The Newsletter by the Jazz Education Network Research Interest Group (JENRing)

Happy JAM - Jazz Appreciation Month. Please enjoy the tips for celebrating Jazz Appreciation Month in this newsletter, courtesy of NAfME. April 30 is International Jazz Day with this year’s celebration at the White House featuring an all-star cast. Tune in from anywhere in the world at 8pm EST and learn more about International Jazz Day as well as register your event here. If you would like to host an event, take advantage of the Jazz2U grants and apply here.

We mourn the loss of jazz legend David Baker who headed up the Indiana University jazz program for nearly 50 years and codified jazz education worldwide. The outpouring of appreciation, stories, pictures, anecdotes from all over the world on the Remembering David Baker Facebook page is a document of his immense impact. Share your memories and the book “David Baker - A Legacy in Music” captures his story and a glimpse into his composition and teaching process.

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. We added a new publications feature, 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.

Monika Herzig
JEN Secretary, JENRing committee

• David Baker dies at 84: Award-winning composer, educator and writer David Baker is being remembered for his dedication to jazz music. Baker died peacefully Saturday, March 26th, at his home in Bloomington, Indiana. A member of the Jacobs School of Music faculty since 1966, he founded the Jazz Studies program and served as its chair from 1968 to 2013.

• Improvisation in Southwestern Ontario: Zulapresents is bringing a variety of improvised music to Hamilton this spring, including Sonoluminescence (David Mott, Jesse Stewart, William Parker) with Dave Gould solo Sunday, March 20, 2 p.m. at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and the Michael Vlatkovich Quartet (with David Mott, Jonathan Golove, Christopher Garcia) and Ken Aldcroft/Mike Gennaro Thursday, March 31, 7 p.m. at the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre. Many of these performers will also be appearing at Silence in Guelph. The work of these presenters, along with the Admission of Guilt concert series in Kitchener, is building an awareness and an audience for improvised music in smaller cities where it has rarely been heard. Thanks to ImprovNotes from IICSI for this news item.

• Society for Ethnomusicology Bibliography: The Society for Ethnomusicology is soliciting submissions for its growing bibliography of resources on improvisation. Interested contributors should register with the Zotero platform. This bibliography of resources will consist of published work that deals with extemporaneous music-making in any global musical tradition, from scholarly and pedagogical perspectives. Using Zotero, the bibliography will be made freely available to scholars and teachers of improvisation. Thanks to ImprovNotes from IICSI for this news item.

• Capacitance in Guelph: The Capacitance music/movement series in Guelph presented Capacitance 7 in Guelph with trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud, dancer Allen Kaeja, and double bassist Rob Clutton. Capacitance 8 will be a co-presentation with independent music and art festival, Kazoo! fest. On Saturday April 9th at 5:30 pm, Montreal dance artists Leanne Dyer and Katie Ward, New York percussionist John Colpitts, aka Kid Million, and Guelph musician Bry Webb will perform at Movement 42, 42 Quebec Street, third floor studio. $10 or pwyc. Thanks to ImprovNotes from IICSI for this news item.

• How Well Your Genre Sells on Streaming, Downloading, and Physical: Here’s another critical thing to consider when strategizing your release: genre.  Because genre audiences are oftentimes wildly different when it comes to how they listen to music, all of which can have giant ramifications on how they pay for music (or, don’t pay for music). Here’s a breakdown of what percentage of revenues each genre generates from different platforms: streaming, downloading, and physical (CDs and vinyl).  The data comes from Nielsen Music, measured across 2015.

        April is Jazz Appreciation Month! (thanks to NAfME for these links)

• 7 cool ways to celebrate Jazz Appreciation Month Every April (Original article can be found on Donna Schwartz Music)
• How Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement Intertwine
• Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz Academy: access Jazz at Lincoln Center's full library of videos and interviews of Jazz legends.
• How to Improve Music Classes in a New Era of Education: This article was written by Todd Stoll, Vice President of Education for Jazz at Lincoln Center, and was recently published in Time Magazine. In Lieu of the ESSA Act, Mr. Stoll focuses his article on how "we should embrace the American arts as a full constituent in our programs-not the pop-tinged sounds of The Voice or Glee but our music: blues, folk, spirituals, jazz, hymns, country and bluegrass, the styles that created the fabric of our culture."
• Jazz Fundamental videos: In 2014, the NAfME and Jazz at Lincoln Center formed a strategic partnership to provide education resources that will enhance the ability to teach jazz and to understand the importance of jazz as part of our collective history. For Jazz Appreciation Month, they have posted this series of Jazz Fundamental videos. Join drummer Bryan Carter and his band as they explore, explain, and perform some of the basic concepts of Jazz in a fun and swinging set!

• IISCI Postdoctoral Fellowship (2016-17): IICSI invites applications from postdoctoral researchers for two residential fellowships. The fellowships may be held at the University of Guelph, McGill University, Memorial University of Newfoundland, or the University of Regina. Applications are due April 15, 2016.

• Making Time in Music: an international conference: This conference will be held September 12 & 13, 2016  at the University of Oxford. The conference committee is issuing a call for papers with this description: “Two assertions about the temporal in music are the starting point for our call for papers: David Epstein’s comment in his seminal book, Shaping Time, that time is ‘the critical element in performance’, and Lefebvre’s lament that rhythm has been music’s neglected component. These comments underscore the aim of this conference, which is to bring time and timing to the fore in our thinking about musical experience, and in particular, its production.” The deadline for proposals is Friday, April 15, 2016 at midday.
  

• Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium: IICSI, in partnership with the Guelph Jazz Festival and the University of Guelph, invites proposals for presentations at our annual interdisciplinary international conference. This year’s edition of the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, Improvise Here!: Profiles in Practice will span all five days of the Guelph Jazz Festival, Sept. 14-18. It will take the form of an Expo by showcasing examples of practice-based research projects, and seek to encourage a rethinking of the places where we conventionally look for knowledge. Proposals are due April 30, 2016.

• ISIM Korea: The International Society for Improvised Music (ISIM) is happy to issue a call for proposals for its 10th Anniversary Festival/Conference in Korea, hosted by Jeonju International Sori Festival 2016 (전주세계소리축제) in Jeonju province, South Korea, September 27- October 2, 2016.  Program Director Jin Hi Kim welcomes proposals from current and new ISIM members, including those who join or renew their membership concurrent with the proposal submission deadline. Proposal deadline is April 15, 2016. 

• Cultural Entrepreneurship and Social Change: Education, Theory and Practice: Submissions are now open for papers and presentations for the Second International Conference on Teaching and Learning Cultural Entrepreneurship (TLCUE 2016) to be hosted by University College of Southeast Norway in Bø, August 24 - 26, 2016.

• Researching (Jazz) Festivals: A Day of Ideas and Discussion: Taking place April 29, 2016, Researching (Jazz) Festivals will feature festival directors and researchers talking about music festivals and  jazz (and jazz festivals), and sees the launch of From Glastonbury to Glyndebourne: The Impact of British Music Festivals, a new report for the Arts and Humanities Research Council about the impact of British music festivals. There will be a full day programme, open to the public, festival organisers, journalists and researchers, free of charge, taking place in the Take Five Tent in the Montpellier Gardens of the jazz festival site during the festival.

  
   

• Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity: The contributors to Negotiated Moments explore how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occur within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space. They place the gendered, sexed, raced, classed, disabled, and technologized body at the center of critical improvisation studies and move beyond the field's tendency toward celebrating improvisation's utopian and democratic ideals by highlighting the improvisation of marginalized subjects. 

• Beatles Studies: Edited by Olivier Julien and Grégoire Tosser. Nearly half a century after Luciano Berio praised the Beatles in his “Commenti al Rock” (1967), this special issue of Volume! surveys the research carried out on the band that was, according to John Lennon, “more popular than Jesus”. In light of an impressive bibliography covering the first 50 years of what we now call “Beatles Studies”, one learns, for example, that the British Invasion originated in Paris, that Popular Music Studies began with the musicological study of popular music, that the theory of harmonic vectors can help analyze pop music or that Marshall McLuhan's concepts shed an interesting light on albums such as Abbey Road.

• Politiques des musiques populaires au XXIe siècle: Edited by Elsa Grassy and Jedediah Sklower with papers by Martin Cloonan, Noriko Manabe, Renata Pasternak-Mazur, Naomi Podber, Andrew Snyder, Emanuele Toscano, and Daniele di Nunzio. Eight international case studies analyze the relationships between popular music and politics in the XXIst century: anti-nuclear protest music in Japan, militant disco in Poland, heavy metal in Iran, political brass bands in the USA, neo-fascist punk in Italy, and more.

• Leadership in the Performing Arts: Dr. Tobie Stein’s new book, with a foreword by Robert L. Lynch, President, Americans for the Arts is now available for purchase. Leadership in the Performing Arts addresses and analyzes the question, “What does it mean to be a performing arts leader?” by presenting the wisdom and expertise of eleven men and women with experience leading nonprofit performing arts institutions in the United States. These successful leaders provide many real-world examples of business practices that may be generally applied by practitioners in our field, and throughout the nonprofit sector.