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Contemporary Jazz UK:
Twenty-one Lives in Jazz

By Chris Horne

Perspectives in Jazz Publications, 220pp., Ł14.99

Contemporary Jazz UK: Twenty-one Lives in Jazz by Chris Horne (Perspectives in Jazz Publications, 220pp., Ł14.99) is a collection of interviews with current UK practitioners, from Iain Ballamy to Clark Tracey, and thus provides an overview of the present British (mainly mainstream) jazz scene.

Each interviewee is asked basically the same questions ('How did you become interested in jazz?', 'How did you establish yourself as a musician?', 'What do you think of the current UK scene?' etc.), so certain themes inevitably emerge: the importance of parental and teachers' support, the intervention of chance at crucial career stages, the vital role played by older mentors and heroes in forming players' styles and approaches, the difficulty of teaching jazz, the irony in the fact that, at a time when UK players have never been more numerous or skilful, there is still a shortage of places to play and audiences to listen, etc.

As is perhaps inevitable in a book of this sort, there is a certain amount of polite pussyfooting round controversial areas (Notes and Tones it isn't), but (to cite just three examples) Nigel Hitchcock does manage to state some uncomfortable truths about the problems of earning a living as a jazz musician in his characteristically forthright interview, Julian Joseph laments the commercialisation of the work of some of his more famous contemporaries, and Ingrid Laubrock has some pithy remarks to make about the jazz press, lamenting its concentration on the commercial aspects of the music at the expense of the truly creative (in my experience, mainstream papers' arts editors are entirely ignorant of, and uninterested by, jazz, regarding it merely as popular music that doesn't even have the nous to be popular, and instructing their jazz writers to concentrate on visiting Americans, under the mistaken impression that there is little of note in the contemporary UK scene.

While at The Times, for instance, I was instructed by letter by the then arts editor not to review so many gigs from the Vortex, since the club was too small to be of interest to a national audience, which at that time was, if the Times's coverage was a reliable guide, interested merely in hearing all about the latest activities of the Spice Girls, ogling pictures of All Saints, half-naked in a cage, and other such high artistic matters).

Sorry, where was I? Yes, so Horne's book is a valuable one for anyone wanting a snapshot of new-millennium UK jazz, and works both as a 'dip-in' and as a 'read-right-through' book; unfortunately, however (and I am by now as weary of climbing up on to my hobby horse as readers must be of hearing what I have to say from it), it contains a great number of name-spelling howlers ('Bennie Goodman', 'Thelonius Monk', 'Rogers and Hart', 'Stan Sulzman', 'Billy Holiday', 'Glen Miller', 'Pharaoh Saunders' etc. etc.), more than its fair share of straightforward misspellings ('practice' as a verb, 'rarified', the confusion of 'it's' and 'its' and many more) and numerous inconsistencies in the way song titles, album titles etc. are cited. In short, like the Ashgate book, it's not been professionally edited or proofread, which (for this pedant at least) does take some of the gloss off what is otherwise an impressive and enlightening work.