'Cultural heritage and jazz festivals' special issue editors' introduction

Festivals claim an important place in Europe’s cultural ecology, with their dynamic and synergetic relationship to specific locations and cultural sites. European jazz festivals in particular offer a distinctive lens through which to explore key issues in heritage research, given their complex relationship to questions of race and diaspora, national identity, and cultural politics. In this special issue we present insights and findings from the EU JPI-Heritage Plus-funded project Cultural Heritage and Improvised Music in European Festivals (CHIME) which ran from 2015 to 2018. Drawing on jazz and improvised music festivals, CHIME explored how music plays a key role in the sonic refiguring of the urban and rural landscapes, and linked studies of cultural heritage to issues concerning national identity, cultural tourism, urban regeneration, and community engagement....