Changing approaches to programming and the audience experience at Cheltenham Jazz Festival

A five-year partnership with Cheltenham Jazz Festival (CJF) has resulted in several significant changes in their approach to audience engagement, festival programming and artistic commissioning.

Summary of Research

Five years of research through a diverse programme of activities, has led to BCU researchers highlighting major issues currently facing European music festivals such as, how to better engage with and measure the experiences of their audiences, the role of digital technologies within festival environments, and the challenges of programming, organisational practices, and artist relations.

How has the research been carried out?

The under-pinning research by Gebhardt, Hamilton, Raine, and Whyton emerged from a long-term and substantial body of jazz research and knowledge exchange at Birmingham City University.

The team has undertaken several funded projects including the development of a mobile app, CHIME, for Cheltenham Jazz Festival, as well as the design of the festival event “Hack the Jazz Festival” to push the boundaries of Cheltenham Jazz Festival’s commissioning process

Outcomes and impact

This impact work responded to key challenges facing the sector in the areas of audience engagement, artistic development, and organisational policy. The practical and artistic elements of the research that the team produced, along with the recommendations they made, had a direct influence on decision-making and are core to the solutions that Cheltenham Jazz Festival management has devised in response to the challenges this research has identified.

The CHIME mobile app developed by the BCU team is now central to the Cheltenham Jazz Festival’s digital strategy. The data gathered from users in 2016 and 2019 revealed the CHIME app’s effectiveness as a medium for better understanding the Cheltenham Jazz Festival audience.

The BCU team drew on their research to design the set of initiatives identified above, including Hack the Festival, workshops and the mobile app pilots, that provided the conceptual and practical resources for Cheltenham Jazz Festival management to implement change in organisational practice.

REF 2021

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REF 2021

Prof. Nicholas Gebhardt

Professor of Jazz and Popular Music Studies

Nick Gebhardt is Professor of Jazz and Popular Music Studies and Director of Research in the Birmingham School of Media.

His work focuses on jazz and popular music in American culture and his publications include Going For Jazz: Musical Practices and American Ideology (Chicago), Vaudeville Melodies: Popular Musicians and Mass Entertainment in American Culture, 1870-1929 (Chicago) and the co-edited collection The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives: This Is Our Music (Routledge). In 2014, he founded the new Routledge book series Transnational Studies in Jazz with University colleague Tony Whyton, which provides a platform for rethinking the methodologies and concepts used to analyse jazz.

Dr. Craig Hamilton

Research Fellow

Craig's research explores contemporary popular music reception practices and the role of digital, data and internet technologies on the business and cultural environments of music consumption. In the main this research is built around the development of The Harkive Project, an online, crowd-sourced method of generating data from music consumers about their everyday relationships with music and technology. Craig also researches live music ecologies and music festivals. He is the co-Managing Editor of Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music and the Project Coordinator for the AHRC-funded Songwriting Studies Network.

Dr. Sarah Raine

Research Fellow

Sarah is a Research Fellow at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR). Having completed a funded PhD at BCU on the contemporary northern soul scene, she is now an AHRC Creative Economy Engagement Fellow, working in partnership with Cheltenham Jazz Festival on their Keychange (PRS Foundation) initiative pledge. Sarah is a founding member and co-Manages Riffs, a journal run by the staff and students of the BCMCR. She is also the Review Editor for Popular Music History (Equinox Publishing).

Prof. Tony Whyton

Professor of Jazz Studies

Tony Whyton is Professor of Jazz Studies at BCU. His critically acclaimed books Jazz Icons: Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Beyond A Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album (Oxford University Press, 2013) have sought to develop cross-disciplinary methods of musical enquiry. As an editor, Whyton published the Jazz volume of the Ashgate Library of Essays on Popular Music in 2011 and continues to work as co-editor of the Jazz Research Journal (Equinox).