To infinity and beyond with black British Jazz

By Jason Toynbee, 26 May 2009

For years it seemed the academy was dead set against the study of popular culture. Or to put it in a more neutral way, there were just no resources to do research into it. Finally, that’s beginning to change. The idea that it might be important to document and interpret the creative expression of ordinary people, beyond elite culture, is gradually gaining acceptance. And I’d say that the Beyond Text programme is playing a key part here. All good, as the young people say. The trouble is, once you do get a grant to research a popular culture topic like black British jazz, the ‘beyond-ness’ which attracted you in the first place threatens to leap out of control. Let me explain.

Our approach on the research team has been to organise the work in strands. To take one of them, in Routes we deal with history and geography: where black musicians and communities came from, where they went to in Britain, and then how the identity of both people and music has changed over the years. There are important ‘beyond text’ issues here because jazz is both an oral and a recorded tradition. Improvised solos and sublime grooves are quintessentially performative and depend on an aesthetic of presence – the notion that the musicians are playing right here, right now. Yet the capture of performance on record has also been a crucial means of documenting the music, and spreading new ideas and shifts in style. Recordings are like photographs of jazz, snap shots of a tradition in the making. At the same time they are an aspect of what jazz is, part of its very being.

For black British jazz this ‘phonographic-oral’ character of the music brings particular problems for researchers. The biggest, perhaps, is, where do you stop? How far back should you go, and to which parts of Africa or the African diaspora? Musicians from the Caribbean have played a crucial part in the development of jazz in Britain. After they arrived many recordings of them were made (for the 1930s and 40s listen to the CD Black British Swing). But the range is patchy and generally doesn’t cover the work of the players who didn’t come to London.

In Cardiff, for instance, there was – and still is – a flourishing black jazz scene. As Catherine Tackley, leader of the Routes strand, has been finding out there seems to have been a very strong representation in the city of string players, mainly banjoists and guitarists. Occasionally they did go to London and got recorded. The Deniz brothers were stalwarts in the 40s and 50s. But many never went beyond the clubs and pubs of Cardiff. What did these people play, and what did they sound like? Through oral history we can start to approach that problem, but without recordings we can’t recover the particular inflections that marked the Cardiff scene in the mid-twentieth century.

If we shift to the question of ‘routes from …’, there are slightly different issues. In Jamaica, for instance, there was a flourishing jazz scene in the 1940s and 50s when swing bands played at the colonialists’ ‘society’ events as well as black people’s weddings and dances. However there are no recordings of this music. There are extant recordings of what the Jamaican music historian Garth White calls ‘proto-ska’, in other words records made for the dancehall sound systems of Kingston in the late 50s. They are in a broadly rhythm and blues style. Over the course of one of the most extraordinarily creative episodes in popular music history, this music would evolve into ‘reggae’. As such it would play a key part in the musical education of the generation of black players (sons and daughters of the post-War migrants) who during the 1980s reinvigorated British jazz through the hugely influential big band, the Jazz Warriors.

What, then, are we to make of these looping traditions and lines of influence, some moments represented on record, others not; some moments definitely belonging to the style we call jazz, others much less clearly so? Can we handle all the ‘beyond text’ implications which arise here and, above all perhaps, can we control the ever receding boundaries of what we’re trying to research? As I write these questions, I’m looking over my shoulder at our funders the AHRC, and Evelyn Welch the director of the Beyond Text programme. They might think we can’t do it. But actually we can … and we will. For doing justice to the extraordinary music making practices and lives of black British jazz musicians is not just a set of problems, it’s what this research is all about.