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Remixing European Jazz Culture examines a jazz culture that emerged in the 1990s in cosmopolitan cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, London, and Oslo – energised by the introduction of studio technologies into the live performance space, which has since developed into internationally recognised, eclectic, hybrid jazz styles. This book explores these oft-overlooked musicians and their forms that have nonetheless expanded the plane of jazz’s continued prosperity, popularity, and revitalisation in the twenty-first century – one where remix is no longer the sole domain of studio producers.

This article examines the dance sequences from Beyoncé’s 2013 video “***Flawless” to highlight the centrality of popular black dance within contemporary culture. Further, it looks beyond Beyoncé’s corpus to critically examine the dance remake, a forum in which dancers harness “media power” (Carroll) within the YouTube archive to re-signify Beyoncé’s work through collective choreographed dance. In this environment, dancers construct alternative biopolitics grounded by localized and participatory modes of identification. In short, this article argues that Beyoncé’s deeply personal and multifaceted poetics, when remixed via collective articulations, prompt non-essentialist negotiations of black culture’s intersectionality. Ultimately such intersectional responses to Beyoncé’s videos complicate recent debates about feminism, resilience, and sexuality within the music industry. It is also within the YouTube archive where the choreographer has assumed an elevated yet precarious status.

This article examines the North Sea Jazz Festival in order to highlight the growing influence of both ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins) and prevailing jazz mythologies upon the reception and organization of contemporary European jazz festivals. In particular, the European jazz festival is examined within the context of increasing commercialization and digital mediation of the live music field. To stake my claim, I first sketch the context within which European jazz festivals arose, especially as initially driven by curators/aficionados, whose longing for ‘authentic’ jazz within natural (resort) surroundings provided the basis for our current European jazz mythology. Next, drawing from both secondary sources and journalistic reviews, I trace how the North Sea Jazz Festival transitioned from an independently curated event to a highly professionalized media festival in Rotterdam, northern Europe’s most modern, post-industrial jazz city. Finally, my close reading of the recent North Sea Jazz Festival’s headlining, crossover Dutch jazz artist, Caro Emerald, reveals how this transformation encouraged associations with the so-called European jazz myth, one which privileged Europeans’ connections to past American aesthetics and promoted New York–based jazz ‘heroes’ alongside crossover European jazz acts. My research draws from the fields of cultural studies, historiography, ethnomusicology and media studies to postulate a multidisciplinary theoretical perspective for examining jazz ideologies in light of large-scale transformations of festival culture.

In this article, I suggest that the feminized and sexualized associations of smooth jazz as fashioned by the industry during the 1990s have since contributed to its vitriolic and sometimes hysterical denouncement by jazz performers and scholars. In particular, I uncover the affective, sexual, and gendered significance surrounding smooth jazz's reception to highlight the industrial complex precipitating its commercial ascent. Finally, I concretely interrogate these values by highlighting the work of Dutch saxophonist Candy Dulfer, emphasizing the industrial dimensions undergirding her reception as a highly successful 1990s instrumentalist whose work was often promoted as smooth jazz, despite the stylistic diversity of her recordings. Here I contrast industry discourse to those performative values expressed by Dulfer, while also recognizing the larger historical and cultural reception of jazz as a highly gendered, racialized, and sexualized cultural phenomenon. Ultimately I show how Dulfer both part...

Said’s groundbreaking monograph Orientalism (1978) inspired critical reflection of ‘Orientalist’ discourses contained within dominant Western literature. In this article, I extend this impulse by illustrating connections between early twentieth-century erotic and exotic representations of a ‘feminised Orient’ and contemporary hyper-mediated negotiations of sex and gender in audiovisual texts. My methodological approach uncovers the musical, kinetic, visual, and aesthetic signifiers that contribute culturally to a broader symbolic configuration of subjectivities in the modern and postmodern eras. As case studies, I compare two visually mediated, gendered performances: Princess Rajah’s early twentieth-century belly dancing film (1904) and the music video ‘Buttons’ (2006) by this century’s leading music-television ‘girl group’, the Pussycat Dolls. To differentiate between prior colonial articulations of difference, my analyses foreground the recent exploitation by the music industry of what I call ‘erotic multiculturalism’; a concept which betrays an accelerated surplus value derived from references to subaltern subjects within late-capitalist cultures of consumption. My examination of Orientalist stars’ online reception constitutes an additional contribution to new analytical strategies. Ultimately, I aim to ameliorate the imbalance of Orientalist studies which prioritise male creativity, by considering symbolic female Orientalist performers who both innovate and ‘Other’ through their adaptation and exploitation of new technologies in popular culture contexts.

The internationally acclaimed all-girl jazz band of the 1920s and 1930s, the Ingenues, became one of the most popular featured attractions of the multi-faceted stage-show performances showcased in combination with the new sound-films. The Ingenues, like other mass-mediated white all-girl jazz performances, remained intimately connected to the mediums of film, vaudeville, and variety revue as well as the controversial chorus-girl spectacles. During the Jazz Age, the seemingly remarkable appearance of all-girl jazz bands was not unprecedented but rather culturally prepared by a particular consumerist presentation of gender and sexuality promoted during these highly transformative decades. By connecting the various discourses surrounding all-girl jazz bands to the earlier and more commodified spectacles of girl acts introduced in variety revues and vaudeville, this article reveals how the immense popularity of the Ingenues in the transformative vaudeville/film combinations was facilitated in part through the careful construction of a feminine novelty which codified notions of innovation, versatility, sexuality and musical amateurism. Ultimately, women's unexpected musical success became implicated in modernist debates about the deleterious effects of a feminized jazz culture which threatened notions of an autonomous male musical culture and also destabilized proscribed gender relations.

Submissions are invited for a special issue of Popular Music and Society on the musical and cultural impact of Beyonce.The 2016 launch of Lemonade and the Formation World Tour–along with Beyonce’s ...

In the twenty-first century, cosmopolitan musical collectivities reinvigorate the architectural spaces of urban neighbourhoods to forge new engagements with culture and technology. Within the New European city, hybrid economic forums (Lessig) generate musical activities involving both shared practices such as musical bartering and proprietary resources such as state-of-the-art commercial recordings. In this article, I examine the growing phenomena of mixed-mediated musical collectivism by examining the socio-cultural, musical and performative activities of two Dutch groups and their surrounding collectives, Kyteman’s Hiphop Orkest (and collectivity Kytopia) and C-mon & Kypski. By offering an ethnographic and socio-cultural analysis of these two Dutch groups, I illuminate the embeddedness of late-capitalist musical collectivities to European hybrid processes. Contemporary forms of musical collectivism are distinguished from earlier varieties by highlighting participants’ engagement with hybrid practices including mixed-genre creativity; sharing of resources and professional skills, and finally collaborative networks among music and non-arts participants through a combination of local and transnational circuits.