Musical Theatre and All That Jazz Research Network

This funding is needed to establish a new network of scholars to explore synergies between Musical Theatre and Jazz: musical theatre often displays features of jazz and jazz culture has long made use of musical theatre characteristics (e.g. as ‘standards’). However, the interactions have not been explored in any detail before. Furthermore, there might be much to be gained by understanding jazz as musical theatre or, conversely, musical theatre as jazz.
The ultimate aim is to produce an edited volume to be published by OUP. This will be achieved in a three-step process during an 18-month period:

1. Meeting (within months 1-2) to bring scholars together to establish key questions and approaches and apportioning research areas.

2. Symposium (within months 6-8) in which initial research papers will be presented and discussed.

3. Workshop (within months 12-14) to develop draft chapters (with involvement of OUP editors) towards publication.

The funding will pay for two days per month for the PI, one day per month for the CI and one day a week for a Network Coordinator. Travel to the various meetings will be factored in to the bid for Network members together with costs for external keynote speakers and a publishers’ advisor.

The PI and CI are well placed to lead on this, as experienced editors of Studies in Musical Theatre and Jazz Research Journal. Furthermore, they have already started to address the area in GB’s forthcoming monograph on Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy and NG’s published monograph on Vaudeville.