The Tomorrow’s Warriors Jam Sessions: Repertoires of Transmission and Hospitality

While jam sessions in London do not enjoy a centrality in jazz lore comparable to the New York scene, there has been a tradition of jamming (albeit a discontinuous one) since the beginnings of the music in the United Kingdom. In the years since the development of modern jazz in the UK, jam sessions have gradually become a steady if rather uneven fixture on the London scene.

In this study, I document a number of jam sessions organized by the Tomorrow’s Warriors (TW) educational program, a program developed by the black arts organization, Dune Music. Through this article I open a particular window on the theme of this issue, black British jazz, examining how these jam sessions offered ways into jazz for the black participants and articulated a particular vision of affiliation to jazz more generally. Data for the article were taken from audiovisual recordings of jam sessions in 2009 and numerous interviews with jam session participants as well as black British musicians who were interviewed as part of the overall project, “What is Black British Jazz?,” of which this piece of research forms a part.

Before looking at the TW sessions, it is worth considering the nature and function of the jam session more generally. Gunter Schuller describes the jam session as “an informal gathering of jazz or rock musicians playing for their own pleasure. . . . The idea of a jam session, or simply jamming, has come to mean any meeting of musicians in private or public, where the emphasis is on unrehearsed material or improvisation” (2011). He goes on to describe how the nature of this type of performance has changed since the 1930s from being a private pleasure for musicians away from the rigors of public performance to a more formally managed mode of public performance. According to this description, the public face of the jam gradually undermined another function of the original sessions, which was as a training ground for aspiring musicians. Schuller’s (2011) brief entry in Grove Music Online, however, points to a rather less recondite and complex performance mode than seems to me to be the case. At once improvised and regulated, at a boundary point between public entertainment and personal development, caught between the formal and informal, the jam offers important insights into the nature of musical sociability and communication, although it has been a focus of attention for only a small number of scholars (Cameron 1954, Kisliuk 1988, Dempsey 2008, Doffman 2012).

The article approaches the TW sessions through two lenses, then: first through understanding them as a form of cultural transmission, and second, through a claim for the sessions to be seen as a site of a hospitality. For black British jazz musicians, hospitality and cultural transmission (and its stewardship) are not necessarily to be taken for granted (Toynbee and Banks, forthcoming).

Cultural transmission in jazz has long been a blend of informal absorption of practice through listening, attending gigs, and jamming, alongside more formal routes such as adult education courses and university degrees (the latter being a relatively recent phenomenon in the UK). Although there has been a sustained shift in the UK over the last forty years from informal learning within relatively close-knit groups of players (that could be characterized as an apprenticeship model of learning) to formal courses of study on a much larger scale, the promise of greater inclusion for black musicians has remained at best spasmodic, and at worst almost nonexistent. For many it has felt as though this lack is simply part of a wider, historical effacement of the black presence in the UK. To give a quantitative measure of this presence in music education, The Higher Education Statistics Agency records 40 black students at six leading English conservatoires for the academic year 2009–10 out of a total of 3,230 UK-domiciled students (Higher Education Statistics Agency 2011, Table 3).¹ For black musicians, therefore, induction into the educational mainstream of the music community in the UK has been, to say the least, rather uncertain.

Hospitality, the second lens of this...