Popular Music and Cultural Memory seminar - tales from Israel and Australia

Our Israeli partner investigator, Motti Regev, is currently visiting Brisbane and will be presenting a seminar paper at Griffith's Gold Coast campus today. His paper will provide a summary of key themes arising from the interview data collected in July/August 2011, when Sarah and he conducted fieldwork in Tel Aviv.

Also at the seminar, Sarah will be presenting a paper about the social and cultural functions of the Victorian Jazz Archive. The paper, co-authored with Alison Huber, considers the important work being done at this DIY institution by volunteers as they seek to collect, preserve and make public Australia's jazz history.

This lunchtime seminar will be held in G02 2.09 from 12-1.30pm.

Victorian Jazz Archive

On May 31, Alison paid a visit to the Victorian Jazz Archive, which is located in the south-eastern suburb of Wantirna in Melbourne.  The archive has been around since 1996, and collects and preserves a huge range of artefacts pertaining to Australia's jazz history.  Volunteers are the backbone of this organisation, and they put on a very warm welcome, happy to share their passion for the archive's enterprise in generous conversation.  Alison was taken on a tour of the archive's collection which contains an incredible array of material, including recordings of all kinds, photographs, posters, magazines, books, clippings, and all manner of ephemera related to jazz.  While the archive is dedicated to the preservation of this material (and Alison saw lots of evidence of the meticulous work they are doing to preserve the material they are donated), its members and management team are also very keen to make this material accessible to the public, and so aim to operate as a 'living museum'.  They offer a range of outreach activities including archive tours, and they actively encourage members of the public to visit and use the archive.

The Victorian Jazz Archive runs entirely on donations, fundraising and the hundreds of hours of hard work donated by its volunteers.  Learn more about the archive at their website, http://vicjazzarchive.org.au/