Nine countries unite for groundbreaking exchange programme Constellations: brightening international ambitions for organisations and artists

Along with eight other partner organisations from the Europe Jazz Network, Finnish Jazz Federation has joined forces to collaborate on a new talent development programme, Constellations, exchanging our artists with others in the international jazz community.

Constellations is a new collaborative artist development exchange programme that reignites international ambitions of artists and partners in the wake of the pandemic. Constellations addresses creative and personal growth, along with recovery, wellbeing and environmental concerns, by enabling participants to meet new international peers and to participate in each other’s development programmes and networks.

Each partner already runs its own respected talent development programme and has nominated one of their alumni artists to take part in Constellations. Artists and partners will visit and participate in a development programme or residency in another country, learning about local ecosystems, and joining working groups of musicians, creatives and other music professionals. All artists and partners will also partake in major jazz networking events such as jazzahead! and the European Jazz Conference to gain a deeper understanding of context. Crucially, Constellations maximises existing programmes and events, avoiding the need to resource new or additional infrastructure.

Constellations builds on a shared commitment to collaboration and to artists, laying foundations for a more connected and sustainable music scene across Europe. It will also provide a workable, solid, innovative model to inspire others to start their own collaborations to empower musicians to expand their horizons.

“We already know each other’s work as members of EJN – some of us for many years – and we realised the huge potential in pooling our resources, experience and expertise in artist development, using our connections to springboard our artists up to the next international level. By inviting a partner and an artist into another partner’s networks, we’ll celebrate the differences in each of our programmes, counteract the impact of the pandemic and at the same time, constellate people and ideas.” – Steve Mead, Manchester Jazz Festival, UK (partner).

International partner organisations and their programmes:

JazzLab / Stepping Stone (BE), Jazz Finland / Nordic Jazz Comets (FI), Association Jazzé Croisé  / Jazz Migration (FR), Stadtgarten Köln / NICA artist development (DL), Synthesizer (IL), I-Jazz / Nuova Generazione Jazz (IT), Powered by TINC / Stepping Stone (NL), Norsk jazzforum / Nordic Jazz Comets (NO), and of course Manchester Jazz Festival (mjf) / hothouse (GB).

Participating artists:

Mattias de Craene (BE), Kaisa Maensivu (FI), Delphine Deau (FR), Pablo Gīw (DE), Ella Ronen (IL), Alessandra Bossa (IT), Frederike Berendsen (NL), Kjetil Mulelid (NO) and Lara Jones (GB).

This year, Finnish Jazz Federation´s exchange partner is Powered by TINC / Stepping Stone (NL), as we welcome artist and activist Frederike Berendsen to Nordic Jazz Comets/Finnish Jazz Federation, whilst one of our Nordic Jazz Comets artists from the previous years, basist Kaisa Mäensivu takes up a residency in Italy.

The pilot edition of Constellations runs until November 2023.

Constellations is funded by The European Union and supported by MusicAire under the Music Moves Europe programme.