Rethinking Jazz Cultures

Nick Leave a comment

Rethinking Jazz Cultures provides an opportunity to explore a number of critical questions bound up with jazz and the dynamics of culture, from Americanisation to the politics of migration and race, from the impact of globalisation and the hybridisation of musical styles to the creation of social institutions and distinct communities, from jazz’s shifting aesthetic status from popular to canonical “art” music. Jazz continues to play a complex role in the cultural life of nations worldwide, shaping scenes, constructing communities and cultural values; the music feeds into historical narratives that are marked by conflict and contradiction but the role the music plays in everyday life is rarely understood. Whilst jazz has developed in a range of national settings through different influences and interactions, as evidenced in the first Rhythm Changes Conference in Amsterdam 2011, the music is also a transgressor of the idea of nation. “Rethinking Jazz Cultures”, therefore, aims to explore wider issues surrounding identity and inheritance, enabling unique perspectives on how culture is exchanged, adopted and transformed.

Rethinking Jazz Cultures is a three day multi-disciplinary conference that brings together leading researchers in the fields of jazz studies, media and cultural studies, history and American studies. The event will take place at the University of Salford’s prestigious new building at Media City UK, Salford Quays, commencing with a reception on Thursday 11 April 2013. The Conference committee invites papers and panel proposals that feed directly into the Conference theme and is interested in featuring perspectives from a range of international contexts. Although not restricted to specific themes, possible topics could include:

  • Jazz, Americanisation and the politics of globalisation
  • Sonic cultural identities (African American, the Nordic Tone, South African jazz etc.)
  • Jazz cosmopolitanism
  • Migration and trans-cultural exchange
  • Jazz scenes, contexts and places
  • Sub-cultural practices
  • Genre boundaries and hybridity
  • Trans-national or post-national jazz sounds
  • Postcolonial settings for jazz
  • Jazz collectives and communities
  • Media dissemination and the spread of jazz culture
  • Venues, festivals and the dynamics of culture
  • Jazz, censorship and political struggle
  • Jazz in urban and rural spaces
  • Jazz traditions
  • Cultural politics of jazz
  • Cultural memory and jazz
  • Revising jazz history

The Conference committee welcomes individual papers and proposals for panels and roundtable discussions. For individual papers, abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted. Panels and roundtable proposals should include a session overview, participant biographies and description of individual contributions. Abstracts and proposals (as well as event queries) should be sent to Professor Tony Whyton ( t.whyton@salford.ac.uk ) by 5 November 2012.

Amiri Baraka in Manchester, 10 October 2012

George Leave a comment

As part of the Manchester Literature Festival:
Amiri Baraka
With support from Young Identity
Wednesday 10th October, 8pm
At the Contact Theatre
Oxford Road
Manchester

Tickets: 10/6 concessions. Book on 0161 274 0600 or Contact Website

Tilt presents the world-renowned poet Amiri Baraka, a leading figure of the evolution of the spoken word genre, who has influenced politics, artistic practice and cultural change on an international scale. Formerly known as LeRoi Jones, Baraka has produced over 40 books of plays, writing essays, poems and music history, is an esteemed lecturer, and has won numerous awards – including a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a Rockerfeller Foundation Award. He will be reading from his rich collection of work and talking with Dr Corinne Fowler about his career and influences. Members of Manchester’s talented young writers’ collective Young Identity (supported by Commonword and the Big Lottery) will be warming up proceedings. An unmissable experience produced by Tilt in association with Contact.

Thinking With Jazz symposium, Lancaster University, 21 September 2012

George Leave a comment

Thinking With Jazz
LICA BUILDING
LANCASTER UNIVERSITY
FRIDAY 21 SEPTEMBER

This one-day event is co-organised with Lancaster Jazz Festival, and features well-known jazz journalists, practitioners, and academics discussing issues of nationalism in jazz, the cultural politics of jazz, and the meaning of improvisation. This free event is informal and open to the public.

10 A.M.
Coffee and Welcome (Foyer, LICA Building)

10.30 A.M.
Session 1: Jazz Nation (A29, LICA Building)
Chair: Tony Whyton
Panel: Deborah Mawer, Alyn Shipton and Catherine Tackley

12 P.M. – 1 P.M.
Lunch Break

1 P.M. – 2.30 P.M.
Session 2: The Cultural Politics of This course has the following components:

  • Teams define project ideas
  • Collect necessary data
  • Team-directed work w/ faculty guidance
  • Boneyard Creek Stormwater
  • C-U Wastewater Treatment Plant
  • Abbott Power Plant
  • Assembly Hall Field Trip
  • Recycling: Materials in Transportation
  • Green Infrastructure
  • Boneyard Creek Stormwater Management
  • Engineering, Policy and Law
  • Waste to Energy

4D Chair: George McKay
Panel: Alan Rice, Walter van de Leur and Tim Wall

2.30 P.M. – 3 P.M.
Coffee Break (Foyer, LICA Building)

3 P.M. – 4.30 P.M.
Session 3: Improvisations (Jack Hylton Room)
Chair: Nicholas Gebhardt
Panel: Christophe de Bezenac, Kathy Dyson and Adam Fairhall

6 P.M.
Drinks Sun Street Stompers (Dukes Bar, Lancaster)

7.30 P.M.
Sun Café (Sun Street, Lancaster)

For further information contact Nick Gebhardt on n.gebhardt@lancaster.ac.uk or check out the festival website at http://www.lancasterjazz.com/thinking-with-jazz-a-one-day-symposium.html

How National Jazz Agencies use the internet

Dubber Leave a comment

I’ve been doing some research into the ways in which different national jazz agencies around Europe use the internet as part of what they do.

At the 2011 Jazzahead conference, I interviewed delegates representing music centres and national jazz agencies from the UK, Netherlands, Slovenia, Iceland, France, Hungary, Finland, Estonia, Catalonia, Denmark, Belgium, Norway and Sweden. From those interviews, I was able to discern a number of shared concerns, overlapping strategies and common goals and approaches that these organisations have used to think about their online offerings.

While each national agency is essentially interested in the promotion and propagation of the jazz music of their own country, this basic commonality of intent is not uniformly reflected in the strategies each brings to the Internet in order to achieve that aim. In fact, in many ways, the approaches differ substantially. In part, this is attributable to the various differences in the cultural, economic and political objectives that underpin the activities of these organisations, but it also reflects differences in audience demographic profiles, access to financial, technical and human resources to develop the online offerings and the levels of online experience (and interest) staff members of the organisation possess.

Read More

Rhythm Changes Conference 2013

tony 2 Comments

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

CFP: Analyzing and Interpreting Improvised Music

Nick 1 Comment
Here’s an interesting one:
Call for Articles – Issue 5: Analyzing and Interpreting Improvised MusicFor further information: http://www.act.uni-bayreuth.de/de/cfa_5/index.html
or http://www.act.uni-bayreuth.de/en/cfa_5/index.html
Also please follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Act.ZfMuP

Instant composing, real-time music, current music, free jazz, intuitive music – the genre indications on the part of artists point to a struggle surrounding a volatile subject. The focus of this issue is to present and discuss the scholarly methods for interpreting and analyzing these and similar genres and to identify their possibilities and limitations.

The topics in this area range from procedural questions of methodological and manual problems of transcription and translation from one sign system to another to problems of descriptive language right up to discussion of aesthetic premises, which, consciously or unconsciously, we bring to the subject. Ultimately, it comes down to the question of what subject we are dealing with when we analyze: a musical structure, a sonic result, a concert situation, a performance, a performance in the sense of performance art, a document of social communication, group processes, or the celebration (possibly arising from other contexts) of festival and performance cultures.
We warmly welcome all authors who are interested in the issue to send their articles for consideration. Editorially-supported languages are German, English, French, and Italian.

In addition to scholars from different disciplines we would also like to invite composers, musicians, and artists to express their views through reflections on their own art or the art of others.

The contributions should not exceed 45,000 characters in length (including spaces). The deadline for articles is 15 September 2012. Please send in submissions by e-mail to act@uni-bayreuth.de

On Jazz Hype and Antihype

Nick Leave a comment
Below is the first two paragraphs from Tom Gsteiger’s comments about jazz in Switzerland. 

I think he’s right on…  <http://www.hathut.com/home.html>

 

Bloom Time for Jazz from Switzerland
by Tom Gsteiger


Prelude: Hype/Antihype

Switzerland is a jazz paradise! Forgive my blatant words, but as I’m writing these lines on August 1, the Swiss national holiday, I expect a bit of patriotic exuberance is in order. Moreover, the tone of jazz reports has become rougher, too. If you want to be heard, you’d be well advised to write your messages with a sharp pen and roar as loud as possible. “Pimping” half-baked theses into dogmatic principles and conjuring up a culture clash between the US and Europe, music critics like Stanley Crouch or Stuart Nicholson have poisoned the climate and stand in the way of a more sophisticated view of things. Alas, their terrible simplifications go down well and encourage copycats. This is why we cheerfully push the repeat button: Switzerland is a jazz paradise!

Of course, Switzerland is far from being a jazz paradise. Just as New York is no longer the epicentre of the jazz world … and Oslo is not the new capital of jazz … and Italy does not have the best jazz scene in Europe … and neither E.S.T. nor The Bad Plus have revolutionised piano trio jazz … Apodictic exaggeration keeps the hype machinery running and in doing so distracts people from the sheer wild complexity of artistic creation (as unfortunately do polls, which are widespread in jazz). People want the best and end up consuming what somehow or other appeals to the majority – instead of letting themselves be guided by their own curiosity, they are satisfied with the lowest common denominator (e.g. Robbie Williams or Fischli & Weiss or Esbjörn Svensson). What does the Swiss writer Urs Widmer think about it? In literature, unlike professional sports, it’s not about being the best, it’s about having as many writers as possible who are good in every possible way. It’s exactly what we find in Switzerland today. Many authors are good in their own way. This statement can also be applied directly to jazz in Switzerland.

Call for papers: Nostalgias

Walter Leave a comment

A special issue of Volume! The French Journal of Popular Music Studies http://volume.revues.org/2914

Edited by Hugh Dauncey (Newcastle University) & Christopher Tinker (Heriot-Watt University)

Volume!, the French peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of popular music, seeks contributions for a special issue on nostalgia and popular music in a variety of national, international and transnational contexts.

CfP Fourth annual Jazz Education Network Conference, January 2-5, 2013, Atlanta, GA

Walter Leave a comment

CALL FOR RESEARCH PAPERS

The fourth annual Jazz Education Network Conference, January 2-5, 2013, Atlanta, GA is calling for submission of research papers related to its theme “Networking the Jazz Arts Community – Local to Global”. The research track solicits the submission of original, principled research papers dealing with topics related to audience development for jazz with focus on presenting and producing jazz events in traditional and new venues, and marketing and messaging about jazz events. Building on the success of 2012 Jazz Arts Initiative (JAI) Workshop Track, we are most interested in topics that link to the following two ideas:

Ways to Sustain Presenting and Producing in Smaller Venues: The JAI research findings demonstrate that venue preference is a significant decision factor for audiences when deciding whether or not to engage with jazz. Across almost all market segments, current and potential ticket buyers indicate they would most likely prefer to engage with jazz in clubs or lounges with small tables. Among 18 – 34 year olds, venue may be a significant barrier to participation. These findings require us to explore more questions like:

1) What is the new sustainable business model for presenting in small or unusual venues? Additional experimentation, dialogue, and assessment will allow JAG to scale findings to help organizations of all sizes and locales bring new energy to jazz, as well as emerging, independent and creative music.
Ways to Leverage Story, Context, and Messaging for Deeper Engagement: As the Columbus Jazz Arts Group (JAG) further explores the role venue plays in jazz participation we must also animate segmentation solutions for current and potential jazz ticket buyers in Central Ohio. The next step for full implementation and impact of this data is to design, test, implement and refine messages/images that motivate audiences to action. The research will guide a variety of smaller experiments, perhaps in tandem with the venue experiments, about ways to effectively communicate with each market segment (10 in all), or across segments simultaneously.

The research track will run parallel with presentations by the Jazz Arts Group of Columbus on the Jazz Audiences Initiative. The research serves as a framework for testing new strategies for overcoming barriers to jazz participation and for building jazz audiences through more targeted marketing and programming efforts. For more information on the initiative and a review of the literature, visit: http://www.jazzartsgroup.org/jai

Submission guidelines:
Submit a 1-2 page abstract by June 15, 2011. Papers should directly relate to the research questions above and may include:

  • Historical perspectives on jazz/ arts audiences
  • Quantitative studies
  • Case studies
  • Literature reviews

Submissions need to be Word documents in .doc or .pdf format. Presentations will be 50 minutes in length, including a minimum of 10 minutes for questions and answers. A projector and screen will be available, presenters will need to provide their own computers and projector adapters. Presenters must be members of JEN and attend the JEN conference. For more information, to submit an abstract, and join JEN go to http://www.jazzednet.org/1/en/node/1305