German Jazz Today
Germany
Time
2014.10.12 14:00 – 16:00
Venue
A3+, North District of OCT-LOFT
Speaker
Wolfram Knauer（Director of Jazzinstitut Darmstadt, Germany）
Introduction of the Lecture
Jazz was born as an African-American music, but it has since conquered the world, asking musicians from around the globe to both follow the model of the American original and add influences from their own musical backgrounds. In Germany, jazz has become an important form of creative musical expression, supported by a devoted audience, by a diverse club and festival scene and by funding through radio, public municipal and regional offices as well as the national government.
The Jazzinstitut Darmstadt has been founded in 1990 by the city of Darmstadt, and has since become the largest public jazz archive and information center in Europe and one of the major sources for information about jazz worldwide. Wolfram Knauer has been the Jazzinstitut’s director since its inception and will talk both about the diversity of current German jazz and about the tasks of an organization connecting the music scene, its audience, and cultural politics. He will also touch upon the importance of jazz and improvised music as a creative force in our globalized world.
Introduction of the Speaker
Wolfram Knauer is a musicologist and the director of the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt since its inception in 1990. He has written and edited more than 14 books on jazz and serves on the board of editors for the scholarly journal Jazz Perspectives. He has taught at several schools and universities and was appointed the first non-American Louis Armstrong Professor of Jazz Studies at the Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University, New York, for spring 2008.
Introduction of the Institute
The Jazzinstitut Darmstadt bridges scholarly and practical demands, regional and multi-cultural activities as well as transnational scholarly discourses in order to support the music and the many people who keep it alive. The Jazzinstitut has also earned a reputation in the jazz world for its reliable services answering inquiries of any kind.
The Jazzinstitut Darmstadt holds Europe’s largest public research archive on jazz. Among its holdings are substantial donations and acquisitions from many private collectors. Today it holds thousands of books and more than 80,000 items of recorded music. Its periodical collection is unique and being used by researchers from all over the world. A bibliographical database allows users from around the globe to find interviews, articles and other information about musicians, styles, recordings, published in major as well as obscure publications.
Apart from its archive, the Jazzinstitut has become a major service organization, providing a website with detailed information about the current German jazz scene (http://www.wegweiserjazz.de/) as well as participating in the political discourse about the need for jazz in a modern society (http://www.bk-jazz.de/). The Jazzinstitut is an internationally renowned research organization and organizes international conferences every other year as well as an annual practical jazz workshop. It has its own concert space aiming at a local audience and featuring contemporary jazz acts in concert series such as the JazzTalk.
Website
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazzinstitut-Darmstadt/362108947150650