Jazz, like cinema, is a relatively new art form—and yet its lack of deep history is often exaggerated. Some young jazz musicians play and talk as if their music started with John Coltrane, whose avant-garde style changed everything in the 1960s. But not 30-year-old alto saxophonist and rapper Soweto Kinch (pictured, below right). Born in London to a Barbadian playwright father and a Jamaican actress mother, he read history at Oxford, and a sense of the subject informs his music. For example, a track called "Snakehips" on an early album is a nod to the nickname of Ken Johnson, a bandleader from the early black British swing movement. (Johnson died playing in the Café de Paris in 1941, when it suffered a direct hit in a Luftwaffe air raid.) Kinch believes that studying and mastering the traditions of his art is the only basis for true originality.
Kinch's most recent album A Life in the Day of B19: Tales of the Tower Block is, in the jazz context, dangerously original, and some purists, puzzled if not enraged by the heterogeneous nature of its material, have denounced it as jazz heresy. This is a concept album, exploring the lives of the hard-pressed residents of a tower block in Birmingham. The introduction, narrated by newsreader Moira Stewart, sets the scene in a relaxed, breezy tone that belies the grim nature of the material. Then Kinch's lyrical, witty rap takes over and introduces a cast of characters whose lives interrelate in an oblique, fractured narrative. We find "the former army major/Now just a neo-Nazi/Who hates his Somali neighbour" waiting for the dysfunctional lift. After an unsuccessful gig, an aspiring DJ is accosted by a youth who says: "You're not funny/You look like Chris Tucker/Or Lenny Henry with less money…" The DJ trudges back to the tower block: "Now the rain hits the bottom of my torn denims/ My thoughts only fill me with more venom…"
Since rock 'n' roll drove jazz to the margins, some jazz men have glorified their obscurity by adopting a sort of heroic dandyism. Others have mounted unconvincing attempts at jazz/rock fusions. What Kinch is doing is much more rewarding. Jazz started on the street (literally) around 100 years ago in New Orleans. With his powerful evocation of life on the street in 21st-century Britain, Kinch has restored something of jazz's original vigour and directness. After all, early jazz comprised many elements, including street parade music and scat singing, as well as the instrumental ensemble that we now consider the glory of the music.
The uncelebrated barber
British jazz has inevitably been coloured by other aspects of British culture. The vivid details of inner-city life in Tower Block are, in some ways, as culturally significant as the seaside postcards, pigeon racing and brown sauce TS Eliot wrote of in his essay "Notes Towards the Definition of Culture." Mindful of this cross-fertilisation (and of the commercial precariousness of jazz), some British musicians have kept a presence in other areas of culture—broadcasting, cartooning, even stand-up comedy. Humphrey Lyttelton did so very successfully. One of the reasons Chris Barber is such a strangely uncelebrated figure may be that he has eschewed such activity, dedicating himself almost entirely to music.
Barber first formed a band in 1949, aged 19, and after several reincarnations it is still going strong. Fifty-nine years as a bandleader is more than Duke Ellington clocked up: it's an astonishing achievement. Barber was swept up in the madness of the 1950s trad jazz boom which, looking back, he finds incomprehensible. This was the time when musically dysfunctional bands dressed up as Mississippi gamblers or Confederate soldiers—even though, as Barber himself says, donning Confederate army garb to play black American music is like wearing concentration camp guard uniforms to play klezmer. But he was never really one of the "banjos and beard" brigade. His original group was inspired by the subtle ensemble sound of King Joe Oliver's Creole jazz band in the 1920s, and today his augmented band is more Ellington than Kenny Ball. Barber is also responsible for a less direct musical legacy. He has always been an astute scholar of black American music, and was quick to understand the importance of the blues tradition. He convinced people in the business that bringing apparently obscure bluesmen to this country would pay off. In 1954 he helped set up a series of British concerts for Big Bill Broonzy. Then he targeted Muddy Waters, whose subsequent British visit kicked off the rhythm and blues rage of the 1960s. The rest is history.
This summer is a significant one for Barber, as his trumpeter Pat Halcox has decided to retire after 54 years with the band. His final gig at the Gillingham festival in July was an emotional occasion. These extraordinary musical partnerships outlast most marriages, and when they end the consequences can be devastating. When Ellington died in May 1974, his faithful lieutenant and baritone saxophonist Harry Carney followed him to the grave five months later. Happily, there are no signs of Barber following Halcox into retirement.
