CLUSTER STATEMENT: Cultural Translation in Jazz Studies

Each of the six research clusters at BCMCR have produced a statement on what cultural translation means for researchers in their area. The statement for the Jazz Studies cluster is as follows:

“Jazz is a global music whose complex and contested history is inseparable from many of the most important social and political movements of the twentieth-century. It speaks to diverse communities throughout the world on themes of freedom, spontaneity, virtuosity, improvisation, individuality and collectivity, as well as mediating major transformations in the relationship between high art and popular culture. Questions of cultural translation are central to Jazz Studies at BCMCR, and our research frequently looks at the connections between local contexts and the global processes and practices that frame them.  This can include, for example, understanding jazz in specific social and historical contexts, but also how different media such as television and film shapes our experience of jazz. Our work examines how processes of cultural translation take place in and through time, and what is lost in translation, while touching on issues from cultural memory to the politics of improvisation.”

You can find specific examples of research from Jazz Studies scholars at BCU  here.

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