Intercultural Musicking and Diasporic Performance in the City:Klezmer and Jazz in Manchester

This paper grows out of our explorations of the politics and aesthetics of musical encounters that cross geographic borders and transcend ethnic identities. Of particular interest are the musical transformations that emerge in the spaces between macro-level geo-politics and micro-level local dynamics as once-local sounds are transported/translated to distant communities where they are not merely listened to but actively remade. We focus on klezmer and jazz as two manifestations of participatory diasporic music-making in Manchester, a city with migration baked into its DNA. Our starting points are the student klezmer and jazz ensembles that serve as laboratories for our research into culturally-situated ensemble pedagogy and the diverse ways in which a world music ensemble might engage with local communities (in this case, through schools, care homes, museums, synagogues, dance evenings, jam sessions and more). We zoom in on two contrasting projects. The performance project ‘Amid the Mirk Over the Irk’ reimagined past musical encounters between Jewish and Irish migrants who settled on the banks of the River Irk in Victorian Manchester. The schools-based project ‘Hear Me Now!’ explored how jazz acquires new meaning when fused with different forms of cultural heritage and how the history of jazz migrations meets with the soundscape of the 21st-century multicultural city. How might we theorise these new physical, temporal and sonic spaces-in-flux and the equally fluid but potentially emancipatory collective identities they allow to emerge? How might these spaces help sustain traditional practices while also enabling new growth?