Programs

The Jazz Studies Working Group was founded in 2015 in Budapest by music and humanities professionals in Budapest following the initiative of jazz critic and scholar Kornél Zipernovszky. Their first open lecture series, supported and hosted by the Budapest Music Center, aims at making jazz a relevant and significant subject of social sciences and the humanities, focusing on the meeting of jazz and society from various perspectives, and thereby establishing new jazz studies in Hungary.

Éva Federmayer - Kornél Zipernovszky - Zoltán Dragon:
Presentation of the Jazz issue of the Americana online journal

The Americana E-Journal, the American Studies journal of the University of Szeged has ventured to publish the first collection of essays in Hungary in the field of new jazz studies. The guest editors of the issue, associate professor Éva Federmayer (ELTE University, School of English and American Studies) and jazz critic Kornél Zipernovszky (PhD student at ELTE, the founder of the Jazz Studies Working Group), managed to get a contribution by the ground-breaking American professor Krin Gabbard, who published a chapter of his forthcoming book on Charles Mingus. Further studies mostly focus on issues of race and ethnicity, the “jazz ambassadors” such as Dizzy Gillespie, the clash of the jazz band and the Gypsy orchestra in the twenties in Hungary, and the issue why jazz has never really been considered a respectable art form. The ten-year-old scholarly journal Americana, scoring over hundred thousand downloads per year, will be presented by one of its founding editors, assistant professor Zoltán Dragon of Szeged University.

The jazz issue and the journal are in English, but the presentation will be in Hungarian.