Teaching Jazzfest Berlin

Bettina
We met each other through Nadin Deventer, she introduced us with the announcement that we were both doing seminars on the subject of Jazzfest Berlin. I would like to know more: Why did you actually do this seminar? What were your motivations?

Matthias
Yes exactly, Nadin Deventer and I started talking to each other, also with a view to the Jazzfest Berlin anniversary and whether we could initiate a cooperation between the UdK and the Jazzfest Berlin in this context. We then agreed to design a course using the Jazzfest Berlin archive as a starting point. That was also my main idea behind the seminar, because the great thing is that the Jazzfest Berlin has made its archive and the digital copies created from it available, which are otherwise not so easy to access. Playing with this archive, together with the students, exploring it to see what insights we might uncover, and what you can learn from it about music historiography, jazz historiography, jazz and festival research - that was one of the focal points of the course in terms of content and methodology.

Bettina
Have you done archive work before, both as a researcher and in your courses? And if so, how was it different to previous archive work?

Matthias
Quite often, of course, endlessly, for example as part of my dissertation on the return of musicians from exile to West Germany after 1945.1_HD I’m a historical musicologist, so archival work is a kind of body and soul business for me. For most of the students in the seminar, this was probably their first encounter with historical sources, but we also work with sources again and again during our studies. I really love letting students loose on sources. It often really triggers them to find musicology exciting and great and not just see it as an annoying minor subject within their already packed degree programme. They then realise: ‘Wow, this is really lively. These sources are full of life, music history is full of life. And that's also directly related to me.’ In the seminar, we also had really living sources, namely a whole host of contemporary witnesses for oral history interviews. These are completely different, direct encounters in which a lot happens in dialogue that often stays with the students for a long time.

Bettina
When it came to the contemporary witnesses, how did you decide who to invite, or was it based purely on practical reasons?

Matthias
Nadin was a great help in that she made contact with many of the contemporary witnesses, e.g. Ihno von Hasselt from the Jazzfest Berlin itself or Dieter Hahne and Markus Müller from Free Music Production. I would have liked to have had Bert Noglik with me; or Alexander von Schlippenbach, but he was on tour at the time. The conversation with Julia Hülsmann was a real labour of love for me, especially because she is a colleague at the UdK. Some of it moved very quickly. Basically, we would now have to organise a follow-up seminar to what we heard, also in order to delve even deeper into the music than was possible now. But at least the students are analysing the recorded conversations in more detail as part of their small research projects.

Bettina
Yes, you required project work from the students as part of the course. Have you done something like this before or did you have the feeling that it was particularly suitable for this topic at the Jazzfest Berlin? 

Matthias
The cliché seminar in musicology is based on presentations. That's fine for many topics if there's a broad body of literature to work on, a multi-layered research discourse. In this case, I would have found that a pity, because on the one hand there is not so much literature on jazz and festival research on the jazz festival itself, but also on a theoretically reflective level. And besides, the main aim was to familiarise myself with the historical source material and work with it. So I thought it made more sense to organise it as a research project so that the students could also see themselves as researchers. At the beginning, we had a four- or five-week familiarisation phase where we read a relatively large amount of theoretical literature, particularly on methodological questions of festival research, but we also read sources together as an exercise. And then we started working with the sources in groups. Actually, we would have needed another three or four weeks to go back a bit to the theoretical-methodological beginning, in order to integrate the material we had gathered back into a theoretical reflection. That's not enough now, but a summer semester is ultimately just too short and too full for that.

Bettina
I had the impression that the Jazzfest Berlin with its history fits in well with your research focus on the Cultural Cold War. Perhaps you would like to say something more about this?

Matthias
Exactly, there are actually two main strands that interested me in this topic. Firstly in terms of content, I've already mentioned my dissertation on the return of musicians from exile to post-war West German society. I had already dealt very intensively with music culture in West Germany and Berlin after 1945. For example, with a figure like Nicolas Nabokov, who was then director of the Berliner Festspiele at the time when the Jazzfest Berlin was founded, and who was in close contact with the CIA and is known to have used music culture, and festivals in particular, as soft power in the Cold War. And at this time, shortly after the Wall was built, West Berlin was really at the centre of events: the cultural frontline city of Berlin, as it was also called, with this showcase function in East and West. There's also some great source material, for example when you look at Louis Armstrong's press conference in East Berlin in 1965, the students' jaws dropped in the seminar when they saw how politically charged jazz was at that time. Especially for today's students with their, let's say unprotected, highly sensitive and charged perspective on identity politics, when they see how the topic of jazz was treated and instrumentalised back then, as an ‘encounter between black and white’, for example, this initially creates a great potential for irritation, which can then be productively discussed. That was one strand, which is why the seminar admittedly had a bit of a 1960s flavour.
The other was more of a methodological approach, which interested me. I also do a lot of research on techno and have already published on festivals in this area.  It was in this context that I came into contact with so-called festival studies. This is the name of a field of cultural studies research that uses the view of festivals as a kind of heuristic vehicle, to put it in pompous terms. It's about the knowledge gained from this particular perspective. What can I learn about music history and music culture by looking at festivals that I might not otherwise understand? And vice versa: What can I, as a musicologist, contribute to a better understanding of festivals? Those would be the key questions.

I still find this very appealing, but as a historian in particular, it is often not straightforward, because most of the festival studies that have been carried out to date have often consisted more of qualitative approaches, such as surveys on today's festivals, the statistical evaluation of programmes, etc. This is then about the average age and other questions regarding the composition of the audience at jazz festivals or the economic and structural background. It's about the average age and other questions about the composition of the audience at jazz festivals or about the economic and structural background. Without question, this is all as interesting as it is relevant and there is a whole range of possible approaches, but you have to consider how they still fit when you are working historically. For example, I would find a critical reflection on the numerous existing television and radio recordings of the Berlin Jazz Festival informative and profitable. The same so-called ‘great moments’ are always shown, such as the performance by Fela Kuti, the Miles Davis performances, Carla Bley's ‘Boo to you, too’ etc., which are regularly used as a quarry to illustrate the historiography of the jazz festival. I would be interested to know how I can deal methodically with such sources. How do I really get them to speak? What other staging strategies were used in television and radio broadcasts, how can I meaningfully analyse audience reactions, what about the announcements that seem irritating from today's perspective? What do outfits, hairstyles, movements of the people on and in front of the stage tell me? And how does all this relate to the repertoire and styles played? The same applies to a close reading of the programme booklets and books. In jazz research at least, there are relatively few models for analysing and evaluating such sources in their various layers of information. And that's where the fun really begins for the historian... 
In jazz research and historiography, you often have to deal with a verbalised gallery of ancestors and heroes: ‘The first jazz festival in history was Paris, then came Newport, then Berlin, and there was always a brilliant steering and leading figure à la Joachim-Ernst Berendt, who initiated and built it up in a visionary way’, etc. The second main strand of the seminar was to drill down on this, reflect critically and think about alternative forms of jazz (festival) historiography.

Bettina
In fact, you inspired me a lot in the way I conceptualised my seminar with the tool ‘festival studies’, which made a lot of sense to me, especially what you say about the heuristic instrument. I actually come from a background in literary studies and philosophy and have dealt a lot with the topic of gernre and subsequently also with institutions. I found festivals as institutions, which on the one hand take up and show musical events, but somehow also shape them, to be a totally interesting topic. 

Matthias
Right, now why don't you tell us a bit about it?

Bettina
There were actually also two strands to how I came to this seminar: on the one hand, Nadin Deventer approached me when it was clear that I would be taking over the position as director of the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt. With Joachim-Ernst Berendt, there is a clear personnel overlap between the Jazzfest Berlin and the Jazzinstitut. I think Nadin had hoped that I could provide good access to Joachim-Ernst Berendt's archive holdings at the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt. There is a lot of his material at the Jazzinstitut, and Berendt's collection, which the city of Darmstadt bought in the 1980s, is the nucleus of the Jazzinstitut as a whole. So for me, the first question was: How can we make the archive holdings from the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt accessible for Jazzfest Berlin? And then I realised: it's super complicated because a lot of things haven't been properly indexed yet and the work resources aren't really there. 
Secondly, it was clear anyway: I can/must fill a seminar in Hildesheim with one topic. And then I said: I would clarify all other practical questions about the materials and topics related to Joachim-Ernst Berendt and the Berlin Jazz Festival during the seminar. That's how it turned out.

Matthias
You hinted that you virtually curated festivals yourselves? That sounds very interesting, why don't you tell us how that went?

Bettina
In Hildesheim there is a strong interlocking of theory and practice, which comes from a Bauhaus tradition; they also have workshops and much more. I already know from my previous teaching experience that practical exercises always work very well, and I also think such exercises are great for the students to develop their own perspective. That's why I had the students develop their own jazz festival at the very first session. They had to think about which target groups they wanted to address, which formats there were, who could perform there - they had to pick out music beforehand as homework –– unfortunately, only a small part of the seminar was spent listening to music. And they also had to think about where they could organise it.
Interestingly, the students limited themselves to the context they know, the city of Hildesheim. Perhaps it is also clever that they simply work with what they know, where they can assess the public, the conditions of the audience a little. On the second day of the seminar, they were then asked to write their own foreword for a fictitious programme booklet to welcome the fictitious audience.

Matthias
So Berendt-like, as a programme foreword?

Bettina
Exactly. On the second day, we got into the story and looked at the forewords of all the artistic directors since the beginning of Jazzfest Berlin, as a kind of mission statement for their artistic vision and how they view jazz. During the preparations, I realised that you can't go through everything historically, but these are the kind of key points where you can trace the history a bit, but also ask the questions: What actually is jazz and what do people want with it in Germany? That also changes over time.
So we went from ‘we curate a jazz festival on paper’ to a historical overview of the programme booklets. That's when I realised: I had to completely leave out all the other topics I had in my head, such as the concept of institutions, how it works philosophically, how it changes over time. It was far too much. And that's why we only looked at the present at the second seminar date. Nadin Deventer spent an afternoon in Hildesheim and spoke at length with the students about her artistic vision, her curation concept and the various obstacles. We then had the second day of the 2nd block weekend as an evaluation day, from Nadin's visit and from the seminar as a whole. We then produced short videos for the jazz festival in which the students themselves briefly described their perspective and what they learnt from the seminar, but that was it.
Block seminars are a very specific format. I was a little envious of your weekly seminars, in which you could come back to this topic of ‘Jazzfest Berlin’ every week, in which you could keep working on things, keep returning to a level of discussion. We hardly had that at all in our Hildesheim seminar.

Matthias
I'd be interested to hear your views on the forms and formats of jazz historiography as a whole. I've told you before that I was often dissatisfied with German-language jazz historiography as I got to know it myself during my studies: this garland of styles and heroes that always seemed to ascend towards progress. I found that very one-dimensional. So the question is: can looking at festivals help to break down this kind of jazz historiography, these stereotypes and formats, and if so, how? And on the other hand, festivals naturally produce a lot of stereotypical historiography themselves, where you then have the feeling that the same anecdotes and ‘great moments’ are always perpetuated in anniversary publications. As the director of the Jazzinstitut, you have a kind of double perspective on the subject of Jazzfest Berlin, which itself plays an important role in this historiographical discourse with its large archive in Germany. One institution of jazz life looks at the other, you could perhaps say. But I would also be interested in your general attitude to the question of how and what should be preserved and secured in a musical culture like jazz. How can a multi-perspectivity be guaranteed? I think that's an important question, whether dealing with the history of the Jazzfest Berlin bears certain fruits for you and for your work at the Jazz Institute.

Bettina
This ‘two institutions meet’ - that was actually a big topic for me in this project, although I was still relatively new to the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt and also to the topic of Joachim-Ernst Berendt. I found it a really nice enrichment of my initial phase here at the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt, because it posed the question of ‘How do you archive music?’ anew for me. Especially in jazz, where the improvisation component is very high, this is an issue. In addition, jazz as black music and the relationship to Germany are also important and not easy aspects. You notice that when you look at the historical programme booklets, how they talk about race, for example. I strongly felt the lack of research on jazz in Germany. I also once did a seminar on so-called “entertainment” and “serious” music. I find this devaluation of entertainment and light music, to which jazz is counted very problematic. I always perceive subtle racist undertones. But then there's also the question of how to keep this music alive. It should be archived, it should be preserved at all costs. But then the question arises: what should be done with the preserved material? Just put it on a shelf somehow? I'm sitting here in my Jazzinstitut office surrounded by really overflowing boxes and shelves. Some of them are labelled ‘Not yet filed’, which my predecessor kindly labelled. And that runs through the whole house. We also noticed this when we came across the Joachim-Ernst Berendt collection, which is not really well catalogued. The questions that you formulated - we can't even ask these questions of this collection yet because they can't really be answered yet, at least with regard to the collection holdings here. But I think that's the way it should be. In this sense, I have sensed even more acutely that one can, but also must, take a closer look at the archive holdings:  How did Joachim-Ernst Berndt actually do it? How did he look at jazz and improvised music? Where and how can this be proven, i.e. scientifically substantiated? How can the materials be made accessible? These are really important thoughts that I am also taking with me from this cooperation with the Jazzfest Berlin, from our two seminars and our collaboration.