Mar 2, 2026 9:58 PM
In Memoriam: John Hammond Jr., 1942–2026
John P. Hammond (aka John Hammond Jr.), a blues guitarist and singer who was one of the first white American…
Improvised and creative new musics have been on the upswing in recent
years, but listeners, critics and scholars have said little, so far, about the relationships of the various forms and practices of improvisation to gender and sexuality.
With an ear to addressing this gap, the second Creative Music Think Tank, presented by Coastal Jazz and Blues Society in conjunction with St. John’s College and the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, is inviting proposals for critical and scholarly conference papers on gender, sexuality and improvisation.
Essays can range from theoretical to practical, from aesthetic to political in their aims and methods, and interdisciplinary work is both welcome and encouraged. The think tank is especially interested in provocative, informed work that deals with improvisation in as unlimited a sense as possible.
Submissions are invited from both academic and non-academic writers and critics.
The symposium will be held in Vancouver, B.C., Nov. 16–17 and will be coordinated with a set of evening concerts. Selected papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of Critical Studies in Improvisation.
Possible themes and areas of interest for conference presentations may include, but are not limited to, any of the following topics:
Queer Music
Sexing the Ear of the Other
Women in Contemporary Creative Music
Body Languages: Fingering, Tonguing, Blowing
Performance and Performativity
The Poetics of Improvisation: Speaking in Music
Musical Affect, the Textures of Feeling
The Politics of Dissonance: Fractured Identities
Improvising Masculinities
The Instrument as Prosthesis
Radical Subcultures: Revolting Noise
The History of Sexuality in/and Contemporary Creative Music
Transitive Genders: Playing with Our Selves
The Erotics of Close Listening
Bump and Grind: Rhythm and Corporealities
Mixed Media, Cyborg Songs
Extemporaneous Positions: Improvising Sexualities
Auscultation and other Apparatuses of Audience
Other than Music: Confronting Idioms of the Heteronormative
Please submit conference-paper proposals of no more than 500 words to Dr. Kevin McNeilly or Dr. Julie Smith by July 15. Finished papers should conform to a 20-minute delivery.
Hammond came to the blues through the folk boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which he experienced firsthand in New York’s Greenwich Village.
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