The Musicians of Bremen (plus their agents, labels & promoters)
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 wares.
I was there with my colleague Tony Whyton, who had his own research to do, so we split up to go do our work, and then reconvened later when there was socialising, listening to music, drinking and dancing to be done.
My task was to do a bunch of interviews with the heads of national jazz agencies such as Jazz Danmark, the Swedish Jazz Federation, UK Jazz Services and so on, for a research project I’m doing as part of the HERA Rhythm Changes European Jazz research project I’m involved in.
In fact, I’m going to be fairly intensively European Jazz-focused over the next couple of weeks, as I’ll be off to Stavanger in Norway next week to work on the other bit of my research project. More on that soon. In the meantime, it was all about talking to public arts organisations about whether they have a Facebook page and so on.
