Shiftless Shuffle in Luton: An Interview with Perry Louis (original) (raw)

This is not really (only) a book about music, about the history of the sounds of jazz in Britain, but a study of the circulation and political inscriptions in and usages of that music’s form and history. My aim is to undertake two projects, with the argument that they are related to rather than distinct from each other. First, I want to consider African-American jazz music as an export culture, as a case study in the operation of the process or problem of ‘Americanisation’. This involves exploring questions of cultural and economic power and desire, of empires even, and the limits and problems of these. I remain surprised that jazz as a cultural form has been insufficiently considered as a prime export culture and seek to balance that. Discourses of Americanisation are always as much concerned with the import society as with the export culture itself, and I do also want to look at the effort at finding an indigenous (in this case, British) voice in an American form. Questions of imitation apply here, of course, but more importantly for the specific attitudinal culture of jazz—predicated on the authentic, the original—are questions of inauthenticity and unoriginality. As far back as 1934, the British critic Constance Lambert recognised in his book Music Ho! one duality in jazz, that it ‘is internationally comprehensible, and yet provides a medium for national inflection’ (1934, 158). I want to explore the British experiences of jazz. Note that the focus on British should not imply a chauvinistic impulse on my part, nor is it intended to reduce the inter- or outernationalism of the music. The book aims to be one of those awkwardly—I prefer energisingly—situated at a nodal cultural location, while acknowledging the fact that ‘different nationalist paradigms for thinking about cultural history fail when confronted by … intercultural and transnational formation[s]’ (Gilroy 1993, ix). It is designed to focus the book in terms of a specific geographical and cultural cluster of dialogues, network of circulations, chart of activisms. Also, and to further problematise the US and UK chauvinistic gazes, I introduce the extraordinary global cultural mixing that has featured in British jazz practice, in part because of Britain’s own (post-)imperial connections—Caribbean, English, Australian, Indian, Scottish, South African…. Second, I want to interrogate the political inscriptions or assumptions of jazz, both formally, in the notions of freedom and expression claimed for the music as an improvisatory mode, and in the particular. Here I am referring to the detailed work that follows on the cultural politics of jazz in Britain, the ways in which the cultures of jazz have been used or understood by musicians, critics, enthusiasts, as well as by its enemies, in British social and political realms. I remain surprised at the lack of attention that has been paid to the ideological development and engagement of jazz in Britain—compared with what may well be the more temporary (or temporarily innovative) subcultural practices of, say, plucking examples from my own previous writings, punk rock, festival culture, dance music in its ‘rave’ moment. Did British jazz really have no politics? Then why on earth (from circum-atlantic origins it became a global culture) choose a music forged in diaspora, struggle and celebration? And for the British left, why the attraction of particularly American—read global capitalist and military oppressor for many—music? Also, I argue that the two projects are related: this may not always seems the case, and I would quite like the reader to be able temporarily to lose sound or sight of some of the apparently wider and more important global issues of American power, the shift of imperial authority, in the minutiae and conflicts of largely leftist and liberatory politics, campaigns, experiments, hyperbole. For micropolitics matter, are rarely as small as appearance suggests. The period of music under consideration is largely post-World War Two. Contains around 40 black and white images, inculding photographs by the acclaimed British jazz historian and photographer Val Wilmer.