Jazz in Britain

This chapter looks at the origins of pop festival culture in Britain, the relatively under-researched phenomenon of the early jazz festivals in the New Forest during the 1950s. It explores subcultural contestation and negotiation, with particular attention to the 1960 festival, at which traditional (‘trad’) jazz fans and modernists confronted each other during the (mediated) so-called Battle of Beaulieu. It introduces issues relevant to the later festival movement, and to Woodstock: the significance of the deep green pastoral location, links (strong or weak) with the burgeoning peace movement of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the suggestion from a London beatnik of a free festival in the forest, the question of atavism and the revival of the past. It considers the problematic issue of Americanisation in the imitation of the recently founded Newport Jazz Festival as well as some of the innovations of Beaulieu.

Jazz Britannia is a UK-produced three-part BBC television documentary about the post-war development of jazz in the United Kingdom. We analyse the programmes to examine how the narrative, form and assumptions of the series can be understood within a series of contextual debates about jazz historiography, history on television, and the value of historiographic method in public service television. We utilize the debates around
Ken Burns’s US-produced ten-part documentary series Jazz, to develop an argument about the way that the British documentary constructs a very different history from Jazz, but using many of the approaches and techniques deployed by Burns. We locate the
series within questions of quality television and other forms of television history. Finally, we seek to explore the way that the programmes produce a totalizing narrative in which the primary material is ordered to tell a predetermined story about innovations and an identifiably British form of jazz.

This article looks at a particular moment in the relation between popular music and social protest, focusing on the traditional (trad) jazz scene of the 1950s in Britain. The research has a number of aims. One is to reconsider a cultural form dismissed, even despised by critics. Another is to contribute to the political project of cultural studies, via the uncomplicated strategy of focusing on music that accompanies political activism. Here the article employs material from a number of personal interviews with activists, musicians, fans from the time, focusing on the political development of the New Orleans-style parade band in Britain, which is presented as a leftist marching music of the streets. The article also seeks to shift the balance slightly in the study of a social movement organisation (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, CND), from considering it in terms of its ‘official’ history towards its cultural contribution, even innovation. Finally, the article looks at neglected questions around Americanisation and jazz music, with particular reference to power and the past.

From Tunapuna, Trinidad, Winifred Atwell (c. 1914-1983) was a classically trained ragtime and boogie-woogie style pianist who gained quite remarkable popularity in Britain, and later also Australia, in the 1950s, in live and recorded music, as well as in the developing television industry. In this chapter I outline her extraordinary international musical biography as a chart-topping pop and television star—innovative achievements for a black migrant female musician which are arguably thrown into more dramatic light by virtue of the fact that Atwell has been and remains a neglected figure in media and popular music (let alone jazz) history.

These are transcriptions of interviews and correspondence undertaken as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council)-funded project exploring the cultures and politics of traditional jazz in Britain in the 1950s.

The project ran through 2001-2002 and was entitled American Pleasures, Anti-American Protest: 1950s Traditional Jazz in Britain.

I edited responses, and structured them here according to the main issues I asked about and to key points that seemed to recur from different interviewees. There is a short-ish introduction to give a sense of context to readers unfamiliar with that period of Britain’s cultural history. I hugely enjoyed meeting and talking with these people, whose cultural and political autobiographies were full of energy, rebellion, fun, with music at the heart. Thank you. Some—Jeff Nuttall, George  Melly—are, sadly, now dead.

Material from these interviews, and a second set I undertook with modern jazzers and enthusiasts (I acknowledge that the distinction between trad and modern doesn’t always bear scrutiny) was included in my book Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain (Duke University Press, 2005).

Interviewees include:
      * George Melly
      * Jeff Nuttall
      * Val Wilmer
      * members of the Ken Colyer Trust
      * members of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Jazz Britannia is a UK-produced three-part BBC television documentary about the post-war development of jazz in the United Kingdom. We analyse the programmes to examine how the narrative, form and assumptions of the series can be understood within a series of contextual debates ...

An ethnomusicologist looking for authentic British folk music in the early to mid-20th Century might well have gone to North Wales to hear Welsh harp music, or to Cheshire to track down rural English folk song. Would they, however, have come to Chester City Centre to hear the dance bands play on a Saturday night, or would they have regarded that as ‘not folk music’? If not, it’s likely that the bands and dancers would have agreed with them, and called their music dance music, swing, or jazz. Yet, there are unexpected overlaps in the ways in which participants interact in both traditional folk and dance band environments, and also between the musical styles themselves, intersections that at first sight may well be hidden. This presentation draws on oral history research on dance bands, musicians, and venues in Chester and North Wales, looking specifically at the River Park Ballroom in the city of Chester and its role in the regional entertainment scene during and after World War II. I will examine the networks of people who provided the entertainment, the ‘hidden pathways’ by which they found one another, and the circumstances which brought particular types of audience to the ballroom at different times, such as migrant workers and officer cadets during the war, or a new group from Liverpool in the early 1960s. I also look at the role of imagination in giving venues such as the River Park Ballroom particular meanings both to the people who played and danced there and to those who didn’t. Finally, as the ballroom was demolished decades ago, I look at ways of preserving and presenting the legacy of the ballroom’s music, dancers and musicians to current and future generations, including location sensitive online resources, and the possibilities and challenges of virtual reality.