The Jazz Method

Music & culture

Jun 21

Who: Nattjazz

What: A Project working to develop the joy of music and the creative curiosity of children and young people.

Where: Bergen

Project period: 2023-2025

Web: Nattjazz

Jazzmetoden (The jazz method) is a three-year project (2023-2025) where we will work to develop the joy of music and the creative curiosity of children and young people. We want to expand our investment in developing high-quality concerts for and with children and young people. Nattjazz has a special commitment to the musical art form of jazz. Nattjazz's task is to create closeness to music and art - a closeness which, in its best versions, can give children and young people an experience of a lifetime.

A long-term commitment to develop:

• new musical talents from Western Norway.

• young people as voluntary cultural organizers

On the basis of allocated support from the Grieg Foundation, and preliminary project from Vestland county, we have been able to carry out many projects aimed at children and young people during Nattjazz the last years. Despite reduced normal activity in 2020/21, children's and youth projects have been carried out as planned. However, two years of pandemic measures have had a negative effect on the opportunity for children and young people to participate in cultural life. We register new challenges with recruitment, both for volunteering and for the talent projects. There are several cohorts who have no experience of participation, and their experience of cultural life is almost blank. This situation requires new methods for inclusion and motivation, where these must be developed and used in recruitment.

We address children and young people primarily from the Bergen area during Nattjazz at the end of May. For the rest of the year, we collaborate with other actors from the music scene in Western Norway.

With the project, we aim to convey the joy of music, and at the same time take the children into an exciting world where improvisation and innovation are the essence. We believe that children's encounter with this way of making music opens a new and exciting world for their perception of music, both as a listening audience, but also as budding performers interested in music. Nattjazz emphasizes that the children should both experience and play music together with professional performers at a high level. Our experience is that children and young people are very open and at the same time quality-conscious, and we want them to experience interaction with the best. It's about taking children and young people – the world's most honest audience – seriously.

The primary arena for project implementation is the Nattjazz festival in Bergen at the end of May (annually). Nattjazz is mainly organized at USF Verftet.