[ecrea] CFP: Jazz Television

Jazz Research Journal special issue: Jazz Television

In an account of Roland Kirk’s appearance on the television programme 
Soul!, Gayle Wald argues that the mediation of a television camera 
“renders the affective power of Kirk’s performance more immediate and 
more suspenseful than it might have been in a nightclub setting” (2015: 
124-125). With these words, Wald explodes dominant myths in jazz 
regarding the primacy of live performance and counters widely-held 
suspicions regarding the possible accomplishments of jazz television 
(see Frith 2002: 277-290). As understandings of jazz reach beyond the 
musicological, scholarship has paid closer attention to questions of 
production and visual style in small-screen presentations of jazz (McGee 
2009: 201-244; Long and Wall 2015; Pillai 2016; Heile et al. 2017) but 
there remains much to be explored.

This special issue of Jazz Research Journal invites scholars of 
television and jazz to make bold interventions into the existing 
discourse. Following Herman Gray (2005: 187), we are not interested in 
value judgments regarding ‘good’ or ‘bad’ representations of jazz but 
rather in historical, textual or methodological formulations that 
provide insightful commentary on the place of jazz television within the 
wider culture. We particularly welcome studies that expand our 
understanding of jazz in programming outside of music performance, e.g. 
as signifier of quality, as accompaniment to drama or as subject of comedy.

The collection will be edited by Dr Nicolas Pillai (Birmingham City 
University) as part of an AHRC Research Leadership fellowship dedicated 
to the development of new methodologies for the study of jazz on 
television. Submissions are invited that reframe the field, treating 
subjects such as:

•	The role of jazz at the birth of television
•	The survival and afterlife of jazz in the digital archive
•	Practice-as-research methodologies that bring us closer to the 
technology of television production
•	Jazz and advertising (following Laver 2015)
•	The scheduling of jazz television, its place within broadcast flow and 
institutional directives
•	The relationship of jazz television to the screening of other musics
•	Studies of jazz composition and performance for television
•	The jazz musician as actor (e.g. Ethel Waters in Route 66, Cleo Laine 
in The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, Kermit Ruffins in Treme)
•	Comedy and parody (e.g. The Fast Show, Duke Silver in Parks and 
Recreation, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle)
•	Jazz and genre television
•	Discourses of television quality (e.g. Sex and the City/HBO, 
Poliakoff’s Dancing on the Edge)
•	Jazz on ITV and regional television
•	The jazz documentary/the place of jazz in pop documentaries
•	Jazz on children’s television (e.g. Peanuts, Sesame Street, 
Schoolhouse Rock!)
•	Streaming, VR and the implications of the digital
•	Reviews of current jazz television or related scholarship

Please submit your abstracts (no more than 500 words) and bio (100 
words) to (nicolas.pillai /at/ bcu.ac.uk) by 8 September 2017. First drafts 
will be expected by 1 January 2018, with peer review comments returned 
by March 2018 and final submission (8000 words max.) in Summer 2018. The 
special issue will be published November 2018.


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