I arrived back from Zagreb around lunchtime yesterday, stopped off at home and picked up some records, and then headed down the road to play at the Mostly Jazz Festival in Moseley Park. I’d been asked to DJ between bands, and then play support for Matthew Herbert at the afterparty at the Hare and Hounds. [...]
Categories: Birmingham,Music
Tagged: jazz
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 spent the last few days in the town of Bremen in Germany at an annual jazz industry trade fair called Jazzahead. It was pretty good, actually – a lot of good music across a number of venues, and lots of stands where people were promoting their bands, their countries, their festivals and their jazz-related [...]
My ‘Soul Food Sunday‘ jazz (etc.) sessions at the Hare and Hounds each week are now being broadcast on a local radio station in Mangawhai called Smooth Jazz 88.1FM. Mangawhai is a beachfront holiday village in the north of the North Island of New Zealand. It has spectacular sand dunes, a lagoon-style harbour, a surf [...]
Categories: Music
Tagged: jazz, New Zealand, Radio
[Video link] Last week, Brian from UB40 came along to the Hare and Hounds to look over my shoulder and get a few jazz DJ-ing tips so that he can fill in for me while I’m away in May. This week, he came back armed with some music of his own, and gave me a [...]
Categories: Birmingham,Food,Music
I was cycling home through the streets of Digbeth today, taking a few shots along the way of the ever-changing street art, when I bumped into local music industry chap Geoff Pearce. We got chatting about what he’s up to at the moment, which amounts to an interesting array of things. He’s still working a [...]
Categories: Birmingham,Music
This is a presentation I gave at the Watching Jazz conference in Glasgow recently. It’s about a research project I did with some colleagues from BCU at the Scarborough Jazz Festival, and how we approached putting that event online. I presented it as a way of contextualising some ideas that I’ll be developing in my [...]
Categories: Research,University
Tagged: Glasgow, jazz, Scarborough
One of the things you get to do as an academic is to read things, think about them, and then talk about them. And sometimes, you get to do that with people who really know what they’re talking about. There’s a small group of us that get together once a month or so at Salford [...]
Categories: Education,University
Tagged: capitalism, jazz, research
I was at the Hare and Hounds this afternoon for my regular weekly Sunday jazz session. It was nice to just focus on classic jazz this week. Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of bossa nova and some more 70s funk and soul material, but this time, it was pretty straight down the line. A [...]
Categories: Music
Back in 1996, I was a self-employed (self-unemployed, more like) radio producer. I’d quit my job at talkback station Radio Pacific after five years making ads for retirement villages, incontinence pants, the Mad Butcher and horse-racing events. Along the way, I’d learned how to make radio programmes and had developed a focus on jazz. My [...]
Categories: Music,New Zealand
