At the Launch: Pentti Puhakka (helsinki Jazz), Bogdan Benigar( Druga Godba), Kenneth Killeen (Improvised Music Company), Pierre Dugelay(Périscope), Karolina Jules (Wytwornia Foundation), Oliver Weindling (Vortex)

Sebastian writes:

Jazz Connective, a new and interesting project which combines jazz clubs from seven cities across Europe was launched this week at jazzahead!

Jazz Connective will take place during 2019 and 2020 across seven partner European cities, and has received support from Creative Europe-Culture Cooperation fund. The project is led by the French organisation, Le Périscope. This idea has been a long time in the making, and it took a few attempts and a few rounds to obtain the funding. So Friday’s launch was the culmination of a long process.

Jazz Connective (quoting from the IMC news story, link below) is “a collaborative artistic and professional exchange project between seven different European organisations. Through this project, artists and organizations will share artists, resources, information and best practices towards a strong future for jazz across Europe.” There will be workshops, conferences, concerts, artistic exchanges, residencies….

To some extent, the “12 Points” model of inter-club collaboration, instigated by the Improvised Music Company, has been extended across a broader canvas. Each of the clubs will host events involving the other partners. At the launch, various participants expressed how they were looking forward to the kind of discussions and dialogues that the project would facilitate between musicians and organisations with different practices and heritages,

The calendar of events announced so far – to the extent that the information was available at the launch – so far looks like this:

May 2019: Ljubljana
July 2019: Łódź
December 2019: Dublin
March 2020: London

The seven clubs involved, with links to their individual websites are:

Druga Godba (Ljubljana, Slovenia)

Vaapa äänet (Helsinki, Finland)

Improvised Music Company (Dublin, Irlande)

The Jazzlines Programme at Town Hall and Symphony Hall (Birmingham, UK)

Vortex (London, UK) 

Wytwórnia Foundation(Łódź, Poland)

Le Périscope (Lyon, France)

LINKS: News post from IMC Dublin
News story from Le Périscope (in French)