Documenting Jazz

An international conference on jazz history, archives and heritage. I founded it at TU Dublin in 2019, and it has since been hosted in Birmingham, Edinburgh and Wales.

Dublin, 17 to 19 January 2019

The first Documenting Jazz put Irish jazz and Irish jazz studies in the spotlight and brought the international jazz studies community to Dublin. Over three days there were two keynotes, 67 papers, a poster exhibition, a closing concert and a conference dinner, along with archive meetings that included a roundtable on an Irish jazz archive.

The theme left room for a wide range of papers and drew in the archive world. Among those represented were the Siena Jazz Archive, the National Jazz Archive (UK), the Scottish Jazz Archive, the Louis Armstrong House Museum, the Russian Jazz Archive, Jazz Heritage Wales, the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation Collection at Stanford, the National Library of Norway, and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

The keynote speakers were Krin Gabbard and Gabriel Solis. Catherine Tackley, Tim Hall, Nicholas Gebhardt and Dana Gooley were there, authors Stephanie Crease and John Gennari gave papers, and Francesco Martinelli and Alyn Shipton, editors of The History of European Jazz, attended, as did Intellect Books, Equinox and Routledge.

Many delegates got in touch afterwards about the sense of community at the event, the range and quality of the research, and the chance to meet people. My thanks to the conference committee, the administrative staff at TU Dublin, and Dr Orla McDonagh for making it possible.

Coverage: All About Jazz and University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

Birmingham, 2020

The second edition took place at Birmingham City University from 16 to 18 January 2020, chaired by Pedro Cravinho. More than a hundred delegates came from twenty countries, and the theme was jazz as visual culture, with keynotes from Catherine Tackley and Kristin McGee.

Edinburgh, 2021, and after

The third edition went online in June 2021, hosted by the Reid School of Music at the University of Edinburgh and chaired by Marian Jago, on the theme of encountering jazz. The fourth went to the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in 2022.