September News from the JEN Research Interest Group

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.

We are excited to announce the first JEN Research webinar - a new monthly series of presentations on the first Friday of every month featuring one of the authors published in JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice) starting Friday, October 1 with Running an Efficient & Effective Big Band Soundcheck with Antonio Garcia. The goal of the presentations is to share the findings as well as ideas for practical implementations in the classroom and curricula. After all we named the journal Jazz Education in Research and Practice to build a bridge between knowledge and teaching practices. Click here to register for this webinar.

I’m including the action list again from last month on how to expand the circulation and practical applications of all the wonderful articles in JAZZ. Please consider implementing at least one of these suggestions this school year:

a. Ask your library to subscribe to the journal by sharing the following link https://iupress.org/journals/jazz-education-in-research-and-practice/. Please note that JSTOR is discontinuing their journal program and JSTOR links are not working at this time. However, your library may add the subscription through their EBSCO and Proquest or similar services anyway but do share the link above initially. A suggested note or request script to your library may read as follows:

Please add a subscription to Jazz Education in Research and Practice (JAZZ) to our library resources. JAZZ explores diverse topics of jazz scholarship and its applications to pedagogy and is an essential knowledge source for our students and faculty. Ideally our students will have access to the print copies as well as the electronic version in our library. It is extremely affordable (institutional print and electronic subscription only $85, single issues starting at $20, here is the complete pricing chart) - please follow this link to subscribe.

b. Include some of the published articles into your course materials for the upcoming semester and ask your students to order the articles for their personal use through the interlibrary loan system. This is a great way to introduce students to available resources and the process of literature review and research. The complete table of content can be found on the JSTOR site for the previous two issues. The journal is also a membership benefit for full JEN members and pdfs are available for read only on the JEN website (you must be logged in to access and no download possible). Preview the various articles and choose the ones to include in your syllabus with instructions for your students on how to order from your library. This strategy is at no cost for you or your students but will be an immense boost for the journal rankings and article distribution stats - similar to getting streaming numbers for your music tracks.

c. Consider advertising or getting your school/institution/company to place an ad in the upcoming volume - deadline September 30. Advertising and contact info can be found at this link, and with the availability to 5,000+ full JEN members and availability in all major scholarly search engines, ads in JAZZ are a lasting and highly effective way for reaching the jazz community.

Registration is now open for the January 5-8 Conference in Dallas. Please note that all research presentations will be on Wednesday, January 5. Plan on arriving Tuesday or Wednesday morning in order to benefit from the wealth of scholarship and insights that is scheduled throughout this first day. Info on registration and hotel reservations is here. In the newsletters leading up to the conference I’d like to feature this year’s research presenters - if you are scheduled for a research presentation, please send me paragraph that describes what you will share and the importance of your work and we’ll include it in the upcoming newsletters.

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)

Join Antonio García in a live Zoom meeting as he presents how achieving a clear and comfortable sonic environment for performers and audience alike is key to an effective big-band performance. The soundcheck must address specific issues critical to the success of the concert. This session provides recommendations regarding mic placement, bass EQ, line-checking, line-balancing, and house- and monitor-sound, including an annotated stage plot. Questions are welcome, as are answers from attendees. Solo vocals with band can be addressed, as to a degree jazz vocal ensembles.

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

Musician Tim Ries has been a touring member of The Rolling Stones since 1999, playing woodwinds and keys. But he also enjoyed a special relationship with drummer Charlie Watts, as their shared love of jazz bloomed into a series of collaborations. Watts died Aug. 24 at age 80; below is Ries' remembrance of a few exceptional moments from their two-decade friendship.

On my first tour with The Rolling Stones, I remember looking over at Charlie Watts during "Moonlight Mile." My keyboard was set up close to his drum kit, facing him, almost how it would be if we were on a small club stage instead of in an arena. I'd been hired in January 1999 as part of the band's incredible extended ensemble: playing saxophone in the horn section along with Bobby Keys, trumpeter Kent Smith and trombonist Michael Davis, as well as keyboard, piano and organ next to Chuck Leavell. But during that song, whose drum part is played with mallets, I listened to Charlie and all I could hear was Elvin Jones, playing a mallet part behind John Coltrane.

The voice of Phil Schaap was as distinctive as the trumpet of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk's piano, or the sumptuous saxophone harmonies of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, but he didn't didn't make his mark as a musician. Instead, Schaap was one of the leading jazz scholars in America, and the genre's foremost evangelist. He was a radio host, a record producer, a concert programmer, an educator, a reissue producer, an archivist and a researcher, and served many other functions beyond those. His voice was the sound of an authoritative, passionate belief in the power of jazz, and in 2021 the National Endowment for the Arts named Schaap a Jazz Master himself.

Schaap passed away on Sept. 7, after a long battle with cancer. His death was confirmed by Greg Scholl, executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, home to many of Schaap's activities as curator, programmer, educator and historian.

"He was a true inspiration," said Wynton Marsalis, the institution's artistic director. "Phil was steadfast in his belief that the story of real, swinging jazz illustrates a positive, inclusive and successful metaphor for how we Americans could and would do better."

When Miles Davis first heard the music of Eric Dolphy, a key figure in the free jazz movement, he described it as “ridiculous”, “sad” and just plain “bad”. Upon encountering the early sounds of free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk said “there’s nothing beautiful in what he’s playing. He’s just playing loud and slurring the notes. Anybody can do that.” The editors at the jazz world’s bible, Downbeat Magazine, went further, initially criticising the entire genre as a force that’s “poisoning the minds of young players”, jazz critic Gary Giddins recalled.

Given the revolutionary nature of the music, it’s no surprise that many in the field greeted it with such disdain. “Free jazz didn’t adhere to any of the rules of what was considered music at the time,” said Tom Surgal, director of the new documentary Fire Music, which covers the history and breadth of the movement. “There wasn’t a single musical tenet this music did not defy.”

That included everything from its approach to chords to the placement of the beat to the role of the solos to the basic notions of melody and harmony. Atonality and abrasion were embraced, polyrhythmic and polytonal modes were amplified and risk idealized, paving the way for some of the most extreme and, to some ears, difficult, music ever made. As even Surgal admits, “this is not easily digestible music”.

George Wein, a pianist, producer, and impresario whose name became synonymous with the concept of the jazz festival, died September 13 at his home in Manhattan. He was three weeks shy of his 96th birthday.

His death was announced by Carolyn McClair, the longtime publicist for the Newport Jazz Festival.

Wein was the organizing force behind the Newport Jazz Festival. He produced it from its inaugural year in 1954, assumed full control over the enterprise in 1962, and attended all but three of its annual iterations during his lifetime. He also produced a number of spinoff festivals under the name of Newport’s longtime sponsor, JVC; founded the Newport Folk Festival; and helped to create the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 1970.

More controversially, Wein pioneered the use of corporate underwriters in presenting his festivals. JVC was one in a long line of deep-pocketed sponsors for Newport, including Kool cigarettes, Schlitz beer, and CareFusion medical technologies. He also introduced non-jazz acts into his jazz festivals as a means to increase ticket sales. Led Zeppelin, James Brown, and Sly and the Family Stone famously headlined Newport in 1969, while at New Orleans’ “Jazz Fest” jazz itself gradually became a rarity.

Though he was often criticized for both of these moves, Wein was unapologetic. “You can’t have a festival without people,” he explained in his 2003 autobiography (with Nate Chinen), Myself Among Others. “Success for my work lies in compromise between commercial and artistic pursuits. I keep sponsors not only because my shows draw people, but also because I do so while maintaining a certain artistic credibility.”

KBR (Royal Library of Belgium), Brussels, May 9-11, 2022

Jean-Baptiste ʻTootsʼ Thielemans was born on 29 April 1922 in the Marollen, a historic neighborhood of Brussels. He died near Brussels on 22 August 2016, at the age of 94. Over the course of his lifetime, he became one of the most renowned musicians of his generation, primarily as a harmonica player but also as a guitarist and whistler. He was also a major representative of Belgian culture and jazz music around the world.

The career and work of Thielemans go far beyond his iconic status as a harmonica player and his composition Bluesette (1963), which has become a jazz standard and a popular song covered by many artists. His work spanned the main styles of jazz between the 1940s and the 2010s, but also extended to many other genres of music: musette, blues, bossa nova, Música Popular Brasileira, French chanson, folk music (Belgian, French, Swedish, etc.), Anglo-American pop, easy listening, screen music (both for film and television), advertising, classical music covers, and so on. His output also includes more than a hundred personal compositions, and collaborations with hundreds of musicians from all over the world.

We welcome all research into the various aspects of Toots Thielemans, his life, work, reception, and the multicultural contexts in which they took place. We encourage multidisciplinary approaches and a diversity of perspectives, including papers from musicians, producers, or anyone having worked with him. We also encourage papers proposing musical analysis of Thielemans’s works (compositions and improvisations) anchored in their cultural context, and papers using archival materials, either from the fonds Toots Thielemans and other fonds at KBR and the MIM, or from any other relevant institution.

docARTES

docARTES is an international inter-university PhD programme for artistic research in music, designed for musician-researchers.

In April 2022, the Orpheus Institute will be organising entrance examination for the docARTES programme of 2022 - 2023, commencing in September 2022.
Application deadline: 15 January 2022

docARTES partners: Orpheus Institute, Ghent (BE), Leiden University - Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (NL), Conservatoire of Amsterdam (NL), Royal Conservatoire The Hague (NL), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Association, Leuven (BE): KU Leuven and Lemmens Institute, Antwerp University Association (BE), Royal Conservatoire Antwerp (BE).

MOOC: Artistic Research in Music - an Introduction

A MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is a free online course available for anyone to enroll. The Orpheus Institute launched its first MOOC in January 2019 and released updated versions in 2019 and 2020. A fourth run is scheduled for 13 September 2021 - 12 June 2022.

The first MOOC on Artistic Research in Music offers an introduction to the most relevant research tools, techniques and methodologies as well as the key concepts of artistic research in music.

Course Staff Orpheus Institute: Jonathan Impett, Paulo de Assis, Tom Beghin, Catherine Laws and Luk Vaes.
Guests: Heloisa Amaral, Nicholas Brown, Marcel Cobussen, Nicolas Collins, Darla Crispin, Lucia D'Errico, Daniela Fantechi, George E. Lewis, Vincent Meelberg, Sally Jane Norman, Stefan Östersjö, Ian Pace, Juan Parra Cancino, Deniz Peters, Gertrud Sandqvist, Ellen Ugelvik, Cathy van Eck and Matthew Wright.

Proposal deadline: 31 October, 2021

The biggest international conference organised by Stockholm University of the Arts, the biennial Alliances & Commonalities, is back for a third edition, October 20-22, 2022. We are anticipating that Alliances & Commonalities 2022 will be a live, online and hybrid form experience.

We invite artists and researchers from around the globe to share ways in which artistic research is reassembling, responding, reconfiguring, and reconstituting in the aftermath of the past two years. How are artists and researchers situating their practices now? What transforms? What transmits? What matters?

Sixth Biennial Conference in Daegu, Korea

October 21–23, 2022

The Regional Association for East Asia of the International Musicological Society (IMSEA) invites proposals for its sixth biennial conference to be held in Daegu, Korea, from October 21 to October 23 in 2022. We welcome proposals from across various areas of music scholarship and beyond, including those reflecting historical, ethnographic, theoretical/analytical, sociological, and scientific methods. We would especially like to encourage presentations of an inter-disciplinary and/or inter-regional character. Participants need not currently reside or work in East Asia. The IMS (International Musicological Society) membership is not required; however, we encourage participants to join the IMS and enjoy a wide range of benefits

Since its foundation in 2011, IMSEA has held biennial conferences in Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Suzhou. The 2022 conference in Daegu, which was postponed last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, will mark the association’s 10th anniversary. We hope this conference will be the occasion to celebrate the past, present, and future of the society and connect our community in East Asia with the global musicological network. We look forward to the dialogues and collaborations amongst scholars with diverse specialty areas, regions, and generations—at this conference and beyond.

Today, the field of artistic research clearly is in need of a process of recharging. The ontological question of ‘What is Artistic Research’, posed so many times in debates over the last ten years, turned out to function merely as an impetus for disciplining the field. As a consequence, an unintentionally bureaucratic and organizational focus restricted room for spotlighting the specific areas of attention of thought and imagination so characteristic during artistic research.

Thus, the production of a strategic apparatus that identifies the structural and programmatic elements for a future artistic research agenda is of the highest priority now. Pressing questions are: Should we talk about a postresearch situation or a postresearch condition? Could this be compared with how poststructuralism relates to structuralism as its philosophical comprehension and the elaboration of its consequences? And how could a postresearch condition address contemporary art practices?

To answer these questions, it is crucial to start from the three conceptual spaces that fundamentally determine what we mean by artistic research: creative practice (experimentality, art making, potential of the sensible); artistic thinking (open-ended, speculative, associative, non-linear, haunting, thinking differently); and curatorial strategies (topical modes of political imagination, transformational spaces for encounters, reflection, and dissemination). How could we comprehend these spaces in their mutual, dynamic coherence as a series of indirect triangular relationships?

From whatever conceptual space one departs though, an artistic research practice could signify a creative proposition for thought in action. Yet again, that mode of research could never be reduced to a method of one of the three constituents: artistic research cannot be equated with creative innovation, disciplinary knowledge production, or political activism. Therefore, we do need to challenge and question the issue of how to articulate and present the intersection between the three conceptual spaces.

For this purpose, an intensive program of workshops, presentations, propositions, and screenings took place as EARN/Smart Culture Conference in Utrecht (BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, HKU University of the Arts) in the spring of 2021.

This new Metropolis M Books publication reflects further on these discussions and debates, while providing programmatic elements for a future artistic research agenda.

In Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul, Deanna Witkowski brings a fresh perspective to the life and music of the legendary jazz pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams (1910-81). As a fellow jazz pianist-composer, adult convert to Catholicism, and liturgical composer, Witkowski offers unique insight gleaned from a twenty-year journey with Williams as her chosen musical and spiritual mentor. Viewing Williams’s musical and corporal acts of mercy as part of a singular effort to create community no matter the context, Witkowski examines how Williams created networks of support and friendship through her decades long letter correspondence with various women religious, her charitable work, and her tireless efforts to perform jazz in churches, community centers, concert halls, and schools. Throughout this fascinating story told with equal amounts of deep love and scholarly research, Witkowski illumines Williams’s passionate mantra that “jazz is healing to the soul.”

Eberhard Weber is a virtuoso who revolutionized jazz bass playing. He brought his instrument from the far corner of the stage into the spotlight – and turned it into a solo force. He began his career as a jazz bassist in the 1960s, and his band Colours with the saxophonist Charlie Mariano became one of the most successful jazz groups in Europe. His record Colours of Chloë (made for ECM) was a cult album in its time. Weber went on to perform with many the big stars of the international jazz scene, including Wolfgang Dauner, Gary Burton, Pat Metheny and Jan Garbarek. He was also a key member of the United Jazz and Rock Ensemble. Playing the five-string instrument, both in acoustic and electric form, he also became a master of the solo recital, using electronics to accompany his own dexterous improvisations.

Weber has not been able to play the bass since he suffered a stroke in April 2007 during a sound check with the Jan Garbarek Group at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall. But he had already created an oeuvre that is second to none. The charismatic bassist made jazz history with his explorations, both in terms of his own instrument and with his range of creative musical companions. His remarkable autobiography is at the same time a humorous and exciting testimony to a vital period in German jazz history.