‘Rawness, freedom, experimentation’: the Brit jazz boom of the 60s and 70s
It was in the dusty depths of Birmingham record library in 2000 that Shabaka Hutchings first discovered the wonders of 70s British jazz. “I was 16 and I’d just moved back to England from Barbados,” explains the Sons of Kemet saxophonist. “The first record I played was John Surman and Stu Martin Live at Woodstock Town Hall, which starts off with this really gnarly synthesiser and sax. I remember thinking: this is pretty crazy. I know this sounds like a cliche but without it being punk music they were playing with this almost punk attitude.”
The scene Hutchings is talking about was a brief golden window, from 1965 to 1975, when London record labels and recording studios opened their doors to British jazz stars creating a unique sound that combined the US influences of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Gil Evans with the London blues, folk and rock scenes plus West Indian and African rhythms. It’s a progressive and thrilling sound – “rawness, freedom, experimentation,” Hutchings says – that is now being documented in depth under the umbrella title British Jazz Explosion, with a scene-spanning compilation alongside a series of remastered original LPs.
For the man behind the project, DJ, music historian and film-maker Tony Higgins, it is the culmination of 20 years of work that began with a short-lived series of British jazz compilations and reissues entitled Impressed, compiled with DJ and broadcaster Gilles Peterson.
“Gilles and I were both into the same records by people like Michael Garrick, Don Rendell, Neil Ardley,” explains Higgins, “Records that captured British jazz at its most innovative, dynamic and experimental.” The compilation led to BBC documentary, Jazz Britannia, and a 2005 concert at the Barbican featuring such venerable British jazz names as Stan Tracey, Garrick, Surman and Mike Westbrook. Then nothing.
“Universal should have seized that moment but they didn’t,” says Higgins. “The moment flagged, management at
Universal changed, and the idea just withered on the vine.” Higgins would occasionally fire off an email to Universal to see if the idea was worth reviving. But in the end, he says, “I had to let it go for my mental health”.
Then, in 2019, Universal got back in touch. There was a booming British jazz scene again, fronted by the likes of Hutchings, Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd, and these old records were being name-checked. “Recordings by people like Garrick, Westbrook and Surman are what really inspired me,” Hutchings says. “The first time I heard John Surman’s red LP from 1969: that record is calypso, modal, Afro-Cuban. These people were making beautiful, far-out music.”
“That wasn’t strange to me,” explains the 76-year-old saxophonist , who had grown up in Plymouth and moved to London in 1962. “I was still basically a schoolboy. I was learning from musicians like Mike Osborne and Alan Skidmore, Caribbean players like Joe Harriott and Harry Beckett, but also the South African musicians who came over here like Dudu Pukwana and Louis Moholo.”
“That is the beautiful thing about this music being out here again,” says Hutchings. “All these musicians were united in a common language at a time when when it seemed like there was actually no hope of finding unification; trying to bring society together as opposed to pull apart.”
Surman agrees: “In 1966, 1968 – this was a time of liberation. We were all involved in anti-apartheid marches, CND marches, embracing different cultures. It all fed into the music and brought a freedom to it. Just living in Ladbroke Grove surrounded by West Indians and their music, it all went into the mix along with the English folk songs I’d learned at the school piano. Put that on top of the blues that I’d learned from playing with Alexis Korner and you have something very interesting.”
Korner, who died from lung cancer in 1984, aged 55, is now a relatively forgotten figure but his group Blues Incorporated, the first amplified R&B band in Britain, was a training ground for everyone from Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts to folk musicians such as Davey
Graham and Danny Thompson, as well as the burgeoning British jazzers.
“That was our university,” says tenor saxophonist Skidmore, 79. “Learning to play and understand the blues was probably the most important thing you could do to become a jazz musician.”
Skidmore, who married in 1965, was a working jazzer with a family to support, paying the mortgage with daytime gigs for the BBC Radio Big Band and an evening shift playing dance music at the nightclub Talk of the Town. Asked how he managed to fit jazz into all that, he mentions the importance of the Old Place, “where I got to realise my dream
of being a jazz musician”.
Previously the original Ronnie Scott’s jazz club on Soho’s Gerrard Street, the Old Place became a place to meet, jam, perform, rehearse and share ideas. “That was the birth of this new wave,” says Tony Higgins. “American jazzers like Sonny Rollins would jam there along with South African émigrés like Chris McGregor and the Blue Notes. There’d be this collaborative creative energy feeding into the music.”
By the mid-60s, many of the London clubs were becoming rock and R&B venues, edging out the jazz scene. But where one outlet died, another grew. In the wake of albums such as the Beatles’ Revolver, Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed, record labels began looking for more progressive sounds. Nurturing producers like Denis Preston at Lansdowne
Studios and Peter Eden at Decca were there to facilitate, satisfying the demand for forward-thinking modern jazz by the likes of the Don Rendell & Ian Carr Quintet, the Mike Taylor Trio and, a few years later, Skidmore’s own Quintet.
“But before that, we had to go to Europe and make jazz more respectable,” says Skidmore with a dry laugh.
In 1968 the BBC had sent the Mike Westbrook Sextet to represent the UK at the Montreux Jazz festival. It had been a huge success. A year later they asked Skidmore to represent them at Montreux. “And we won loads of prizes as well!” he says. “When we returned home this journalist called Steve Race wrote an article asking: ‘Why do British jazz musicians have to go abroad to be recognised?’ From that period on people suddenly wanted to record British jazz. That’s when I became a professional jazz musician.”
The Alan Skidmore Quintet’s spiralling, lyrical, abstract 1970 LP, Once Upon a Time…, came out on Deram a Decca offshoot label that quickly became a home for other British jazz musicians and bandleaders such as Mike Westbrook and Mike Gibbs. Suddenly it was hip for major labels to have a boutique subsidiary releasing progressive jazz. RCA launched Neon, EMI had Harvest and Philips had Vertigo, the home of jazz trumpeter Ian Carr’s prog-jazz-fusion collective Nucleus. But despite Steve Race’s words, and the late-60s efforts of jazz organisations to get the genre recognised as a government-subsidised art, British jazz musicians were still struggling to make a living on the live circuit.
“That tight-knit time of cross-pollination of jazz and rock was a very narrow period,” says John Surman. “Just as quickly jazz lost its popularity. The clubs were no longer run by aficionados or musicians – they were run by people looking to make a profit from the latest thing. In 1969, me, Mike Osborne, Harry Miller and Alan Jackson had a gig in Coventry and got paid four pounds and ten shillings. A pound each and ten shillings for the petrol. I think that tells your story.”
Beaten down by lack of recognition in their own country, musicians such as Surman and Skidmore established themselves in Europe, where subsidised jazz gigs were regularly broadcast on national radio. Surman made a name for himself as a composer of note for Manfred Eicher’s ECM label, Skidmore toured the world playing with numerous outfits and British jazz went back underground.
“But there was always someone carrying the torch,” says Surman. “The music has always been alive and well in its underground stream, it’s just that sometimes, like 1970 and like now, the general public and the press decide to take notice.”
“That’s the thing,” says Hutchings. “It’s not up to the artist to decide whether their music has longevity or relevance. The music will finds its place. Without those records from 50 years ago by people like Harry Beckett, Kenny Wheeler and John Surman you wouldn’t have the music that’s here today. You won’t hear the influence directly but it’s there. It created where we are now.”
Journeys In Modern Jazz: Britain is available now on double CD and double vinyl. The British Jazz Explosion vinyl reissue series starts with The Don Rendell Quintet’s Spacewalk (out now), Ken Wheeler & The John Dankworth Orchestra’s Windmill Tilter (out now) and Le Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe by The New Jazz Orchestra (released 10 September), all on Decca.
Short was born in Ontario, Canada, and started out as a comedian alongside his still-close friend Eugene Levy. He hasn’t had a film career like Martin’s, but one of my favourite films as a kid was the slapstick-tastic Innerspace, in which Short, for reasons we don’t need to investigate too closely here, has a mini Dennis Quaid swimming in his body. Short’s bodily and facial contortions in the film are a thing of wonder. “I have no idea how I did that – I was young and stupid,” he says.
His parents and the eldest of his three brothers (he also has a sister) died before he was 20. “There’s an assumption that out of the sadness in my childhood came my need to perform. But it’s just a coincidence. But you do tap into things in your life to duplicate emotions in your work,” he says. Perhaps for that reason, he and Martin have always had a knack for vulnerability and comedy. In John Hughes’s 1987 comedy Trains, Planes and Automobiles, Martin cruelly tears down John Candy, playing a travelling salesman, only to then be pole-axed when Candy replies defiantly: “I like me.” Did Martin know when he was making that scene that Candy’s character was based on Hughes’s father?
“I didn’t know about that. At all. I was looking through the script the other day, because I was finding things that were cut from the movie that were so poignant. Right at the end, there’s a scene between me and John [Candy] and he explains his life … that scene was a page and a half long in the script and in the movie I think it’s cut to three lines. But there was such beauty in it and I never understood why John [Hughes] trimmed that scene,” he says.
Speaking of fathers, in Only Murders in the Building, Martin’s character discusses his strained relationship with his father. His dialogue sounds an awful lot like the opening chapter of his memoir, Born Standing Up, in which Martin describes his difficulties with his father. Was that autobiographical?
“Honestly, no. As a performer, I might have tapped into … but no, to answer the question in an uninteresting way, no,” he says.
Martin found a wonderful father figure in Hollywood when Reiner directed four of his early films – The Jerk, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, The Man with Two Brains and All of Me. When I interviewed his son Rob Reiner, the actor and director, in 2018, he said that Martin and his father developed such a close working relationship that he became jealous.
Martin laughs it off. “Well, I definitely saw Carl as a father figure, but he did not see me as a son figure, because he already had two sons. But I’d watch him in social environments, listen to his attitudes and his speech, and I still hear myself and think: ‘That’s something Carl would say,’” he says.
Reiner died last year at 98. I ask what Reiner’s memorial was like, given that he was so beloved. “It was on Zoom,” Martin and Short say glumly as one. For once, there is no punchline to follow, because not even they can find the funny in a Zoom funeral.
Short has three grownup children, while Martin became a father at 67 when he and Stringfield had a daughter in 2012. Which of his films prepared him best for fatherhood: Parenthood, Father of the Bride or Cheaper by the Dozen?
“You know what? In a way, all of them did. I was not a kid person and when I did Parenthood I would see these kids, who were like little freakish things, and I’d realise: ‘They’re not so bad; I actually like them.’ So it did pave the way to an understanding that I would like children. Now, I see a kid and I’m staring at it like: ‘Oooh! Ahhh!’ Especially a little toddler. The innocence, just walking around …” he trails off fondly.
So does he make balloon shapes of lower intestines at kids parties, as he does in Parenthood? “Ha! Well, we haven’t had birthday parties in a while,” he says, adept at keeping personal questions at arm’s length.
One of the joys of Martin and Short, now more than ever, is that they are purely funny. This might sound obvious, but comedy so often comes with an edge or a political message, designed to provoke what the comedy writer Jeff Maurer calls “clapter” rather than laughter. With their love of gags, songs and punchlines, Short and Martin feel like unicorns from another age, in the best way – very brilliant, very silly unicorns. Do they ever feel pressure to include politics in their comedy?
“I think people need a respite from it, especially in the United States. I’m sure it’s the same in the UK, where it’s so divisive,” says Short.
Martin nods: “I just don’t want to hear those boos when you say a political name, and then the audience is at war with each other – I don’t think that’s what we’re there for. We just have a love of getting laughs.”
Only Murders in the Building premieres on 31 August on Hulu in the US and Disney+ internationally
There’s an assumption that out of the sadness in my childhood came my need to perform. But it’s just a coincidence
Martin Short