University of Salford

Faculty Member, Media, Music and Performance

Professor - Director of the Salford Music Research Centre

About

My research work deals specifically with music and its place within the creative industries, from the packaging of popular music to the iconic representations of jazz artists. I’ve published widely on a variety of related topics, including jazz history, the politics of music education, the cultural influence of recordings and interdisciplinary approaches to music.

My first book, Jazz Icons: Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. My second book, Beyond A Love Supreme, will be a cross disciplinary study of the musical and cultural influence of John Coltrane's seminal album, and will be published by Oxford University Press.

As the founding editor of the international journal The Source: challenging jazz criticism, I created the first peer reviewed interdisciplinary journal for jazz studies and he now co-edit the internationally peer-reviewed Jazz Research Journal with Equinox.

I have recently been awarded just under €1 million to lead a three-year, pan-European project entitled Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities. The ground-breaking project, the first and largest of its kind for jazz in Europe, has been funded as part of the Humanities in the European Research Area's (HERA) theme 'Cultural Dynamics: Inheritance and Identity', a joint research programme funded by 13 national funding agencies to 'create collaborative, trans-national research opportunities that will derive new insights from humanities research in order to address major social, cultural, and political challenges facing Europe'. As an interdisciplinary research project, Rhythm Changes will examine the inherited traditions and practices of European jazz cultures, developing new insights into cultural exchanges and dynamics between different countries, groups and related media.

I joined the University of Salford in September 2007 after 10 years at Leeds College of Music. In my work at Leeds, I was responsible for the creation, management and strategic development of the Centre for Jazz Studies UK and the Leeds International Jazz Conference.

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