Talking about jazz and capitalism
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 University to discuss jazz, usually using an article or a book chapter as a launching point into a discussion on a particular topic of interest.
For me, this dovetails nicely with Rhythm Changes – a large European jazz research project I’m involved in, funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area), led by Tony Whyton from Salford, and involving several key people in this discussion group. For me the meeting’s a way to stay on the same page, intellectually speaking, with this calibre of scholarship in the area.
This week we looked at an article by an improvisational jazz drummer by the name of Edwin Prévost, who contends that the music that he makes (and has done for decades) is a direct oppositional response to capitalism. It was an interesting starting point, though we all agreed right off the bat that the piece wasn’t the greatest piece of writing on earth.
