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.

Each year the Institute of Jazz Studies awards up to ten grants of $1,000 each to assist jazz researchers. Half of the awards are designated for students in the Rutgers-Newark Master’s Program in Jazz History and Research and half are awarded to scholars from other institutions or unaffiliated researchers to enable them to visit IJS in conjunction with their projects. The Institute is a special collection of the John Cotton Dana Library on the Rutgers-Newark campus.

BACKGROUND
The Morroe Berger – Benny Carter Jazz Research Fund was established in 1987 with a gift by composer/arranger/multi-instrumentalist Benny Carter (1907-2003) in memory of Morroe Berger. Berger, a close friend and Carter’s biographer, was a professor of sociology at Princeton University until his death in 1981.

Carter’s initial gift was matched by the Berger family, who asked that Carter’s name be added to the Fund’s title. Benny Carter, his wife Hilma, and other donors have regularly added to the endowment over the years. To date, over 85 awards have been given to scholars and students worldwide working in a variety of disciplines, including jazz history, musicology, bibliography, and discography.

ELIGIBILITY
Rutgers Master’s Program Students:
Students currently enrolled in the Rutgers-Newark Master’s Program in Jazz History and Research. NOTE: Students must be nominated by a member of the Jazz Program faculty. Please contact Prof. Lewis Porter before submitting an application.

Others:
Jazz researchers at Rutgers or other institutions or non-affiliated researchers whose projects would benefit from the use of the research collections of the Institute of Jazz Studies.

NOTE
Previous Berger-Carter award recipients are not eligible.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE
Send a brief (two-page maximum) resumé and a one-page description of your project and how this award and access to IJS collections will facilitate your research. Include your full contact information (email and mailing addresses). The resumé and one-page description should be sent as MS Word or pdf attachments to:

eberger4@verizon.net

DEADLINE
Applications are due by June 28, 2013. Awards will be announced by July 31, 2013.

For further information go here.

If you’re still having Conference withdrawal symptoms and enjoyed the Storified Twitter feed and London Jazz Blog Conference summary below, why not check out the photo gallery of selected images from the Rethinking Jazz Cultures event here?

A big thank you to Ian Patterson, Andrew Dubber, George McKay and Walter van de Leur for sharing their images with us! Feel free to send in more images and we’ll add them to the gallery.

Sebastian Scotney has published my summary of the Salford Rhythm Changes conference on his site:
http://www.londonjazznews.com/2013/04/roundup-report-2013-rethinking-jazz.html
Tom

And here is another good deal for delegates coming to the Rhythm Changes conference this week in Salford. After the opening reception at CUBE Gallery in Manchester city centre on Thursday, we’ve arranged a special discount for a terrific jazz gig at one of the city’s leading live music club venues, the Band on the Wall. (25 Swan Street, in the Northern Quarter.) It just keeps getting better and better …

A very special jazz double bill featuring the spectacular and visceral mash-up of rock, jazz and dance music of Troyka plus the Anton Hunter Trio whose debut at last year’s Manchester Jazz Festival got everyone talking about this immensely creative new outfit.

Troyka

Troyka are Chris Montague (guitars and loops), Joshua Blackmore (drums) and Kit Downes (organ), three young musicians based in London whose intense live shows have seen them hotly tipped to follow in the foot steps of Polar Bear and Portico Quartet and become the next young band to explode from the capital’s fertile jazz scene. A multi-textured trio with a febrile imagination where no role is pre-defined, their music twists and mutates in an ongoing dialogue inspired by a shared love of Aphex Twin, the angular world of iconclastic New York saxophonist Tim Berne and the blues-jazz-rock groove of legendary Steely Dan and Billy Cobham guitarist Wayne Krantz.

Anton Hunter Trio

The Anton Hunter Trio made its debut at Band On The Wall at Manchester Jazz Festival 2012 and showcases material at the borders of composition and improvisation. More introspective and spacious than his work with HAQ or the Beats & Pieces Big Band, there is, as ever, still plenty of room for freedom and exploration within the structures, whilst not letting go of strong melodies. The trio is completed by his “Skamel” bandmates Johnny Hunter on drums and James Adolpho on bass.

This concert begins at 8pm but the venue’s Picturehouse Cafe Bar is open earlier for delicious food and drinks. Full price tickets at the door are £14.00 but Rhythm Changes delegates pay £8.00. Yes, in these hard economic times, we are still supporting venues, live musicians, but also looking after our delegates!

And the Twitter hashtag conference is #salfordjazz13. Join the conversation!

In 2012, Rhythm Changes commissioned Paul Floyd Blake to produce a photography exhibition based on his experiences and impressions of three leading European jazz festivals. As the 2009 Taylor-Wessing National Portrait Photography Prizewinner, Floyd Blake has gained critical acclaim for his unique studies of identity and place, and his work often seeks to challenge existing photographic practice.

 

The brief from the Rhythm Changes team was simple: Floyd Blake was to present an impression of music and its relationship to place in three international festival settings and to capture aspects of festival life that were either unique, counterintuitive or which captured a sense of social ambience. Rather than capturing shots of musicians on stage, we invited Floyd Blake to explore jazz from different perspectives, from the views of audiences to examinations of festival settings.

The resulting collection of 30 images on display at CUBE encourages the viewer to rethink their relationship to jazz and consider the role music plays in very different festival, and social, contexts. Click here for more images and to read Floyd Blake”s reaction to the commission.

Paul Floyd Blake’s “Rethinking Jazz” runs from 5 – 14 April at CUBE Gallery in Manchester.

Some RC-ers will be interested in this call for papers for both a conference and a special issue of the journal The Soundtrack, on the theme of jazz and cinema.

Call for Papers

The conference will gather academic scholars and others with an interest in the relationship between jazz and cinema from across a range of disciplines.

Possible themes could include:

• • Analysis of the use of pre-existing jazz recordings to soundtrack films
  • Analysis of purpose-made jazz soundtracks
  • The social implications of the use of jazz in cinema
  • The historical development of jazz in cinema
  • Jazz musicians on the screen, an exploration of jazz musicians appearances in film

Other topics around the broader theme of Jazz & Cinema are also invited for submission.

We are delighted to confirm our keynote speaker will be Dr Nicolas Pillai from Warwick University. Dr Pillai is currently researching jazz in British film and television, as well as teaching more widely on music and visual culture. He has given papers on European jazz culture as an invited speaker at the National Jazz Archive and at Rollins College, Florida.

Selected papers from the conference will be published in The Soundtrack special issue on jazz and cinema in 2014.

Please send an abstract of 300 words and a short bio to jazzandcinema@gmail.com.

Deadline for abstract submission: 1st June 2013.

Successful submissions will be notified no later than 1st July 2013.

Further information about the conference is available here.