June News from the JEN Research Interest Group

Welcome to the June edition of the JEN Research Interest Group newsletter. Below please find a variety of news items, announcements, callouts, new publications, and job opportunities.

Concerts and in-person events are returning quickly and life is getting busy. During the pandemic we had an opportunity to contemplate the meaning of our profession and passions and many found new focus and new insights. I would like to encourage everyone to write down those thoughts, to keep learning experiences fresh in our memories before habits and busy schedules take over and push us back into old routines. I’m taking stock right now on what I’m taking along into the new normal, for example many meetings that can be done virtually to safe travel time and new family habits that I want to keep. Many are working on recording and writing projects as a result of extra time and deep emotions to express - I look forward to listening and reading and please feel free to share any new publication notices for this newsletter.

We’re in the middle of the Documenting Jazz conference presented by the University of Edinburgh, June 23-26. Here is the link to the program - jump right in, it’s free and virtual with many fascinating and important international presentations and conversations. I will present my recent research on the ABCs of Jazz Education, participate in a panel discussion on Jazz and Gender with the co-editors of our upcoming Routledge Companion Book as well as a panel discussion on artistic research and a lecture/recital by Oliver Nelson Jr on his father’s music.

Thank you to all the offers to join the Editorial Board for JAZZ. The peer review process is beneficial for authors and reviewers alike and creates important dialogue and stronger publications. The current review process is nearly completed and Volume 3 of JAZZ will be available for the upcoming JEN conference in Dallas. Remember that access to JAZZ is a JEN member benefit and available on the website for full members. And please make sure to have your school library buy a subscription so students and faculty can benefit from this growing knowledge base.

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.
Registration for the 13th annual JEN Conference, January 5-8, 2022 in Dallas, TX is now open - see you there, in person!

Sincerely,

Monika Herzig

JEN Research Interest Group Committee Chair

Editor, JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice)

Professional Development Brought To You!

Jazz Education Network Educator Summer Online Institute
July 28 & 29

Members • $50
Non-Members • $50 + Membership

Replays & Completion Certificates Available

$5 off registration before June 30 with code "june5"

The Jazz Education Network's Educator Summer Online Institute is a two-day, professional development seminar for all jazz educators. 18 professional development sessions taught by world-class artist-educators include:

Jazz History Pre-1950 with Bria Skonberg
Jazz Ear Training with Rosana Eckert (sponsored by Univ. of N. Texas)
Latin Jazz History with Francisco Torres
Guided Jazz Listening with Vincent Gardner
Introduction to Jazz Recordings with Seton Hawkins
The Beauty of Obscurity with Brad Leali (sponsored by Univ. of N. Texas)
Putting Jazz Back into Jazz Band with Ollie Liddell & Jeff Wolfe
Now What? Tips for the Developing Jazz Band with Mike Kamuf (sponsored by Alfred Music)
Inside the Successful Big Band with Alan Baylock (sponsored by Univ. N. Texas)
Pathways Toward Greatness with Bob Sinicrope (sponsored by MakeMusic)
The Feeling Behind Rhythm with Quincy Davis (sponsored by Univ. of N. Texas)
Teaching Jazz in the Concert Band Setting with Mike Steinel (sponsored by Hal Leonard)
Starting a Vocal Jazz Ensemble with Roger Emerson (sponsored by Hal Leonard)
Unlearning to Teach with Terri Lynn Carrington & Aja Burrell Wood
Breaking Out of Our Implicit Biases with Ashley Shabankareh, Laura Gentry, & David Kauffman
Selecting Your Choir Repertoire with Matt Falker (sponsored by Anchor Music)
Vocal Music Reading Session - Independent Arrangers & Publishers - with Kerry Marsh
Instrumental Music Reading Session - Various Levels - with Shamie Royston & Julius Tolentino

plus a special 2-day intensive workshop
(requires separate registration)

Creating A Free Virtual Practice Room
with Jason Camelio & Ray Seol
sponsored by Berklee Global

The exhibitions, concerts, performances, and workshops organised at the University of the Arts Helsinki’s (Uniarts Helsinki) Research Pavilion showcase artistic research and its various approaches.

If the Sibelius Monument in Helsinki had a prototype, what would it be like? Anyone can answer this question next August by attending one of the workshops entitled Walking as Prototype, arranged as part of Uniarts Helsinki’s Research Pavilion. The workshops are organised by artist-researchers Tero Heikkinen, Petri Kaverma, and Denise Ziegler, and the workshop participants approach the monument by making sketches and taking notes, thus reverting it back to an imaginary prototype stage.

Workshops like these are just one example of artistic research. Hietsun Paviljonki, the communal and cultural building located near the Hietaranta public beach in Helsinki, will be a busy hub for artistic research from June 5 to August 29, 2021 as it becomes home to Uniarts Helsinki’s Research Pavilion, a project that has previously been organised in the context of the Venice Biennale.

Events with a research twist until the end of August
This year’s Research Pavilion includes nearly forty exhibitions, concerts, performances, discussions, and workshops, which the audience can enjoy. Over sixty artists and researchers take part in the activities of the Pavilion.

Artistic research is manifested in the exhibited works and events in many ways. Research may provide the starting point, background or method to the works and projects, or it may be their essence.

The Research Pavilion has previously been organised in the context of the Venice Biennale in 2015, 2017, and 2019. The summer of 2021 brings the Pavilion to Helsinki, where it is organised at the same time with the inaugural Helsinki Biennale. The fourth edition of Uniarts Helsinki’s Research Pavilion is supported by the Louise and Göran Ehrnrooth Foundation.

More information about the Research Pavilion, including a full list of events, can be found at the link below.

Researchers in artistic and practice-based research are invited to submit proposals for presentations at this year’s symposium on artistic research. The symposium will be held on November 24-25, on the theme of Articulations. The deadline for proposals is September 1.

Articulation is a central feature of artistic research. Articulation can be regarded as a process where the relationship between different elements is made discernible, tangible and possible to mediate, and where the forms, dependencies and consequences of understanding are made visible. The purpose of this year’s symposium is to open up a dialogue about articulation as “theorising in practice”, about knowledge-related freedoms and opportunities, but perhaps also about the rights and obligations that research entails. How does artistic articulation impact on theory formation and concept development? How can artistic articulation be expanded within other research fields? In what way does artistic research follow up the articulations it develops?

The symposium will focus on the articulations and the theoretical and conceptual development that occurs within the framework for artistic research, but will also critically consider the importance of articulations as knowledge contributions in more general terms.
In order to deepen the discussion, we are inviting proposals for articulations that, in addition to relating to the overall theme, also consciously and creatively relate to the combined online and on-location format of the event.

We welcome abstracts that address subjects such as:
how articulation, as theorising in practice, can be made conscious and visible, be materialised and changed within the framework for an artistic research project
how specific articulations can contribute to creating understanding in a certain context
how artistic articulation can function critically in relation to academia, professions and the market
how artistic research can contribute to a broadened research discussion on the challenges of conceptual articulation.

Aside from colloquial communication and creative expression, writing is the main apparatus for the production and assessment of knowledge and the preservation of human memory. Since the emergence of artistic research, the problem of writing has been one its most actively debated issues. When understood as a form of knowledge production, artistic research has both utilised and questioned the known forms of scientific writing in portraying the artistic undertakings inherent to it. Even the necessity to include any explanatory text in artistic research has been argued against in an effort to substantiate the arts’ own most aesthetic and epistemological qualities. In appreciating these qualities, artistic research appropriates forms of conventionalised writing by disputing, disrupting and playing with their institutionalised practice and creates completely new forms of reflective articulation.

Artist-researchers increasingly work with multi-media formats to creatively utilise, challenge and supplement words and written texts, and to integrate reflective appraisal into artworks themselves. The technologies of writing, including digital ones, offer opportunities for exploring the potentials and limits of the materials, media and approaches to writing in artistic research. The conference Elastic Writing in Artistic Research invites participants to introduce and explore extended forms of writing that critically substantiate the aesthetic and creative features and diverse knowledges involved in artistic research. It brings together artistic doctorates and other artist-researchers to examine together how to carve, tear, scratch, score, sketch, draw, trace, design and outline artistic research in performing arts in the post-Anthropocene, pandemic era.

The conference addresses its thematic through a threefold grid: Forms of Writing (with No Hands), Dis(guised) Writing and Techno-Writing. To introduce timely perspectives on each strand, they each will be addressed by an invited presenter with experience in issues related to writing in, with and about art and artistic research. The conference days will begin with an exploratory writing workshop involving both embodied and digitally-mediated approaches to collaborative writing. Additionally, continuous feedback, exchange and collaborative writing opportunities are offered for the conference participants via shared digital platforms. The overall set up of the conference will allow participants to envision approaches to writing in artistic research by different writing agents through different media, as well as writing for different audiences.

150+ performers! 24 hours straight! All artistic disciplines, from all over the world, and all completely free!

On August 13–14, we are excited to present the second iteration of our all-night improvised arts festival: IF 2021. This celebration of in-the-moment creation will feature new, improvised performances from an impressive variety of creators—musicians, poets, dancers, performance artists, theatre practitioners, and much more—all responding to their ongoing experience with the pandemic. We invite you to join us for this unforgettable night: a world of a concert from the comfort of your home.

We’re looking forward to sharing more details about the festival—including the full festival lineup—soon. In the meantime, you can check out the website below.

Sound Changes responds to a need in improvisation studies for more work that addresses the diversity of global improvisatory practices and argues that by beginning to understand the particular, material experiences of sonic realities that are different from our own, we can address the host of other factors that are imparted or sublimated in performance. These factors range from the intimate affect associated with a particular performer’s capacity to generate a distinctive “voicing,” or the addition of an unexpected sonic intervention only possible with one particular configuration of players in a specific space and time. Through a series of case studies drawn from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania, Sound Changes offers readers an introduction to a range of musical expressions across the globe in which improvisation plays a key role and the book demonstrates that improvisation is a vital site for the production of emergent social relationships and meanings. As it does this work, Sound Changes situates the increasingly transcultural dimensions of improvised music in relation to emergent networks and technologies, changing patterns of migration and immigration, shifts in the political economy of music, and other social, cultural, and economic factors.

Improvisation studies is a recently developed, but growing, interdisciplinary field of study. The discipline—which has only truly come into focus in the early part of the twenty-first century—has been building a lexicon of key terms and developing assumptions about core practices. Yet, the full breadth of improvisatory practices has remained a vexed, if not impossibly ambitious, subject of study. This volume offers a step forward in the movement away from critical tendencies that tend to homogenize and reduce practices and vocabularies in the name of the familiar. Chapter authors include John Corbett, Jason Robinson, Kirstie Dorr, Beverley Milton-Edwards, Sally MacArthur, Waldo Garrido, Jemma Decristo, Mike Heffley, Monica Dalidowicz, and Hafez Modirzadeh.

This special double issue of Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, “Volume II: Improvisation, Musical Communities, and the COVID-19 Pandemic,” invited musicians, performers, scholars, arts presenters, and other cultural workers to reflect on the extraordinary challenges posed by the pandemic and to begin envisaging a post-pandemic musical landscape. As issue editors Daniel Fischlin, Laura Risk, and Jesse Stewart write, "One year into the pandemic, with tropes of exhaustion vs. resilience circulating like viral contagions in their own right, the voices here suggest something else: the beginnings of a dream of liveness."

This issue features more than thirty scholarly articles, essays, reflections, testimonies, interviews, and creative offerings reflecting on the ongoing impact of the pandemic. In addition to the many community voicings included, the issue also contains six peer-reviewed articles:

Hadi Bastani, Anna Linardou, Rojin Sharafi, and Ioannis Tsioulakis: “Musical Careers in Constant Crises: An Asynchronous Dialogue from Tehran to Athens, via Belfast and Vienna”
Juan Calvi: "La escena de las músicas creativas improvisadas en Iberoamérica: de la música en vivo a la música online y al desierto pospandemia digital"
Monika Herzig: “What the World Needs Now is Jazz"
Jessie Cox and Sam Yulsman: "Listening through Webs for/of Creole Improvisation: Weaving Music II as a Case Study"
Glen Whitehead: "'Take it Outside, People!': Bridging Ecoacoustics and Improvised Music"
Kate Galloway and Rachael Fuller: "'Unmute' Bread: Listening, Improvising, and Performing with Sourdough in Quarantine"

Every piece in this double issue offers unique perspectives from artists around the world, all living and improvising through an unprecedented historical moment.