BRIT JAZZ: EXPLOSION
Psst – want to buy some classic UK jazz wax, but don’t fancy re-mortgaging the house? Help is at hand. Plus, saxmen Alan Skidmore and John Surman recall those halcyon days.
“Recordings by Michael Garrick, Mike Westbrook and John Surman are what really inspired me.” SHABAKA HUTCHINGS
“MY DAD was a jazz musician before me,” remembers 79-year-old British saxophone colossus Alan Skidmore, from his home in Borehamwood, “and he blamed The Beatles for the end of jazz, but of course that wasn’t true.”
Skidmore fils could back up his more optimistic stance with receipts for payments from the Fab Four for session work at Abbey Road, and adds, “I can’t remember which song it was, but John Lennon didn’t like the feeling in the studio so he got the crew to fill it with flowers.” He was lucky enough to be one of a golden generation of British jazz players – operating between the trad and modern jazz booms of the late ’50s and early ’60s, and the wilderness years of the mid-’70s onwards (when you had to go to Europe if you wanted to make a living) – who fused Swinging London’s musical hubbub into a legacy as rich and rewarding as any The Beatles left behind.
It’s this dizzyingly fluid period of creative cross-fertilisation that’s captured with ecstatic clarity on new compilation Journeys In Modern Jazz: Britain (1965-72). Opening the British Jazz Explosion reissue series, it heralds an exciting sequence of deluxe remastered editions of often prohibitively rare LPs from the Decca, Lansdowne, Deram, Argo, and Fontana catalogues (good luck getting originals of the two Mike Taylor albums for less than a grand each).
Compiler Tony Higgins’ inspired selection started life more than 10 years ago but then the tide of record company interest receded a little – as has happened all too regularly over the decades – giving him the time needed to expand it into its current lustrous double-CD/double-LP form.
It reveals the brief but magical period when visionary facilitators such as Denis Preston and Peter Eden created a climate where the cadre of eclectic virtuosi operating on the London jazz scene of the time could make albums which captured the full extent of their talents. “I learnt as much from Alan Skidmore as I did from Sonny Rollins,” says Skidmore’s fellow Mike Westbrook Concert Band and Mike Gibbs veteran John Surman from home in Norway, “because I was standing next to him on the stage and I could feel what he’s doing.”
For his part, Skidmore remembers other unique moments of the era, like waiting in the cold outside Pye Studios in Marble Arch with Jimmy Page and Brian Auger at 10 in the morning in 1968, while Sonny Boy Williamson downed the bottle of whiskey he needed to get himself going. He also recalls working with the BBC radio orchestra in the day, playing the Talk Of The Town in the evening and jamming at Ronnie Scott’s Old Place in Gerrard St after-hours. “It all added up to the end product,” Skidmore remembers, “which was to be a soloist.”
With a new wave of British jazz talent ready to big up the contributions of illustrious but often under-appreciated forebears, the timing of this release is auspicious. “Recordings by people like Michael Garrick, Mike Westbrook and John Surman are what really inspired me”, Sons Of Kemet powerhouse Shabaka Hutchings has insisted. Hearing this beautiful music being given the prominence it deserves at last, it’s like the Noah’s Ark of British jazz came back from the flood.
Ben Thompson Decca’s British Jazz Explosion series starts with The Don Rendell Quintet’s Space Walk, Ken Wheeler And The John Dankworth Orchestra’s Windmill Tilter, and Le Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe by The New Jazz Orchestra