Jazz educators are heading to Leeds this week for the annual Leeds International Jazz Conference which begins on Thursday and runs through until Friday. Titled “Time Captured – Jazz Composition, Composing and Composers” this year’s event will be the seventeenth conference to take place in Leeds, based at the city’s College of Music.

The main keynote speaker this year is composer Mike Gibbs, who will address the conference on composing, compositional process and his own personal influences. Gibbs has worked with many music luminaries including Pat Metheny, John McLaughlin, John Scofield, Bill Frisell, Gary Burton, John Dankworth and Laurie Anderson. Born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) he was awarded scholarships to attend Lenox School of Jazz and Tanglewood Summer School where he studied with Aaron Copland, Gunther Schuller, George Russell, J.J.Johnson, Lukas Foss and Iannis Xenakis.

The other keynote speaker is Tony Whyton, a reader in music at Salford University who has just published the book Jazz Icons: Hopes, Myths and The Jazz Tradition with another book Beyond A Love Supreme expected soon. His work champions the relationship between theory and practice and encourages performers, composers and musicologists to engage critically with music as a discursive cultural practice. The Leeds conference is the largest gathering of jazz academics in the UK.

– Stephen Graham

For more go to www.lcm.ac.uk