News, callouts, conferences, jobs, and more...

April 2023

Friends,

Welcome to the April edition of the JEN Research Interest Group newsletter. Below please find a variety of news items, announcements, callouts, new publications, and job opportunities. April is Jazz Appreciation Month and hopefully you’re finding many ways to celebrate in your community. I have been on the road for the whole month sharing music from the new release Both Sides of Joni (www.bothsidesofjoni.com) together with NY vocalist Alexis Cole and it’s inspiring, energizing, and a privilege to be able to travel and connect with audiences. Maybe I’ll see some of you at Jazz Ahead in Bremen April 27-30, let me know!

Only a few more days left to submit the 2024 conference applications, open April 1-30 on the JEN website for JEN members. For research presentations, consider offering a presentation and poster presentation to increase chances of acceptance. Don’t miss the deadline. 

The deadline for submissions to Volume 5 of JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice) is May 1 on the JAZZ portal. If short extensions up to Maz 15 are needed please contact the current editor Martin Norgaard. Articles, case studies, quick hits, reviews, are all welcome and the editorial team is happy to help and answer questions, contact Martin Norgaard or Monika Herzig. JAZZ Volume 4 is published, you can purchase copies with your JEN membership discount for $15 here.  JEN members have access to reading the JAZZ articles for free on the JEN website, but also have access for a discounted yearly subscription to the print or electronic edition for $15 through the IU Press website. Please make sure your school library has a subscription to JAZZ.

JENRInG Mentoring is under way! Those interested in obtaining mentoring through

the JENRInG Mentoring Initiative may contact our mentoring chair, Dr. Tish Oney, at

tishoney@gmail.com. We match mentors who are experienced in peer-reviewed

publishing with mentees seeking help developing research projects or professional

writing skills, particularly with the goal of writing for our Jazz Education in Research and

Practice journal. We have several mentoring teams currently working together and we

are excited about the research progress we are making! If you would like assistance

with organizing or polishing a research article for journal consideration, let us help you.

Thank you for your support of JEN's new mentoring initiative!

The monthly series of webinars will continue on May 5, 3pm EST  with Donna Williams - Jazz in PreK-6 General Music and on the first Friday of every month featuring one of the authors published in JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice). The goal of the presentations is to share the findings as well as ideas for practical implementations in the classroom and curricula. Please look for links and invitations to the webinars on the JEN website and Facebook page. They’ll be live streamed on Facebook, but those who register for the zoom webinar will be able to ask questions and interact with the panelists. All previous presentations can be accessed here.

Please feel free to share this news compilation and invite colleagues to join the mailing list and/orFacebook page. Remember to check the updated job listingshere. If you have new books/ articles/ dissertations published, send me the info to be included in the newsletter. Also send over ideas on how JENRing can help you in your jazz research and networking. Items of interest related to jazz research may also be shared on the Facebook page.

Sincerely,

Monika Herzig

JEN Research Interest Group Committee Chair

Newsletter Sections

Jump to any section by clicking below

APPLY NOW

to perform or present
at the 15th Annual JEN CONFERENCE

Time left to apply:

🎶 FREE WEBINAR 🎶

Jazz in PreK-6 General Music
with Donna Williams

In 2018, Donna Williams reviewed jazz materials marketed toward elementary music teachers. In this webinar, she revisits commercial materials along with discussing her personal approach toward listening, research, and improvisation with elementary students in the current teaching climate. The discussion will include social-emotional learning and classroom management.

Friday, May 5 • 4pm ET
Zoom (Members) & Facebook Live (Non-Members)

A presentation from the Jazz Education Research and Practice Journal, a publication of the Jazz Education Network.

Have a question you don't see covered above? Once registered, you will be invited to submit any questions you would like answered.

PLEASE NOTE:
JEN Members will receive a link 1-hr before the event to join the Zoom Room.

Non-members & youth (under 18) members will receive a link 1-hr before the event to join via Facebook Live. Click here for membership information.

Your membership associated with _t.e.s.t_@example.com is expired. JOIN or RENEW NOW!

NEWS

Met premieres Blanchard’s `Champion,′ an `opera in jazz’
by Mike Silberman

When Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” proved a sell-out hit at the Metropolitan Opera in 2021, general manager Peter Gelb wasted no time lining up the composer’s other opera for the current season.

And that set the clock ticking for Blanchard and his collaborators to adapt a relatively small-scale work to the vast resources of the nation’s premiere opera house.

“We knew we had only a year and a half, so we immediately went to work,” recalled Michael Cristofer, who wrote the libretto. “We had an opportunity to enhance and expand not just story points but also certain scenes. And you want to use all of what the Met is capable of. We were a bit like kids in a candy shop.”

“Champion,” which Blanchard calls “an opera in jazz,” premiered at Opera Theatre of St. Louis in 2013. It’s based on the troubled life of prizefighter Emile Griffith, who knocked out Benny Paret in a welterweight title bout in 1962. Paret never regained consciousness and died 10 days later.

Griffith was haunted by guilt, his feelings complicated by the fact that Paret had humiliated him by calling him a “maricón,” (a derogatory Spanish term for homosexual) during their weigh-in. Later in Griffith’s life, he was savagely beaten after leaving a gay bar.

Blanchard, who in addition to writing operas is known as a jazz trumpeter and composer of film scores, said he was inspired by Griffith’s own words, rephrased for poetic effect in Cristofer’s libretto: “I killed a man and the world forgives me; I love a man and the world wants to kill me.’”

“To me, ‘Champion’ is about redemption and Emile forgiving himself for what happened in the ring,” Blanchard said.

Happy songs: these are the musical elements that make us feel good

Music has a unique power to affect the way people feel and many people use music to enhance or change their mood, channel emotions and for psychological support.

The strong emotional impact of music is derived from its profound physical and psychological effects. For example, listening to relaxing music often has a positive impact on the autonomic nervous system (which regulates many key bodily functions), by slowing breathing, regulating heart rate, lowering blood pressure and reducing muscle tension.

Listening to music also affects us at a deep physiological level, as it has a strong impact on the endocrine system, which is responsible for hormone production.

Music can stimulate the release of the neurotransmitters which affect experiences of pleasure by increasing the production of dopamine (the reward hormone), reducing levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) and increasing salivary immunoglobulin A – an antibody responsible for strengthening the immune system.

Of course, these benefits are only experienced if we listen to music that we enjoy. Familiarity also affects enjoyment, but even new music can stimulate positive physical and psychological responses if it is similar to other music that we like.

Music we don’t like can have a strong adverse effect upon mood and wellbeing. Individual differences mean emotional reactions to songs differ depending on the participant’s preferences and associations they might have with the music. If we don’t like the song (or it brings back negative memories), it won’t make us happy, regardless of the quality.

5 Minutes to Make You Love Jazz

The New York Times has recently released an interactive article that curates five minutes of musical highlights from different eras of jazz and specific jazz luminaries. Spanning the entire jazz umbrella, critics, writers, and musicians alike agreed upon five minutes of music within each of the following categories:

• Alice Coltrane

• Bebop

• Duke Ellington

• Mary Lou Williams

• Ornette Coleman

• Jazz Piano

• Sun Ra

• 21st Century Jazz

Curators include anyone from Questlove to Sonny Rollins.

Ahmad Jamal, Whose Spare Style Redefined Jazz Piano, Dies at 92

Ahmad Jamal, whose measured, spare piano style was an inspiration to generations of jazz musicians, died on Sunday at his home in Ashley Falls, Mass. He was 92.

The cause was prostate cancer, his daughter, Sumayah Jamal, said.

In a career that would bring him a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award, a lifetime achievement Grammy and induction into France’s Order of Arts and Letters, Mr. Jamal made a lasting mark on jazz with a stately approach that honored what he called the spaces in the music.

That approach stood in marked contrast to the challengingly complex music known as bebop, which was sweeping the jazz world when Mr. Jamal began his career as a teenager in the mid-1940s. Bebop pianists, following the lead of Bud Powell, became known for their virtuosic flurries of notes. Mr. Jamal chose a different path, which proved equally influential.

The critic Stanley Crouch wrote that bebop’s founding father, Charlie Parker, was the only musician “more important to the development of fresh form in jazz than Ahmad Jamal.”

In his early years, Mr. Jamal listened not just to jazz, which he preferred to call “American classical music,” but also to classical music of the non-American variety.

“We didn’t separate the two schools,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “We studied Bach and Ellington, Mozart and Art Tatum. When you start at 3, what you hear you play. I heard all these things.”

Building a better brain through music, dance and poetry

To make sense of difficult science, Michael Kofi Esson often turns to art.

When he's struggling to understand the immune system or a rare disease, music and poetry serve as an anchor.

"It helps calm me down and actively choose what to focus on," says Esson, a second-year student at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Esson, who was born in Ghana, also thinks his brain is better at absorbing all that science because of the years he spent playing the trumpet and studying Afrobeat musicians like Fela Kuti.

"There has to be some kind of greater connectivity that [art] imparts on the brain," Esson says.

That idea — that art has a measurable effect on the brain and its structure — has support from a growing number of scientific studies.

"Creativity is making new connections, new synapses," says Ivy Ross, who is vice president of hardware design at Google and co-author of the New York Times bestseller Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us.

Ross co-wrote the book with Susan Magsamen, director of the International Arts and Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Magsamen says art's effect on the brain is most dramatic in children.

"Children that are playing music, their brain structure actually changes and their cerebral cortex actually gets larger," Magsamen says.

In Your Brain on Art, Magsamen and Ross describe how a person's neural circuitry changes in response to activities like learning a new song, or a new dance step, or how to play a character onstage.

They also explain why a growing number of researchers believe these changes result in a brain that is better prepared to acquire a wide range of skills, including math and science.

Your membership associated with _t.e.s.t_@example.com is expired. JOIN or RENEW NOW!

CALLOUTS & CONFERENCES

Sound, Meaning, Education: CONVERSATIONS & improvisations

University of Guelph/IICSI, October 20-22, 2023

Proposal Deadline: May 15, 2023

SME | CFP (Call for Proposals)

Sound, Meaning Education (SME) invites researchers, artists, and/or teachers to submit proposals for an in-person conference to be held at the University of Guelph, October 20-22, 2023. The conference will gather all manner of curricular innovators to share research/scholarship, pedagogical strategies, narratives/stories, performances, and imaginings for the purpose of building infrastructures that support sound and meaning explorations within teaching and learning contexts. 

As an organization, SME responds to and is part of: 1) the sensory turn in the academy, 2) recent technological and experiential shifts in how music and sound are created/heard/disseminated, and 3) the re-orienting of human existences toward ecological resonance (SME Guiding Statement). The 2023 conference continues in these veins via a partnership with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) at the University of Guelph and will co-convene with the fourth annual Improvisation Festival (IF). As such, the conference will emphasize improvisations, as related to sound theory/research and pedagogical practice, along with CONVERSATIONS, as related to sound theory/research and pedagogical practice. To that end, three session types comprise the conference schedule: research talks (15 min + 15 min Q&A), interactive workshops (60 min), and improvisational performances (60 min). Keynotes and guest artists are forthcoming.

SME is, by nature, interdisciplinary. As such, we encourage proposals/projects of all methodologies; please be specific in that regard. Proposal topics include, but are not limited to:

• Pedagogical encounters in/with sound and improvisation thereof. (PK-16, community-based programs, etc.)

• Creative and critical intersections between sound, music, improvisation and education.

• Ecological/relational impacts of human engagements with sound/music.

• Sensuous scholarship and phenomenological studies centered around sound, improvisation, and pedagogy.

• Embodied and cognitive processes with sound/music.

• Sound/music narratives and narrative inquiries in music/sound learning contexts.

• Multi-sensorial engagements with sound/music as related to inclusivity and disability studies, and/or other areas of inquiry.

• Social and political structures that inform and constitute sound/music experience and sound/music pedagogies.

• Philosophy of sound and music as related to technology, identity, the environment, and/or education.

Proposals should include the following:

• Proposal type: Research Talk, Interactive Workshop, or Improvisational Performance

• 500-word summary (PDF)

• 100-word bio (PDF)

• Optionally, one additional media file may be submitted for workshop and performance proposals

• Technical requirements, if any

Submit to Jashen Edwards and Rebecca Rinsema at soundmeaningeducation@gmail.com by May 15, 2023.

Academy of Art and Design FHNW

Summer Workshop «Decolonizing Digital Archives»

The Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures IXDM at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW in Basel/Switzerland offers a program for continuing education:
Decolonizing Digital Archives.

The summer workshop assembles transdisciplinary approaches to archival issues from artistic research, art history, media studies and digital culture. In a week-long course from 21.-25.8.2023 the focus is set on the modes of digitization of collections and the discourses of decolonization. The aim is to illuminate how post-digital and decolonizing practices can  support digitization efforts that meet contemporary and future complexities. 

Please register until May 25, 2023.

Journal for Artistic Research - Call for Submissions

We are welcoming submissions to the Journal for Artistic Research. The Journal publishes three issues a year. To be eligible to publish in next year’s first issue, submit by the 31st of May, 2023.

• JAR accepte les propositions en espagnol, portugais, français, allemand et anglais.

• JAR aceita submissões em Espanhol, Português, Francês, Alemão e Inglês.

• JAR accepts submissions in Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and English.

• JAR acepta envíos en español, portugués, francés, alemán e inglés.

• JAR akzeptiert Einreichungen auf Spanisch, Portugiesisch, Französisch, Deutsch und Englisch.

JAR is an internationally recognised Open Access journal that publishes artistic research from all arts disciplines including (but not limited to) the visual arts, architecture, dance, design, film, literature, music, painting, performance, photography, poetry, sculpture, theatre, video art, urban planning, etc. The journal seeks submissions of artists and theorists focusing on artistic research, with or without academic affiliation, and at all stages of their research curriculum.

Rethinking the traditional journal format, JAR offers its contributors a free-to-use online space called the Research Catalogue (RC) where text can be woven together with image, audio and video material allowing for creative modes of presenting and documenting artistic work. We are specifically interested in contributions that reflect upon and expose artistic practice as research, and welcome submissions from artists interested in opening up the processes that underlie their practice. Please view our archive to get a sense of what we publish.

To be accepted for peer review, the Editorial Board considers the degree to which the exposition is conceptually and artistically strong, considered, and significant to the field, and whether the submission exposes artistic practice as research. This last aspect engages with questions and claims about knowledges within practice. For more information about the notion of ‘exposition’ please read the editorial to JAR0.

JAR is part of an active community and network of practice. Alongside the peer-reviewed expositions, the website also provides a space for the publication of channels, reflections and book reviews. The JAR Network space carries no restrictions in terms of language, length, topic or theme and aims to represent the diversity of positions and practices of artistic research regardless of whether or not they coincide with JAR’s approach. If you would like to contribute, please contact JAR using the website contact form and your proposal will be discussed by the editorial board. Please click here for more information.

If you don’t have one already, register for a free account on the RC and use the online space to design and submit your research. JAR provides editorial and technical guidance with these processes.

Performance practices of music are becoming more and more intertwined with the context of artistic research. This issue of Ruukku examines the relations of artistic research with the performance and presentation of music: what kind of music performance practices does artistic research produce or enable?

In this context, performance practices point to a wide range of ways of making music heard, such as concert traditions and related experimental settings, communal music making, playing outside the performance context, as well as non-real-time performance through different media and sound installations. In addition, the theme of the issue examines the outreach of current music performance practices: what kind of audiences does artistic research in music attain? What kind of role does the audience take in this context? How does music affect different groups of people, or the environment, or society?

Artistic research as an experimental, avant-garde artform opens up a wide range of possibilities for music to be presented or heard. The traditional concert setting, where the roles of the musicians and the audience are predetermined, can take on new forms through, for example, shared agency and approaches that critically examine human-centeredness. Medial, social, spatial, environmental, or technological experiments also open up possibilities for performing music.

On the other hand, the scientific ethos of artistic research can cause friction with the essentially non-semantic nature of music, with the sharing, thinking, being and experiencing of music that takes place directly through sound. How does the academic dimension of artistic research manifest or articulate in the performance of music?

We invite actors in the field of music and sound art to present, examine and critically reflect on the current manifestations of music within the scope of artistic research. The purpose of the issue is to gather an overview of the diversity of artistic research in music at the current moment, as well as to form a critical discussion forum for actors in the field. We welcome Research Catalogue expositions that approach the topic through artistic practice and case studies, as well as contributions stemming from social and theoretical starting points.

For example, the expositions may cover the following topics:

• Discussing experimental performance practices of artistic research in music and the creative processes underlying them.

• Manifestations of the epistemic dimension of artistic research in music performance practices.

• Impact of artistic research in music: how and where does music-related artistic research have an impact (e.g. the social impact of music)?

• How do each artist-researchers consider the impact of their own research? And how is the impact seen from outside of specialised music communities?

• Music performer and audience: what kind of settings of musical agency does artistic research open up?

• To which audiences is artistic research of music presented, where, how? What kind of roles can the audience have? What about music without an audience?

Issue's editors are Anu Lampela, Otso Lähdeoja and Saijaleena Rantanen. 

We ask you to create your research exposition proposals in the Research Catalogue (RC) publishing platform at http://www.researchcatalogue.net.

Note! The use of RC requires a full user account (see ‘register' and choose ‘full account'). In addition to the theme and its discussion, the exposition must include the planned structure in the RC platform. Please submit your proposals (complete expositions) via RC (‘submit for review', and choose the portal ‘RUUKKU') by 15 June 2023.

You can discuss draft submissions with the editors until 15 May 2023. In this case, you must share the exposition with the editors using RC's link share function. From the exposition menu, choose ‘share', and select the last option (‘When enabled…'). Note that the actual share settings are not modified, and the exposition remains private. With the share link, you can present your exposition to others and continue working on it. Confirm the selection and send the link via e-mail to the address below.

For additional information about the issue, and discussing draft submissions, please contact Saijaleena Rantanen at saijaleena.rantanen@uniarts.fi. 

Your membership associated with _t.e.s.t_@example.com is expired. JOIN or RENEW NOW!

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Music & Letters 104.1

The latest issue (104.1) of Music & Letters is now available!

Articles:

James Burke, ‘The Custodial History of the Sadler Partbooks (Oxford, Bodleian Library MSS Mus. e. 1–5)’

Danielle Padley, ‘From Ancient to Modern: Identifying Anglicanism in an Anglo-Jewish Hymnal’

Esther M. Morgan-Ellis, ‘Mediated Community and Participatory Blackface in Gillette Original Community Sing (CBS, 1936–1937)’

Benjamin Court ‘Cardew’s Lessons: The Scratch Orchestra’s Amateur Democracy (1967-1973)’

Review Article:

Karen Desmond, ‘The Indicative Mood: A Response to Margaret Bent’

Plus twenty book reviews… Happy reading!

VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research

The brand of jazz that developed in the Kansas City area in the period from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is recognised as both a distinct stylistic variation within the larger genre and a transitional stage between earlier forms of African-American music, such as ragtime and blues, and later, more modern forms, up to and including bebop. Kansas City’s brand of jazz has been described as “the most straightforward and direct style which has been developed outside New Orleans,” by Hughues Panassié and Madeleine Gautier in their Dictionary of Jazz. Kansas City jazz has inspired the creation of a museum and has been the subject of a feature-length film, Robert Altman’s 1996 “Kansas City,” and even a sentimental rock song, “Eternal Kansas City” by Van Morrison.

The first comprehensive work on the subject in over 15 years, this book draws on new research to delve deeper into music of the American Midwest that evolved into Kansas City jazz, and includes profiles of individual musicians who developed very different styles within or beyond the framework of the sub-genre. Kansas City Jazz focuses on the broader themes and the stories of the major personalities whose individual talents came together to create the larger whole of Kansas City’s distinctive brand of jazz.

Rhythm Changes: Jazz, Culture, Discourse

Stanbridge’s new book, Rhythm Changes: Jazz, Culture, Discourse, takes its title from the expression used by jazz musicians to refer to the ubiquitous chord changes of George and Ira Gershwin’s celebrated song, ‘I Got Rhythm’, from the 1930 Broadway musical Girl Crazy. The book offers a unique perspective on the history and development of jazz, addressing the music, its makers, and its social and cultural contexts, as well as the various discourses – especially those of academic analysis and journalistic criticism – that have served to influence the creation, interpretation, and reception of this distinctive cultural form.

Tackling a diverse series of issues, encompassing race, class, nationalism, authenticity, irony, parody, genre, musical meaning, romanticism, gender, art, commercialism, technology, sound recording, and musical form and style, the book adopts a radically contextualist viewpoint on artistic and cultural practices, suggesting new ways of thinking and talking about jazz and its history. In addition to his own provocative insights, Stanbridge challenges many established scholarly approaches in the field, whether those of analytical formalism, cultural elitism, critical idealism, or national and racial exceptionalism, providing a much-needed and long-overdue intervention in the current academic orthodoxies of Jazz Studies research.

Your membership associated with _t.e.s.t_@example.com is expired. JOIN or RENEW NOW!

Follow Us | Connect with Us

WARNING:
If you choose to unsubscribe, you will no longer receive any emails from JEN, including membership benefits & renewal information, and the announcement of events & programs.