Black British Jazz

Routes, Ownership and Performance

Jason Toynbee, Catherine Tackley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472417565
• eBook ISBN: 9781317173977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Jazz Music

Black British musicians have been making jazz since around 1920 when the genre first arrived in Britain. This groundbreaking book reveals their hidden history and major contribution to the development of jazz in the UK. More than this, though, the chapters show the importance of black British jazz in terms of musical hybridity and the cultural significance of race. Decades before Steel Pulse, Soul II Soul, or Dizzee Rascal pushed their way into the mainstream, black British musicians were playing jazz in venues up and down the country from dance halls to tiny clubs. In an important sense, then, black British jazz demonstrates the crucial importance of musical migration in the musical history of the nation, and the links between popular and avant-garde forms. But the volume also provides a case study in how music of the African diaspora reverberates around the world, beyond the shores of the USA - the engine-house of global black music. As such it will engage scholars of music and cultural studies not only in Britain, but across the world.

Chapter 1
Another Place, Another Race? Thinking through Jazz, Ethnicity and Diaspora in Britain

Jason Toynbee, Catherine Tackley and Mark Doffman

Of course … there is a flavour of the British sound … . It’s born directly from the influences of living here. And it’s the same in jazz. We have a sound with a heritage of Britain and also a sound with a heritage of the Caribbean – if you want to, if it’s the Caribbean. So it’s a lot more diverse than a lot of people would want to make out, and there’s a richness that it’s hard to see elsewhere you know … . I mean that’s one thing I’m proud of with British jazz music, performing, you know, you can go into black. I’m proud of the fact that we fuse the cultures over here more than in the States … . It’s quite the melting pot just here in Britain alone. (Dennis Rollins)

Where does jazz belong? The glib answer in the age of globalization and digital technology is everywhere. Jazz is no different from any other cultural product which gets distributed around the planet. Doubtless, the ubiquity of jazz today brings a democratic dividend; it is more widely accessible than ever, more listened to, more available for development by young musicians with all kinds of local inflection. And yet … jazz also has a history in which its specific origins and points of emergence are fundamental, defining even. Historically we can say that jazz belonged mainly to a particular place and culture: African America. That position is not uncontested of course. Several writers have attempted to remove race from place and produce histories of jazz in which it is presented simply as an American people’s music, unmarked by ethnic identity or racial division.¹ But for the most part, the formative period of jazz, say from 1920 to 1975, is recognized as being predominantly African-American in character.

It is exactly the relationship between this African-American identity and its geo-historical transcendence – the growing ubiquity of jazz – that the present volume explores. Black British jazz, we want to suggest, provides a case study in how jazz persists as a music of the African diaspora even while it has slipped its original moorings and left home. In the epigraph to the chapter, British jazz trombonist Dennis Rollins describes his multiple sense of belonging – to a tradition of music making called jazz, to the Caribbean whence his parents came, and to the ‘melting pot’ of Britain, where you can ‘you can go into black’. All these things are part of him, he emphasizes. Hybridity, then, is essential to a sense of identity for Rollins and indeed, we would venture, for any black British jazz musician.²

That theme animates and provides the narrative spine for all the contributions in the book. The authors explore what happens to jazz in another part of the African diaspora, beyond its ancestral home of the USA. The setting of Britain, and the experience and practice of British musicians are not only important in themselves; they constitute something like a lens through which the problem of jazz and its vexed relationship to race may be examined from a different angle. In one sense, then, this is a story about the Black Atlantic. Paul Gilroy’s book of that name brilliantly shows how African diasporic culture, and music in particular, has always been given to migration and cultural exchange between Africa, Europe and the Americas. If the process was driven originally by ‘plantation slavery’, Gilroy nevertheless makes clear this was just one moment in a much longer era of racialized global capitalism which persists today. What is more, Gilroy understands the cultural network of the black Atlantic to encompass, rather than be centred upon, black America. The black Atlantic is a ‘single, complex unit of analysis’ – transnational and intercultural (15).

We might ask how such an approach squares up against histories of jazz produced in its heartland, the USA. Take Guthrie Ramsey’s illuminating account. ‘Race music’, including jazz, is for Ramsey a part of home – the spatial but also cultural entity which we might call black America. He quotes the musician Muhal Richard Abrams on the importance of this: ‘You can go anywhere, but don’t never leave home’ (Ramsey xi). As Ramsey says, this is the major theme of his book. And indeed the notion of home is much more than mere metaphor. The writer takes us on a personal journey through not only his own life, but also that of his family, and the neighbourhood of his upbringing. It is an account which emphasizes continuity, and the generative culture of black America that has given race music, with jazz at its heart, such creative force through the twentieth century and beyond.

We want to suggest that this perspective, while at first sight quite distinct from that of Gilroy, is actually compatible. Indeed, the two need to be integrated in order to understand black British jazz and, through that lens, the problem of jazz and the African diaspora more generally. One reason is that the origins of what is now transnational, intercultural jazz just were in black America – never exclusively but, at least to till the 1970s, predominantly. Another reason for integrating the two approaches is that doing so helps us to understand the way in which the historically American character of jazz is intrinsic to its outernational³ blackness. We can hear this resonate in the life story of trumpeter, vocalist and composer Abram Wilson. From New Orleans, but resident in London since 2002, Wilson came to Britain almost accidentally. He was on his way to Paris ‘to seek advice from Quincy Jones on composition, arranging and the business of music’. Crucially, though, he had also read about the Paris of Josephine Baker, Dexter Gordon and Miles Davis. This was a mission informed by a properly historical notion of the black Atlantic, and the possibilities of musical creativity beyond American shores. Simple contingency was also involved. On the plane over to Europe a man sat next to him who knew the London jazz scene and told him about places to go and people to meet. The result: when Wilson encountered the black British bassist and bandleader Gary Crosby at a lunchtime jam session in London, his four-hour stopover on the way to Paris turned into an act of settlement.

A third reason for bringing together the accounts of Gilroy and Ramsey is that if home and away, continuity and change, tradition and hybridity are opposed terms they nevertheless confront one another in a dialectic of productive tension. Actually this is implicit in the foregoing. African diasporic culture from which jazz emerged is a form of nurture, involving care and protection in the face of a racialized regime of social, symbolic and sometimes physical violence. But it is also a process of translation, adaptation and change in response to those same power relations. If we go back to the words of Dennis Rollins we can hear these two aspects together; he embraces both his Caribbean roots and his British becoming, forged out of the migration of his parents. For Rollins, home is where the path is.

Five Moments in Black British Jazz

All this suggests the need for some historical mapping, a means of working through the dialectic of home and away which has animated (and sometimes dominated) the work of black British musicians since the arrival in Britain of the genre called jazz around 1920. On one level this mapping should function in the conventional way one might expect in a volume whose chapters span a long and complex period. That is, it ought to provide historical context in which the arguments, themes, people and events presented later on may be located. But in what follows we want to do this in quite a particular fashion. Given that our focus is on continuity set against transformation, what counts are conjunctures; key moments when causal factors are at play together, interacting one upon the other in ways which produce significant change. At least the following will need to be considered: transformations in musical structure, new waves of migration or generational change, shifting forms of racialized social relations. As far as possible we need to grasp these factors together in tension, in combination. What follows, then, is a sketch of five conjunctures, or key moments, in black British jazz.

Moment One

What had previously been a relatively small African diasporic population in Britain increased significantly during and after the First World War with the arrival of colonial subjects to work in the war economy, especially as seamen in the port cities of Liverpool, London and Cardiff. Crucially, the wave of migration, which brought with it both state-sponsored racism and sometimes violent resentment by white British workers, coincided with the arrival of jazz in the UK. Indeed as members of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra (SSO), one of the two ensembles which played a key role in bringing jazz to Britain from the USA, were disembarking in Liverpool in 1919, a ‘race riot’ was in full swing.⁴ The musicians needed a police escort to pass through the city (Bergmeier and Lotz).

This vignette reflects a deep ambivalence about early jazz in Britain, which Catherine Tackley (née Parsonage) has articulated. On the one hand, black American musicians were revered for their authenticity as living emblems of true jazz culture. On the other, they fell victim to racism and exclusion. During the early 1920s jazz moved out of the theatres and into London nightclubs. But a key factor in driving this move was the immigration policy of the British state. As work permits for black American musicians became impossible to obtain, those who remained in Britain literally moved underground into what were often basement nightclubs in London’s West End. Such a beginning matters because, as it turned out, it has provided something of a pattern for British jazz ever since. There has continued to be confusion and anxiety about the nature of the music, in particular the relation of race to what are taken to be the American sources of jazz as a musical style.

Moment Two

During the mid-1930s increasing numbers of musicians from the West Indies built careers in Britain, even as a ‘colour bar’ was being inaugurated that would systematically exclude black people from access to housing, public spaces and dignity. Paradoxically, many of these musicians had been trained in colonial police and military bands established by the imperialists. By 1935 there were enough of these instrumentalists to enable the Jamaican trumpeter Leslie Thompson to form an all-black orchestra. This moment, of course, also marked the shift to swing when jazz changed metric gear from a jerky two feel to even fours. And it was a jazz dance moment too (see Catherine Tackley, Chapter 3 in this volume), inaugurating almost twenty years of big band music. In the UK as much as the USA jazz was now popular. Interestingly, Thompson was a follower of Marcus Garvey, and even if his all-black band – and those that followed – was marketed to appeal to white listeners in search of the exotic, then black solidarity and self-defence in the face of the colour bar were also at play here.

Moment Three

In night clubs in the West End of London in the 1950s it was possible to hear West Indian musicians playing bebop. The leading performer among this group was alto saxophonist Joe Harriott, who had come to Britain from Jamaica in 1952. After the Second World War the British state opened up immigration from the empire for a straightforward material reason: national capital required cheap labour to rebuild the shattered economy. As Robert Miles describes it, the new wave of migration, particularly from the Caribbean, was channelled into a ‘racialised fraction of the working class’. Harriott escaped this fate only to encounter another form of marginalization. An auto-didact, who compared his own music-making to contemporary modern art, by 1960 he was developing ‘free-form’ jazz with a quintet including two other West Indians. This music paralleled but developed independently from the work of Ornette Coleman in the USA. Yet Harriott was widely ignored in the UK, and quickly forgotten too. Were Harriott and his mixed-race band victims of racism of a certain understated British kind? George McKay (161–2) thinks this is likely. Harriott’s problem, perhaps, was that he did not belong to the working-class fraction of low-paid, menial workers where his compatriots were sequestered – he was the ‘wrong kind’ of Jamaican.

Moment Four

As apartheid in South Africa intensified during the 1960s, a growing number of political refugees left to go to Britain. They included a group of black musicians led by the white pianist and composer Chris MacGregor. Their arrival coincided with a new kind of populist racism, promoted by a section of the Conservative Party and one-time cabinet minister Enoch Powell. Crucially for the British jazz scene, these South African musicians were received in quite a different way from Harriott and his confreres. The Bluenotes, and the later big band The Brotherhood of Breath, were not only extremely influential, they also absorbed British players from the new avant-garde jazz scene. Together the music they made was an extraordinary melange of township jazz, free improvisation, hymns and marching songs, which left a lasting impression on British jazz. How were the South Africans able to make headway in the British jazz scene, and at a time of heightened racism? Largely, we suggest, because of the rise of a new left politics associated with the counter-culture, but also, perhaps, a reading of African music as a kind of legitimately primitive form which might be incorporated into the new jazz-art that was emerging in Britain at this conjuncture.⁵

Moment Five

By the mid-1980s the children of the West Indians who had arrived in Britain after the Second World War were reaching adulthood. This generation only had experience of living in Britain, an experience marked in the early 1980s by new troubles, this time economic (unemployment and public sector cuts hit working-class black people disproportionately) as well as more straightforward racism (including police harassment, murders and assaults). There was widespread resistance, too, in the form of riots across many British cities. Among the young generation were musicians who had come up playing reggae and funk. Some of them were influenced by black nationalism from the USA, as well as Rastafarianism and the politics of Marcus Garvey. In 1985 a large orchestra, the Jazz Warriors, coalesced around the young saxophonist Courtney Pine. Jazz was suddenly on the agenda, and the Warriors became both emblems of, and catalysts for, a shift towards a new notion of what black music might sound and look like in Britain.⁶ Several black British jazz musicians signed to major record labels, or appeared in style magazines. All were courted by the media. Then, in the early 1990s, the jazz craze subsided as quickly as it had taken off, and the music industry dropped their black British jazz artists. Still, something like a self-sufficient tradition had been established. Black musicians would now play a key part in British jazz even if they often remained unacknowledged. Indeed, in an important sense it is these conditions of dogged self-sufficiency which continue to define the contemporary scene and contribute to national and international recognition.

But there is a larger issue at stake. The struggle of black musicians today to make their way in the world of British jazz is actually emblematic of the fate of African diasporic music beyond American shores. It throws up the awkward problem of the relationship of jazz to its black American past and present, and of how far this genre with its roots in the popular has become an elite art form. On a broader front we might say that today black British jazz encapsulates the problem of music of the African diaspora as it circulates in a world where cosmopolitan values are often enshrined, but seldom enacted in any rigorous fashion.

So far, we have been sketching an historical outline, one which takes its shape around five moments. By definition such an account is incomplete. For one thing, it misses out the mundane fact of continuity: black British musicians have carried on making music, and have achieved artistic and material successes by so doing, throughout the whole period. For another there are inevitably significant musicians and tendencies which remain unmentioned. Take the mixed-race singer Cleo Laine. Her position at the heart of the British jazz mainstream for six decades raises some important questions about jazz, race and popular culture in the UK, not to mention their intersections with gender (which is referenced by George McKay in his chapter on Winifred Atwell in this volume, Chapter 8). There are no doubt other important figures who are missing. The studies in this volume focus on musicians with roots in the African diaspora, and doubtless other perspectives and issues would emerge through consideration of musicians from other backgrounds. But if the account is limited in these ways we also hope that it reveals some of the factors impacting upon the players and their communities across the years. These factors have combined and recombined in complex ways to produce conjunctural shifts when the terms and conditions under which musicians work have changed in decisive ways.

The above is also quite a ‘strong’ reading of black British jazz. Yet within it, we want to acknowledge the sense of contest, ambivalence and transformation around the term which emerges from musical practices and associated discourse from musicians, audiences, critics and many others. In using the words ‘black British jazz’, we have been less interested in ontological monoliths and minutiae, in drawing boundaries and protecting fences as much as understanding what has been going on – making sense of the identities, sounds, lived realities and cultural imagination that are encapsulated in the term. Black British jazz is an actual cultural formation, but it is also ever changing, a reflexive point between rootedness and departure (or home and away), a provocation and celebration of the cultural politics of British jazz.

And we should also note some cross-currents which render this story more complex still. Perhaps most importantly, there has always been a tendency towards multiculturalism and hybridity across lines of race and ethnicity. Black and white British musicians have performed together in all five moments we have identified. In two of the most important bands – the Harriott Quintet and the Brotherhood of Breath – white musicians played key roles. More broadly, in British society at large continuing structural racism has been accompanied by a growing cosmopolitanism in popular music and culture. This is reflected in jazz too. Many of the musicians discussed in the book are engaged in hybrid creative acts which move well beyond reference to the African diaspora.

In the rest of the Introduction we want to sketch out how our authors articulate the necessarily abstract account above, and make sense of the music, its politics and aesthetics, together with the experiences and reflections of its makers. It is in the chapters themselves that we find the thick description and analysis which can reveal how musical life emerges from social and cultural dynamics of the sort we have described. How, then, are their contributions organized? There are three parts in the book: Routes, Ownership and Performance. The chapters in each deal with an important dimension of that overarching dialectic of home and away which, we have been arguing, is key to the making of black British jazz. Among the writers there is ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Music Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• General Editors’ Preface
• 1 Another Place, Another Race? Thinking through Jazz, Ethnicity and Diaspora in Britain
• PART I ROUTES
• PART II OWNERSHIP
• PART III PERFORMANCE
• Index