British jazz acts mark Black Lives Matter, Grenfell and Windrush
In the 1980s, the British roots reggae of groups such as Steel Pulse and Aswad provided a cultural backbeat to protests and civil unrest. In 2020, British jazz is covering similar ground as the Black Lives Matter movement continues, Grenfell is remembered and
Windrush day celebrated.
The Vortex jazz club in Dalston, east London, is hosting a virtual concert on Monday evening with work on the theme of Windrush. It is the latest connection between the genre – which has grown substantially in recent years, led, in the most part, by black British musicians – and the issues of race, Windrush and the themes driving the Black Lives Matter movement.
While the Sus laws, nationwide uprisings and an anti-immigration Conservative government provided the ammunition for the reggae groups, for artists like Moses Boyd it is Grenfell, hostile environments and the fallout from the Windrush scandal that inspired his album Dark Matter, which was released in February. “I was creatively responding to what was going on,” says Boyd. “But it is only when I kind of looked back and had to explain it that I realised it was a statement.”
The album’s artwork – a burning black union jack – gives a strong hint about the record’s content, as Boyd tackles themes of identity and belonging in a modern Britain where issues like race and immigration are increasingly divisive. “I’m affected by what’s going on,” says Boyd. “My art is now being affected.”
Mobo winner Zara McFarlane’s last record, Arise, was “a response to the systemic causes of Black Lives Matter and Windrush”, and her upcoming album, Songs of an Unknown Tongue, contains songs that focus on colonialism and black heritage.
McFarlane grew up in Dagenham, close to the BNP headquarters and a
pub that hosted their meetings, and says she was spat at and had racist abuse shouted at her on the street. “[Dagenham wasn’t very mixed at all. I was born here, but you don’t always feel like you belong here because you might get told often that you don’t,” she said.
“My mom was born in Jamaica, she came here when she was about eight years old. If we go back to Jamaica, we’re often taught that we don’t belong there either because we’re seen as English,” she said. “There’s that feeling you don’t belong anywhere, almost. And that’s partly due to colonialism and how people have been displaced.”
Saxophonist and bandleader Shabaka Hutchings has regularly weaved the issues of race, identity and Britishness throughout his records with the groups Shabaka and the Ancestors, Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is
Coming. Last year he projected Boris Johnson’s quote of “Cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” when he was playing at Somerset House and in an upcoming column for Big Issue calls for “full integration of black perspective in the current telling of British history”.
Hutchings, who lives in London but is from Birmingham via Barbados, where he lived till he was 16, says the George Floyd video left him feeling numb. “The first reaction I had when I watched the video was numbness. Because when I saw that video, I saw a situation that could have happened to me, being a big black guy.” Hutchings says he feels a responsibility to create music that can inspire or energise those protesting in the Black Lives Matter movement.
“In the second world war, they would take musicians and have them at an army barracks not to fight, but just to kind of play to increase the morale,” he says. “I think that’s what we need to not forget, as musicians in this time, that what we’re doing is a service for the struggle.”
In September 2019, Cassie Kinoshi, the leader of SEED Ensemble, said her band’s Mercury-nominated record Driftglass was both a “celebration of what it means to be a young black British person” and a critique of Britain inspired by the political jazz of the US artists Jackie McLean and Charles Mingus. Boyd thinks jazz as a genre lends itself to politically charged times.
“It comes from the black American, the black Caribbean, the black West African, the black diasporic experience – so you’re always going to be connected to the ground and what’s happening on the street,” says Boyd.
“It’s a very grassroots music,” he adds. “It’s connected to real people. It’s still a folk music where you have to have a degree of interaction with your community for you to really get it. I think, because of that, it’s very easy to be attuned to what’s going on.”
• The Windrush Suite is streamed by the Vortex jazz club, 22 June at 8pm