Music Matters - Double Book Presentation - KRISTIN MCGEE: "Remixing European Jazz Culture" (Routledge 2020) & CHRIS TONELLI: : Voices Found: Free Jazz & Singing" (Routledge 2020)

On Wednesday, January 27th from 17:00-19:00 (CET), the Music Matters Lecture Series (website & Facebook), presented by the Music, Sound and Culture theme group of the Research Centre for Arts in Society will open its annual performance & lecture series with a double book launch event celebrating the release in 2020 of Remixing European Jazz Culture by Arts, Culture and Media faculty member Dr Kristin McGee, and Voices Found: Free Jazz and Singing by Arts, Culture, and Media faculty member Dr Chris Tonelli.

Dr Fabian Holt, author of Genre in Popular Music (2007) and Everyone Loves Live Music (2021), will be present to comment on Remixing European Jazz Culture, and Carey West, vocalist and doctoral student in the University of Guelph’s Critical Studies in Improvisation program will comment on Voices Found. Musicians discussed in the two books will also be present to comment and offer performances; these will include: Amsterdam based saxophonist, DJ, and producer Susanne Alt; Berlin-based DJ, producer, and Jazzanova member Stefan Leisering; and Toronto based poet and soundsinger Paul Dutton. This session is a co-presentation with IASPM Benelux’s Pop Talks series.

Remixing European Jazz Culture examines a jazz culture that emerged in the 1990s in cosmopolitan cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, London, and Oslo – energised by the introduction of studio technologies into the live performance space, which has since developed into internationally recognised, eclectic, hybrid jazz styles. This book explores these oft-overlooked musicians and their forms that have nonetheless expanded the plane of jazz’s continued prosperity, popularity, and revitalisation in the twenty-first century – one where remix is no longer the sole domain of studio producers.

Voices Found: Free Jazz and Singing contributes to a wave of voice studies scholarship with the first book-length study of free jazz voice. It pieces together a history of free jazz voice that spans from sound poetry and scat in the 1950s to the more recent wave of free jazz choirs. The author traces the developments and offers a theory, derived from interviews with many of the most important singers in the history of free jazz voice, of how listeners have experienced and evaluated the often unconventional vocal sounds these vocalists employed. This theory explains that even audiences willing to enjoy harsh sounds from saxophones or guitars often resist when voices make sounds that audiences understand as not-Human.

Platform and registration

This event will take place via this Google Meet.

Participants entering via a University of Groningen google account need not pre-register. All others are requested to register in advance by emailing your first and last name to c.j.tonelli@rug.nl with the subject line "Double Book Launch Registration."