Andrew Dubber     

Once or twice a year, I find myself at an academic conference about jazz. The Leeds one is a regular feature, but there are others that crop up from time to time, and for the last couple of days, I was in Manchester for the ‘Mediating Jazz‘ conference put on by Salford Uni.

It’s a small crowd – maybe forty or so people – some of whom have travelled from far and wide to be there. Delegates from Australia, Poland, America, Canada, Germany and Russia make the trek to the north of England in the hopes of finding another human being who’s interested in the intersection between musicology and cultural studies – and who knows the difference between Ornette Coleman and Coleman Hawkins.

Birmingham City represent
Four of us were there from BCU – Tim and I gave complementary papers about jazz online: me first, setting it up with a discussion of methodology derived from just getting stuck in and doing stuff with Aftershock, and him talking about how we refined that as part of a research and knowledge transfer project with the Scarborough Jazz Festival.

Paul Long talked about jazz-influenced 80s pop music (Style Council, Matt Bianco, etc) and Simon Barber discussed the marketing and business practices of the GRP label. Both really interesting.

Three personal highlights (apart from the fact that all four of our presentations went well):

1) Seeing my name on someone else’s Powerpoint presentation (above). Tom Sykes referenced the work Tim and I had done with the BBC about specialist music fandom online. Really flattering to be considered an ‘authority’…;

2) Alan Stanbridge‘s fascinating presentation about jazz discourse (no, really) – in which he explained how he’d had to write a 13,000 word encyclopedia entry about jazz, but couldn’t really describe it;

3) Ducking out to have a coffee meeting with my friend Jason Singh. Jason’s doing an amazing project with Rajasthani folk musicians and putting out an album with his band The Safires. We had plenty to talk about, and it was great to catch up.

Overall, the conference was a bit of fun, we learned a few things, talked about some potential collaborative projects, and went out and had a nice meal. I’m still recovering from my travels, so I was back in the hotel pretty early – but I’m glad I made the effort to go.