My younger sister Kerryn is a high school teacher in our home town (brains run in the family, you know). As a matter of fact, it’s the high school we went to – Edgewater College in Pakuranga, in the city of Auckland, New Zealand. She’s doing a project with a bunch of her year 10 [...]
Categories: Education,New Zealand,Photography,Travel
I’ve spent the past week in Rio de Janeiro, which was pretty amazing on all sorts of levels, though you’ll be delighted to hear that I was there working hard and not just on a big junket to a fabulous city with incredible beaches, breathtaking scenery, great nightlife, amazing music, wonderful food and awesome people [...]
Categories: Music,Research,Travel
Tagged: brazil, Fora do Eixo, Rio
I’m in Denmark this week to talk about jazz. I’m spending most of my time in Copenhagen, though I was in Aarhus yesterday as well. The main purpose of my trip is to have a meeting about a project I’m keen to get off the ground. It involves one of my favourite albums of the [...]
For the past week, I’ve been in Amsterdam as part of the Rhythm Changes project. Rhythm Changes is the three-year European jazz research project I’m involved in, and this was the big conference on Jazz and National Identity. Academics from around the world came together to talk about their own research, share ideas, give presentations, [...]
Categories: Research,Travel,University
I spent last week in a 12th century chateau in the south of France. I travel a lot, as you may have noticed if you follow this blog – but I hardly ever get an actual holiday (to which my sisters always say “from what?!”). In fact, I was so ready for this break that [...]
Categories: Travel
I’ve been in Belfast for the past weekend, doing what we came to describe as a ‘knowledge sprint‘. My friend Rich Dale (pictured above, uploading his brain to the internet) is co-founder of a startup called Planzai. I’m on their board of advisors.* Planzai is a web application that helps people do things, with easy-to-follow [...]
Earlier this week, I went to visit my friend Clutch at his home in the seaside village of Burntisland in Fife, Scotland. We have a whisky blog together (called, unsurprisingly, Dubber and Clutch), we’re co-writing a book about whisky (along with a bunch of other authors), and we’d arranged to visit a couple of distilleries [...]
I’m in the city of Zagreb in Croatia at the moment to take part in a Knowledge Transfer event run by HERA, the European research agency that funds Rhythm Changes – the jazz research project I’m involved in. HERA funds a bunch of different projects – from pop music to mediaeval manuscripts and the idea [...]
I’m in Madrid today at a conference about the independent music industry in the digital age. I’m doing the keynote speech tomorrow, and I’m here with my colleague Jez Collins (left, above) who’s going to be talking about music, identity and cities. The first thing we’ve noticed is the heat. It’s around 40 degrees here. [...]
Categories: Travel,University
Tagged: Conference, Madrid, Seminar
I spent the past week in Buenos Aires, speaking at the 19th Un-Convention event. I was part of a whole bunch of different panels – about live music, copyright, building local music scenes and the relationship between visual aesthetics and music. Un-Convention formed the music part of a larger trade fair conference about the creative [...]
Categories: Travel
Tagged: Argentina, unconvention
