Jazz is not just ‘a certain type of music’ but ‘a remarkable aspect of the society in which we live’,3 not to mention a part of the entertainment industry. Besides, relatively few readers of the New Statesman were likely to go to jazz gigs or buy Thelonious Monk, although I discovered, to my intense pleasure, that the second half of the fifties was a new golden age for the music, whose American stars were now coming to Britain, after being kept out of our island for twenty years by a union dispute. I therefore wrote not only as a reviewer of concerts, records and books but as a historian and reporter. What is more, pretty soon I found myself in contact (probably through my cousin Denis) with the small but culturally hip publishing house of McGibbon and Kee, then financed by a moody millionaire supporter of the Labour Party, Howard Samuel, which had already published books by what was probably the only Old Etonian jazz band leader, Humphrey Lyttelton, and by the difficult, lonely and haunted social explorer of 1950s London, Colin MacInnes, connoisseur of, and guide to, the new black London and the beginnings of the music-saturated teenage culture. They wanted me to write a book about jazz. It appeared as The Jazz Scene in 1959, the same year as my first history book, and was well received though it did not make much money.4 It encouraged me to explore the scene more systematically. This was not hard, for at least some of the jazz aficionados of the early 1930s had gone into the music business as agents or promoters, not least cousin Denis, who was establishing himself as probably the leading British record producer in the field of indigenous jazz and ethnic music. Indeed, his fortunes rose with those of the artists he recorded, such as Lonnie Donegan, whose ‘Rock Island Line’ (a jailhouse song originally recorded by the great Leadbelly) exploded into the big time in the spring of 1956. Fortunately also I was at the time unmarried and, teaching in an evening college which did not lecture until six p.m., I could adapt to the rhythm of life of the late-sleeping night people who make up the entertainment scene. Also I lived in Bloomsbury, within ten minutes’ walk of any action anywhere in the West End. So I found myself dropping without difficulty into my habitual role of ‘participant observer’ or kibitzer .
The jazz people were by no means teenagers. And yet both my contemporary sketch of the public for ‘trad jazz’ and ‘skiffle’ and Roger Mayne’s photographs for the first edition of The Jazz Scene show clearly that what the music they made inspired was essentially a somewhat older children’s crusade. They were part of the youth culture that was by then becoming sufficiently visible for those of us who roamed on its outskirts for whatever reason to recognize its existence, although only someone like Colin MacInnes with a special private affinity for adolescent rebellion and independence, could tune in on its wavelength. Nevertheless, apart from a distinct relaxation of female sexual conventions in the vicinity of musicians and singers, it had not yet become married to a counter-culture. That did not happen, at least in Britain, until the 1960s.
Much of what symbolized the youth counter-culture of the 1960s was nevertheless to be taken over from the old jazz scene – notably drugs and the patterns of life of what I once described as ‘the floating, nomadic community of professional black [and white] musicians living on the self-contained and self-sufficient little islands of the popular entertainers and other night people’, the places where the day people got rid of their inhibitions after dark. This was not necessarily a counter-culture in the later sense, for jazz musicians had an almost limitless toleration for any variant of human behaviour, but did not usually make a manifesto of it. The nearest thing to a counter-culture around the jazz scene was to be found on its fringes and among its hangers-on or outside admirers, as among the musicians’ girlfriends on the game who could earn a few hundred pounds in a few hours on the street – good money in the 1950s – and take off for a quick holiday in Morocco, among the conscious rejecters of traditional middle-class conventions, such as Ken Tynan, or among the middle-aged bourgeois insiders asserting outsider status by drinking sessions in the watering-hole of the painter Francis Bacon, Muriel Belcher’s Colony Club in Frith Street, Soho. Not that Muriel’s mostly homosexual crowd was particularly jazz-oriented, although I was introduced into this shabby first-floor room by an admiring reviewer of The Jazz Scene, and was quite likely to meet Colin MacInnes there, who praised jazz but did not understand it, and George Melly, who sang it and did. Melly was part of a fringe of the British jazz scene made up of refugees from middle-class respectability or people who combined their music with activities in the world of words and images. To the fans he was known as a self-parodying blues singer close to a music-hall act, as Wally Fawkes was known as a clarinet player. In the straight world both were much better known as the joint creators of a highly popular strip-cartoon which gently satirized the recognizable members of what was not yet known as the media world.
The third change, this one more readily recognized, was the change in the political or ideological mood after 1956. I can now see that the new factor that brought it about was the end of empires, but in Britain this did not become clear until the 1960s.
The Cold War remained, but, outside western governments, the public’s commitment to an emotional anti-communism began to decline. However much it was denounced, from 1960 the Berlin Wall stabilized the frontier between superpower empires in Europe, neither of which was seriously expected to cross it. We still lived under the black cloud of nuclear apocalypse. It came close in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and in 1963 Stanley Kubrick produced its definitive version, the film Doctor Strangelove – but by then it could already be played for laughs, however black. But CND, the new Campaign for (unilateral British) Nuclear Disarmament (1959), by far the largest public mobilization of the British left, was not intended to, and plainly could not, affect the USA’s and the USSR’s nuclear arms race, although many Britons were sincerely moved by the idea of setting a good moral example to the world. It was about keeping out of the Cold War or, perhaps more exactly, about getting Britain used to no longer being a great power and a global empire. (The argument that Britain’s own nuclear capability was necessary to deter a Soviet attack made no sense, especially as we now know that the bomb had originally been constructed by British governments to maintain their status and independence against the USA rather than to frighten Moscow.)