INARJ 2026: Artistic Research, Embodied Time, and Conviction

Recently, I had the opportunity to present at the fifth conference of the International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ), held at the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel under the theme “Places and Spaces”. It was a fitting setting for the paper I brought there: “Pocket as Embodied Space: Reflections from the Bandstand.” The conference framed artistic research in jazz as a serious and expanding site of inquiry, explicitly naming embodiment as one of its core strands.

The seriousness of the conversations and the generosity of the people in the room made clear that artistic research in jazz is no longer peripheral. It is real, rigorous, and increasingly necessary. This point matters to me because there are still contexts in which artistic research is treated as softer than conventional scholarship, too intuitive, too personal, or too difficult to verify. Gatherings like INARJ make clear that this is a false reading. Artistic research does not evade rigour. It often demands another kind of rigour capable of addressing forms of musical knowledge that are lived before they are theorised, felt before they are named, and shared before they are formalised. INARJ itself describes this terrain through embodiment, 4E cognition, and the effort to make discussable those forms of knowing captured in the idea that “we know more than we can tell.”

My own paper emerged from that tension. I argued that the concept of “pocket” is not merely something musicians count, measure, or place against a grid, but something they inhabit. Drawing on autoethnographic reflection across drums, bass, and keyboards, I explored how groove emerges through gesture, bodily weight, touch, movement, and ensemble attention. The central claim was simple but important: what stabilises time-feel is often not abstraction alone, but embodied action. In that sense, “pocket” is less a technical target than a lived and negotiated space.

That framing also clarifies why ensemble playing remains central to my thinking. The rhythm section is not merely a support mechanism beneath the “real” musical action. It is one of the primary sites where musical intelligence becomes visible. Timing, density, release, anticipation, trust, and adjustment all converge there. To speak seriously about pocket is therefore to speak about ensemble ethics: how bodies coordinate, how musicians hold one another, and how time is made inhabitable together. My presentation materials put this directly. Shared time is negotiated through touch, weight, and attention, and what holds an ensemble together is not only sound but shared physicality.

Jazz remains, for me, the discipline that made me into a professional musician. Other fields have shaped me since: higher education, curriculum design, supervision, research, writing, and institutional life. Yet jazz is where certain forms of accountability first became non-negotiable: listening, time, responsibility to others. The need to make a decision and stand by it. The capacity to adjust in real time without losing one’s centre.

To return to a room where these values were being explored not only in performance but also in research terms was quietly powerful. At the same time, the experience reinforced something I have long believed: jazz loses its meaning when it becomes a badge of exclusion. Treating it as a refuge for those who define themselves against other musics, dismissing pop outright, or approaching teaching merely as a convenient source of income misses the point. Music is organic and interconnected, and the values that jazz cultivates only matter if they remain open to that broader ecology.

I was also struck by the ethos surrounding the event. Many of the people presenting, publishing, convening, and building this area of work are not doing so for obvious reward. They do it because they believe the music matters, because they believe practice facilitates thought, and because they believe that some of the most valuable knowledge in our field still sits below the threshold of easy academic language. That spirit came through in both the formal papers and the conversations around them. The programme itself reflected this breadth: research on pedagogy, embodiment, improvisation, journals, hybrid instruments, performance construction, and artistic citizenship all sat alongside one another.

While I am grateful to INARJ and to the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel for hosting the conference, a small human footnote belongs here, too. The journey home became far more complicated than expected. My return flight was cancelled. I reached the airport before fully understanding the scale of the disruption, and what followed involved a frantic last-minute rebooking, two flight changes, a long layover, and a rather painful amount of extra cost. It was not ideal. In the end, that inconvenience remains only that: a footnote.

What stays with me is the conference’s larger aftertaste: a renewed belief that artistic research in jazz is not only legitimate but urgent, a renewed desire to keep articulating ensemble knowledge with greater precision, and a renewed sense that the work I most want to build sits at the intersection of groove, embodiment, rhythm-section practice, and higher music education.

If anything, the journey home was an oddly fitting reminder. Jazz, at its best, teaches us that time is never only measured. It is shared, shaped, negotiated, and inhabited. Delays, detours, and adjustments are part of the ensemble logic of moving forward. I returned from Brussels tired but grateful to the organisers, to the colleagues in the room, and to the continuing work of teaching, researching, and making sense of music together.

That still feels worth pursuing.