September News from the Jazz Education Network Research Interest Group

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the September edition of the JEN Research Interest Group newsletter. Below please find a variety of news items, announcements, callouts, new publications, and job opportunities. As most of our work has moved online so is the 2021 JEN conference. Watch for detailed announcements next week as well as new website features. The research presentations will be on Wednesday, January 6 with additional poster options throughout the conference - look for invitations and further details also over the coming two weeks.

Applications for the EFCF/JEN Research Fellowship are open until October 15. The EFCF/JEN Research Fellowship is intended to provide opportunities for a serious educator/student/music historian (such as senior researchers, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students) to conduct a directed research project associated with the archival collections at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Applications for this $5,000 award with additional $1,000 travel budget are open now until October 15. Please consider applying and share with your colleagues and students - more information can be found here.

The second edition of the Journal for Jazz Education in Research and Practice is in the final stages of editing with a projected publication date of December 2020. Please encourage your library to order a subscription - subscriptions and single copies available here. Also consider advertising for yourself, for your school, for your company in the upcoming edition. Ads will be due by October 15 - see details below - please share with your colleagues!

Please feel free to share this news compilation and invite colleagues to join the mailing list and/or Facebook page. Remember to check the updated job listings here. 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
Editor, JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice)

The Jazz Education Network was founded to support and sustain the art form that was born out of the legacy of black resistance. Our music calls us to speak out and actively work on behalf of justice and equality. We share in the pain and disgust of watching another black citizen murdered in public view as they pleaded for their life. JEN stands with #blacklivesmatter and all other organizations and individuals who are protesting the unrelenting and corrupt racist system that does not value black Americans in our society.

The music known as jazz grew up in New Orleans, in the decades after Emancipation, as Black and Creole people founded social clubs with their own marching bands. As it evolved, jazz remained a resistance music precisely because it was the sound of Black Americans building something together, in the face of repression. But at the end of the 1960s, just as calls for Black Power were motivating musicians to create their own publishing houses, venues and record labels, a new force emerged: Schools and universities across the country began welcoming jazz as America’s so-called “classical music,” canonizing its older styles and effectively freezing it in place.

This year, the pandemic and the protest movement against racial injustice have created a moment of enormous potential. Conversations about radical change and new beginnings have crept into seemingly every aspect of American life. But as jazz musicians reckon with the events of 2020, they have found themselves torn between the music’s roots in Black organizing and its present-day life in the academy.

The very institutional acceptance that many musicians sought in the mid-to-late-20th century has hitched jazz to a broken and still-segregated education system. Partly as a result, the music has become inaccessible to, and disconnected from, many of the very people who created it: young Black Americans, poorer people and others at the societal margins.

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“You know, wash your damn hands,” he told the crowd, as can be heard on “Axiom,” a new live album culled from that weeklong residency. “But we’re not running.”

The concert world as a whole is in crisis, but perhaps no genre is as vulnerable as jazz, which depends on a fragile ecosystem of performance venues. In pre-pandemic New York, the genre’s creative and commercial center, young players still converged to hone their craft and veterans held court in prestigious rooms like the Village Vanguard and the Blue Note. It’s an economic and creative network that has sustained the genre for decades.

But after suffering nearly six months of lost business, New York jazz venues have begun sounding the alarm that without significant government relief, they might not last much longer. Even with support, some proprietors said, the virus may have rendered their business model extinct.

Perhaps you have a comic strip that you wrote on issues of representation in the music industry, or a piece of short fiction that considers popular music heritage, work that has not yet found a home. Or maybe your experiences as a musician, a music fan or researcher have provided you with rich characters, begging to be explored through a dialogue or a short story. We invite you to flex your imagination as a tool for analysis and criticism, to find a fictional form for your insights and arguments, and to imagine potential popular music futures (utopian or dystopian) as a means to critique the present.

Inspired by the work of our Guest Editor, Dr Ash Watson and the Fiction Desk of The Sociological Review, the next issue of Riffs will bring together work that uses fiction to critically explore issues within popular music and to communicate this to a wide audience.
Dr Ash Watson is based at the Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney. She leads the public sociology project So Fi Zine, and is Fiction Editor of The Sociological Review. Her debut novel Into the Sea was published by Brill in 2020.

Riffs publishes contributions from writers from academic and non-academic backgrounds. We encourage submissions which include written, visual, and musical elements, interrogate traditional and experimental forms of communication of ideas and arguments, and collaborations between writers, poets, musicians, composers and visual artists. For examples of pieces based on previous prompts, have a look through our current and past issues, available to download from our website linked above.
Deadline for a title and 300-word synopsis of the proposed work – October 4th, 2020. Please also include your name, a short bio and contact email.

Deadline is OCTOBER 4, 2020.

12th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research

Hosted by mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Conference will be hosted as a live online event: from April 7-9th, 2021.

Deadline for submissions via the Research Catalogue (RC): Sept 30th, 2020.

Deadline for registering as full users at the RC: Ten days earlier – Sept 20th, 2020.

The 12th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research will invite submissions that relate to three attractors care, dare, and share. It will be the first SAR conference organized as a live online event. We are calling for artistic researchers to present their work, processes, methods, discoveries, knowledge interventions, new insights, understandings, and to engage in exchange – in actions and words, complex and simple, by conventional and unconventional, robust, and fragile means.

We encourage original contributions that take on the challenge of bringing liveness to this mediated online event. Each contribution shall receive ample discussion time (in real time via video conference).

We will support the following presentation formats:

Presentation using pre-produced material, which will be “presented” and integrated in an interactive online conference;
Streamed live-performances/demonstrations.

ISJAC, in conjunction with our host institution the University of Texas at Austin, has decided to reschedule its “Jazz Composers’ Symposium” (originally slated for May, 2021) for May 12-14, 2022 in Austin when we’re much more confident our members and guests will be comfortable/able to travel and attend. To that end, we’re already making plans and eagerly looking forward to welcoming you to Texas for what we’re confident will be an absolutely terrific gathering of our profession!!

In the meantime, there’s a lot new and coming in the near future at ISJAC that you won’t want to miss!!

“Un[Chart]ed Territory” – an ISJAC ZoomFest – will debut in March, 2021. We are really excited about this new venture and the opportunity it provides to unite our community while engaging new artists, audiences, and programming. Stay tuned!! More info will be forthcoming in the very near future!
ISJAC Shorts – a new and regularly occurring series of 5-7 minute videos submitted by our members – MEANING YOU!!! Videos will be selected by a committee of professional composers and educators and chaired/curated by Dr. Matt White (Coastal Carolina University). Topics will be exciting, creative, timely, and essential. Stay tuned for more information and a call for submissions.
ISJAC/USF Prize for Emerging Black Composers – While ISJAC, most emphatically, adds its voice to the chorus of those appalled by recent incidents and the systemic racism and injustices it has brought so clearly to light; we, like so many others, have struggled with how we can meaningfully address this issue given our limited resources. While it’s a small step, we are inaugurating an annual Prize to support and encourage young black, jazz composers. Details and a call for scores will be announced shortly.
Owen Prize in Jazz Composition – This annual prize is also back and will be awarded for an outstanding big band composition this year. Details forthcoming.

Finally, ISJAC’s annual “Giving Campaign” will, once again, take place in October. Like so many other non-profit arts organizations, the virus has had a profound impact on us. As a result, your financial support is needed now more than ever!! When the time comes, we hope you will give generously.

The fifth international conference on performance philosophy is hosted by University of the Arts Helsinki, and it is arranged in collaboration with the Performance Philosophy network.

Our time generates problems with an unprecedented scope, depth, complexity and ubiquity. As the problems we face change in nature so too must our ways of struggling with them. Planetary problems require new modes of collaboration, transversal combinations and inclusiveness, summoning all kinds of agents from different fields, with different experiences and views. At the same time, existing organisations are compelled to rethink their reasons for existence, their values and ways of functioning. Performance Philosophy (PP) is not immune to this challenge.

Performance Philosophy Problems 2021 (PPP 2021) asks: what kinds of problems does working in the field of performance philosophy lead us to encounter and to articulate, and what tools does it provide to face them? The conference invites its participants – artists, philosophers, scholars, artist-researchers and performance philosophers, regardless of their particular genre, school or discipline – to articulate the range of performance philosophy problems whose treatment calls for dialogue and collaboration between philosophy and the performing arts:

What kinds of problems in the contemporary world require an interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophy and performance, philosophers and performing artists? How has our way of articulating problems in these fields changed as a result of unfolding global catastrophes?

What kind of burning or smouldering problems does the contemporary or historical field of performance present to you as an artist, researcher, performer, spectator or educator? What are their philosophical implications, and how can philosophy help to face them?

Is there thinking within performance that presents problems that standard philosophy cannot approach, let alone solve? Are there philosophical problems that can only be detected and processed in and through performance philosophy?

In the wake of the global pandemic VIS #6 suggests focus on different aspects of contagion as a potent and multi-faceted concept, both literally and metaphorically. There are parallels and differences between the transmission of biological infection and the ways that artistic works and processes are shared, disseminated and spread – just as there are in distribution of knowledge, rumours and myths. In the arts it may manifest itself as inspiration, imitation, iteration, replication, mimetics, references, whispering games and in many more ways. How do we as artists infect each other? How is art and its associated ideas, aesthetics and forms transmitted – between artistic fields and between the arts as a whole and the receiver? Can art have any impact on the growing fear and protectionism between nations and regions? Are the forms within research for references and documentation a way of tracing patterns of artistic contagion?

Word from the author:

Reflectory, my second book on Pepper Adams, is the biography that I promised Pepper I’d wrote when he was dying of cancer. I had absolutely no idea that my Adams research would splinter in so many different directions - the annotated discography, the complete recordings, lyrics to his ballads, this web site - before I actually sat down and began to write this. For those who want to keep abreast of my work, please see the blog that I post on the first Monday of each month.

At one point during the aptly titled opening song ‘Feed the Fire’ at the 1993 Hamburg Jazz Festival, the improvising singer par excellence Betty Carter went to sing a line but the audience heard nothing – her microphone lead had dropped out of its socket. Where others might have stumbled, Carter magically weaved the equipment malfunction into a memorable and joyous moment. Without missing a beat, she raised her arms in the air, danced in a circle, reinserted the lead, and picked up where she left off with a quick-fire improvised line and a wry laugh – all the while, composing new music. For much of the performance, Carter was like a preacher moved by the spirit, singing an improvised language beyond literal meaning but that carried the weight and wonder of other worlds.

How do singers such as Betty Carter take command of the present moment, seemingly bending reality to their will? While more romantic notions of creativity might point to Carter, and others like her, being ‘touched by the spirit’, there are less lofty explanations related to the physical dimension of making music with the human body, as well as the singer’s skilful musical interplay with the other musicians and the audience. There are also complex cognitive and psychological processes that drive the ‘real-time’ spontaneous creation of music.

A greater appreciation of these factors has implications beyond jazz, for how we all live our lives, moment to moment. Much of our everyday lives is improvised. For example, aside from stressful situations that require a script in advance, nearly every conversation you have is a spontaneous creation conducted without preparation.

The operative word in Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott’s The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel is, of course, “necessary.” This sequel updates the themes explored in the award-winning The Corporation (TIFF ’03). The original film reacted to legal decisions that defined corporations as persons, and gave them the same legal rights as people. The new film examines how, since the 2008 economic collapse, corporations claim to have changed, passing themselves off as socially responsible.

A fine balance of righteous indignation and rapier insight, the film boasts numerous indelible moments. On the comical — and appalling — side, one of the co-founders of Bill Gates’ favourite private education firm, Bridge International, struggles to explain why it’s socially beneficial for them to profit off responsibilities traditionally borne by the government. Meanwhile, the World Economic Conference at Davos, that grotesque, neoliberal celebration of greed, is presented as a smug horror, a slightly better-dressed, less libidinous version of Passolini’s Salo.

Encyclopaedic and precise, with sharp visual flourishes, The New Corporation boasts a who’s who of thinkers and activists, including Anand Giridharadas, Robert Reich, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and first-term US congresswoman Katie Porter. A cheerful buzzsaw of common sense, Porter expertly decimates JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon during a congressional hearing. It’s an excellent reminder of the virtues of representative democracy — when you elect representatives who protect people and communities instead of corporations and capital.

Line By Line presents findings from an evaluation of Poetry Out Loud, a national arts education program supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and state and jurisdictional arts agencies. The quasi-experimental study—involving data collection from ten sample schools—assessed the program’s impact on poetry appreciation and engagement, social and emotional development, and academic performance.

How do we define improvised music? What is the relationship of highly improvised performances to the work they are performances of? How do we decide what are the important parts of an improvised musical work? In Intents and Purposes, Eric Lewis uses a series of case studies to challenge assumptions about what defines a musical work and musical performance, seeking to go beyond philosophical and aesthetic templates from Western classical music to foreground the distinctive practices and aesthetics of jazz. Pushing aside the assumption that composition and improvisation are different (or even opposed) musical practices, Lewis’s philosophically informed approach revisits key topics in musical ontology, such as how to define the triangle of composer-performer-listener, and the status of live performances in relation to scores and recordings. Drawing on critical race theory, feminist theory, new musicology, sociology, cognitive science, and genre theory, Lewis opens up new questions about agency in performance, as well as new ways of considering the historical relationships between improvisational practices with roots in different cultural frameworks. By showing how jazz can be both art, idea, and action all at the same time, Lewis offers a new way of seeing any improvised musical performance in a new culturally and aesthetically rich context.