The Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, London N16 8JH | Bookings 020 7254 4097 | Enquiries 020 7993 3643 | Email Info at Vortex

More book reviews

Read more of Chris Parker's book reviews.

CD reviews

The latest CD reviews by Chris Parker

Join the Vortex
email list

To receive monthly gig details, news and ticket offers.



RSS feeds

For news, gig and CD reviews and information about the club.

Click on the link below to get the subscribe address
Vortex news

For more informaton about RSS see the
RSS help pages

 

A History of Jazz in Britain
1919-50

By Jim Godbolt

(Northway Publications)

a-history-of-jazz-coverI must confess to a certain interest in Jim Godbolt’s A History of Jazz in Britain 1919–50: I commissioned the original hardback, published by Quartet in 1984.

Northway Publications, run by Ann and Roger Cotterrell, have recently published a revised edition (300pp., £16.99), in conjunction with a four-CD set of the relevant music (Properbox 88).

The book traces the history of jazz in Britain (not British jazz) from the arrival on these shores of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919, through the dance-band era and the Musicians’ Union ban, to the advent of bebop in the late 1940s.

Specialist magazines (their reviews of early jazz often unintentionally hilarious, frequently intentionally offensive) are extensively quoted; the visits of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong are comprehensively described; the slow acceptance of jazz courtesy of such institutions as Rhythm Clubs, specialist magazines, Archer Street and the BBC is detailed at great length; the now almost incomprehensible internecine warfare between traditionalists and beboppers ditto.

The result is a fascinating study, shot through with ironic humour, of how an apparently ‘alien’ artform established itself and eventually flourished in an environment that had originally seemed entirely inhospitable to it.