Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: Stu Hunter's project The Migration, with a 10-piece ensemble, showcased at Jazzahead in 2017.  

The Australian Music Centre has been successful in securing funding from the Australia Council for the Arts for a two-year European market development project. Realised in partnership with SOUNDS AUSTRALIA, the project will create opportunities for Australian jazz in Europe.

The project will involve a series of activities around the annual Jazzahead industry event in Bremen, Germany, extending the scope of our existing partnership with SOUNDS AUSTRALIA. We will also be exploiting the AMC's membership of the Europe Jazz Network.

Over the past three years, the AMC and SOUNDS AUSTRALIA have employed a raft of highly successful strategies to strengthen the visibility of Australian art music at Classical:NEXT in Rotterdam each May. The new project seeks to emulate this success for Australian jazz.

The opportunities for deeper engagement at Jazzahead include (but are not limited to):

• Advocacy for Australian representation in decision-making contexts, for example, inclusion of an Australian on the Jazzahead jury. In 2019 this has already been achieved, with Melbourne Jazz Festival CEO Jennifer Kerr serving on the 2019 jury;
• Complementing the annual reception at the SOUNDS AUSTRALIA stand with a hosted event involving international programmers and potential collaborators, to provide face-to-face networking opportunities;
• Developing a Fellows program at Jazzahead, providing an opportunity for Australian emerging artists to develop their international networking skills.

Other aspects of the project include bilateral collaborations and exchanges through the Europe Jazz Network and its associated European Jazz Conference, presented in a different European city in September each year - this event regularly draws over 350 delegates. As the only EJN member in the Southern Hemisphere, the AMC is ideally placed to take advantage of its active presence in this energetic and highly connected network, where members interact and engage with each other with a dizzying array of programming exchanges, collaborations, and projects. We see such engagement as having enormous potential for the Australian jazz community, far beyond the term of this project.

In 2019, SOUNDS AUSTRALIA and the AMC will be providing a platform to support Australian delegates at Jazzahead (25-28 April). Please be in touch with Glenn Dickie at SOUNDS AUSTRALIA or John Davis at the Australian Music Centre to obtain the code to register at a reduced rate under the umbrella of the Australian stand.

Stay tuned for more news on the new project as it unfolds during 2019 and 2020.

> Jazzahead online registrations - see also article 'Register now for Jazzahead and Classical:NEXT 2019' on Resonate (10 January 2019)

> Europe Jazz Network