Gig Calendar

Jazz and Race, Past and Present
A conference at The Open University, 11-12 November, 2010

Keynote speaker: Guthrie Ramsey, Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania and author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003).

Emerging at the confluence of diverse streams, the genre we know as jazz was made predominantly by African-Americans for a good deal of its history. Indeed, African-American musicians and critics have often claimed the form as their own, part of their people’s struggle to assert their humanity in the face of a racialised structure of power which would deny it. However, year by year this position grows more difficult to sustain as jazz spreads around the world, and more musicians of other ethnic origins, and who are socially positioned in different ways, enter the field. Often they bring their own distinct musical and cultural resources to bear on the problem of making jazz. Meanwhile, of course, racial oppression persists in western and other societies.

The aims of the conference are to examine, refute or develop this account, and to do so across all the disciplines which touch on jazz. In particular, contributors might want to consider the following themes, or use them as points of departure. The conference is supported by the AHRC ‘Beyond Text’ research project based at the Open University, What is Black British Jazz? Routes, Ownership, Performance and from the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change.
The conference takes place immediately before the London Jazz Festival, and so could be combined with a weekend of great jazz just down the road/line in the capital. Conference convenors are Catherine Tackley, What is Black British Jazz? The Open University; Jason Toynbee, What is Black British Jazz? The Open University; Tony Whyton, Salford University; Nicholas Gebhardt, Lancaster University.