Jazz goes Pop goes Jazz

Throughout its history, jazz has straddled the line between different aesthetic categories: to some, it was the popular music of the 1930s and the foundation for many styles in later pop music; to others, it was a distinct form of art music, an alternative to the commercial aspects of pop music. Jazz musicians have always had to live with this balancing act; they had to grapple with it, though they could certainly use it to their advantage as well. The 9th Darmstadt Jazz Forum will shed light on the various aspects of the relationship between popular music and jazz.
The focus will be on fundamental questions (What makes music popular?), historical classifications (Where do jazz and pop music diverge, and how has their relationship evolved?), economic issues (the influence of record labels), current trends (the deliberate interplay with pop music in the work of younger musicians), aesthetic questions (jazz as art music and the questionable nature of commercial success), and much more.
In addition to scholars from Germany, Austria, Denmark, and Australia, practitioners such as the British composer Colin Towns and the New Yorker Paul D. Miller, alias DJ Spooky, will also have their say. Finally, a panel discussion will bring together representatives from record production, various media outlets, agencies, and musicians.

With contributions by:
Martin Pfleiderer: What Makes Music Popular?
Reflections on (Un)popularity in Jazz and Elsewhere
Andrew Hurley: Joachim Ernst Berendt – Jazz, Light Music,
Pop-Jazz and Ambivalence (1950–1970)
Fabian Holt: Not a Silent Way. Popular Music and Jazz Modernism After Elvis
Wolfram Knauer: Healing Force of the Universe? Why Free Jazz Became Tame
Jürgen Schwab: New Standards – The (Not-So-)New Pleasure of Covering in Jazz
Frithjof Strauß: Between Mysticism and Functionalism.
On the Popularity of Jazz from Scandinavia
Doris Schröder: Colorful Music. Tony Munzlinger’s Jazz Illustrations Between Caricature,
Pop Art, and Applied Art
Roundtable on Aspects of Jazz Production and Marketing with Veit Bremme,
Bodo Jacoby, Harald Justin, Reiner Michalke, and Olaf Schönborn
Peter Kemper: Who wouldn’t want to be a global player? – On the orthodox
and paradoxical convergence of jazz and pop
Music for the heart, mind, and feet.
The different musical sides of Colin Towns
The science of rhythm. DJ Spooky, the philosopher of turntablists,
explains the art of DJing
Andreas Felber: An old man in search of a new youth?
Notes on the new openness between jazz and popular music
in the 1990s and 2000s
Diedrich Diederichsen: Jazz as Concept Art

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