This new exhibition features photographs and musicians’ quotes from a collaborative pilot research project called Everyday Jazz Life: A photographic project on contemporary jazz musicians lives in Birmingham. The project, at Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, brought together jazz scholar, Dr Pedro Cravinho and freelance jazz photographer Brian Homer. The exhibition launches in mid-January 2020 and is linked to the Documenting Jazz 2020 international jazz conference to be held at Birmingham City University (BCU) between 16-18 January.
By using photography, as one of the outputs of their project, the Jazz Journeys exhibition reveals some of the challenges and constraints that jazz musicians face through their musical careers. Homer’s photography of the six musicians involved in this project show them cooking, teaching, working and writing plays, as well as the more well-known music training sessions. The participants were pianist David Austin Grey, sax players Alicia Gardener-Trejo, Chris Young and Joey Walter, violinist and vocalist Ruth Angell, and 2018 Young Jazz Musician of the Year Xhosa Cole. In addition there will be a multi-media projection of Homer’s pictures contrasting fast paced performance shots with a slower paced images from the project – curated by artist Tony McClure who has also acted as a consultant to the exhibition.
UPDATE: 6th February 2020 The exhibition is over but we have plans to show elsewhere but in the meantime there is now a website www.everydayjazzlife.com
Jazz Journeys Exhibition
Find out more about these musicians lives and what they do as well as play jazz by visiting the exhibition at Centrala in Digbeth, Birmingham.
Venue
Centrala, Unit 4 Minerva Works, 158 Fazeley St, Birmingham B5 5RT
Tel: 0121 513 0240 Web: www.centrala-space.org.uk
January 15th to February 1st 2020
Open Wednesdays to Saturdays 12 – 8 pm
Documenting Jazz Conference
Focus on the theme, ways of documenting, will bring together in the West Midlands in January 2020 a significant number of national and international delegates from across the academic, archive, library, and museum sectors to explore and discuss proposals on jazz as visual culture, and its distinct representations: photography, press, cinema, television, and web. Additionally, the conference will address other ways of documenting jazz, challenging the narratives surrounding jazz as a male-dominated domain, and the way those affected have been marginalised from this music history.
Venue
Birmingham City University,Curzon Building, 4 Cardigan St, Birmingham B4 7BD
January 9th to 31st 2020
Contact: Dr Pedro Cravinho (Conference Chair) at pedro.cravinho@bcu.ac.uk
During the Documenting Jazz 2020, there will be a smaller exhibition of photographs of the musicians featured in the Everyday Jazz Lives project taken in performance by Brian Homer.
