Downtown New York Jazz

Library of Birmingham, Heritage Learning Space

Thursday 5 June 2014

Free Entry

 

10:30am

Welcome

Ed McKeon (Director, Frontiers Festival)

11 am – 11:45 am

WIS (aka Warren Smith) in conversation with Rhys Chatham

12pm – 12:30pm

Professor Tim Wall (Birmingham City University)

“Jazz in Manhattan’s Lofts in the 1970s: David Murray, new jazz and its contribution to the founding of the Downtown Scene”

12:30pm – 1:30pm

Lunch (not provided)

1:30pm – 2pm

Dr. Kirsten Forkert (Birmingham City University)

“The Lower East Side and the politics of real estate”

2:15pm – 2:45pm

Tony Dudley-Evans (Jazzlines)

“Tim Berne: his role in the Downtown and Brooklyn scene.”

3pm – 3:30pm

Dr. Roger Fagge (University of Warwick)

”MacDougal Street Blues’: Jack Kerouac and Jazz Performance’.

3:45pm – 4:15pm

Dr. Nicholas Gebhardt (Birmingham City University)

“Friends and Neighbors: living with jazz”

4:30pm

Close

This event is supported by the Library of Birmingham, Birmingham Conservatoire and the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. It forms part of the Frontiers Festival: Extraordinary Music from Downtown New York & Birmingham www.frontiersmusic.org

The Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is currently a partner of the Cheltenham Festivals, and organises a set of public lectures and panel talks by AHRC-funded researchers at each of the four festivals (jazz, music, literature, science) through the year.

Professor George McKay has worked with Cheltenham Jazz Festival and the AHRC to curate the series of talks at this year’s festival. There are three talks (information taken from festival website):

• “Denys Baptiste: Struggle and Liberation.” Saturday 3 May, 6-7 pm. The history of jazz is inseparable from the struggle for racial equality and Denys Baptiste’s suite Now is the Time: Let Freedom Ring captures this in music. He talks to leading British jazz academic Professor Tony Whyton about how he drew from Dr. Martin Luther King’s powerful speech.
• “What makes a jazz legend?” Sunday 4 May, 6.45-7.45 pm. What does it take for a jazz musician to become iconic? Professors McKay (AHRC Leadership Fellow) and Tony Whyton (Project Director, Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities) discuss how musicians made jazz history or got written out from Winifred Atwell to John Coltrane.
• “The story of British jazz festivals”. Monday 5 May, 5-6 pm. Professor McKay (AHRC Leadership Fellow) leads a panel of festival organisers and researchers, including the Festival’s Programme Advisor Tony Dudley-Evans, as they trace the memories and significance of Britain’s jazz festivals, from their riotous origins at Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1956 to today’s diverse festival scene. Also features Alison Eales, AHRC-funded PhD student, who holds a Collaborative Doctoral Award between the University of Glasgow and Glasgow Jazz Festival.

Here, again, since we’re on the subject, is the film we made recently about AHRC-funded collaborations between jazz festivals and academic researchers…

This 15-minute film, entitled Carnivalising the Creative Economy, was funded by the AHRC and launched at the AHRC Creative Economy Showcase on 12 March 2014 at King’s Place, London.

Led by Professor George McKay, the film brings together academics and festivals directors from 5 recent / current AHRC-funded projects (including Rhythm Changes), who discuss the benefits and findings of such collaboration.

The film was made by Gemma Thorpe.

We are delighted to announce the creation of a new monograph series with Routledge entitled “Transnational Studies in Jazz” The series will present interdisciplinary and international perspectives on the relationship between jazz and its social, political, and cultural contexts, as well as providing authors with a platform for rethinking the methodologies and concepts used to analyse jazz’s musical meaning.

We therefore encourage proposals that challenge disciplinary boundaries, that find different ways of telling the story of jazz with or without reference to the United States, and that are sympathetic to jazz as a medium for negotiating global identities. This does not exclude artist biographies or close analysis of musical works, but rather, we ask that authors reconsider how they address their subjects and from what perspective they do so. Transnational Studies in Jazz explores the complex cultural and musical exchanges that have shaped the global development and reception of jazz.

We have launch publications planned for 2015 which include texts on jazz and advertising, post WWII jazz collectives, and the discourses of jazz, but we are now welcoming new proposals for monographs to appear in the series.

We would be delighted to discuss monograph proposals with you and hope you consider placing your work with this exciting new series.

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

Editors: Tony Whyton (t.whyton@salford.ac.uk) & Nicholas Gebhardt (nicholas.gebhardt@bcu.ac.uk)

I’ve just published a blog on the Oxford University Press website about the cover of my new book Beyond A Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album. Here’s the opening- click on the link below if you want to read more:

Judging a book by its cover: recordings, street art, and John Coltrane

Created by the Berlin-based street artist MTO, a graffiti artwork was painted on a Parisian wall a few years ago and only on display for a few days before being painted over. A few photographs of the image, taken by MTO at the scene, are all that remain of the work. MTO’s image served as a perfect visual manifestation of the issues and strategies at play in my research: a graffiti version of an iconic photograph of John Coltrane which appears on the front of his 1964 album, A Love Supreme.

The influence of recordings is more than just musical or sonic in nature; recordings impact different arts and appear in different cultural contexts. In many ways, they have the potential to alter our view of the places we live in and, in some instances, can change our relationship to history itself. The temporary nature of MTO’s artwork and its subsequent use in photographic form and on the web also mirrors the changes that occur when music is recorded, disseminated, and used in different ways. Just as the recordings themselves can be understood in a number of different ways, these layers of mediation – that is, the channels through which we communicate, or the involvement of third parties in the construction and distribution of meaning – enable A Love Supreme (and other recordings) to take on infinite new lives and meanings.

Read more

Thinking With Jazz is a day-long symposium that takes place during the 2013 Lancaster Jazz Festival. This year, our panelists and keynote speakers include John Cumming (London Jazz Festival), Fiona Talkington (BBC Radio 3), Gerry Godley (Twelve Points Festival, Dublin), George McKay (University of Salford), Tim Wall (Birmingham City University), Kristin McGee (University of Groningen), Matt Robinson (Lancaster Jazz Festival), Pete Moser (More Music) and Tony Whyton (University of Salford).

Join them to discuss a range of topics including festivals and social media, spaces and places, funding and programming, and artistic dreams and realities.

In the afternoon there will be an open workshop in which symposium participants collaborate on a Grow Your Own Festival resource. Our aim is to provide festival promoters and arts organisations with ideas and practical tools to design festivals which engage local communities in creative and meaningful ways.

This event is supported by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Enterprise Centre and the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University.

For further information, please contact leo@lancasterjazz.com or n.gebhardt@lancaster.ac.uk

The symposium is free to attend, but early registration is necessary, as lunch will be provided. Go to the website here for further information and registration.

On Sunday 16 June, I hosted a public conversation with Django Bates‘ Belovèd before their concert at the Holmfirth Arts Festival in West Yorkshire. Bates was joined on stage by bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun and I started off the conversation with a question about the relationship between place and creativity. We moved from an examination of the differences between festivals and venues – how performing contexts shape the direction of music – to exploring how the Danish jazz scene had led to the formation of the trio. Belovèd formed in Copenhagen during Bates’ time at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory and their Charlie Parker-inspired albums developed out of an event organised by the Copenhagen Jazzhouse.

During the talk, we discussed concepts of inheritance and identity, how the “weight of history” can often hamper the creative process. In my first book, Jazz Icons: Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition, I suggested that official histories of jazz are too fixed in nature and the presence of iconic figures has spawned a number of imitative projects which can be read as too indebted to past masters. Exploring these themes with Belovèd, Bates was keen to stress the difference between love and reverence for an artist, and suggested that this was the key to his success; using Parker’s music as a springboard for his own creativity without feeling restricted by official narratives or expectations about how to draw on music of the past. The trio touched on ways in which working transnationally encourages this kind of thinking.

The conversation moved on to a consideration of what it means to be an artist and a refusal to be pigeonholed and the trio discussed their musical and compositional processes. Bates will be developing the Belovèd project for big band for the BBC Proms in August and the translation of this material has presented a number of challenges for the group. Both Bruun and Eldh have such a close working relationship with Bates, feeding off each other and taking the music in different directions, that the inclusion of additional musicians has led to the need for the clarification of ideas and the sharing of established processes beyond the trio.

We concluded our discussion by considering the dynamics of cultural influence and the flow of ideas. I asked the trio to reconsider the well trodden idea that creative influences flow in one direction – namely that musicians of the present are influenced by the great masters of the past a?? and posed the question of how Bates’ music could encourage us to think about the past in different ways. For example, I asked how does Belovèd encourage people to listen again to Charlie Parker with fresh ears and think differently about Parker? Although Bates acknowledged that all our listening is tempered by present values, he suggested that associations with his own music (ranging from compositional complexity to playful humour, from political statement to improvising in the moment) could be used as a strategy for revising our readings of the music of the past.

There is a strong Rhythm Changes presence at this international conference at Musee du Quai Branly this week, which sounds right up our street. Tony Whyton, Walter van de Leur, Nick Gebhardt and George McKay are presenting in a panel on the project and its related research…. More information here.

Here’s a brief promo from Kings Place featuring Soweto Kinch. Kinch has been working with the HERA-funded SCIBE project (which explores creativity through scarcity in architecture) in developing content and ideas for his Urban Landscape concert on Friday 31 May.

Visit the Serious website for booking information and more details about The Time and The Place.