April News from the Jazz Education Network Research Interest Group

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. Many of us are finishing the most extraordinary year of teaching in history with mostly online courses. I only know this year’s students from the shoulders up or as black squares - hopefully by August we’ll have more holistic perspectives. While it’s been difficult in many ways, I learned so much about integrating new technology and being much more strategic in teaching. Can’t wait to exchange experiences at the January conference in Dallas - registrations are open!

The deadline to submit for the third issue of JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice) is extended to May 1 - find submission info on the journal portal. The journal features a wide variety of contributions from full research articles, to quick tips, reflective essays, and book reviews. This is a great opportunity to share your work in a double-blind peer reviewed journal and contribute knowledge to the field . Also, please share the callout with your colleagues and students, feel free to contact me with questions!

The second issue of JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice) has arrived! It features 200 pages of research articles, case studies, tips, essays, and reviews, all peer-reviewed and edited throughout this past year. JEN membership includes full access on the JEN website, find it here. Please encourage your libraries to order a subscription to this invaluable resource for teachers and students alike from this link. And of course, consider a hard copy for your personal library.

I’m still hoping to get more feedback on possible strategies and initiatives for the JEN Research Interest Group. Here is a quick survey - click here and share your input and how you might want to be involved/ support the JEN Research Committee or the Journal Editorial Board, and any suggestions for future directions of our committee. Thank you so much for your input. You can also email me at mherzig@indiana.edu.

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.

Best Wishes for the start of a new semester and lots of positive news in 2021.

Sincerely,

Monika Herzig

JEN Research Interest Group Committee Chair
Editor, JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice)

Talk to enough musicians about the problems they see with corporate streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, and you’re bound to encounter a version of the following proposition, usually presented as a far-off hypothetical, if not an outright unattainable dream. What if we got together and built an alternative platform that prioritized the needs of independent musicians? What if we made the rules about who gets paid, and how? And what if we owned the company ourselves?

Catalytic Sound, a cooperative organization comprising 30 avant-garde instrumentalists and composers, is attempting to actualize this dream—and hoping to help other similarly minded musicians do the same for themselves. In January, the co-op’s partners launched Catalytic Soundstream, a small-scale streaming platform that charges listeners $10 per month for access to a rotating library of albums from the fringes of improvised music. The catalog is much more curated than the neverending buffets of the major platforms, with between 100 and 150 albums available at any given time and new ones swapped in and out every day. Most of these records feature one or more of the players who operate Catalytic and share equally in its revenue, an international and multi-generational roster of out-jazz and free improv luminaries that includes Joe McPhee, Tomeka Reid, Tashi Dorji, Ikue Mori, claire rousay, Chris Corsano, and Luke Stewart.

Esperanza Spalding has never been one to sit idle. Her wandering spirit has brought this 36-year-old musician major achievements over the past decade and pushed her work in new directions. In 2017, Spalding, a bassist, vocalist and producer, spent 77 straight hours in the studio, writing and arranging songs. The resulting album, "Exposure," was pressed directly to CD and vinyl for a limited release of just 7,777 copies. Her next project, "12 Little Spells," explored the healing power of music; each song correlated with a different body part.

Continuing in that vein, Spalding’s new release, a suite of three songs called "Triangle," is meant to bolster listeners, physically and emotionally. But this time, she’s setting her sights on pandemic tension.

"I was remembering ways that music had supported me," she said on a recent call from her native Portland, Ore., "and wondering if we could go deeper into those themes."

Spalding, an easygoing conversationalist who effortlessly accesses a broad range of scientific vernacular, lights up when unpacking the medicinal powers of music. But with her youthful curiosity and considered cadence, it doesn’t feel like you’re talking to a stuffy professor. Over the past year, she spent time building a retreat in Portland where like-minded artists can think and create without real-world interruptions.

The jazz world owes a debt of gratitude to the filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, who died on March 25th, at the age of seventy-nine. The French auteur’s career included such stylistically disparate films as "A Sunday in the Country" and "Death Watch," but his signature work may be the moody, impressionistic " ’Round Midnight," from 1986, about an aging American jazz musician in nineteen-fifties Paris and the admiring fan who befriends and helps him. It’s ironic (and maybe fitting) that it took a foreign director to do justice to a quintessential American art form. " ’Round Midnight" is the film that jazz deserves.

American jazz movies tend to resemble the "scare films" in driver’s-ed classes, cautionary tales that show what happens when we don’t follow the rules. From "The Jazz Singer," in 1927, right up through this past year’s "Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom" and "The United States vs. Billie Holiday," the story that Hollywood has told about jazz is one involving over-the-top caricatures, the lives of its geniuses rife with criminality, runaway libidos, wanton self-destruction, and obsessive madness. If American cinema has a message to impart, it seems to be that jazz musicians are trouble—best observed from a safe (read: morally superior) distance. They’re exotic creatures, these movies say. They’re not like us.

" ’Round Midnight" is the exception. Tavernier treats the jazz milieu with respect, subtlety, and restraint. (He also co-wrote the screenplay, with David Rayfiel.) There is no overheated drama to be found here. There is a love story, but, rather than a fraught tale of sexual misadventure, it’s a platonic one—and it’s between two men. That one of them is Black and the other is white doesn’t overtly factor into their relationship, a reminder that the opportunity for regular work was not the only reason that many great African-American jazz artists fled to Europe in that era. (The film was inspired, in part, by Francis Paudras’s "Dance of the Infidels," an account of the pianist Bud Powell’s expatriate years in France.)

Futures of Liveness or

Hello, Liveness. Where are you?

Research Academy Performative Practice with Philip Auslander

August 21 to 26 2021

The RESEARCH ACADEMY invites applications from artists, practitioners, and theorists working in the field of theatre and performance to be part of this annual international research-lab based at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). In this 7th edition our focus is on Liveness as a concept and practice in the performing arts.

Where are we in terms of Liveness today? Without a doubt, the pandemic has intensified the longing for Liveness at the same time as making it disappear - perhaps forever? Will it come back, and, if so, will it look and feel the same as it did before the covid 19 cessation of live events? What does this mean for artists? Will digital forms of Liveness permanently take their place alongside co-presentational forms? Will audiences return to live events?

As the quality of Liveness is ever changing and interacting with the landscape of media we ask: Have the conditions for Liveness shifted - through the internet as the new leading medium, through streaming services, through digital interactive media, through the gaming industry?

One of the leading voices in the discussion on Liveness, Philip Auslander, will share his concepts, ask current questions and challenge both himself and the participants to come up with research projects to capture new aspects of Liveness in the performing arts.

The RESEARCH ACADEMY 2021 provides a supportive environment for experimentation and discussion, each participant pursuing her or his or their own research, sharing and taking it to the next level with the help of peer-to-peer feedback. The process will be facilitated by Philip Auslander and Gunter Loesel.

Women Jazz Composers Wanted!

Now accepting entries for Seattle Women’s Jazz Orchestra’s 9th Annual Composition Contest for Women Composers.

Winner and Honorable Mention composers receive an honorarium. The winning and honorable mention compositions will be performed and recorded live by the Seattle Women’s Jazz Orchestra and a guest artist as part of the Earshot Jazz Festival in Seattle.

Entries will be accepted from women only. Deadline for submissions is June 30, 2021.

The contest was created to encourage the composition and performance of the highest possible quality jazz ensemble literature playable by high school, college and professional bands alike.

The winners will be announced by August 31, 2021.

We are happy to announce the ALMAT Meta Exposition! Algorithms that Matter (ALMAT) is an artistic research project that aims at understanding the increasing influence of algorithms, translating them into aesthetic positions in sound. The Meta Exposition is a reorganisation of the vast materials we collected in the project from 2017–2020 in the form of the Continuous Exposition, a network of Research Catalogue entries: texts, sketches, sounds, images, videos, transcriptions, code. In the past year, all these materials were annotated with meta data, and a parser software was developed to store the data in the form of a novel search engine accessible at https://metaexpo.almat.iem.at .

Throughout ALMAT, we built new perspectives on algorithmic agency by subjecting the realm of algorithms to sonic experimentation and diffractive reading. We have worked on several sound and intermedia pieces, invited a number of artists to participate in artistic research residencies, and we collaborated with national and international partners to organise events such as workshops and new formats in artistic research around the topics of ALMAT. The Meta Exposition now offers an alternative way to browse these instances of the project, and to construct new relations. It is itself an instance of algorithmic experimentation, and it augments the familiar hypertext interface of the Research Catalogue with a search engine.

The American Brahms Society is seeking applications for its Karl Geiringer Scholarship in Brahms Studies, from students in the final stages of preparing a doctoral dissertation written in English. Work relating to Brahms should form a significant component of the dissertation, but it need not be the exclusive or even primary focus. The society gives equal consideration to research in historical musicology, analysis, performance practice, and cultural history, among others.

Completed applications will consist of a cover letter, including the applicant’s address, phone number, email address, and institutional affiliation; and a description of the project of no more than 500 words. Two confidential letters, including one from the dissertation adviser, should be submitted separately.

All materials should be submitted electronically as pdf files to Scott Murphy at smurphy@ku.edu.

The deadline for submission of materials is June 1, 2021.

Finalists will be invited to submit a sample chapter. Recipients will be notified in November.

The STP&A Conference is the oldest and one of the most influential academic gatherings in the field of arts management and cultural policy. STP&A participants are drawn from a broad range of disciplines including political science, sociology, economics, law, arts management, arts education, art history, museum studies, cultural studies, education, and policy studies as well as arts managers and artists.

Each year, the STP&A Conference Committee welcomes proposals that address the following topics:

Accessibility & social inclusion
Arts and cultural participation, marketing, & audience development
Arts learning and/or training
Arts management, business models, & strategic thinking
Arts & technology
Arts workforce & labor issues
Cultural/creative industries & market structures
Cultural democracy
Cultural economics and impact assessment
Cultural planning & community development
Cultural policy
Diversity, equity, & inclusion in the arts
Festivals & events
Heritage policy & administration
Indigenous cultural practices
Popular & high culture
Society & evolving aesthetics

Proposals Due May 1st

Proposal deadline: May 28, 2021

IICSI McGill is pleased to present the Call for Proposals for "Echoes of a Distance: Music, Protest and Community in Confined Times," which seeks to examine the relationship between music and social resistance in light of the circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic and is intended as a "meeting point for artists, activists, and academics to reflect and share perspectives on these issues." The conference will run from November 19-20, 2021.

Applicants may submit text-based materials, research-creation projects, performances and artworks, as well as hybrids of these forms. The following topics are suggested (though applicants are not limited to these):
Social impacts of the strategies of collective music creation during lockdown;
Sonic dimension of demonstrations in the COVID-era;
Music creation inspired by/related to social movements in times of confinement;
Political significance of soundscapes emptied of their human presences;
Telematic performances motivated by social and political struggles;
Affective dimensions of imposed distancing, on a sonic and political level;
The transformation of the perceptual modalities of sound in relation to the pandemic.

Proposals may be submitted in English or French, and should include a short bio (250 words maximum), as well as an abstract or presentation of the project (500 words maximum). Projects that are not purely text-based should also include links to excerpts of the work (or to similar previous work, if the proposed work is yet to be presented). The deadline for proposals is May 28. For more details, see the full call for proposals here at the link below.

Deadline: May 31. 2021

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, 2021.

JAR aceita submissões em Espanhol, Português, Alemão como também em Inglês.
JAR akzeptiert Einreichungen auf Spanisch, Portugiesisch, Deutsch und Englisch.
JAR acepta envíos en español, portugués, alemán e inglés.
JAR accepts submissions in Spanish, Portuguese and German as well as English.

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.

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.

For our guidelines on submissions visit:
www.jar-online.net/submissions/
For submissions information, and advice on whether your research is suitable for JAR, contact the Managing Editor, using the web contact form.

JAR works with an international editorial board and a large panel of peer-reviewers.
Editor in Chief: Michael Schwab
Managing Editor: Barnaby Drabble
Peer Review Editor: Julian Klein
Editorial Board: Annette Arlander, Danny Butt, Barnaby Drabble, Yara Guasque, Julian Klein, Paul Landon, Barbara Lüneburg, Manuel Ángel Macía, Mareli Stolp and Mariela Yeregui.
Editorial Assistant: Ioannis Andronikidis

JAR is published by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR), an independent, non-profit association. You can support JAR by becoming an individual or institutional member of SAR. More information can be found here.

Contact: jar@jar-online.net

The themes of this issue discuss the methodical, conceptual and practical connections of artistic research to slowness and silence, inertia and tranquility. What kinds of dimensions can silence or slowness open up and catalyse in artistic research? What might silence challenge, and what slowness? Depending on the perspective, slowness can either be worth pursuing or it can clearly refer to "retardation" or a lack (e.g. bureaucracy). Silence, in turn, can be a value to be sought for: we often long for the quiet of nature or wish for the traffic noise to muffle down. Silence can be an issue that makes communication difficult, or even aggressive/passive resistance, for example when an initiative receives only silence in return. Are there certain specific aspects of knowing and being that are associated with slowness and silence?

As a jazz musician, filmmaker, anthropologist, sexologist, and crime novelist, the boundlessly curious German autodidact Ernest Borneman exemplified the conflicting cultural and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. In this long-awaited English translation, acclaimed historian Detlef Siegfried chronicles Borneman’s journey from a young Jewish Communist in Nazi Berlin to his emergence as a celebrated (and reliably controversial) transatlantic polymath. Through an innovative structure organized around the human senses, this biography memorably portrays a figure whose far-flung obsessions comprised a microcosm of postwar intellectual life.In Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space James Gor-don Williams reframes the nature and purpose of jazz improvisation to illuminate the cultural work being done by five creative musicians between 2005 and 2019. The political thought of five African American improvisers—trumpeters Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire, drummers Billy Higgins and Terri Lyne Carrington, and pianist Andrew Hill—is documented through insightful, multilayered case studies that make explicit how these musicians articu-late their positionality in broader society.

Informed by Black feminist thought, these case studies unite around the theory of Black musical space that comes from the lived expe-riences of African Americans as they improvise through daily life. The central argument builds upon the idea of space-making and the geographic imagination in Black Geographies theory. Williams considers how these musicians interface with contemporary social movements like Black Lives Matter, build alternative institutional models that challenge gender imbalance in improvisation culture, and practice improvisation as joyful affirmation of Black value and mobility. Both Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire innovate musical strategies to address systemic violence. Billy Higgins’s performance is discussed through the framework of breath to understand his politics of inclusive space. Terri Lyne Carrington confronts patriar-chy in jazz culture through her Social Science music project. The work of Andrew Hill is exam-ined through the context of his street theory, revealing his political stance on performance and pedagogy. All readers will be elevated by this innovative and timely book that speaks to issues that continue to shape the lives of African Americans today.