Jazz Movements

12th Nordic Jazz Conference

The 12th Nordic Jazz Conference is on the theme “Jazz Movements.” The conference explores the theme along a number of different lines, including:

• Movements across geographic space and place
• Movements and changes across time and history
• Jazz as part of political, cultural, and artistic movements
• Bodily, affective, and performative movements and gestures
• Movements in musical structure, form, and rhetoric

The conference features two days of talks, panels, and performances.

The event is a part of Jazz Danmark’s celebration of “Danish Jazz 100 Years” in 2026.

 

 

 

 

Registration

• All presenters are automatically registered for the conference.
• The conference is open to anyone. Participation is free-of-charge, but registration is necessary and can be done by emailing Mikkel Vad at mkv@hum.ku.dk.

Abstracts

Catherine Tackley (University of Liverpool): Mainstream Movements: Jazz, Swing and the British Dance Band

Dance bands were an integral part of popular culture in Britain in the twentieth century with a legacy that extends into the present. Their activities extended beyond the obvious - playing music for social dancing – to providing musical accompaniment for performances as well as functioning as ‘acts’ in their own right in live settings, on record and through broadcasts on radio and television. Dance band repertoire was vast and varied, encompassing the standard ballroom dances including Latin American styles, speciality dance numbers, novelty or comedy pieces, light classical music and also jazz. For bands to achieve and maintain mainstream success required careful and ongoing negotiations between these elements which demanded versatility and virtuosity from the musicians involved.

This paper examines the movement of musicians between subculture and mainstream which enabled the presence of jazz in dance band music. Consequently, jazz provided a basis for virtuosic dance band showpieces but more habitually, a source of variety within carefully structured arrangements. Swing presented a threat to the mainstream, socially and musically, in the 1930s; and its adoption necessitated more substantial changes which could ultimately only come about due to the disruption of an event of the magnitude of the Second World War.

John Howland: "Mixing the Modes for the Masses": Bridging the Gap, Fusion's Crossover, and Jazz Sidemen in 1970s "Sophisticated" Pop Production

This keynote talk considers the contributions of, and discourses around, jazz-grounded sidemen working in 1970s pop. This research spans both cross-genre discourses in Downbeat (DB) and Rolling Stone (RS) over 1974-1979, and considerations of music, especially hits from Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan. 

In Billboard's 1972 jazz special, the article “Looking for Freshness on a Pop Date? Hire a Jazz Sideman” points to jazz musicians contributions to pop production and performance. At this time, DB already carried the subtitle "Jazz-Blues-Rock." But while a 1973 editorial change foregrounded increasing interest in "movin' toward new dimensions, the editor stressed that "Downbeat is jazz and all related to jazz." By the next year, the subtitle changed to "Contemporary Music Magazine."

DB develops a new mindfulness of how jazz-trained musicians might create broader careers within the music industry, as seen in the new DB annual "Music Handbooks," which they characterized as "Definitive Music Industry Reference" guides for musicians seeking employment as cross-genre sidemen and more. From 1975, DB coverage includes sideman spotlights such as a Tom Scott feature on his work with Joni Mitchell, or 1979 articles on "Session Musicians, the Sound of Rock's Elite" and the Brecker Bros. in the "Studio Rat Race." While many jazz-affiliated musicians worked as industry sidemen and arrangers pre-1970, they rarely contributed jazz textures to Top 40 pop. This changes in the mid-1970s, as heard across hits by Mitchell, Steely Dan, David Bowie, Carole King, Paul Simon, and more. This mainstream pop trend has received little scholarly inquiry. Its roots are illuminated in Matthew Brennan's When Genres Collide, which considers late 1960s cross-genre jazz-rock discourses in RS and DB, but this study ends with a chapter on the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival. 

By contrast, Kevin Fellezs's 2011 Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion, considers three central fusion artists alongside singer-songwriter Mitchell, but Fellezs overlooks her breakthrough 1974 album Court and Spark (with Scott as musical director) to focus on Mitchell's less-commercial "jazz" grounded albums of 1975-1980. The taste-culture discourse on such jazz-informed pop involves sustained tensions between admiration and dismissive snobbery. For example, DB glowingly describes Steely Dan as "the quintessence of cool," "musicians who view the recording studio as an instrument," and musicians with a more "sophisticated harmonic sense than most rock," despite also noting critical complaints about their "commercial," "slick, mechanical, soulless qualities" and "jazzy" complexity.

Central to Fellezs' study is the notion of a "broken middle" in fusion's "state of permanent instability" and its "point[s] of contradiction, where opposites fail to transform each other." Similar sustained, cross-genre tensions are relevant to 1970s mainstream pop's genre mixing (often via fusion musicians working as sidemen), and its aspirational sophistication and "adult" pop sensibilities. These qualities reveal issues of hidden studio authorship, genre hybridity, taste-culture discourse, crossover limits, and how sidemen integrated jazz topics and practices into iconic 1970s pop tracks.