Circular Breathing

McKay George McKay

Description

In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb's Dixielanders in 1943 through the burgeoning British bebop scene of the early 1950s, the Beaulieu Jazz Festivals of 1956-61, and the improvisational music making of the 1960s and 1970s, McKay reveals the connections of the music, its players, and its subcultures to black and antiracist activism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, and the New Left. In the process, he provides the first detailed cultural history of jazz in Britain.McKay explores the music in relation to issues of whiteness, blackness, and masculinity-all against a backdrop of shifting imperial identities, postcolonialism, and the Cold War. He considers objections to the music's spread by the "anti-jazzers" alongside the ambivalence felt by many leftist musicians about playing an "all-American" musical form. At the same time, McKay highlights the extraordinary cultural mixing that has defined British jazz since the 1950s, as musicians from Britain's former colonies-particularly from the Caribbean and South Africa-have transformed the genre. Circular Breathing is enriched by McKay's original interviews with activists, musicians, and fans and by fascinating images, including works by the renowned English jazz photographer Val Wilmer. It is an invaluable look at not only the history of jazz but also the Left and race relations in Great Britain.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Reino Unido
• Popular culture
• United Kingdom
• Great Britain
• Jazz
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 23 novembre 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822387282
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

CIRCULAR BREATHING

CIRCULAR BREATHING

  

   

Duke University Press

George McKay

              

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Designed by Rebecca Giménez Typeset in Garamond  by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data and illustration credits appear at the end of this book.

In loving memory of ,    --   

Caro, caro Freddie, re del mare!

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction: Jazz, Europe, Americanization



ONE New Orleans Jazz, Protest (Aldermaston), and Carnival (Beaulieu) 

TWO Whiteness and (British) Jazz



THREE Jazz of the Black Atlantic and the Commonwealth

FOUR The Politics and Performance of Improvisation and Contemporary Jazz in the s and s 

FIVE From ‘‘Male Music’’ to Feminist Improvising

Conclusion

Notes



Bibliography

Index











The fact that British working-class boys in Newcastle play . . . [jazz] is at least as interesting as and rather more surprising than the fact that it progressed through the frontier saloons of the Mississippi valley.— (pseud. of Eric Hobsbawm),The Jazz Scene(, )

The more you shore up their conditioning, the more gigs you get. —The improvising pianist ,  (quoted in Wickes , )

PREFACE

This is not really (only) a book about music, about the history of the sounds of jazz in Britain, but a study of the circulation and political 1 inscriptions in and usages of that music’s form and history. My aim is to undertake two projects, with the argument that they are related to rather than distinct from each other. First, I want to consider African American jazz music as an export culture, as a case study in the opera- tion of the process or problem of ‘‘Americanization.’’ Doing so involves exploring questions of cultural and economic power and desire, of em- pires even, and the limits and problems of these. I remain surprised that jazz as a cultural form has been insufficiently considered as a prime export culture, and I seek to balance that. Discourses of Americaniza- tion are always as much concerned with the import society as with the export culture itself, and I do also want to look at the effort at finding an indigenous (in this case, British) voice in an American form. Ques- tions of imitation apply here, of course, but more importantly for the specific attitudinal culture of jazz—predicated on the authentic, the original—are questions of inauthenticity and unoriginality. As far back as , the English composer and critic Constant Lambert recognized in his bookMusic Ho!one duality in jazz, that it ‘‘is internationally com- prehensible, and yet provides a medium for national inflection’’ (). I 2 want to explore the British experiences of jazz. Note that the focus on Britain should not imply a chauvinistic impulse on my part, nor is it in-