[ecrea] Jazz Utopia, Rhythm Changes 2016 conference, Birmingham

The fourth Rhythm Changes conference: Jazz Utopia will take place at 
Birmingham City University in the United Kingdom from 14 to 17 April 2016.



Keynote Speakers

Professor Ingrid Monson (Harvard University)

Professor Raymond MacDonald (University of Edinburgh)



We invite paper submissions for Jazz Utopia, a four-day 
multi-disciplinary conference that brings together leading researchers 
across the arts and humanities. The event will feature academic papers, 
panels and poster sessions alongside an exciting programme of concerts 
delivered in partnership with the Birmingham Conservatoire and Jazzlines.



Jazz has long been a subject for utopian longing and hopes for a better 
future; it has also been the focus of deeply engrained cultural fears, 
visions of suffering and dystopian fantasies. In its urgency and 
presence jazz is now here. As improvisational and transitory, jazz is 
nowhere. Utopia is nowhere and now here. Jazz is utopia. Or: jazz is 
utopian desire. Jazz Utopia seeks to critically explore how the idea of 
utopia has shaped, and continues to shape, debates about jazz. We 
welcome papers that address the conference theme from multiple 
perspectives, including cultural studies, musicology, cultural theory, 
music analysis, jazz history, media studies, and practice-based 
research. Within the general theme of Jazz Utopia, we have identified 
three sub-themes. Please clearly identify which theme you are speaking 
to in your proposal.



·      Jazz identities.

Claims have always been made for jazz as a certain utopian practice, in 
which jazz has made possible a musical-social space where different, 
usually marginal, identities are expressed and confirmed. At the 
multiracial club, bandstand, or dance-floor race and ethnicity are 
acknowledged, difference is championed or erased. Musicians have used 
jazz to step out of their class. The dialogic qualities and queer sounds 
alike of jazz offer opportunity for the expression of gender and 
sexuality. New thinking around disability and music reads jazz as a 
crip-space. Equally, consider the way in which freedom in improvisation 
has been understood as a liberating utopian practice. Even in its 
diasporic invention jazz comes from a kind of no-place (ou-topia = no 
place). In utopia, jazz is the effort to sound another world into being, 
the only condition of which is that it must be better. Has jazz really 
been that good?



·      Inside / outside: jazz and its others.

What does jazz mean to its community of insiders and those that approach 
it from outside? For those who are deeply involved with jazz, whether 
musicians, critics, scholars, or fans, the genre often provides a 
utopian space for creative encounters. By definition, the articulation 
of this space through performance, writing, research and consumption 
also creates a community of outsiders who may seek ways to engage with 
the jazz community or observe it from afar. This strand invites papers 
that address the relationships between jazz and its ‘others’, defined in 
relation to music making, criticism, scholarship or reception, whether 
these interactions are antagonistic or collaborative in tone.



·      Heritage and archiving.

This strand focuses on the different ways in which heritage practices 
and archival work contribute to the reconfiguration of jazz as a utopian 
space. Through its commitment to alternative ways of living and being, 
jazz offers imaginative variations on themes of history and 
preservation. It creates communities of collectors and music lovers, who 
refigure jazz as nostalgia and escape, as well as renewal and return. We 
welcome papers that explore all aspects of archiving practice and 
cultural heritage and the opportunities and tensions that present 
themselves for scholars, institutions and practitioners in these fields.



Proposals are invited for:

·      Individual papers (20 minutes) – up to 350 words.

·      Themed paper sessions of three individual (20 minute) papers – 
350 words per paper plus 350 words outlining the rationale for the session.

·      Seventy-five minute sessions in innovative formats – up to 1000 
words outlining the form and content of the sessions.



Please submit proposals (including a short biography and institutional 
affiliation) by email in a word document attachment to: (jazzutopia /at/ bcu.ac.uk)



The deadline for proposals is 1st September 2015; outcomes will be 
communicated to authors by 1st October 2015. All paper submissions will 
be considered by the conference committee: Christa Bruckner-Haring, 
Nicholas Gebhardt (chair), George McKay, Loes Rusch, Catherine Tackley, 
Walter van de Leur and Tony Whyton.



The conference builds on the legacy of the Rhythm Changes research 
project. Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities was 
funded as part of the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) 
Joint Research Programme, which ran from 2010-2013. The project team 
continues to develop networking opportunities and champion collaborative 
research into transnational jazz studies.



Updates on the conference and information about travel and accommodation 
will be available at: http://www.rhythmchanges.net

Prof George McKay
AHRC Leadership Fellow, Connected Communities Programme
Film, Television & Media Studies (FTM)
University of East Anglia
Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK
tel +44 (0)779 1077 074; +44 (0)1603 592152

connected-communities.org     georgemckay.org
Shakin' All Over: Popular Music & Disability (University of Michigan 
Press, 2013)
ed., The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015)



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