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

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

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

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.

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

Anne’s research centres around festivals and what makes them special for audiences, for musicians and for the spaces they inhabit.

In the context of a discussion around the connection between festivals and places (specifically, places in Europe), we got into a conversation about what festivals mean for people – but also what people (and particularly political people) use them to mean.

What do you think about the connection between festivals and places. Are they reducible to tourism and local identity, is there some greater meaning – or even transcendence to be found within, or is the fact that it’s more complicated than that the thing that is interesting here?

A conversation in which questions are raised about the relationship between the state of jazz in a particular country – and the policies and expectations of the institutions that educate the musicians.

Is it important that musicians rebel against what they are taught in jazz conservatories?