Jazz Studies – Work in Progress

Dr. Sid Peacock (BCU) 

Balancing Act – A learn-as-you-go approach to developing a unique festival with an international vision

Sid Peacock will be talking about the Surge in Spring festival that has just delivered its 3rd year. The festival presents music from around the world ranging from amateur to professional acts. There is a focus on new works and collaborations and future plans are to interweave a conference within the festival so that the wider public can engage with academic activity. This presentation will look at the decision-making process and how to achieve balance between genres, entertainment, art and academic activity.

Dr. Pedro Cravinho (BCU) 

Exploring the border crossings between jazz and fado in Portugal

Based on fieldwork and archival research, this paper explores the borders crossing between jazz and fado, as part of a broader ongoing investigation that I am conducting on Portuguese twenty-century jazz history. Like in jazz, in fado, tradition, and modernity coexist. Over the last decades, distinct Portuguese artists pushed the boundaries of both musical genres. By rethinking its performance, and resounding the traditional fado melodic patterns with new forms that collect inputs from the jazz tradition, arrangements and improvisation assumed a central role in those projects. This paper will explore some of those border crossings between these two distinct musical genres.

About the speakers:

Sid Peacock is a researcher at BCU and artistic director of Surge Orchestra. His PhD thesis was Developing a Compositional Voice for Experimental Big Band and his current research interests are in festival curation and contemporisation of traditional musics in experimental ensemble.

Dr Pedro Cravinho is a Research Fellow at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research and the current Keeper of the Archives – Faculty of Arts, Design and Media (Birmingham City University). His research is focused historically on jazz, as a social and musical practice, and its distinct media representations on the public sphere. As an author, published his first bilingual (Portuguese – English) monograph about jazz on a single locale, the Portuguese city of Coimbra (JACC, 2016), together with several articles and chapters on the cultural politics of jazz in Portugal. As editor advisor, has worked on Jazz and Totalitarianism, edited by Bruce Johnson (Routledge, 2017).