British jazz’s greatest moment
In the Sixties, the late Chris Barber was crucial in creating a scene which was as cool as Beatlemania, says
The history of post-war British jazz is often painted in broad brushstrokes, and it goes something like this. In the late 1950s, the trad jazz revival of the 1930s and 1940s reached its zenith, led by bandleaders such as Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball.
But the rise of American rock ’n’ roll knocked it off its perch, and in the early 1960s, the arrival of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones dealt it the coup de grâce. Hence jazz vanished from clubs and dance halls, and clung to life only in its new highbrow “modern jazz” form, in niche venues. Its glorious history as a popular music form was over.
Like most conventional histories, this contains only a grain of truth. For one thing, trad jazz continued to thrive well into the height of Beatlemania. Indeed, in 1963, the very year that the Fab Four took hold, a concert was staged in Alexandra Palace, described by the NME at the time as the biggest trad jazz event in Britain.
The line-up featured, among others, the trombonist Chris Barber, who died this week at the age of 90. An early enthusiast of the American blues scene, he had introduced the likes of Muddy Waters to the UK, and had arranged a national tour.
Barber’s commitment to the form chimed with that of other enthusiasts such as Alexis Korner, and no doubt helped to break down the boundaries between rock and jazz, actually making the two forms porous.
Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts and Cream drummer Ginger Baker both started their careers in jazz, and both admitted their ultimate loyalty was to jazz as well. Besides, jazz and pop shared the same venues. At the 100 Club on Oxford Street, you might hear a trad band on one night and a rock ’n’ roll band the next.
Given all this, the opposition between the supposedly backwardlooking form of trad jazz and the new modern one of pop could never be absolute. Both sprang from the same taproot in jazz and blues, so the relationship was bound to be one of mutual influence.
An astute trad band leader such as Barber could cash in on that affinity, by bringing an invigorating blast of gospel and blues into his music-making.
He also introduced British audiences to Louis Jordan and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and his in-house singer Ottilie Patterson could sound astonishingly close to Bessie Smith.
But Britishness was also crucial to the success maintained in the trad form in the early to mid-sixties. One of the big crossover hits of the time was Acker Bilk’s Stranger on the Shore. George Melly viewed Bilk’s carefully cultivated West Country accent and antique outfits as a riposte to US domination: the “mixture of Edwardian working-class dandy and rural bucolic came to stand for a pre-atomic innocence when we were on top”.
Of course, times did change, and eventually British jazz lost its profile, as the young became more influenced by the hard edge of British pop, and the psychedelia hastened by the new permissiveness.
Yet, for a time, trad jazz actually took on a countercultural energy. Wherever there was a World Youth rally advocating friendship with the Soviet Union, or a May Day rally, or a CND march, you would find a trad jazz band to keep people’s spirits up.
At the Beaulieu Jazz Festival, trad jazz fans even got involved in a riot against their deadly foes, the modern jazz enthusiasts. It was a fleeting moment, perhaps, but one that was crucial to the evolution of British music. It deserves to be remembered.
The 1963 Ally Pally concert was the biggest ever trad jazz event in Britain