Black British Jazz

Black British Jazz
Author: Jason Toynbee
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317173988

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.

Black British Jazz

Black British Jazz
Author: Dr Jason Toynbee
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2014-08-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1472417569

Black British musicians have been making jazz since around 1920. This book reveals their hidden history and major contribution to the development of jazz in the UK. The chapters show the importance of black British jazz in terms of musical hybridity and the cultural significance of race. 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. It will engage scholars of music and cultural studies not only in Britain, but across the world.

Black British Jazz

Black British Jazz
Author: Jason Toynbee
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 131717397X

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.

Gordon Stretton, Black British Transoceanic Jazz Pioneer

Gordon Stretton, Black British Transoceanic Jazz Pioneer
Author: Michael Brocken
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2018-09-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1498574475

This extensively researched text concerning the life and career of Liverpool-born Black jazz musician Gordon Stretton not only contributes to the important debate concerning the transoceanic pathways of jazz during the 20th century, but also suggests to the jazz fan and scholar alike that such pathways, reaching as they also did across the Atlantic from Europe, are actually part of a largely ignored therefore partially-hidden history of 20th century jazz performance, industry and influence. The work also exists to contribute to a more complete picture of the significance of diaspora studies across the spectrum of popular music performance, and to award to those Liverpool musicians who were not contributors to the city’s musical visage post-rock ‘n’ roll, a place in popular music history. Gordon Stretton was a jazz pioneer in several senses: he emerged from a poverty-stricken, racially marginalized upbringing in Liverpool to develop a popular music career emblematic of Black diasporan experience. He was a child dancer and singer in the Lancashire Lads (the troupe which was also part of a young Charlie Chaplin’s development), a well-respected solo touring artist in the UK as ‘The Natural Artistic Coon’, a chorister and musical director with the Jamaican Choral Union and, having encountered syncopated music, a jazz percussionist, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist (not to mention a ground-breaking bandleader). All of these musical experiences took place through time on his own terms as he learnt his craft ‘on the hoof’ via many different encounters with musical genres from Liverpool to London, Paris, Brussels, Rio, and Buenos Aires. Gordon Stretton was truly a transoceanic jazz pioneer.

Inside British Jazz

Inside British Jazz
Author: Hilary Moore
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351562754

Inside British Jazz explores specific historical moments in British jazz history and places special emphasis upon issues of race, nation and class. Topics covered include the reception of jazz in Britain in the 1910s and 1920s, the British New Orleans jazz revival of the 1950s, the free jazz innovations of the Joe Harriott Quintet in the early 1960s, and the formation of the all-black jazz band, the Jazz Warriors, in 1985. Using both historical and ethnographical approaches, Hilary Moore examines the ways in which jazz, an African-American music form, has been absorbed and translated within Britain's social, political and musical landscapes. Moore considers particularly the ways in which music has created a space of expression for British musicians, allowing them to re-imagine their place within Britain's social fabric, to participate in transcontinental communities, and to negotiate a position of belonging within jazz narratives of race, nation and class. The book also champions the importance of studying jazz beyond the borders of the United States and contributes to a growing body of literature that will enrich mainstream jazz scholarship.

Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945

Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945
Author: Jon Stratton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317173880

Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945 provides the first broad scholarly discussion of this music since 1990. The book critically examines key moments in the history of black British popular music from 1940s jazz to 1970s soul and reggae, 1990s Jungle and the sounds of Dubstep and Grime that have echoed through the 2000s. While the book offers a history it also discusses the ways black musics in Britain have intersected with the politics of race and class, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, and debates about media and technology. Contributors examine the impact of the local, the ways that black music in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and London evolved differently and how black popular music in Britain has always developed in complex interaction with the dominant British popular music tradition. This tradition has its own histories located in folk music, music hall and a constant engagement, since the nineteenth century, with American popular music, itself a dynamic mixing of African-American, Latin American and other musics. The ideas that run through various chapters form connecting narratives that challenge dominant understandings of black popular music in Britain and will be essential reading for those interested in Popular Music Studies, Black British Studies and Cultural Studies.

Sounds Like London

Sounds Like London
Author: Lloyd Bradley
Publisher: Profile Books
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2013-08-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1847656501

For as long as people have been migrating to London, so has their music. An essential link to home, music also has the power to shape communities in surprising ways. Black music has been part of London's landscape since the First World War, when the Southern Syncopated Orchestra brought jazz to the capital. Following the wave of Commonwealth immigration, its sounds and styles took up residence to become the foundation of the city's youth culture. Sounds Like London tells the story of the music and the larger-than-life characters making it, journeying from Soho jazz clubs to Brixton blues parties to King's Cross warehouse raves to the streets of Notting Hill - and onto sound systems everywhere. As well as a journey through the musical history of London, Sounds Like London is about the shaping of a city, and in turn the whole nation, through music. Contributors include Eddy Grant, Osibisa, Russell Henderson, Dizzee Rascal and Trevor Nelson, with an introduction by Soul2Soul's Jazzie B.

The Godfather of British Jazz

The Godfather of British Jazz
Author: Clark Tracey
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Jazz musicians
ISBN: 9781781793534

This is the first book about the life of jazz pianist and composer Stan Tracey CBE (1926-2013). Drawn largely from his personal diaries and some of his many interviews, his son Clark Tracey pieces together what made the late Stan Tracey a unique character in jazz music. Stan's wit and wisdom also come shining through in abundance in this long overdue account of one of the UK's most important jazz musicians. In a career that spanned 70 years, Stan Tracey recalls his earliest memories in war torn London and his first experiences of hearing jazz. As a teenager, he joined ENSA and the RAF Gang Show and for the next three years played at more venues than many musicians do in a lifetime. Once demobbed, Stan befriends pianist Eddie Thomson, vibist and drummer Victor Feldman and clarinettist Vic Ash and begins his career in music. He toured with Kenny Baker's band and the Kirchin Band before joining the Ted Heath Orchestra, then began recording under his own name. He was asked by Ronnie Scott to be the house pianist at Scott's new club, where Stan's legendary status grew for the next six years. He accompanied giants of American jazz such as Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Roland Kirk, Dexter Gordon, Freddie Hubbard and many others. During this period he wrote and recorded the seminal album Under Milk Wood, which to this day remains his best selling work. Stan left Ronnie's club following a drug addiction and in the 1970s found himself penniless. His wife Jackie employed her skill in the music business as an A&R from previous years and began presenting concerts to keep Stan afloat, as he formed new musical friendships in the free/improvised idiom at that time, such as Mike Osborne and Keith Tippett. Commissions for suites emerged and Stan's writing skills found an outlet again through the formation of his various groups that were to last for nearly 30 years. Stan's achievements and awards are ample and in many cases unique. Recipient of an OBE and a CBE, Stan also received several lifetime achievement awards and in his last year became the first recipient of the Ivor Novello Jazz Award. The book includes a complete discography of all commercial recordings featuring Stan Tracey, compiled by Stephen Didymus.