🎶 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.

Greetings from Vienna, Austria where I will spend most of the upcoming school year building an Institute for Artistic Research in Jazz and Popular Music at the Jam Music Lab Private University. This is an exciting and growing field bringing doing and thinking together and nurturing meaningful projects and communities. I would love to have conversations and build international collaborations, contact me any time for further discussions. Also, I’d like to point out one special new publication by one of our JEN Ring members, Gretchen Carlson, entitled “Improvising the Score: Rethinking Modern Film Music through Jazz” just released through the University of Mississippi Press - find info and more links below.

The lineup for the research presentations and posters for the JEN 2023 conference will be announced in August together with the conference lineup, make plans to attend January 4-7. Volume 4 of JAZZ (Jazz Education in Research and Practice) is in the editorial process to be published by the 2023 JEN conference. As a JEN member, you can claim a discounted yearly subscription for $15 if you order directly from IU Press here and follow the subscription links. And of course, as a full JEN member you have access to reading all editions on the JEN website for free.

The monthly series of webinars will continue on July 8 with Benjamin Nichols - Melodic rhythms, intervals, and harmony in selected works of Jerry Bergonzi, on August 5 with Garo Saraydarian - Pedagogy of Place - Connecting the improvisational language with geographical context, 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/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.

🎶 FREE WEBINAR 🎶

Melodic Rhythms & Intervals in Selected Works of Jerry Bergonzi
with Dr. Benjamin Nichols

Friday, July 8 • 3pm ET

Zoom (Members) & Facebook Live (Non-members)

Join Dr. Benjamin Nichols, Assistant Professor of Saxophone at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, for this live webinar on the music of Jerry Bergonzi (1947- ), a late-twentieth and twenty-first century jazz saxophonist and composer, often associated with the 1970’s New York Loft Scene.

Through the use of specific rhythmic, intervallic, and harmonic shapes, Bergonzi uses compositional techniques inspired by John Coltrane, Olivier Messiaen, and Arnold Schoenberg. Bergonzi’s compositions “It’s the Same,” “Philapino,” “Ryvim with Ding,” “Awake,” “Do It to Do It,” “Ellwood,” “New in the Neighborhood,” “Czarology,” “Cadiz,” are studied. Through formal analysis this presentation gives insight into Bergonzi’s compositional methods used in the selected pieces.

This presentation supplies research that answers two questions:

1. What are Bergonzi’s compositional techniques?

2. What makes his compositions compelling and unique?

Plus a Q & A with the live Zoom audience.

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.

His otherworldly falsetto has led many to describe Milton Nascimento’s music in spiritual terms.

“[My mom once said that] if God had a voice, it would be Milton’s – and she is absolutely right,” said the Brazilian singer Maria Rita, the daughter of one of his closest musical collaborators, the late singing legend Elis Regina.

Yet even the voice of God must rest. As Nascimento nears his ninth decade of life, the inimitable Afro-Brazilian vocalist is preparing to retire from the stages that have made him one of South America’s most venerated troubadours.

“I’m saying goodbye to the stage but I’m not saying goodbye to music. I refuse to say goodbye to music,” the 79-year-old singer-songwriter insisted at the tranquil hillside villa where he is gearing up for the final tour of his six-decade, 43-album career.

“Music is my journey. It’s the most beautiful thing that exists in my soul,” said Nascimento, whose “Last Session” tour will take him to the UK and Europe next month, before a series of emotional farewell concerts in Brazil.

The years preceding Nascimento’s last act have been a melancholy time, both for the singer and his homeland.

As coronavirus ravaged Brazil, killing more than 665,000 people, the Grammy-winning artist retreated into the hills of Minas Gerais, the state where the Rio-born artist was raised after his biological mother died from tuberculosis when he was a toddler.

“I went three years without talking to or seeing anyone and it made me want to stop,” Nascimento said during a rare face-to-face interview at the Rio home he shares with his adopted son Augusto and two Cane Corso dogs named after Paul McCartney and John Lennon.

Politically, Brazil has slipped into the doldrums after the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right radical who celebrates the 1964-85 dictatorship that once hounded musicians such as Nascimento. “It makes me so sad,” Nascimento said of Bolsonaro’s attacks on the democracy his ethereal tenor voice helped recover and cement.

Making Artistic Research Public
How to make artistic research public? How do artworks engage with their immediate surroundings, neighbourhoods and public space? How to bring forth artistic research in its diversity and variety?

The gathering of the European Artistic Research Network (EARN ) and the accompanying exhibition engaging with these questions, among others, is organized and hosted by the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki.

27.10–28.10.2022 EARN Gathering in Helsinki
Venue: Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki
Language: English
Free admission, open to all, welcome!
27.10.–13.11.2022 Exhibition
Venue: Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki, various spaces
Free admission, open to all, welcome!
Further information on the program and practicalities will be announced in the autumn.

The gathering consists of workshops offered by the EARN Working Groups, two key-note presentations and the publication events of Expo-Facto: Into the Algorithm of Exhibition (MetropolisM Boooks) co-edited by Henk Slager & Mick Wilson and RUUKKU-journal's thematical issue: Making Artistic Research Public, co-edited by Denise Ziegler, Tero Heikkinen and Saara Hacklin.

Key note speakers:

Bassam El Baroni is a curator, writer and an associate professor at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University. Through exhibitions, publications and other media, his research most recently engages with financialization in relation to artistic practices, artists’ engagement with infrastructural futures and histories, and new forms of artist-led activism.

Paul Tiensuu, PhD candidate in law at university of Helsinki, co-creator of the "City as space of rules and dreaming" -project.

Coordinators: Denise Ziegler and Antti Nyyssölä
Contact and further information about the EARN gathering: denise.ziegler@uniarts.fi
Further information about EARN

contact: michaela.brann@uniarts.fi

Dear all,

Thanks to AAAE for a great conference this year. Looking forward to the next one! In the meantime, I'm pleased to announce that LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore is organising the next Conference of ANCER - the Asia Pacific Network for Cultural Education and Research. It will be held from 2 - 4 Dec 2022.

Titled "Ecologies of the Arts: Sustainable Futures, New Creative Economies and the Management of Arts and Culture", the conference's Call for Papers can be found here. The closing date for submission of abstracts is 1 Aug 2022.

Students (undergraduate and postgraduate) may choose to submit to the Emerging Researchers section of the conference which is designed for students and young independent researchers. I hope you'll encourage your students, particularly if they are studying Asian developments, to submit proposals.

ANCER Is an initiative of LASALLE College of the Arts and was formed to help stimulate and develop inquiry in the field of arts/cultural management and cultural policy particularly in Asia and Southeast Asia. ANCER functions as a project-based network of arts and culture researchers and practitioners in the field, and provides a link between academia and practice in a part of the world where the arts and cultural sectors are in varying and rapid stages of development. It runs two core programmes, the bi-annual ANCER Conference and the ANCER Lab - a seminar programme that explores developments in arts and culture in a specific city in Asia.

As one of ANCER's goals is to stimulate conversations between academia / research and practice in the field, we welcome papers from arts practitioners, arts managers, and independent researchers.

I hope to have your support for the conference and please join us if you can, in Singapore. The plan is to host an in-person event at our campus unless the Covid-19 situation changes.

Best Regards,
Audrey Wong
LASALLE College of the Arts

Artists have always related to what happens around them, both on local and global levels. This relation to society manifests itself in many forms of artistic practices in public spaces and spheres: "on stage, in studios and theaters, in classrooms, in museums and galleries, on the streets and in communities." (Arts in Society Research Network) 'Socially engaged art', 'community art', 'artistic activism' or 'artist educator' are terms that are well known for a longer or shorter time. ELIA and the AEC working group 'Strengthening Music in Society' are examples of international networks that centralize these relations(hips) to society in and from the context of higher arts education. However, there is also an urgent need for the voices of artistic researchers in relation to issues in society. How can artistic research(ers) contribute to the social and societal challenges of our time?

The symposium aims to bring together artistic researchers with an interest to contribute to society through their research practice: Not only to question, but rather to actively engage in the present, and 'helping time forward' through a dedicated relation to the world. They can therefore play a critical role in the present. The professorship and research chair 'Artistic Connective Practices' has started its work since September 2021 and, after the first year of its work, invites the international field to come to Tilburg, The Netherlands. In the context of a three-day symposium, we will address the notion of artistic connectivity as an approach to artistic research in relation to society, and will collectively and collaboratively explore the socio-economic and ecological issues of our time. The professorship aims to investigate how artists and their artistic (research) practices can contribute to the transformation towards a sustainable and resilient society, while being right in the midst of it. Artistic Connective Practices aim to provide a perspective on complex issues through a number of core values, such as: connecting through spending time together, rooted in the dedicated investigation of agreed common ground; mutual respect and endless curiosity; affinity, integrity and kinship. With non-hierarchical and emergent forms of collaboration in an inclusive and diverse context as point of departure, these core values will be developed into the future of the professorship.

Our aim is to map the field; explore, collect and discuss approaches with which artistic researchers relate to connectivity. On a broader level we aim to position and contextualize the importance of artistic research to place itself in relation to society on the agenda of our discourse and to build a professional research network for further explorations and collaborations. The areas of research in themselves can be different and multi-facetted, as long as they are bound by the central concept of connectivity; topics for proposals may include, but are not restricted to:
artistic connectivity as a concept to think and work with in the context of artistic research in society
sustainability in artistic research: What stays in societal contexts after the artists or artistic researchers are gone and the research is finished?
impact of (art and) artistic research: What kind of 'impact' can we speak of, and what kind of impact 'should' artistic research have: on the arts and artistic practice, on the sciences and on society? How can impact be conceptualised and assessed in ways that do justice to the disciplines in which the work is done?
artistic research in contexts of socially-engaged art
artistic research in contexts of public space
artistic research in relation to:
social-societal local agendas
multiple, recent and persistent crises
the ideology of commoning, as a set of alternative approaches to economy, cooperation and distribution
artistic work and research as making socially engaged imaginary propositions

The call is open to all career stages from MA students to PhD researchers, postdoctoral researchers and beyond. The submission should clearly articulate the status of the researcher, so that the review team can evaluate proposals accordingly.

The full, multi-day event will include and combine laboratories, performances, forums, keynote presentations and interactive workshops. The form of the symposium will happen in a connective, co-creative fashion/design. It is our aim to collectively and co-creatively think and work together through the course of three days. We strongly welcome presentations including artistic contributions, performative, collaborative or participatory forms.

Managing Director

The International Society of Jazz Arrangers & Composers (ISJAC) seeks a dynamic individual to manage and lead ISJAC’s administrative and operational functions. The Managing Director (MD) will be a strategic thought partner on the Executive Committee and support the Board of Directors through reporting and communications, cultivation and management of resources, and event production. The MD will report to the Executive Committee led by the ISJAC Board President. This is a half time (20 hours/week) remote position.

Minimum Position Requirements
Bachelor’s Degree
Evidence of Arts Administrative or Production experience/background
Demonstrated ability to manage time, tasks, money, quality, and staff

The successful candidate will:
embrace the mission & goals of ISJAC and grasp challenges/needs of the jazz composer community as well as the nature of the music business
demonstrate effective leadership & management skills
be organized, self-motivated, detail-oriented, collaborative, and able to manage multiple priorities
exhibit excellent written and verbal communication skills.
demonstrate a core belief in diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.
have fundraising and/or grant-writing experience (preferred)
have experience with website & communication systems (Google Suite, MailChimp, and WordPress a plus.)

For more information, click below.

On December 4, 1957, Miles Davis revolutionized film soundtrack production, improvising the score for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. A cinematic harbinger of the French New Wave, Ascenseur challenged mainstream filmmaking conventions, emphasizing experimentation and creative collaboration. It was in this environment during the late 1950s to 1960s, a brief “golden age” for jazz in film, that many independent filmmakers valued improvisational techniques, featuring soundtracks from such seminal figures as John Lewis, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington. But what of jazz in film today? 
Improvising the Score: Rethinking Modern Film Music through Jazz provides an original, vivid investigation of innovative collaborations between renowned contemporary jazz artists and prominent independent filmmakers. The book explores how these integrative jazz-film productions challenge us to rethink the possibilities of cinematic music production. In-depth case studies include collaborations between Terence Blanchard and Spike Lee (Malcolm X, When the Levees Broke), Dick Hyman and Woody Allen (Hannah and Her Sisters), Antonio Sánchez and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman), and Mark Isham and Alan Rudolph (Afterglow). 
The first book of its kind, this study examines jazz artists’ work in film from a sociological perspective, offering rich, behind-the-scenes analyses of their unique collaborative relationships with filmmakers. It investigates how jazz artists negotiate their own “creative labor,” examining the tensions between improvisation and the conventionally highly regulated structures, hierarchies, and expectations of filmmaking. Grounded in personal interviews and detailed film production analysis, Improvising the Score illustrates the dynamic possibilities of integrative artistic collaborations between jazz, film, and other contemporary media, exemplifying its ripeness for shaping and invigorating twenty-first-century arts, media, and culture.

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

The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) is an international, online, open-access and peer-reviewed journal that disseminates artistic research from all disciplines. JAR invites the ever-increasing number of artistic researchers to develop what, for the sciences and humanities, are standard academic publication procedures. It serves as a meeting point of diverse practices and methodologies in a field that has become a worldwide movement with many local activities.
Issue 26 contains 6 peer-reviewed contributions:

In ‘Acoustemological Investigation: Sound Diary #Tehran,’ Ali Mousavi observes and analyses processes of architecture and urbanisation in Iran, specifically the housing construction in the Pardis Phase 11 suburbs of Tehran. The project employs sensorial methodologies, such as acoustemology and field recordings, to investigate the area and urban transformations caused by concepts such as ‘modernisation’, ‘development’, ‘progress’, and ‘globalisation.’ [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.822215]

Pavel Prokopic’s ‘Affective Atmosphere: A Non-Representational Method of Devising Film Performance and Fiction’, introduces a new method of directing film performance and producing experimental fiction in the tradition of art cinema. Affective atmosphere prioritises the becoming of an event over a narrative/production plan, and uses experimental production strategies, spontaneous directorial decisions and the unpredictable flow of reality for generating alternative narrative/dramatic film structures. [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.989439]

Ella Raidel’s ‘Of Haunted Spaces’ is an art-based research project focusing on Chinese ghost cities. This exposition follows the making of a performative film essay that combines acting and documenting to indicate the phantasmatic aspect of global capitalism. Through her research, Raidel seeks to create a discursive space in which facts, analyses, commentaries, and references are woven into one narrative. [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.1001280]

In ‘Petals to Light...Pedagogic Possibilities with Floor Art,’ Geetanjali Sachdev explores Rangoli and Kolam floor art practices to understand their pedagogical potential for the study of plants. The research looks at how these indigenous art practices have moved beyond their traditional media of decorating the ground with coloured rice powder, various flowers, leaves, and twigs, to incorporate alternative media such as lights, rollers, stencils, coloured beads, and stickers. [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.955755]

Katharina Swoboda’s ‘Zoological Architectures and Empty Frames’ explores visual and psychological aspects of framing. Beginning with an observation of how zoo architecture directs the attention towards the animals and the buildings create ‘frames’ around the animals. She asks the question of how the representation of animals in human culture affects how we treat animals socio-politically. [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.823739]

In ‘Research-Creation about and with Food: Diffraction, Pluralism, and Knowing’, David Szanto and Geneviève Sicotte present two food-centred research-creation projects. By bringing these two projects into dialogue with each other, and through an experimental, “diffractive analysis” process, they propose ways in which research-creation can help illuminate new forms of knowledge that engage with the distinct challenges and opportunities within food studies and for the future of food-and-human relations.

Jazz and Culture is an annual publication devoted to publishing cutting-edge research on jazz from multiple perspectives. Founded on the principle that both scholars and musicians offer invaluable contributions, the journal juxtaposes groundbreaking work by researchers alongside oral histories and articles written by master artists in the field. All methodological approaches are welcome, including ethnomusicology, music theory, and critical and cultural studies. The journal particularly encourages work relating to jazz's international scope.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Articles
- Jazz Feminism is to Soul as Purple is to Lavender by Nichole T. Rustin
- Archival Silence in the Collections of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn by Kira Dralle
- The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism
by Benjamin Phipps

Oral History
- Bass and Voice: Sheila Jordan Discusses Race, Class, and the Emergence of Her Concept
Interviewed by Cisco Bradley

Poetry
Few meet Paris, but Bobby blew it up 1969 onward by Rashida K. Braggs

Book Reviews
- Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space, by James Gordon Williams, review by Jonathan Leal
- Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II Paris, by Rashida Braggs, and Jazz Diaspora: Music and Globalisation, by Bruce Johnson, review by Ofer Gazit
- Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood, by Fatima Shaik, review by Brian W. Casey

Media Reviews
- Soul (2020, dir. Pete Doctor), review by Gretchen L. Carlson
- Coisa Mais Linda (2019-20, created by Giuliano Cedroni and Heather Roth), review by Joachim Polack

Musicology Australia is the scholarly journal of the Musicological Society of Australia. Since its inception in 1963, the journal has published articles on all aspects of music research, including ethnomusicology and musicology, which marks it out from most other music journals.

Today, articles and reviews cover a broad spectrum of music research, including historical musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music, indigenous music practices, jazz, theory and analysis, organology, performance practice, contemporary music and psychology of music. The journal is published twice a year: in July and December. Contributors are not required to write on Australian music or be Australian-based musicologists.

Articles should normally be 6000-10,000 words (including footnotes and/or references), though shorter and longer articles will be considered. Solicited and unsolicited book reviews (2000 words) and review articles (4000 words) are considered for publication.