Audiences, Cosmopolitanism, and Inequality in Black British Jazz

In one sense, jazz is a marginal cultural form in Britain. Poised uneasily between high and low culture, state subsidy and commerce, and youthful and aging cohorts, jazz has a relatively small listenership. Jazz is also an imported genre, and whereas in the country of its origin, the United States, black musicians have played a central, even defining role in its development, it is not clear at first glance how far jazz made by black Britons can be identified as a specifically black tradition or as simply the contribution of individual black musicians, always a minority, to the larger British scene (see Toynbee in this issue).

Still, precisely because of its ambiguous position on the cusp of a number of key sociocultural divides, black British jazz, as we will tentatively call it, raises important issues to do with cultural values, race, and class. We want to suggest that its location makes it symptomatic, if not typical, of certain contradictions in contemporary British culture and beyond. In particular, it makes an illuminating case study in the cosmopolitanism that, among others, the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Natan Snzaider (2006) argue characterizes the present conjuncture. A key point for these writers is that cosmopolitanism is unremarkable and “unfolds beneath the surface or behind the façades of persisting national spaces, jurisdiction and labelling” (8). Generated by increasing migration, global trade, and cultural exchange, it is an emergent social process that involves “really-existing relations of interdependence” between different peoples.

We would suggest that black British jazz encapsulates just this kind of practical cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, our central argument is that it is also riven in important ways by inequality. Indeed, what is so significant is that inequality, across both race and class, impacts strongly on a musical culture that seems to carry the promise of cosmopolitan encounter and mutual understanding between black and white, high art and popular culture. The present article aims to explore how this is so through a study of audiences at jazz concerts in the United Kingdom featuring black British musicians.

Perhaps we ought to begin by examining some of the historical context through which black British jazz has emerged in the present moment. When, during the mid-1980s, a new generation of British-born black musicians turned to jazz from reggae and funk (the Jazz Warriors orchestra was crucial here), they were hailed by the media and record companies. Performances and recordings soon found a new and relatively young white audience in addition to the peer group of the musicians themselves. For a while, black British jazz was strongly correlated with “subcultural capital” (Thornton 1995). In the context of the times, shortly after the New Cross fire and the inner city riots of the early 1980s in the UK,¹ this was on the face of it at least a moment of hope, emblematic of what Stuart Hall (1988) saw as a turn towards “new ethnicities.” In contrast to a fixed form of ethnic identity—“black”—formed in response to racialization in the postwar period, new ethnicities were fluid, open, and multifaceted, Hall suggested.² Above all, they were creative in that the kinds of cultural expression in which they were manifest were innovative and hybrid. Hall was discussing black cinema rather than music, but the Jazz Warriors surely fitted well with his characterization of the culture of new ethnicities. Here was a form of musical cosmopolitanism, involving the interaction of notionally American jazz with musics of the Caribbean, and played mainly by the children of migrants to Britain.

Now, more than twenty-five years later, black British musicians continue to play jazz, and indeed they appear to have consolidated their position and generated a self-sufficient tradition, a tradition with a strong sense of its own identity. Many have also become actively involved in music education as a way of passing on that tradition and giving inner-city youth access to what they understand as being an important art form. To give some idea of the range of profiles and strategies of these musicians, it might be...