Richard Williams on the fall of British jazz
Can you dig it?
It was music's loss but potato-picking's gain. Richard Williams on the fall of British jazz

Richard Williams
Monday January 24, 2005

Guardian [UK]

When Howard Riley arrived from Bangor University to take part in a national students' jazz band contest in Croydon in the spring of 1963, the 20-year-old pianist couldn't believe what he saw. "There were hundreds of us," he says now, the shock of discovery still apparent in his voice. Like most people who played jazz in Britain in the 20th century, Riley had developed the conviction that his chosen musical path was the lonely obsession of a tiny minority. But here, one afternoon at the brand-new Fairfield Halls, was the evidence that others shared his belief in the music's special value.
Riley tells that story in Jazz Britannia, a series of three one-hour programmes starting this week on BBC4. Not long after his trio had finished third in the competition, he was providing background music at holiday camps and on ocean liners. By the end of the decade he had landed a contract with a major record label, a significant step on the way to becoming a respected improviser and teacher.

He now performs his highly original music every year at festivals in Italy, Germany and France. That respect, however, has never been paralleled by an increase in his audience at home, and in conversation last week he mentioned that there is currently no London engagement in his diary. "When I was 15," he said, "I was playing three gigs a week. It's never been quite as good since."

The story of British jazz is that of a series of promising dawns quickly extinguished by lengthy cold showers. If American jazz musicians had to battle to be heard against the forces of racism and corruption, their British equivalents faced the disdain of the establishment and the indifference of a public largely driven by an appetite for novelty.

It was the arrival of the Beatles that turned even the more inquisitive ears away from the harmonic and rhythmic complexity of modern jazz. "When I arrived at Bangor there were lots of people who wanted to play what I wanted to play," he says. "By the time I left, a lot of guitars had appeared and there weren't very many people interested in jazz."

Jazz Britannia is the tale of how generation after generation of musicians refused to be intimidated by this unequal struggle. It shows, too, how many of them succeeded in placing indelible marks on an idiom that prizes imagination above commercial acumen. Or did, until the current generation of corporate jazzers - Jamie Cullum, Amy Winehouse et al - came along.

Not that the success of this flimsy, derivative jazz-lite is anything new. At around the time the teenaged Howard Riley was getting to grips with the demanding music of Bill Evans and Cecil Taylor, the wider world sent Acker Bilk, with his bowler hat and striped waistcoat and neutered New Orleans clarinet, to the top of the charts with Stranger on the Shore, the theme tune to a BBC TV children's serial. The trumpeter Kenny Ball did something similar with a Russian folk song retitled Midnight in Moscow.

While colouring in the background, Jazz Britannia does the music a favour by concentrating on those players whose work, whatever degree of public acclaim it commanded at the time, has managed to cling on to its value. And in trying to simplify a complicated story, it concentrates heavily on a few figures of particular significance.

We hear a lot about Tubby Hayes, the teenage tenor saxophonist from west London whose virtuosity also extended to the flute and the vibraharp, and who achieved the accolade of being asked to deputise for an ailing saxophonist in the Duke Ellington band. We hear about the alto saxophonist Joe Harriott, a Charlie Parker disciple who arrived from Jamaica and slowly worked his way towards a form of ensemble improvisation that matched anything coming from New York in the turbulent early 1960s. As a contrast to those two prematurely curtailed lives, we hear about the pianist Stan Tracey, a symbol of the perseverance required to spend a lifetime in British jazz. Then there's Courtney Pine, a representative of the multicultural attitudes of a more recent generation.

The series begins in the big-band era. In the first episode, Johnny Dankworth talks of joining "Geraldo's Navy", the dance orchestra that serenaded passengers aboard the transatlantic liners. Shore leave allowed Dankworth and the other young musicians to sit at the feet of Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk in the clubs of 52nd Street before returning home to found Club Eleven, the Soho headquarters of British bebop and the predecessor of Ronnie Scott's.

The second part of the series traces the increasing diversity of the music as the 1960s went on. The bassist Jack Bruce and the drummer Jon Hiseman describe the transition from modern jazz to R&B to jazz-rock. We hear from the drummer Louis Moholo, who arrived from South Africa in 1965 with Chris McGregor's Blue Notes, and the saxophonists Evan Parker and Trevor Watts, who reflect on the seminal free-improvisation sessions at the Little Theatre Club in Covent Garden.

John Surman, Mike Westbrook and Keith Tippett then talk about the early 1970s, a time when, in the wake of the chart success of Blood, Sweat and Tears and the appearance of Soft Machine at the Proms, it really seemed as though jazz and its offshoots could achieve a genuine popularity on their own terms. "It was artist-driven," says Tippett, who once appeared on Top of the Pops with King Crimson and went on to fill the Lyceum for a gig by a 50-piece band including free-jazzers, classical string players, members of Patto and Blossom Toes, and his wife, Julie Driscoll, each of whom received #100. "It wasn't business-driven."

Once again, however, bright hopes were to be doused, at least for the majority. "I became unfashionable," Tippett says of the 1980s. "It was very difficult, financially. I had to go potato picking." Bobby Wellins, a flinty Glaswegian whose eloquent tenor saxophone had helped to make such a success of Stan Tracey's suite inspired by Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood in 1965, speaks affectingly of his descent into disillusionment and drug-dealing.

Peter King, another fine Parker interpreter, remembers going to see a record company and being told that he was too old and ugly. "The work dried up completely and I couldn't find my enthusiasm for playing any more," he says.

Fortunately the climate was to change again and his enthusiasm returned, along with that of Tippett, Wellins and Tracey, who had considered retraining as a postman. In the third episode, British jazz returns from the brink of extinction, and a new generation arrives, spearheaded by two London-based big bands, the Jazz Warriors and Loose Tubes. We see kids dancing to classic Blue Note discs by Art Blakey and Horace Silver, and hear from Gilles Peterson, the indefatigable London DJ, whose love of rare vinyl has helped spark a reappraisal of the British jazz of the 1960s, leading to the reappearance of many long-unavailable LPs, including those of Howard Riley.

What this means in the long term is hard to guess, not least because British jazz has never dared to peer into the distance. "In some ways it's better than ever," Riley told me, reflecting the experience of musicians of his generation. "In terms of getting records out, anyway. The gig scene is far, far worse. It used to be that you'd play 50 gigs for every record you had out. Now it's more like 50 records per gig. There's a loyal audience, but it's not very big and it isn't expanding."

While giving the appearance of telling the whole story, Jazz Britannia's decision to begin its narrative at the end of the second world war unjustly ignores the work of those who really pioneered jazz in Britain, men such as the saxophonist Buddy Featherstonehaugh and the bandleaders Harry Gold and Ken "Snakehips" Johnson, who could be widely heard in the interwar years. It fails to mention the appearances in London in the 1930s of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter and Coleman Hawkins, and it neglects the achievements of the first British musicians who made the move to the US and established their reputations in the heartland of jazz, notably the pianists George Shearing, Victor Feldman, Eddie Thompson and Dill Jones, all of whom were accepted as equals by their American colleagues.

The proliferation of less well-known but no less talented figures is what gives jazz its special flavour, but there is no room here for mention of Denis Rose, a mysterious self-taught pianist from London who deserted from the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1943 and was not arrested until 1950, by which time he had become one of the presiding spirits of British bebop. Or, by way of contrast, Pat Smythe, another pianist, an RAF pilot who qualified as a lawyer in his native Edinburgh before moving to London and adding wonderful layers of texture and harmony to Harriott's great quintet. Other world-class originals, such as the saxophonists Bruce Turner and Tony Coe, the trumpeter Tommy McQuater, the clarinetist Sandy Brown, the pianist Mike Taylor and the drummer Phil Seaman, go unmentioned.

In its repeated insistence that British jazz avoided being wiped from the face of the earth only through the discovery of its own distinctive sound, which it dates to the release of Tracey's Dylan Thomas suite, this valuable series puts an unnecessary strain on its credibility.

Apart from occasional pastoral or folk-based works by the likes of John Surman, Danny Thompson's Whatever and Ken Hyder's Talisker, the very best of British jazz seldom shows any sign of overt "Britishness", or of any other distinctive sound or attitude. What has happened instead is that British jazz musicians of all kinds have gradually grown in self-confidence, losing the inferiority complex that had its roots in a deference towards the American masters, taking their place in a music characterised by its infinite inclusiveness and its embrace of musicians of true originality. And of those, Jazz Britannia has plenty to show.

? The first part of Jazz Britannia will be broadcast on BBC4 on Friday evening. A weekend of performances at the Barbican, London EC2 (0845 120 7536), on February 12 and 13 features Michael Garrick, Soweto Kinch, Bobby Wellins, Courtney Pine, Norma Winstone, Stan Tracey, Louis Moholo, Andy Sheppard, John Surman and others.

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