There’s a growing collegiate atmosphere in UK jazz. That sounds odd, as ‘collegiate’ is a term you don’t hear as much here as in US academic circles. It’s unheard of at jazz gigs. Why I say that is the use of the word “fellows” and “fellowships”, in the wake of the announcement last night of the recipients of the first Jazzlines Fellowships in Birmingham. It’s a trend that’s been around for a while and musical instrument company Yamaha got there a while back with their jazz “scholars” scheme. One of the new fellows Lluis Mather was a scholar himself three years ago. The image of musicians, possibly monks, toiling over illuminated manuscripts springs absurdly to mind. There’s even a pun there somewhere.
The Birmingham fellowships offer mentoring, advice and masterclasses, a bit like Take Five that the promoter Serious runs and has extended to a wider European roll-out. But the Birmingham scheme is different, angled at the creation of new work and then the touring of it directly, with no residential element as far as I can make out involved, unlike Take Five’s annual sojourns in Kent. The Jerwood Charitable Foundation’s involvement means the scheme connects with the foundation’s work in other sectors of the arts.
The three musicians selected are part of the Birmingham and increasingly national scene having graduated from the Conservatoire jazz course, and in trumpeter Percy Pursglove’s case have had an active involvement in running the Harmonic festival, one of the most imaginative new festivals to begin in recent years. Dan Nicholls reminds me in his setting up of magazine Green Chimneys and gigging with his band Strobes of the enterprise demonstrated by someone like World Service Project’s Dave Morecroft, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he isn’t on the talent-spotting Whittingham prize radar already for later in the year as WSP were.
Maybe the Jazzlines fellows will also be in the vanguard of the new jazz in the future. Tony Dudley-Evans of Jazzlines has a good track record working with Jerwood in the past at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, and if the new music produced is of the calibre achieved in a festival commission such as the one that resulted in the formation of the band Food then it will prove to be of wider European let alone national significance. So collegiality might be as jazz a word in 2013 as ‘Congeniality’ even if the mortar boards might have to be ditched.
Stephen Graham
Dan Nicholls (above left), Lluis Mather, and Percy Pursglove.
Photo: John Watson/jazzcamera.co.uk
Ornette Coleman’s ‘Congeniality’ from The Shape of Jazz to Come: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNOzv2KuAAo