Please join us from Wednesday, September 11 to Saturday, September 13 for the “2024 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, Sheets of Sound: Jazz, Improvisation, and Liner Notes.”

This colloquium will take place in person at ImprovLab (Room 108) in the MacKinnon Building. The event is free and open to everybody.

Since 1996, the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, co-presented by the University of Guelph in partnership with the Guelph Jazz Festival, has brought together diverse communities of interest by providing a scholarly forum for dialogue among researchers, creative practitioners, arts presenters, and members of the general public.

The focus of this year’s colloquium is “Liner Notes.”

In what ways have liner notes shaped the way the music is received? To what extent do liner notes contribute to the ways in which we negotiate and construct meaning about the music, how we understand history, how and why we listen? In what ways have digital dissemination and streaming services disrupted our notions of liner notes? And how has this shifted listener/audience understanding about their favourite artists?

Featuring keynotes by Daphne Brooks (Department of African American Studies, Yale University) and Ashley Kahn (NYU Tisch School of the Arts), this year’s edition of The Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium showcases panels, workshops, and artistic presentations that creatively respond to these tasks, and that take up the question of what it means to use the liner note genre to write about jazz and creative improvised music.