We’re delighted to announce that, at the annual University Day celebration this week, Profs Tony Whyton and George McKay won the University of Salford’s Vice-Chancellor’s Research Excellence Award for 2014. This was for the Rhythm Changes: European Jazz and National Identities research project (2010-13), that brilliantly stimulating and massively creative and fun three-year jazz jaunt, caravanserai, parade, around the New (Euro-)Jazz Studies, with partners from Graz, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Birmingham, and Stavanger, musicians, artists, festivals, academics, archivists. Yes, that project was an absolute blast – and it’s still going of course, for we have the 3rd international Rhythm Changes conference, Beyond Jazz Borders, this September at Amsterdam Conservatory to look forward to.
It’s great to get such recognition from Salford, the university that led the project. Here’s what the Vice-Chancellor, Prof Martin Hall (left, in photo below) , had to say at University Day, which was attended by 400 colleagues from across the institution.
The University of Salford is nothing without its people. Everyone has a part to play in making the University – the vibrant, pioneering and, above all, warm and welcoming institution that it is. Without you, this University would be little more than bricks and mortar. It is you who bring these buildings to life with your passion, your endless enthusiasm, your dreams, your focus on our students, your curiosity, thirst for knowledge, the need to find answers and a desire to change lives.
Here is the finalised programme for the symposium, which includes jazz festivals and several contributions from the Rhythm Changes team. Further information, including directions and registration information, is here.
Friday 13 June 2014, The Old Fire Station, University of Salford
9:30 – 9:50: Arrival and Coffee
9:50 – 10:00: Welcome and introduction – Professor George McKay, University of Salford
10:00 – 10:45: Keynote 1 – Dr Gina Arnold, Stanford University Race, space, and representation at American rock festivals
10:45 – 12:15: Session 1 – Aspects of and developments in festival culture
Dr Nicholas Gebhardt, Birmingham City University Rock festivals of the transatlantic counterculture
Dr Anne Dvinge, University of Copenhagen Musicking in Motor City: reconfiguring urban space at the Detroit Jazz Festival
Dr Roxanne Yeganegy, Leeds Metropolitan University No Spectators! Burning Man, boutique festivals and the art of participation
12:15 – 1:00: Lunch
Includes screening of short film, “Carnivalising the Creative Economy: AHRC-funded Research on and with British Jazz Festivals” (dir. Gemma Thorpe, 2014)
1:00 – 2:30: Session – Mediating, Performing and Technologising the Festival
Dr Mark Goodall, University of Bradford
Out of Sight: the mediation of the music festival
Dr Rebekka Kill, Leeds Metropolitan University The artist at the music festival: visual art, performance and hybridity
Dr Andrew Dubber, Birmingham City University Music Technologism: innovation, collaboration and participation at the festival of music ideas
2:30 – 3:15: Keynote 2 – Alan Lodge, veteran festivals photographer and travellers activist
Discussion and showing of some key photographs of festivals, New Travellers and alternative culture in Britain since the late 1970s
3:15 – 3:30: Coffee Break
3:30 – 4:15: Session 3 – How to Make a Popular Music Festival
Ben Robinson, director, Kendal Calling festival
Danny Hagan, co-founder, Green Man festival
4:15 – 5:45: Session 4 – From Festivals to Arenas
Professor Robert Kronenburg, University of Liverpool From Shed to Venue: The Architecture of Popular Music Performance
Dr Emma Webster, Oxford Brookes University The role of promoters at arena shows: a case study of Stereophonics at Glasgow’s SECC arena
Dr Ben Halligan, University of Salford
Skanky Shamanism: Sensual Audience Participation and the Miley Cyrus “Bangerz” Arena Tour
WIS (aka Warren Smith) in conversation with Rhys Chatham
12pm – 12:30pm
Professor Tim Wall (Birmingham City University)
“Jazz in Manhattan’s Lofts in the 1970s: David Murray, new jazz and its contribution to the founding of the Downtown Scene”
12:30pm – 1:30pm
Lunch (not provided)
1:30pm – 2pm
Dr. Kirsten Forkert (Birmingham City University)
“The Lower East Side and the politics of real estate”
2:15pm – 2:45pm
Tony Dudley-Evans (Jazzlines)
“Tim Berne: his role in the Downtown and Brooklyn scene.”
3pm – 3:30pm
Dr. Roger Fagge (University of Warwick)
”MacDougal Street Blues’: Jack Kerouac and Jazz Performance’.
3:45pm – 4:15pm
Dr. Nicholas Gebhardt (Birmingham City University)
“Friends and Neighbors: living with jazz”
4:30pm
Close
This event is supported by the Library of Birmingham, Birmingham Conservatoire and the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. It forms part of the Frontiers Festival: Extraordinary Music from Downtown New York & Birmingham www.frontiersmusic.org
The Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is currently a partner of the Cheltenham Festivals, and organises a set of public lectures and panel talks by AHRC-funded researchers at each of the four festivals (jazz, music, literature, science) through the year.
Professor George McKay has worked with Cheltenham Jazz Festival and the AHRC to curate the series of talks at this year’s festival. There are three talks (information taken from festival website):
“Denys Baptiste: Struggle and Liberation.” Saturday 3 May, 6-7 pm. The history of jazz is inseparable from the struggle for racial equality and Denys Baptiste’s suite Now is the Time: Let Freedom Ring captures this in music. He talks to leading British jazz academic Professor Tony Whyton about how he drew from Dr. Martin Luther King’s powerful speech.
“What makes a jazz legend?” Sunday 4 May, 6.45-7.45 pm. What does it take for a jazz musician to become iconic? Professors McKay (AHRC Leadership Fellow) and Tony Whyton (Project Director, Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities) discuss how musicians made jazz history or got written out from Winifred Atwell to John Coltrane.
“The story of British jazz festivals”. Monday 5 May, 5-6 pm. Professor McKay (AHRC Leadership Fellow) leads a panel of festival organisers and researchers, including the Festival’s Programme Advisor Tony Dudley-Evans, as they trace the memories and significance of Britain’s jazz festivals, from their riotous origins at Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1956 to today’s diverse festival scene. Also features Alison Eales, AHRC-funded PhD student, who holds a Collaborative Doctoral Award between the University of Glasgow and Glasgow Jazz Festival.
Here, again, since we’re on the subject, is the film we made recently about AHRC-funded collaborations between jazz festivals and academic researchers…
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.
In recent years jazz studies has attempted to move beyond the canonical view of jazz as a narrative of great performers within an American context, becoming more interdisciplinary and international in its approach. This one-day conference will bring together Warwick, Midlands and National speakers to discuss current research in jazz, share ideas about methodologies for future study, and explore the link between academics and the practice of jazz in the wider community.
Speakers: Tony Whyton, Catherine Tackley, Andrew Hodgetts, Roger Magraw, Katherine Williams, Adrian Litvinoff, Simon Barber and Vic Hobson (National Jazz Archive)
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)
The Third International Rhythm Changes Conference, hosted by the Conservatory of Amsterdam. The event is delivered in partnership with the University of Amsterdam, University of Salford, Birmingham City University, Open University, and Amsterdam World Jazz City 2014.
Keynote Speakers
Steven Feld (musician, filmmaker and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music at the University of New Mexico)
John Gennari (Associate Professor of English and Director, ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies Program, University of Vermont)
Conference outline
Jazz Beyond Borders (and: Beyond the Borders of Jazz) seeks to critically explore how borders – real and imagined – have shaped, and continue to shape, debates about jazz. Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities (www.rhythmchanges.net) sought to question traditional ways of understanding and articulating jazz history and the concept of moving beyond borders – whether geographical or aesthetic – has played a key role in the project’s research strategy. Borders can be multifaceted and fluid, from geographical boundaries, to disciplinary fields, there can be theoretical or institutional borders, which permeate discourses relating to the cultural, social, political, national and ethnic as well as artistic, performative, canonical, aesthetic, stylistic and genre-related understandings of jazz. Because of the music’s inherent hybridity, jazz provides an excellent lens through which such borders, and border-policing processes, can be questioned and analysed. The music is ideally placed to think about the dividing lines between, for instance, academia and journalism, popular and art music, “new jazz studies” and “traditional musicology”, the sonic and the visual, and so forth.
Jazz Beyond Borders is a three day multi-disciplinary conference that brings together leading researchers across the arts and humanities and is the largest event of its kind world-wide. Based on our previous conferences (Amsterdam 2011 and Salford 2013), we expect well over 100 participants. The Conference committee invites papers and panel proposals that feed 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:
Exploring borders: framing, understanding and policing borders; transnational, transcultural, postcolonial, and global perspectives; jazz and its musical others; jazz beyond jazz (jazz as lifestyle from cooking to comedy); genre politics; “frontier” myths; reconfiguring gender, race, ethnicity, disability
Challenging binaries: questioning perceived antonyms such as Afrological/Eurological, composition/improvisation, professionals/amateurs, musicians/audiences, theory/practice
Jazz historiographies: exploring origins, mythologies, cultural memory, and the different constructions of jazz history
(Re-)Mediating jazz: evaluating jazz in film, advertising, literature, art, journalism, criticism
Jazz futures: questioning disciplinary boundaries; new directions for jazz research; changing status jazz studies within musicology
The Conference committee welcomes individual papers and proposals for panels and round table discussions. For individual papers, abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted. Panels and round table 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 Walter van de Leur (W.vandeLeur@ahk.nl) by 1 March 2014.
Conference Committee
Walter van de Leur (Chair, Conservatory of Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam), Nicholas Gebhardt (Birmingham City University), George McKay (University of Salford), Loes Rusch (University of Amsterdam), Catherine Tackley (Open University), Tony Whyton (University of Salford)
Steven Feld, the late Guy Warren and afrifone inventor Nii Noi Nortey
Keynote speaker biographies
Steven Feld is a musician, filmmaker and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music at the University of New Mexico. His books include Sound and Sentiment and Music Grooves (with Charles Keil). As a jazz trombonist he recorded and performed with Leadbelly Legacy Band, Live Action Brass Band, Tom Guralnick Trio, and Bonefied. Since 2004 he has been studying the spectral presence of jazz in West Africa, represented in a CD, DVD, and book project titled Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra. In addition to documentary work, the Accra project includes performing on ashiwa box bass with the Accra Trane Station trio, dedicated to points of contact between African idioms and the legacy of Coltrane”s later works. Connecting the ATS project to the contemporary Euro-Am jazz scene, ATS collaborated with the Amsterdam-based jazz flute/reed player Alex Coke on the CD Topographies of the Dark.
John Gennari is an American Studies-trained U.S. cultural historian and nonfiction writer with specializations in jazz and popular music studies, Italian American cultural studies, food studies, race and ethnic studies, and cultural criticism. He is the author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2006), which won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Criticism and the John Cawelti Award for the Best Book in American Culture. He is currently completing a book examining how practices of expressive ethnicity in music, film, sports, cooking, and eating reconfigure our understanding of Italian American culture. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. An active member of the American Studies Association since 1993, he chaired the association’s Gabriel Dissertation Prize committee in 2008, and served on the Romero Book Prize committee in 2010.
Rhythm Changes
This conference builds on the legacy of the Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities (www.rhythmchanges.net) research project. Rhythm Changes was initially funded as part of the Humanities in the European Research Area’s (HERA) first Joint Research programme which ran from 2010 – 2013. The project team continues to develop networking opportunities and champion collaborative research into transnational jazz studies.
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.
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.
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.
Here is the finalised programme for the symposium, which includes jazz festivals and several contributions from the Rhythm Changes team. Further information, including directions and registration information, is 
The 
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.
Thinking With Jazz is a day-long symposium that takes place during the 2013 