As you may well know, next week the first Rhythm Changes Conference ‘Jazz and National Identities’ takes place in Amsterdam. There will be jazz performances, keynote speakers, panel presentations, and the usual stuff that takes place at academic conferences – especially those academic conferences that happen to be about jazz.

But this conference will be Dubberised.

Don’t look it up. The verb ‘to Dubberise’ does not, to our knowledge, appear in any dictionaries. But it’s a word that has become common parlance among the members of the Rhythm Changes project.

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Preparing a paper on “Jazz and European Cultural Studies” for the Current Issues in European Cultural Studies conference in Sweden, I came across Stuart Nicholson’s interview with Courtney Pine in the April 2011 issue of Jazzwise. As part of the interview, Pine talks about the background to his latest album Europa:

“I have always said that I am Afro, Caribbean, European, that’s who I am… To me, it means I shouldn’t feel that I can’t exploit each cultural thing and make it one, which is how I think the United Kingdom should be.”

“Europe is a lot more close than what is being proclaimed at the moment… We live on an island and it does work to say this is an isolated state, but it isn’t, there is so much cross fertilisations of ideas, concepts, identities – I dare anybody to have a DNA test and then find out they are from Holland or Sweden! This is how it is across Europe” (Pine quoted in Nicholson: 2011, 20).

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In the second week of May, we conducted an online practice-based research and knowledge transfer project to explore the online mediation of jazz and improvisational performance.

As part of the Mai Jazz festival in Stavanger, Norway the members of the Kitchen Orchestra collaborated with visual artists Testuya Nagato and Hiraku Suzuki to create a performance that blended composed and improvised elements.

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Yesterday, at a jazz research seminar at the University of Salford, the discussion focused on Alex Lubet’s recent book Music, Disability and Society (Temple University Press, 2010).

Towards the end of chapter 2–Let”s Face the Music and Dance”–Lubet writes that the possibilities for jazz musicians with disabilities to pursue successful careers is due to “…jazz performance practice, whose essence is the embrace of difference…” (p.65).

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Rhythm Changers may be interested in this archive (interviews in PDF and mp3 formats):

http://www.hamilton.edu/jazzarchive

Members of the Rhythm Changes team attended the AHRC-funded Watching Jazz conference in Glasgow in February. The two-day event featured presentations on a range of topics including Jenny Doctor”s exploration of jazz on BBC television in the 1950s and 60s and Bjorn Heile’s comparative analysis of footage from Duke Ellington’s European tours between 1969 and 1971. Rhythm Changes team members Nick Gebhardt and Tony Whyton gave presentations about televised performances of Miles Davis and John Coltrane in different European settings and Andrew Dubber delivered the following paper entitled “Online mediation of jazz performance, its context and its audiences”:

Andrew Dubber, Watching Jazz from Tony Whyton on Vimeo.

The presentation concludes with details of Dubber’s planned Rhythm Changes project at the Maijazz Festival in Stavanger this year, the results of which will be featured on this website over the coming months.

I’ve been writing a column on research for the online jazz magazine JazzFlits (See issues 152 and 154). This month, JazzFlits was nominated for the Jazz Media Award. Check for updates on: http://www.jazzflits.nl/ (In Dutch)