Jazz goes Pop goes Jazz

Throughout its life, jazz sat between the chairs of aesthetic pigeonholes: For some, it was the popular music of the 1930s and the basis for many musical styles in later pop music; for others, it was a decidedly art music, a counter-design to the commercial side of pop music. Jazz musicians have always had to live with this balancing act, they have had to deal with it, but they have also been able to use it for their own purposes. At the 9th Darmstadt Jazz Forum, the different sides of the relationship between popular music and jazz will be examined.
It will deal with fundamental questions (what makes music popular?), historical classifications (where do jazz and pop music separate and how did their relationship to each other develop?), economic questions (the influence of record companies), current trends (the conscious play with pop music in the activities of younger musicians), aesthetic questions (jazz as art music and the suspicious character of commercial success) and much more.
In addition to academics 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 and agencies as well as musicians.

With contributions by:
Martin Pfleiderer: What makes music popular?
Reflections on (un)popularity in jazz and elsewhere
Andrew Hurley: Joachim Ernst Berendt - Jazz, U-Music,
Pop-Jazz and the 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 desire to cover jazz
Frithjof Strauß: Between mysticism and functionalism.
On the popularity of jazz from Scandinavia
Doris Schröder: Colorful music. The jazz pictures of Tony Munzlinger between caricature,
pop art and commercial art
Roundtable on aspects of the production and marketing of jazz 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, head and feet.
The different musical sides of Colin Towns
The science of rhythm. DJ Spooky, the philosopher of turntables,
explains the art of DJing
Andreas Felber: Old old man in search of new youth?
Notes on the new openness between jazz and popular music
in the 90s and 00s
Diedrich Diederichsen: Jazz as concept art

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