impact – CHIME

Travelling Exhibition: A History of Dutch Jazz Festivals in Thirty-Some Objects

March 5, 2018March 8, 2018 Tony Whyton Leave a comment

This exhibition tells a story of jazz festivals in the Netherlands through objects. It is a story that originates in the jazz competitions held in the 1930s and which encompasses about 85 years of music, people, festival sites, and objects. While over the years jazz festivals have grown to cover a wide range of musical styles, performers, audiences, and venues, some consistency can be found in these festivals’ ambitions to engage with international musicians and to connect with local communities.

Both a creative space and place for cultural consumption, the festival is also very much a material culture. What remains of a jazz festival when the music, the musicians, the organizers, and the listeners have left? How does intangible cultural heritage of jazz turn into tangible heritage? How does a festival materialize in objects, and what can we learn from this? To engage with these questions, we have used a concept modelled after ‘A history of the world in 100 objects,’ a series by Neil MacGregor, director of the British
Museum, that explores world history from two million years ago to the present.

A collaborative project between CHIME, the Nederlands Jazz Archief (NJA, Dutch Jazz Archives), and photographer Foppe Schut, the exhibition is designed as a digital travelling exhibition, to be projected at festivals and conferences. We have focused specifi cally on awards, merchandise, jury reports, and other artefacts that have been produced as part of the festival, or which – in the case of the scrapbooks – have been made with festival artefacts. Most of these objects are in the repository of the NJA. Consequently, this selection excludes other parts of material culture that are indisputably part of festivals, such as festival sites, instruments, music stands, gear, clothing, portable toilets, food, or beer stands.

Click here to download the Exhibiton brochure: CHIME-travelling-exhibition-2017

How is CHIME chiming? Visualising impact in 2015 and 2017

May 4, 2017May 4, 2017 George McKay Leave a comment

The impact of our research is important for us as researchers, for our industry and public partners, and for our funders—from the inception event at the EFG London Jazz Festival (a project partner) in November 2015 on we have been talking about impact as well as ‘doing’ it. In fact if you click the following link you can see and download the short presentation I gave about what ‘impact’ means and its scope in the British research landscape from that first event.

CHIME inception day Nov 20 2015

We wanted to capture and to easily visualise a sense of impact as a process through the development of the project. We thought a simple infographic-style map could do that, and gathered information from each researcher about their key collaborative relationships and anticipated work at the start of the project, and asked them to update that a year or so later. So we have produced two impact maps to date, one from November 2015 and second from March 2017. The aim is to capture how the work packages have developed as work is undertaken and activities completed. The maps capture the project’s scope (how CHIME is indeed chiming), but also in a way they visualise its development, its story. Here are our impact maps, side-by-side, 2015 and 2017.

Rachel Daniel, my AHRC Connected Communities administrator, who also happens to be a creative artist and researcher (see Rachel’s own work exploring drawing and medicine here), made the maps happen. We thought about using Coggle or some other infographic/mapping programme, but in the end it didn’t need to be done like that, and she used Adobe Illustrator actually. So relatively simple, I’m told—though I gather the second one was slightly (…) more fiddly. Thank you, Rachel.

Gathering the information from each researcher, and then selecting from what each submits, and double-checking with them that we’ve got it right, takes a bit of time. From one of the team we received an email headed ‘Can you read this?’ and a photo attached of a pen-on-paper sketch of her collaborations on the project. Yes, we could.

CHIME at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival

April 30, 2016April 30, 2016 Tony Whyton 2 Comments

It’s International Jazz Day and UK members of CHIME are at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival.

Matt Brennan; Stephanie Pitts, Alison Eales and Nick Gebhardt talk about collaboration and live audiences. — Matt Brennan, Stephanie Pitts, Alison Eales & Nick Gebhardt talk about festival collaborations & audience research.

On Friday, George McKay hosted a day-long symposium on ‘Researching (Jazz) Festivals’ that included talks from leading scholars in festivals research and jazz festival directors from Cheltenham, London and Manchester festivals. Italian scholar and archivist Francesco Martinelli and CHIME’s Tony Whyton delivered keynote presentations on European jazz research and the day concluded with the launch of Emma Webster and George McKay’s ‘The Impact of Festivals’, an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded literature review that charts and critically examines existing writings on the impact of British festivals.

J-Hive

In addition to the symposium, Nick Gebhardt has been working with a team of media researchers from Birmingham City University to develop a digital heritage tool called J-Hive. J-Hive is being piloted in Cheltenham for the first time and runs from 28-30^th April. The project aims to document the experiences of different audiences at the Festival.

In putting the project together, a mobile application has been designed to allow different audiences (concert goers, musicians, promoters etc.) to send text and images to a web page where they regularly respond to, and reflect on, the music, the festival atmosphere, and the people they meet.

Through the interface, participants can follow their own posts as well as those of others participating in the project. Ultimately, J-Hive will create a collection of different festival encounters and memories that will offer insights into the festival experience, how festivals are navigated and understood, and the relationship of music to the places and spaces of the town.

Happy International Jazz Day!

How does CHIME chime? Producing an impact map

January 15, 2016February 8, 2016 George McKay Leave a comment

We want to capture in different forms ways in which the project is having impact — this can be through its collaboration between academics researchers and our parter organisations, including festival, music and sustainability / heritage groups.

For one of these we thought it would be a good idea to have a map of impact — of collaborations, relations — and to revisit this mapping exercise periodically through the project (e.g. on an annual basis) in order to visually capture its scope and spread. Click here to see the higher resolution version of our map of impact at the very start of the project.

This map is made from information gathered from project partners at our inception day event at EFG London Jazz Festival in the Royal Festival Hall in November 2015. We asked all academic partners present to identify up to three key activities, events, other projects, organisations, they were involved with in relation to the project, and to tell the rest of the room a little about each. We noted these down and subsequently produced an infographic-style version of them.

We aim to revisit and (this is our assumption…) add to this map in 2016 and again in 2017, producing a more complex version as work and collaboration takes place. Yes, more dots and curvy lines (we hope)! We anticipate that such an exercise will also illustrate the development of a project.

[Thanks to Rachel Daniel, administrator at University of East Anglia for George McKay and the Connected Communities Programme, including the Impact of Festivals project, for her work on this.]

Links to reports and resources about the impact of festivals

December 7, 2015December 7, 2015 George McKay Leave a comment

I thought some people interested in CHIME would like to know of a very useful page on the website of a related new Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded project from the University of East Anglia, The Impact of Festivals. The post-doctoral researcher on The Impact of Festivals is Dr Emma Webster, who spent much of November acting as researcher-in-residence at the EFG London Jazz Festival, and contributed to the CHIME inception event there in November.