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.

What is the connection between Bronze Age artefacts, European jazz, medieval manuscripts and photography which captures Europe’s complex colonial past? And how do artists as diverse as gipsy violinist Roby Farkas and his colleagues in the extrovert multi-national band Budapest Bár, or saxophonist/MC/rapper Soweto Kinch, or the hauntingly beautiful Sami voice of Mari Boine fit into the picture? These seemingly disparate subjects form part of The Time and the Place: Culture and Identity in Today’s Europe, a series of concerts and creative interventions from a Europe-wide choice of artists whose music acts as a counterpoint to the themes of a wide-ranging and fascinating group of research projects that reach their conclusion this year.

Members of the Rhythm Changes team are heavily involved in this quite outstanding set of events in London at the end of May, to mark the end of the current round of HERA projects. In fact our Project Leader, Prof Tony Whyton, has worked with HERA and Serious music promoters as lead organiser of much of the activities. There is a conference, panels, debate, presentations, posters and videos about the 19 HERA projects, with speakers from across Europe and worldwide. Also there is a wonderful series of music concerts, focused on national identity, international dialogue and transnational cultural exchange.

From Rhythm Changes, apart from Tony, Prof Walter van de Leur will be speaking about European culture, Prof Andrew Dubber about digital creativity, Prof George McKay about the public value of humanities (and jazz) research. Other team members will be in attendance and contributing in their characteristically lively and engaged manner! Tony and George will also be introducing the live evening concerts. Some of the events are free to the public, some are ticketed. It should be a terrific send-off for HERA 1, as well as a launch for HERA 2 projects. Events include:

Thursday 30 May

British Library, 9 am-5 pm
Final conference on the HERA joint research programme projects

King’s Place evening concert, 8 pm
Budapest Bar

Friday 31 May

King’s College, London, 1-3.30 pm
Cultural Dynamics and Creativity in Digital Europe seminar

King’s Place panel discussion, 6.15-7.30 pm
Does Research Matter? The Public Value of the Humanities

King’s Place evening concerts (two, choose one) 8 pm
Poul Hoxbro and Fraser Fifield
Soweto Kinch and Andreas Schaerer

Saturday 1 June

King’s Place HERA open day, from 10.30 am
feat. four public panels through the day, ideas, discussion, culture, just turn up

King’s Place evening concerts (two, choose one) 8 pm
Mari Boine
Gianluigi Trovesi and Gianni Coscea

You know you must be doing something right when the jazz media starts reviewing academic events. Excellent! Here’s to more and deeper dialogue and collaboration between all critics, enthusiasts, and historians of the music. As reviewer Ian Patterson asks in his piece, just published here in the leading online magazine All About Jazz:

The study of jazz in academic institutions may be a relatively modern trend, but the presence of over a hundred academics from South Africa to Russia and from America to Portugal at the Rhythm Changes: Rethinking Jazz Cultures conference, at Media City UK, Salford, underlined that it’s an undeniably global phenomenon. It’s also a sign of the continuing evolution and maturation of historical, socio-political, anthropological and musicological perspectives on music that is more than a century long in the tooth. There may be some who feel that jazz and academia make for odd companions, mutually exclusive fields, but if academic scrutiny is good enough for poetry, literature, graphic art, cinema, theater and other forms of music, then why not jazz?

Quite. Why not. Knowledge exchange, in process.