The CHIME Project team will officially launch the project at an Inception Event on Friday 20 November, during EFG London Jazz Festival. The event, held at the Southbank Centre in London, will provide partners with an opportunity to come together to talk about their work, to share ideas, and to discuss ways in which CHIME research can impact on different festivals and heritage organisations.
Supported by Associated Partner MISTRA, the Inception Event will also bring together representatives from case study festivals, including London, Cheltenham and the GMLSTN Festival in Gothenburg to explore audience development initiatives and plans for creating digital tools to support their programming, audience participation and partnerships with heritage sites.
The relationship between jazz, festivals, and heritage sites is a complex and underexplored field of enquiry. Since the late 1940s, jazz and improvised music festivals have developed synergetic relationships with heritage sites to the point where, in different European settings today, festivals employ and engage with a range of heritage forms. Festivals facilitate uses and re-uses of heritage and have a transformative impact on attitudes to place, identity and history, from events that draw on landscapes, stately homes, iconic buildings and sites of historic importance to performance projects that encourage new forms of engagement and participation. 
