I’ve had my first taste of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, and so far, it’s pretty overwhelming. I’ve already missed several of the bands I’d planned to see – and have been in to see a few more that caught my ear as I wandered around the city.

I’m taking a bit of break back at the hotel to catch my breath – but I’m heading out to see more jazz tonight. But this is a short video of some of the music I caught in my first four or five hours of the festival.

This has been going on since last Friday.

Just been through the jazz festival programme with Christian, one of the organisers of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival. Together, we’ve managed to whittle the baffling array of 900 bands across 100 venues down to just 40 concerts over the next few days. Some of them are happening simultaneously, so it remains to be seen exactly how many of them I’ll get to – but from the encyclopedia-sized programme, everything I’ve circled looks amazing.

A lot of big names I’m really impressed by – and a lot of names I’ve never encountered, but who come highly recommended. Quite excited to go and see Daedelus with Jon Hopkins and the Universal Quartet with Yusef Lateef. There’s also a lot of contemporary avant-garde stuff, which I’m really pleased about.

I was worried there’d be a predominance of traditional, Dixieland jazz about, but it turns out there’s only one significant band doing trad – and they’re young guys who also play a lot of avant-garde stuff, so that’ll at least be interesting.

On the agenda today, at different venues across the city:

1430: George Garzone / Rasmus Ehlers Quartet
1600: Kolkhöze Printanium
1600: Mikkel Ploug Group feat. Joachim Badenhorst
1630: Junglebreed
1800: Sinne Eeg Group
1830: Barefoot Records presents EstherOrkester
2000: Snekkestad, Kjaergaard, Strønen
2000: Thirsty Ear – Lotte Anker & Fred Frith
2030: Maria Laurette Friis
2100: Provis, Tranberg & Friis
2100: Tim Exile
2230: Delirium
2230: Emil de Waal & Spejderrobot
2300: Mark Solberg 4 feat. Herb Robertson

…and then the evening ends with all-night weirdness and drinking on a ferry that’s been reconditioned and turned into some sort of floating speakeasy. Apparently.

They’ve given me a pass which will theoretically get me in free to all of the jazz venues around town, sat me down in their VIP chillout space (sofas, coffee tables, guitars, wifi, stereo… festival organisers and jazz journalists from around the world), told me to help myself to the beer fridge (Tuborg is a sponsor – and they like their beer to have ice crystals on it here, which suits me) – and there’s a free lunch shortly.

So my question is this: Who do these people think I am – and what happens when they find out?

This is the audio recording of the panel session I chaired at Un-Convention in Manchester last month. It was about music that falls outside the indie rock band tradition you’d normally expect represented at these sorts of events. I wanted to know if there were any lessons that could be drawn from outside the margins.

Some really amazing and insightful stuff from Stef Lewandowski, Steve Lawson, Amran Ellahi, Abigail Seabrook, and Caroline Churchill.

You can listen to all of the panel sessions at the Un-Convention Soundcloud page.

I’m now officially allowed to be your PhD supervisor.

I did a three-day training course run by the university on Friday last week, Tuesday and Wednesday this week – and having come out the other side of that, we’re all systems go.

What’s your theoretical framework?

My first two doctoral students turn up in September, and it looks like the vast majority of my teaching from here on out is going to be post-graduate stuff. After a decade of teaching mostly undergrads, this is going to be an interesting change – though, that said, I have taught Masters programmes in the past… and there are certain topics I will still inevitably be called upon to lecture in for the BA students.

To answer the obvious next question – no, I don’t have a PhD myself. And while it might seem absurd that someone without a doctoral degree might supervise a doctoral programme, it’s just how it works. To be fair, I was teaching a Bachelor’s degree before I had one of those myself.

But I’m seriously considering applying for what’s known as a PhD by publication. Essentially, they weigh up all the stuff you’ve published on a single topic, look at the weight and impact of that in its context, and then make a call as to whether that’s equivalent in a meaningful way to a PhD by dissertation.

Not sure what does and doesn’t qualify in terms of my own output, but the fact that I’ve pretty much stuck to a single topic over the past 5 years certainly works in my favour.

The internal exam board was earlier today (I didn’t go, but it happened all the same), so with the exception of the external exam board and the inevitable resubmissions, that’s the academic year all tucked away and wound up.

I’m kind of exhausted, so I’m pretending Friday is part of the weekend, and sitting in the back garden with a cold drink for most of the day. I’ll have the laptop with me, of course.

As it happens, I have a lot of writing to do.

______________________________

Link: PhD at BCU

Of course, we were into that particular fad before any of you guys – and now Jake, at 16, has finished his GCSEs. That’s a picture of him, taken yesterday at his high school prom. And yes, he’s the only person in this family who owns a suit.

He’s just been accepted into CTC Kingshurst Academy – a 6th form college, where he is going to start doing the International Baccalaureate – a relief, since Solihull 6th Form College decided to drop the programme after he’d been accepted there.

He’s spending his holidays so far doing a bit of graphic design, some (paid) sound engineering work, a spot of skateboarding, staying up and making up for lost time on all of those computer games he wasn’t able to play in the lead-up to his exams, a spot of drum practice and some full-on chilling out with his girlfriend Hannah, and his best friend Ethan.

So this is just to say – to members of my family and the many of my friends (including some yet to make their news public) – if you’re going through the early stages, the doctor’s appointments, the morning sickness, the colic, the lost sleep, the midnight feeds and the constant full-attention responsibility for something so fragile (and, of course, so cute), then enjoy it, remember that it doesn’t last forever, and in the end – if you’re lucky – they turn out like this.

Jake’s awesome – intelligent, interesting, creative and funny – and we’re really proud of him.

As expected, I had a great time in Italy. I was busy pretty much the whole time, but I did make sure that I got to see a bit of the city, hang out with some great people and do some interesting things.

I was in Genoa with Stef working on the Aftershock Project – a collaboration between composer Nitin Sawhney and about a dozen musicians from across Europe who had never met. Over the course of the week, they wrote and rehearsed an hours worth of new music for a one-off performance in the little fishing village of Camogli.

Stef’s job was to build them a website, and he brought me in because I’m the ‘online music’ guy. Our idea was rather than simply build an online brochure, we would tell the story of the collaboration as it happened. Instead of making a website about Aftershock, we put Aftershock online.

We gave all of the musicians digital video cameras and asked them to film anything they thought was interesting. We took that footage, added a little bit of our own for context, and then uploaded it.

The site’s still being developed, because what we’ve done is a prototype, but if you visit the website, you can explore the narrative of Aftershock. Meet the different characters, see how they interact, get a sense of how music develops from idea to rehearsal to performance – as well as get behind the scenes and see the musicians’ perspective on the whole experience in the rehearsal room, on breaks and as they explore Genoa.

To me, that’s far more interesting than just a concert.

The stage at Camogli

We’re still putting it all together from over 500 individual pieces of video footage from 14 cameras, and figuring out how to connect it all and make it intuitive and navigable online – but it was an amazing experience, a really interesting thing to do – and a hell of a lot of work.

Italy itself was amazing. We met some great people, ate some fantastic food, stayed up till all hours drinking and talking, and explored the city.

The highlight was Camogli itself, where the concert took place. It was really gorgeous. Of course, the concert went brilliantly and everyone was awesome. For an hour by the sea, about 150 people were treated to music that nobody else had ever heard before, and which would never be performed live again.

The concert in Camogli

The drive home was a bit of a mission though. Far more so than the drive to Italy in the first place. When you’re not going on an adventure, but returning from one, 30 hours on the road seems to go by less quickly.

Stef had left his car in Camogli overnight, so we took a boat ride back there along the coast from Genoa, and left around 5pm. After crossing the alps in the most ferocious lightning storm I’d ever seen, we stopped for the night in a town in the south of France called Chambéry.

There was a music festival of some sort going on there, so we parked the car, wandered around the town, listened to some (mostly awful) music, grabbed a beer and then headed back to sleep in the car.

The boulangerie we’d strategically parked near didn’t actually open on Sunday morning, and the breakfast we picked up en route was both meagre and expensive. Not a great start to an incredibly long journey. I mean, we had some really good conversations and saw some interesting things along the way, but we were both pretty exhausted and the drive was just plain long.

So it’s nice to be back home after a long trip and an amazing but tiring week. Of course, I returned to a huge pile of marking… but it’s still lovely to be back.

I wish there’d been time to blog what I’ve been doing over the past few days, but I’ve been so busy doing it that the opportunity just never presented itself.

My friend Stef and I are working on a project in Italy called Aftershock. It’s a collaboration between musicians from across Europe, led by Nitin Sawhney and culminating in a major concert event on Friday night. The musicians meet (mostly for the first time ever), and then compose a whole set of new pieces over 5 days.

There’s a real mix – vocalists, a drummer & beatboxer, a harpist, a percussionist, guitarist & bass-player, trumpeter… and Nitin leading the group, conducting workshops and overseeing the whole project. People from the UK, Italy, France and elsewhere. It’s quite an amazing and unique event.

Stef and I are building the website. Which is to say – Stef’s building the website.

What I do is less concrete but seemingly no less intensive. But the reason we’re actually in Genoa doing it is because it’s not just a website about Aftershock, it’s the Aftershock project itself put online.

That may not sound like a major difference – but where most events would be likely to have a website that is effectively an electronic brochure focused on promoting the event, we are more concerned with the underlying story: the creative process that takes place in the lead-up to the event, the characters of the musicians themselves, and the progress from the blank page to a full concert worth of music.

The people are amazing and very individual – there are some really strong characters, and lots of really amazing stuff going on. So what we’ve done is to give all 12 musicians a handheld video camera and told them to film whatever they thought was interesting. In a way, it’s like a reality show where the contestants get the cameras.

What’s great and interesting about that is that it allows the public to see into the development of the works, get to know the people involved, care about the characters and want to know the ‘end’ of the story – which is to say, come to the concert.

In other words, I’m approaching this as storytelling, rather than as marketing.

It’s a musical journey
One of the interesting things about what we’ve been doing is that it’s turned into a real adventure. Because the arrangements were so last minute, it was really expensive to get flights or trains, so Stef and I decided we’d drive from Birmingham to Genoa – a 22 hour trek across Europe, the highlight of which was crossing the alps.

The prototype website
Stef and I have been collecting up the footage, tagging it with the name of the people in the videos, and assembling them on the site, which is slowly coming together nicely.

The point of it all is that this one is the prototype. This is not just about building a website, but about inventing and formulating the way in which events like this one can be portrayed and presented online.

But how we thought it would work has, of course, changed in response to what we found when we arrived – which is sort of what we expected might happen. There is no way we could have anticipated how it would work, and this site could not have been accomplished had we stayed in Birmingham to do it.

Even what the cameras are for has changed. Nitin recognised that the portable digital video cameras were a great tool for the artists to take notes and record difficult pieces that they could then take away, study and rehearse – so the online presence has actually become part of the creative process as well, which is great.

Good times in Genoa
It’s an amazing experience, an amazing amount of fun, and quite a lot of hard work. It’s a real challenge to think through the way in which this all works, and make it an integrated part of the process. The results, though, are quite pleasing.

The site is coming together, and while it will change and adapt as we go along, the point of the whole thing is to get it how we want it, and then document the process so that it can be repeated for future events – like Aftershock Marseilles and Aftershock Manchester, which are to follow next.

We’re almost there on the site. It does almost everything it’s supposed to do technically, though we have a few cosmetic changes to make. Now my job is to continue collecting and uploading the video footage while writing up the documentation so that somebody else could walk in and make the next one work smoothly.

Of course, it’s an amazing experience to hang out and work with such incredible musicians in such an amazing place. I’m working on this 12 hours a day, and then going out and experiencing the city with Stef and the musicians. I’m making great friends and having a fantastic time.

I hope there’s a way I can be involved in future Aftershock events, even though the point of my job here is to make myself redundant.

Go explore the site, meet the musicians and see what we’re up to.

My flight back from Holland to Birmingham today left at 10.15am. I was not on it.

I stayed the night at Lykle’s place in Groningen last night, and we were up at 5am getting ready so I could make it to the 6am train in plenty of time. A ‘direct to the airport’ express – two and a half hours journey. Plenty of time to get there.

There’d been some amazing storms overnight, but it was already promising to be a beautiful day.

Lykle saw me onto the train, we said our goodbyes and he went back home to bed.

At five past six, there was an announcement in Dutch. A woman in my carriage kindly translated for me. The train track had been hit by lightning overnight, and there was going to be a bit of a delay until they’d fixed the problem.

So we waited…

Sneltrein fail rail
45 minutes later, another bunch of people got on our train. It was now going somewhere completely different (The Hague, I think). It would stop at every station along the way, but we’d be able to change trains at Amersfoort and get to Schiphol from there.

We made it as far as Hoogeveen. That is, not very far at all. The train would go no further.

After ten minutes or so of dithering, the train company had managed to get a bus or two to turn up to take us to Meppel. From there, we could take another train to The Hague (where I wasn’t trying to be) – and from there, I could take another train to Schiphol.

It was already 8am, and it would be almost noon before I got there – best case scenario. My flight was at 10.15am.

The kindness of strangers
Fortunately, the woman who had translated for me on the train found a man who had driven to his local station and was on his way to the Hague. She arranged a place in his car for me – and he only had one spare place. She could have taken it herself, as they were headed to the same place, but she knew my predicament, and voluntarily resigned herself to the vagaries of public transport.

So it was back on the train, back the way we had come, as far as Assen, where he was parked. I explained the urgency of the situation and he very kindly offered to take me direct to the airport – a journey that must have been nearly 100km out of his way, all up.

He planned the journey on his iPhone, stepped on the gas and reckoned he could get me to the front door by 10am. He was spot on. It was worth a shot.

Amazing coincidences
On the journey, we talked, and it turned out that he was a product manager for an internet & software company that sponsor the Eurosonic Noorderslag festival – a big music industry conference and series of concerts in January.

Naturally, we knew several of the same people, at one level of remove.

I’ve also given him contact details for Lykle, as they’re working on very similar – possibly overlapping – development ideas. I reckon there could be some business to be done there.

So close…
On arrival at the airport, I ran through checkout. It was bang on 10am. They assigned me a seat and told me that if I run, I might just make it.

I ran. But I didn’t make it.

Apparently – I missed by 30 seconds. They were very sorry, but there was nothing they could do. And since this was a non-transferable ticket, I’d have to buy another one. Go to Transfer desk 4 please.

Exhausted, I trudged to T4, where I explained my situation to the woman behind the counter. She told me she liked my story – particularly the ‘tracks hit by lightning’ bit – and so she wasn’t even going to look at my ticket to see what kind it was. She was just going to assume it was a transferable one, and give me free replacement.

This always happens and people are always cool
Between the woman from KLM who was just delightful; Koen from the internet company who went so far out of his way to drive me here; the woman who both translated the announcements for me and gave up her free ride; and Lykle & Annet who were such exceptional hosts and made me feel incredibly welcome, I have to say that despite missing my flight, I’ve really had quite an incredible day already – full of amazingly cool people.

As Clutch and I always say – ordeals beget treats.

In this case, the ordeal was full of treats. And of course, it wouldn’t be a Dubber journey without an adventure somewhere along the line…

I spent the day at the offices of New Music Labs in Groningen. The morning was spent catching up with emails and phone calls, but by lunchtime, there was a steady stream of visitors bearing problems, questions and gifts.

Krause (above), who has a record deal with Sony, came to chat. I’ve consulted with her in the past, and she gave me a copy of the CD promo she’s managed to produce so far under that contract.

We had a lot of good ideas, and came up with some ways in which she could develop her online strategy, and I’m going to be working with her through More Canals to handle that side of things.

The artists formerly known as ‘Believe is a Doubt’ (really)

I spoke to a band who have played their last gig under their old name, and are laying to rest all of their old music.

They came to me with a new style – but no web strategy, no plan and no band name. They left with all three, some promo photos and a notebook full of ideas.

I spoke to someone who’s writing a dissertation about social media and music business, and I managed to both challenge and develop some of the ideas of that dissertation – and come up with the solution to a problem I’ve been struggling with for New Music Strategies for two years.

Sometimes it just takes the right combination of people in the room at the same time in order to spark an idea.

Dinner with two members of Audiotransparent, who gave me a copy of their split double 7″ single with Great Lake Swimmers.

We talked over dinner (amazing Dutch mustard soup) about their plan to play in theatres, living rooms, concert halls and trains (yep – trains) and their impending meeting with Rough Trade.

I’m back at Lykle’s place now, after a very full day, drinking Frysk Hynder – the Frisian single malt whisky we discovered last night in Leeuwarden, and managed to find a bottle of today in a specialist store in the city centre of Groningen.

A quiet one tonight sorting and uploading photos – and then it’s a 6am train to Amsterdam so I can catch a 10.15 flight from Schiphol back to Birmingham.

Spent most of yesterday in the city of Leeuwarden, meeting with students and other interested parties at the Academie Voor Popcultuur, where Niels Aalberts, Marco Raaphorst and I talked as a group and with individuals throughout the afternoon.

Niels is an independent A&R/Manager who represents Kyteman (amazingly popular trumpeter who leads a hip hop orchestra in the Netherlands) and Marco is a composer, Creative Commons activist and sound designer for Propellerhead. Both are well-known music industry bloggers in Holland.

The session was really great, though of course, everyone had to speak in English because my Dutch extends to about four general purpose phrases, which wouldn’t have been very helpful at all.

After the session the four of us (including Lykle, who’d organised and chaired the session) went out for a drink, a look around Leeuwarden and a bite to eat for dinner. We went to a place called By Us, which served beautiful food, really amazingly presented, but really, really slowly.

I got to try a Frisian single malt whisky called Frysk Hynder, which was produced locally and was really young – only one month past the 3 years maturation required before you can call a spirit ‘whisky’. Really nice though – sherry cask, which came through a lot, a little bit salty without being peaty, and a bit of caramel to it.

Apparently, once they’ve used the casks for whisky, they go and use them again to make mustard. Haven’t heard of that practice before, but I approve.

Once our meal was finally over (delicious – but by god you’re hungry when it arrives), Lykle and I went out to catch a band – Children of 9, which was the final project of one of the Academie students.

Amazing stuff. Some rough edges – and I described it as a mix of Nine Inch Nails, Muse, Disturbed, Depeche Mode, Rocky Horror and the Corrs – only not so tastefully understated.

This was clearly meant to big stadium stuff, and pyrotechnics would not have been out of place. A few rough edges, but given that Robin was a techno DJ two years ago, and he programmed the beats (the best bit) and coordinated all the visuals… as well as wrote the songs, put the band together and sang lead – it’s an impressive effort.

Late home (it’s about an hour’s drive to Groningen, where I’m staying, from Leeuwarden) but a really great day. Leeuwarden’s a really attractive city. Go have a look at the photos.

…and yes, I’ve changed the blog layout again.