We are hugely saddened to report the death of drummer Tony Levin, who passed away today at the age of 71. Tony was a highly regarded jazz drummer and one of our partners on the AHRC KTF project. Together we developed http://tonylevin.org and produced academic research into building British jazz archives.

Tony was highly respected for his performances on several great British jazz albums and performed frequently at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in the 1960s with artists including Joe Harriott, Al Cohn, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Zoot Sims, and Toots Thielemanns.

He was perhaps best known for his work as a member of Tubby Hayes’ Quartet (1965-9), including the seminal record Mexican Green, but also played with numerous groups and artists, including the Alan Skidmore quintet (1969), Humphrey Lyttelton band (1969), John Taylor (1970s), Ian Carr’s Nucleus (1970s), Stan Sulzmann quartet, Gordon Beck’s Gyroscope, European Jazz Ensemble, Third Eye (1979), Rob van den Broeck (1982), Philip Catherine’s trio and quartet (1990s), Sophia Domancich Trio (with Paul Rogers, double bass; 1991-2000) and Philippe Aerts trio and quartet (2000s).

From 1980, Levin worked extensively with saxophonist Paul Dunmall, including as a member of the free jazz quartet Mujician, also with Paul Rogers (double bass) and Keith Tippett (piano).

Tony ran his own monthly club in Birmingham called TL’s Jazz Club and operated his own label, Rare Music Recordings. He had recently completed a successful 70th birthday tour, organised by Birmingham Jazz.

As you can tell from the video below, Tony was a lovely guy, a great storyteller, and a gifted musician. We feel privileged to have known and worked with him. RIP Tony. You will be greatly missed.

For more information, interviews and memorabilia, please visit: http://tonylevin.org.

The workshop came about initially from Morag who approached me to help formulate this into a collaborative project where we could share skills, good practice and knowledge between us and our KTF partners at the PRA. This was done with the intention of providing the conference attendees with a solid insight into how prison radio could be adopted by other national prison services and integrated into their programs for education, health and well being based on the successes already demonstrated by the Prison Radio Association in the UK.

The workshop was well attended by a mixture of international delegates who were involved in the prison service at various levels from policy makers to frontline health workers.

Morag chaired the workshop, on behalf of BCU and Phil and Andrew delivered a dynamic presentation on the history and development of prison radio within the UK and how it has been used by the prisoners, in a participatory manner, as a tool for development and well being. They played examples of radio productions by prisoners and explained the rationale and benefits of their participatory approach in addressing many issues concerning prisoners and their families but especially focussing on health ‘spots’. They also talked about how radio has met with great success in getting messages and information to hard to reach prisoners such as those with literacy issues.

After their delivery I talked about my background, experiences and involvement with radio as a tool for development drawing on previous projects I have worked on. I then focussed my part of my delivery on the potential use of radio and audio artefacts as a tool for ‘through care’. This was focussed around the production of audio information such as podcasts that could be embedded into post-release agencies websites for easy access to ex offenders, especially those that had literacy problems. I also discussed the benefits of how a participatory approach could benefit ex-offenders in their rehabilitation by them producing some of the podcasts and audio files. I also talked about the ease of skills acquisition in radio production and self esteem building and the relative cheapness of using modern digital technologies. (A video of my address is available on request).

After this the floor was opened for questions of which there were many especially based around application within prisons, cost of equipment, benefits to inmates etc. On the strength of our workshop we have had a prospective invite from the Italian Director of Prisons to address at a similar conference in Italy.

Having the opportunity to address this conference at this international level was really exciting and has provided a platform for the University and School of Media to be given international exposure and recognition for their ongoing work.

All in all this was a really positive and beneficial collaboration between the School, CRQ and our KTF partners the PRA and offers up the potential for further collaborative projects that I believe will benefit the school. I, Siobhan and Morag have already put forward a proposal for a European project dealing with violence against women and young children and looking at ways in which community radio could be employed to train trainers in radio/audio production for agencies that work with victims of domestic violence and exploitation.

Watch this space!!

And there’s our problem. We’ll have spent two years working with our KTF partners – and there are lots of them – and we have to judge how effective our involvement has been. But in many cases, the work that we did with the partners isn’t something which will have an overnight effect. It might, in fact, take years to establish just how much value our partners got from our intervention. This is a problem that the folks at the AHRC are wrangling with themselves; we report to them and they, in turn, have to report to government on the significance of the impact that this funding has had.

So, what’s to do? The answer to questions about the concrete value of our project to our partners is probably I’m not sure. Or perhaps give us two more years and we’ll tell you. These are, as you might expect, are not appropriate answers. The best answer, in terms of the most usefully informative and the closest to any sort of truth, will be drawn not from us but from our partners. Early indications of the value of interventions will be seen by the people who are most sensitive to subtle changes in the way their financial year is panning out. Still, there will be a lot of educated guesses here.

As I’ve mentioned, though, we’re not an isolated case. There must be hundreds of knowledge transfer and even standard business relationships out there which need years to mature, but require evidence of returns of value in a much shorter period. Jon hinted at this when he talked about interventions previously; if you set aside your presumption that a particular thing must be good for businesses – they must need a website, they must need a business plan – it becomes a lot harder to tell if your intervention is valuable.

How, then, can we effectively estimate the value of these relationships? I’m sticking with I’m not sure for the moment – at least it’s honest. We’ll talk to our partners, and hopefully they’ll say nice things about us, so we’ll at least feel better even if we still don’t know the answer.

What is it?

‘Just Like Jazz‘ is a collaborative project between the Interactive Cultures research unit at Birmingham City University, and the Scarborough Jazz Festival. The team comprises Professor Tim Wall, Andrew Dubber, Dr Simon Barber and Jez Collins. Part of our academic interests include jazz and so we’re working with the Scarborough Jazz Festival to explore the ways in which jazz festivals can be portrayed online.

Why is it different?

Rather than creating a brochure website around the festival, or simply filming the festival and putting that online, our goal is to capture the spirit of the festival using a range of techniques such as photography, text and handheld, personal digital video. We have given small, cheap, portable video cameras to select audience members, musicians, backstage staff and the festival organisers and asked them to capture whatever they think is interesting: the buzz of the audience, the surrounding environment, snippets of the music performed, and any discussions that take place around jazz.

In this video, Professor Tim Wall describes the aims of the project:

What are we going to do?

We’re gathering together all of this video, photography and text from contributors and publishing it live on a website as the festival happens. We’re also tagging the content in order to experiment with the ways in which the characters and stories that are captured can be navigated by visitors to the website. This process gives audiences the opportunity to experience the festival in their own way and makes the event accessible to those who may wish to attend the festival in future years, or who may never have considered visiting a jazz festival at all.

Andrew Dubber describes this process:

Although we’ve worked on projects like this before, with Aftershock in Italy and with the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, we don’t have a fixed idea of what we’re going to end up with. We’re working with a loose structure and quite a lot of improvisation – in a way, it’s just like jazz.

Follow the event

Please bookmark http://justlikejazz.org and follow along with the experiment as it happens live online between September 18-20. The website will also remain online in the future, so you can check back to discover our thoughts on what came out of the process.

We hope you enjoy exploring the festival online with us,

Tim, Andrew, Simon and Jez.

In an earlier post we mentioned an Interactive Cultures radio documentary about Irish rocker Phil Lynott. To mark what would have been Lynott’s 60th birthday this Thursday, BBC West Midlands 95.6 FM will be broadcasting the half hour feature at approximately 1300 on the Jimmy Franks Show on Saturday the 22nd of August.

The feature will also be discussed on the Thursday morning breakfast show with possible contributions from narrator Paul Murphy and Dawn Mccarrick, the UK Representative of the Phil Lynott Memorial Trust. As fate would have it, it turns out Dawn works here at BCU. Small world.

The national rock station ‘Absolute Radio’ (ex Virgin) will feature sections from the interviews along with the rare Lynott track showcased in the documentary. This can be heard during ‘Geoff Lloyd’s Hometime Show’ on Thursday afternoon, August 20th at http://www.absoluteradio.co.uk. Freeview (channel 727).

‘Spin FM 1038′ in Dublin will also be featuring music from the documentary – which has been designed to indirectly promote the efforts of Jez Collins at the Birmingham Music Archive, the initiator of this project. The radio feature was created as a “prototype” method of disseminating information about the BMA, as part of an ongoing KTF partnership with BCU.

The team here were relieved to hear that Phil’s Mother, Philomena Lynott in Dublin, had seen the YouTube clips accompanying this documentary and sent her approval.

The audio slideshow above features extracts taken from the documentary of Paul Murphy’s journey from Birmingham to Dublin. Other YouTube clips discuss the poetry of Phil Lynott:

And a previously unheard song, featuring Lynott, that had been sitting under a bed gathering dust for 25 years:

The background – birmingham.gov.uk

An investigation by Help Me Investigate - a crowdsourcing tool for investigative journalism run by my Birmingham School of Media colleague Paul Bradshaw and a number of Birmingham based social media experts – has obtained information from the Council that indicates the web development project is over budget and significantly behind schedule. The investigation has led to reports in the mainstream media, and discussions within social media communities as to the rights and wrongs of this situation.

Reading between the lines

The response by Birmingham City Council to Help Me Investigate states:

“Since the original report the scope of the website has changed in line with technology improvements and the changing needs of the council and its citizens” (see full response).

While this certainly explains why a project might take longer and cost more money it doesn’t excuse the mismanagement of the project. I’ve managed many web projects (admittedly nothing with a budget of this size) and this comment suggests that there were two key problems at the outset of the project:

• Birmingham City Council did not think through their brief fully. They simply got it wrong. It’s hard to believe that the needs of the City have changed so radically since the project was agreed that they would need to increase their budget to this extent.
• The developers did not challenge their client’s brief. Web professionals are paid for their expertise. The customer isn’t always right, and the customer won’t have considered every eventuality of a project: that’s where the developer’s expertise is supposed to come in. Really this is Year 1 undergraduate stuff (certainly I teach BCU First Year’s to do this) and yet it seems to be a perennial problem in these large IT and web projects.

While both parties here are complicit in the resultant problem, there is a more significant issue at play. This scenario, played out time and time again in projects big and small, suggests that the very nature of procurement for websites is broken.

The brief is the problem

Let’s leave behind the Birmingham situation for now, and generalise the notion of procuring a website.

Every project starts with a problem. A need or set of needs becomes apparent to an organisation. Someone within the organisation, let’s call him Harold, will parcel up these needs, and think about what the organisation should do next. Harold will develop certain preconceptions and then use these to develop an inital brief. It may be something as simple as a side of A4 or an email saying what Harold wants to happen. It might even be a comprehensive specification complete with concept artwork and a site map. He contacts some web companies and invites them to pitch for the work. If it’s a big project he might put the job out to tender.

The web companies respond to Harold’s document. The good ones won’t just respond to what’s in Harold’s brief; they will try to work out what the original needs were. They might then come up with a better set of ideas. But the ability of the web company to challenge the brief is restricted the more prescriptive it is. Tenders can be incredibly restrictive. The bigger the project, the more restrictive the tender is likely to be (in my experience).

Once the project has started it is always structured in terms of that original specification that Harold put together. As the project develops, Harold’s real needs come to the surface and the web company come up with better ways to answer the problem than Harold ever could have come up with. Other issues come up, and the keen designers and programmers at the web company spot new opportunities to help Harold out. This is when we get scope creep, or changes to the brief. This is when the project gets delayed, and becomes more expensive.

Let’s buy developers & designers, not websites

So if the root of the problem is the procurement process, what would I suggest instead? I’m going to be completely idealistic, and I do realise that there are quite huge barriers to this sort of change, but I have an answer. Here’s a manifesto for better procurement of web projects (it would work for IT projects and service design too):

1. Let’s focus on needs and the original problem, not best guess briefs by well meaning non-experts.
2. Let’s be aware from the outset that your best guess cost is going to be wrong, and the project will be late.
3. Let’s allow for changes in a radical way: not just contingency days in the spec, or a change management process.
4. Let’s budget for innovation.
5. Let’s open up the project and let users shape the end result.

And based on that manifesto, here’s my solution, based loosely on the Birmingham City Council Project (£600k to deliver a project in seven months):

Throw away your specification. Hire the brightest freelancers you can find who care about your service. Tell them the project should take two years, but give them six years to do it. Let them find out how your organisation works, how your users want to speak to it, and build the tools you need. Support them in every random avenue they go down. Some will not work. One might be the best idea you never knew you needed.

I said it was idealistic, but it is possible. We operate this way, on a small scale, on the AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellowship and it works. When we sit down with partners, we discuss what their organisation is doing, and how we could use the web to do that better (or to do something completely new). We then get together some really simple web tools and put together a prototype. The prototype may be rough and ready, but it means that the partner can see what the solution might look like. They can speak to people about it, test the idea, and then go on to do it bigger and better (bringing in a web development company). We call the whole process “knowledge transfer”. A web based tool is the smallest part of it: the real value is in finding a problem and making it into an opportunity.

As a way of celebrating Lynott’s roots and promoting the BMA (a KTF partner), a radio documentary with accompanying photographs has been developed by Interactive Cultures. The story follows Paul Murphy, lead singer of Birmingham band The Destroyers – as he visits the landmarks of Lynott’s short life and talks with the people he meets along the way. A highlight of the item is a previously unheard track featuring Lynott on bass and backing vocals. The song, called “Do You Want To Rock?”, was recorded with Birmingham born musician Colbert Hamilton just weeks before Lynott’s death.

I recently accompanied Murphy and photographer Ellie Gibbons on a visit to Dublin to capture the final audio for the documentary which included an interview with Johnny Lions, a journalist on Dublin’s 98 FM and former Hot Press rock critic, who spoke of the city’s enduring love for the troubled bass player. A preview of the documentary, along with broadcast details, will be posted here shortly.

The prisoners were part of a team working on “Electric Radio Brixton”. A PRA initiative which plays 24 hours a day on a channel of the television sets supplied to each cell. The class explored various spot production techniques and was designed to assist the prisoners in the creation of information spots about the various services provided in the prison, such as; health, education, post-release employment and safer custody.

Next month Andrew Wilkie, Manager of the National Prison Radio Network, and I will be visiting HMP Rye Hill, near Rugby, to deliver a combined session on spot production. This is in anticipation of the PRA’s quest to install a radio station in every English and Welsh Prison within the next few years.

“Electric Radio Brixton” has earned an enviable broadcasting reputation – recently scooping double gold at the Sony Radio Academy Awards 2009.

As chief judge Andy Ashton commented…

“Electric Radio Brixton is an example of what can be achieved when radio is used for what it does best – an intimate connection to deliver powerful, meaningful content that targets an audience who have a genuine need to be fulfilled. Everyone interested in making great radio would do well to follow it’s example of power full simplicity.”

The workshop brought together academics from a range of disciplines as well as various media practitioners. Keynote speakers included Professor Barbara Klinger from Indiana University and Hugh Hancock, the Artistic Director of “Strange Company”.

Professor Jon Dovey from the University of West England gave an enlightening paper titled; “Archeologies, Economies and Ecologies” which commented that it’s our attention spans as media consumers that has become ephemeral – rather than the content itself.

Jon dismissed the image of web surfers as “nomadic browsers” – instead using the analogy of foie gras geese, engorged on a diet of force fed data. Mmmm… tasty data.

Another of Jon’s vivid metaphors was that of the internet as a lush rainforest, where only a few trees grow strong enough to form the “canopy” of online media. According to Jon, most net surfers only look down on the top of the forest – while the millions of “organisms” underneath the canopy “crawl around in the mulch”, unnoticed on the forest floor as they search frantically for sunlight.

For my part, I delivered a presentation entitled “Sound and Vision: Online Practices of David Bowie Fans” – which discussed the reconstitution of an AM radio documentary I produced in 2008 by YouTube users.

An example of which can be seen below:

For more information visit http://www.ephemeralmedia.co.uk

Of course, work’s a relative term when you’re doing something really enjoyable and fascinating in a really amazing setting, but given that I was completely focused on (almost) nothing other than the task at hand from 8am till 2am over 5 consecutive days, perhaps he had a point.

I was in Genoa, Italy with Birmingham web developer and entrepreneur Stef Lewandowski to work on the Aftershock Project – a pan-European collaborative music event. In short, Nitin Sawhney turns up in a town, brings about a dozen musicians together, and they workshop, compose, rehearse and eventually perform about an hour’s worth of completely new music over the course of a week. Stef had been commissioned to make them a website, and he’d asked me on board for my perspective as the “online music guy”.

The conversation I’d had with producers Debra and Jeremy was that it would be a shame to simply do the standard web approach, which is to make an electronic brochure. Rather than make a website ABOUT Aftershock, it would be far more interesting to put Aftershock ONLINE. A one off performance and the end result of the music that is created over the course of the week is interesting, of course – but far more interesting, engaging and interactive is the opportunity to actually present the process of Aftershock as it happens.

We considered that this was an opportunity for digital narrative; that the narrative would have a strong arc (from meeting to rehearsal to a final performance), interesting characters – and that those characters would interact and develop over the course of the week.

To that end, we decided to provide each of the musicians with small, cheap, portable digital video cameras, let them catch the interesting material (rather than impose a ‘film crew’ on them) and then make sense of that material through the website.

We agreed to make a prototype of this approach, and to develop the procedures and parameters on the ground in Genoa, so that we would have a model for working at future Aftershock events in Marseilles and Manchester.

Nitin was initially cautious of our idea. His concern was that the cameras would get in the way of the musicians’ attention to the material that he was workshopping, and that over such an intensive week, working in the service of the website, rather than in the service of the performance would potentially be to the detriment of the project. We reassured him that the ease of use of the cameras, and the musicians’ familiarity with the technology would quickly mean that capturing content would soon become a natural part of the workflow – but he wasn’t entirely convinced. Until he asked one very interesting question:

“Can they watch the video back?”

“Of course.”

And at that moment, Nitin transformed what we were proposing into a genuinely useful extension of the project and integrated learning technique for the musicians. If they filmed parts of the workshops on their personal, portable video cameras, then they could take that video away with them and study the complex bits, rehearse, and get it right overnight. As a result, more could be squeezed into the workshop time with less repetition, and the event could be more musically ambitious.

A great example of this was when Nitin taught the musicians his Hindi rhythmic vocal composition The Conference. The video above shows the musicians simultaneously capturing and learning the piece (which was later adapted and developed into a larger, collaborative piece for the concert).

Digital Narrative

One of the real challenges of the week for us was to develop a strategy to represent the narrative online. With over 500 individual pieces of footage filmed on a total of 15 cameras, sorting, tagging and contextualising was a real challenge – but we identified three main ways in which the material could be explored by visitors to the website.

1) Chronology

From the arrival in Genoa and meeting the other musicians for the first time, through the workshops and rehearsals and using the reality television convention of the ‘video diary’, audiences can get an insight into the process of music-making from idea to finished production.

2) By character

On a video that briefly introduces each of the characters in turn, explains where they come from and what they play, we get a glimpse into their individual character. Visitors to the website can select a character and view videos that include that person – whether in rehearsal, or in the break, interacting with their fellow musicians.

3) By song

Using the final setlist as navigation, audiences can trace the development of a single song (in any chronological direction) from its original, embryonic form through to its final presentation at the concert.

Approach

One of the most interesting things about this process, from a research perspective, was the difference in approach, rate of uptake in the technology, and comfort with the cameras between the different participants. My original assumption would be that everyone would more or less automatically become an ad hoc documentarian, contextualising and explaining the footage in front of them for the benefit of the audience. In fact, only one person in the Aftershock team took that approach: David the sound engineer.

Other approaches differed markedly from that style. One person turned the camera on herself and created her own story around (and separate from) the event itself, filming her trip into the centre, picking up foccacia for the other musicians and reflecting on her own state of tiredness (a recurring theme across all of the participants). Another simply caught short (10-15 second), anecdotal moments of humour and levity between the songs. Others conducted interviews, created set pieces just for the camera, or merely filmed entire songs.

The rate at which the musicians became comfortable with the technology was fairly uniform, with one or two exceptions (singer/songwriter Ila already has her own videoblog), but the use seemed to become almost second nature and casual by the third day. On the second day, we had removed the soft protective bags for the devices, which had added a stage when bringing out the cameras. As they were cheap (£35) pieces of kit, we were not worried about breakages or wear and tear – and this seemed to increase the amount of use for the devices overall.

On the final day, nearly everything was documented: the final rehearsal in its entirety; the bus trip to Camogli where the concert was taking place; the soundcheck; the performance itself and everything that happened around it. There were also quite a few reflective pieces, as well as instances where the musicians joked around, using the cameras as part of their ‘play’. In one instance, drummer Jason and Nitin interviewed each other – cameras facing each other – in a semi-ironic ‘lifestyles of the rich and famous’ parody. The camera had become an occasion for levity as well as simply the medium through which that levity was documented.

But as with their use of the technology itself, the musicians (with one notable exception) also became increasingly comfortable with being in front of the camera – and so the tone became increasingly conversational. Rather than try and present a camera-ready persona, the musicians relaxed by about the third day – as evidenced by the entirely conversational tone in Nitin’s post-soundcheck video above.

Into the future

There’s a lot to be written up from this week in Genoa – and Stef and I are still cataloguing, tagging and uploading the videos themselves, and reconfiguring the site so that it presents the different digital narrative approaches outlined above. I’m still drawing lessons from this process and there will no doubt be conference presentations and journal articles that spring from this. I’ve also arranged to interview Nitin further for a book I’m writing about Music as Culture.

Final performance of a collaborative piece called ‘Gondwana’

What was most interesting to me, though, was that the musicians asked the same question at the beginning of the process as they did at the end – but for entirely different reasons.

The question: “How long will this be up on the internet?”

Our answer: “Forever”.

Their response at the beginning of the process was to worry about their possible shortcomings in performance, mistakes made, how they might come across and how it might reflect on their future musical projects. Their response by the end was that they were delighted that they’d be able to go back and revisit this in future – and, for more than one artist, possibly even show their children or grandchildren one day.