Editors’ Introduction

This number of Black Music Research Journal is devoted to black British jazz. As we hope the articles show, this is an important topic not only in its own right, but also because it sheds light on two general problems: the connection between race and music and the transmission of jazz. When examined from Britain, these problems take shape in a significantly different way to how they appear from the vantage of the United States, prima facie the fount of jazz.

The differences derive from contrasting histories and culture. Perhaps most importantly, the black population of Britain is much smaller, both absolutely and as a percentage: 2.81 percent (1.5 million) in Britain compared with 13.1 percent (41 million) in the U.S. Related to this, migration to Britain from the colonial territories of the West Indies and Africa became significant only in the twentieth century, chiefly in the years from 1947 to 1968. Black culture in the United Kingdom is therefore more marginal and much newer than in the U.S. It is still also a recently migrant culture, one that retains strong links to the regions from which black people’s parents and grandparents have come, especially the Caribbean.¹

This provokes the question (asked in other places around the world as well, of course) of whether we can talk about black culture, in this case jazz, as such. The articles presented here emerged from a research project that ran from 2009 to 2011 called What Is Black British Jazz? Routes, Ownership, and Performance. It was based at the Open University in the United Kingdom and funded by the Beyond Text program of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. When the project began, the team was uncertain about the problem of racial identity as transmitted through music. Was there a reflexive tradition handed down by musicians who did indeed understand their music making as “black British jazz”? Or were we looking simply at the individual contributions to jazz in Britain over the years that happened to have been made by black performers?

The article by Jason Toynbee on race and history deals with these questions. In it he argues that across five key conjunctures, there has, in fact, emerged a reflexive tradition. However, the process of emergence has neither been linear nor has it developed according to a coherent cultural logic. Rather, it has depended upon successive episodes of migration and, related to this, a changing social structure of racial inequality in Britain. In making this case, Toynbee appeals for the renewal of an approach to race and music that understands black music as not simply a cultural formation, but rather as something produced conjointly across social relations.

In a study of audiences at concerts by black British jazz musicians, drawing on semi-focused interviews and survey data, Jason Toynbee and Linda Wilks also reflect on social structure. They suggest that while some audience members hear the cosmopolitan sound of contemporary Britain in the music, nevertheless that projection is undermined by actually existing racial and class divisions. These tend to exclude black working-class people from the audience. In an important sense, then, the power of black British jazz to conjure a hybrid, Black Atlantic culture finds its nemesis in deep social inequalities.

While these first two articles make a strong case regarding the implications of social structures for music culture, the remaining three pursue a culture-centered approach, focusing on the transmission of musical practices. Particularly salient to these explorations is the cultural distance between the United Kingdom and the United States. As the site of the formation of jazz, the U.S. has assumed an inadvertent, if increasingly contested, global hegemony. Meanwhile, the role of African Americans within that national formation has from earliest years taken on a certain canonical authority. The articles by Mark Doffman and by Nate Bakkum explore, from rather different angles, the way in which black British jazz musicians in the contemporary period work through their relationship with this distant-yet-authoritative jazz tradition.

Bakkum focuses on the young, mixed-race band Empirical. Drawing on his interviews with members and...