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Tony Dudley-Evans is Jazz Adviser to the Jazzlines programme at Town Hall/Symphony Hall Birmingham and Programme Adviser to the Cheltenham Jazz Festival.
He now sees himself as a jazz promoter, but he was for many years a British linguist and expert in English for Specific Purposes. One of the most influential authors in the development of the modern notion of genre, he is usually grouped together with John Swales and Vijay Bhatia as the driving force behind recent developments in ESP.
Tony Dudley-Evans was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham. Having gained a BA in Arabic (University of London), a PGCE in teaching English as a Foreign Language (University of Wales) and an MA in Applied English Linguistic (University of Birmingham), Tony pursued a career as a researcher and lecturer until his retirement in 2001. Among his best-known books are Developments in English for Specific Purposes, authored with Maggie Jo St John, and The Language of Economics, co-edited with economist Willie Henderson.
Despite the demands of his 'day-job', he was from 1985, chair of Birmingham Jazz, an organisation which promoted up to 100 concerts a year at Symphony Hall, the CBSO Centre, the Adrian Boult Hall, mac , The Drum, the Fiddle and Bone and the Glee Club. In Birmingham alone he has promoted around 1000 jazz events since 1985. A popular promotion is the weekly free Friday evening session, now known as the Jazzlines Free Gigs, held in Symphony Hall Café Bar showcasing emerging and established jazz musicians to regular audiences of hundreds.
In 2012 the work of Birmingham Jazz was transferred to Jazzlines, Town Hall and Symphony Hall's dynamic programme of live jazz performances and education projects across the city. Tony became Jazz Adviser and works closely with Jazzlines Programme Manager, Mary Wakelam-Sloan. Jazzlines is now the major jazz promoter in Birmingham and a key national jazz organisation.
As a promoter Tony has commissioned composers including Mike Gibbs, Tim Berne, Julian Joseph, Iain Ballamy, Tom Bancroft, Barbara Thompson, Billy Jenkins, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Liam Noble, Hans Koller, Ingrid Laubrock and many more. He received one of the BBC Jazz Awards in 2005 for services to jazz. He is also an honorary Fellow of the Birmingham Conservatoire.
Tony has been involved with the Cheltenham Jazz Festival since its beginnings 20 years ago, initially as Chair of the Jazz Advisory Group, then as artistic director and, finally, for the last three years as Programme Advisor, working closely with Ian George, Director, and firstly Philip Woods and for the last two years Emily Jones as Jazz Managers. This programming team has built Cheltenham Jazz Festival up into one of the leading jazz festivals in Europe.
Tony has also supported the Birmingham Conservatoire's BMus Jazz course and has until recently co-ordinated the Performance Platform class for third year and final-year students. Tony has also been a member of the Arts Council's Music Panel and was on the Board of both Birmingham Arts Marketing and JazzDev. He is now a member of Jazz Services Touring Panel and is widely consulted about jazz promotion.
He is married to Maggie Jo St. John, and has two grown up children, Stephanie and Adrian. He supports West Bromwich Albion F.C. and Leeds Rhinos.
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Sir Adrian Cedric Boult, CH was an English conductor. Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family, he followed musical studies in England and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London for the Royal Opera House and Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. His first prominent post was conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1924. When the British Broadcasting Corporation appointed him director of music in 1930, he established the BBC Symphony Orchestra and became its chief conductor. The orchestra set standards of excellence that were rivalled in Britain only by the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO), founded two years later.
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) is a British orchestra based in Birmingham, England. It is the resident orchestra at Symphony Hall: a B:Music Venue in Birmingham, which has been its principal performance venue since 1991. Its administrative and rehearsal base is at the nearby CBSO Centre, where it also presents chamber concerts by members of the orchestra and guest performers.
Julian Lloyd Webber is a British solo cellist, conductor and broadcaster, a former principal of Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and the founder of the In Harmony music education programme.
Symphony Hall is a 2,262 seat concert venue in Birmingham, England. It was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 12 June 1991, although it had been in use since 15 April 1991. It is home to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and hosts around 270 events a year. It was completed at a cost of £30 million. The hall's interior is modelled on the Musikverein in Vienna and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The venue, managed alongside Town Hall, presents a programme of jazz, world, folk, rock, pop and classical concerts, organ recitals, spoken word, dance, comedy, educational and community performances, and is also used for conferences and business events as part of the International Convention Centre.
Andrew Downes was a British classical composer. He was head of the School of Composition and Creative Studies at Birmingham Conservatoire from 1992 until 2005. His compositions have been performed and broadcast internationally.
The culture of Birmingham is characterised by a deep-seated tradition of individualism and experimentation, and the unusually fragmented but innovative culture that results has been widely remarked upon by commentators. Writing in 1969, the New York-based urbanist Jane Jacobs cast Birmingham as one of the world's great examples of urban creativity: surveying its history from the 16th to the 20th centuries she described it as a "great, confused laboratory of ideas", noting how its chaotic structure as a "muddle of oddments" meant that it "grew through constant diversification". The historian G. M. Young – in a classic comparison later expanded upon by Asa Briggs – contrasted the "experimental, adventurous, diverse" culture of Birmingham with the "solid, uniform, pacific" culture of the outwardly similar city of Manchester. The American economist Edward Gleason wrote in 2011 that "cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution", concluding: "wandering these cities ... is to study nothing less than human progress."
Soweto Kinch is a British jazz alto saxophonist and rapper.
The Royal Birmingham Conservatoire is a music school, drama school and concert venue in Birmingham, England. It provides professional education in music, acting, and related disciplines up to postgraduate level. It is a centre for scholarly research and doctorate-level study in areas such as performance practice, composition, musicology and music history. It is the only one of the nine conservatoires in the United Kingdom that is also part of a faculty of a university, in this case Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University. It is a member of the Federation of Drama Schools, and a founder member of Conservatoires UK.
The National Scout and Guide Symphony Orchestra (NSGSO) was formed in 1976 by George Odam and Sue Stevens as a joint youth orchestra of The Scout Association and Girlguiding in the United Kingdom.
Adrian Adlam is a British violinist, conductor and music educator. He was educated at Westminster Abbey, Winchester College, Conservatoire Royale de Musique of Brussels and the Hochschule fur Musik, Hanover.
Birmingham Jazz is a voluntary, non-profit organisation responsible for promoting and commissioning jazz and related contemporary music in the UK.
Michael Clement Irving Gibbs is a Rhodesian-born English jazz composer, conductor, arranger and producer as well as a trombonist and keyboardist.
Cheltenham Jazz Festival is one of the UK's leading jazz festivals, and is part of Cheltenham Festivals' annual festival season, also including the Science, Music and Literature Festivals in Cheltenham Spa.
Cheltenham Festivals is a registered charity that aims to bring joy, spark curiosity, connect communities, and inspire change year-round with four world-class Festivals in Jazz, Science, Music and Literature, and charitable programmes for education, community, and talent development in the spa town of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England.
Cheltenham Science Festival is one of the UK's leading science festivals, and is part of Cheltenham Festivals: also responsible for the Jazz, Music and Literature Festivals that run every year.
Paul Spicer is an English composer, conductor, and organist. He taught choral conducting at the Royal College of Music and conducted the RCM Chamber Choir between 1995 and 2008. He currently teaches conducting at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and conducts their chamber choir which records for Somm Records. He also teaches at Oxford and Durham universities. Since 2004 he has been the conductor of the Petersfield Festival. He was Senior Producer for BBC Radio 3 for the Midlands Region based in Birmingham between 1984 and 1990 after which he moved to be artistic director of the Lichfield Festival. He also produced for various record companies over many years. He founded the Finzi Singers in 1984 making many recordings for Chandos Records. He conducts the Birmingham Bach Choir and the Whitehall Choir in London. His compositions include two oratorios for Easter and for Advent with libretti by the Dr Tom Wright and a choral symphony 'Unfinished Remembering' (2014) to a libretto by Euan Tait commemorating the outbreak of World War 1. He runs a series of choral courses under the banner of The English Choral Experience based mainly at Abbey Dore in Herefordshire.
Charlotte Bray is a British composer. She was championed by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London Sinfonietta and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, BBC Symphony Orchestra. Her music has been performed by many notable conductors such as: Sir Mark Elder, Oliver Knussen, Daniel Harding, and Jac van Steen.
Jazz is a popular musical style in Birmingham and has been so since the 1920s. Venues such as the Birmingham Palais pioneered British jazz and lead to the establishment of a string of jazz clubs in the city such as The Rhythm Club and the Hot Club. Today jazz remains a prominent part of the cities culture; events such as the Harmonic Festival, the Mostly Jazz Festival and the annual International Jazz Festival run each year along with Birmingham Jazz, an organisation that promotes and commissions dozens of jazz concerts every year.
Sarah Munro is an English singer-songwriter from Hertfordshire. Her debut album, Say Hello To You, was released on 14 September 2016. Her debut single 'For Eternity' received airplay across BBC Radio 2, in particular from Michael Ball who described her as, "What a gorgeous voice! I think she's absolutely fabulous – real purity and clarity to her voice".
Daniel Fardon is a British composer of contemporary classical music.
