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Circular Breathing The Cultural Politics Of Jazz In Britain  George
McKayDuke University Press, 2005 Paperback. 376pp. b&w illustrations £14.99  In
Circular Breathing, George McKay, a
leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the sometimes surprising
ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation
in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb's Dixielanders
in 1943 through the burgeoning British bebop scene of the early 1950s, the
Beaulieu Jazz Festivals of 1956-61, and the improvisational music making
of the 1960s and 1970s, McKay reveals the connections of the music, its
players, and its subcultures to black and antiracist activism, the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, and the New Left. In the process, he
provides the first detailed cultural history of jazz in Britain.
McKay explores the music in relation to issues of whiteness, blackness, and masculinity - all against a backdrop of shifting imperial identities, post colonialism, and the cold war. He considers objections to the music's spread by the "anti-jazzers" alongside the ambivalence felt by many leftist musicians about playing an "all-American" musical form. At the same time, McKay highlights the extraordinary cultural mixing that has defined British jazz since the 1950s, as musicians from Britain's former colonies - particularly from the Caribbean and South Africa - have transformed the genre. Circular Breathing is enriched by McKay's original interviews with activists, musicians, and fans and by fascinating images, including works by the renowned English jazz photographer Val Wilmer. It is an invaluable look at not only the history of jazz but also the Left and race relations in Great Britain. George McKay is a professor of cultural studies at the University of Salford in England. He is the author of Glastonbury: A Very English Fair and Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties; the editor of DIY Culture: Party and Protest In Nineties Britain, and a co-editor of Community Music: A Handbook and Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Political Protest. "Circular Beathing is quite simply
the best book so far on jazz in Britain. Geroge McKay acts as a cultural
archaeologist, digging up traces of a ninety-year musical presence and
writing them back into history. He comments acutely on a music which can
be peripheral and exclusive but which he rightly sees as vital to the
story of Britain's social and political evolution." - ANDREW BLAKE, author
of The Land Without Music: Music, Culture, and Society in Twentieth-Century
Britain |
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read Simon Spillett's essays on major British jazz saxophonist stylists after 1950, British brass and British jazz pianists and his essay Yellow Birds: West Indian Jazz Musicians in London and on Tubby Hayes read an interview with Michael Garrick read an essay on Joe Harriott
subscribe to Avant
magazine:-
 AVANT
is a magazine devoted exclusively to contemporary music. Avant
is available on subscription or from newsagents.Avant is chiefly about jazz, free improvised music, electronic, experimental and contemporary classical music, but essentially about anything that is genuinely new and challenging. 68 pages make it incredible value [and each issue includes a free FMR-records CD with every issue linked to the articles, reviews and interviews in the magazine]. Avant Magazine
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© Jazzscript 2002 Wendover Bookshop, 35 High Street, Wendover, Bucks, United Kingdom HP22 6DU tel / fax: +44 (0)1296 696204 | email |
