy to hate nationalism in music. But then we run up against those who love national and nationalist music, and they remind us that it is one thing to hate nationalism and another thing to hate music.” (Bohlman: 2011, 12)
What do you think?
Jazz and European Cultural Studies
Preparing a paper on “Jazz and European Cultural Studies” for the Current Issues in European Cultural Studies conference in Sweden, I came across Stuart Nicholson’s interview with Courtney Pine in the April 2011 issue of Jazzwise. As part of the interview, Pine talks about the background to his latest album Europa:
“I have always said that I am Afro, Caribbean, European, that’s who I am… To me, it means I shouldn’t feel that I can’t exploit each cultural thing and make it one, which is how I think the United Kingdom should be.”
“Europe is a lot more close than what is being proclaimed at the moment… We live on an island and it does work to say this is an isolated state, but it isn’t, there is so much cross fertilisations of ideas, concepts, identities – I dare anybody to have a DNA test and then find out they are from Holland or Sweden! This is how it is across Europe” (Pine quoted in Nicholson: 2011, 20).
Watching Jazz
Members of the Rhythm Changes team attended the AHRC-funded Watching Jazz conference in Glasgow in February. The two-day event featured presentations on a range of topics including Jenny Doctor”s exploration of jazz on BBC television in the 1950s and 60s and Bjorn Heile’s comparative analysis of footage from Duke Ellington’s European tours between 1969 and 1971. Rhythm Changes team members Nick Gebhardt and Tony Whyton gave presentations about televised performances of Miles Davis and John Coltrane in different European settings and Andrew Dubber delivered the following paper entitled “Online mediation of jazz performance, its context and its audiences”:
Andrew Dubber, Watching Jazz from Tony Whyton on Vimeo.
The presentation concludes with details of Dubber’s planned Rhythm Changes project at the Maijazz Festival in Stavanger this year, the results of which will be featured on this website over the coming months.