Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain

New
Paperback
2005
$38.90

In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb's Dixielanders in 1943 through the burgeoning British bebop scene of the early 1950s, the Beaulieu Jazz Festivals of 1956-61, and the improvisational music making of the 1960s and 1970s, McKay reveals the connections of the music, its players, and its subcultures to black and antiracist activism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, and the New Left. In the process, he provides the first detailed cultural history of jazz in Britain.
McKay explores the music in relation to issues of whiteness, blackness, and masculinity-all against a backdrop of shifting imperial identities, postcolonialism, and the Cold War. He considers objections to the music's spread by the anti-jazzers alongside the ambivalence felt by many leftist musicians about playing an all-American musical form. At the same time, McKay highlights the extraordinary cultural mixing that has defined British jazz since the 1950s, as musicians from Britain's former colonies-particularly from the Caribbean and South Africa-have transformed the genre. Circular Breathing is enriched by McKay's original interviews with activists, musicians, and fans and by fascinating images, including works by the renowned English jazz photographer Val Wilmer. It is an invaluable look at not only the history of jazz but also the Left and race relations in Great Britain.

Synopsis

In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb's Dixielanders in 1943 through the burgeoning British bebop scene of the early 1950s, the Beaulieu Jazz Festivals of 1956-61, and the improvisational music making of the 1960s and 1970s, McKay reveals the connections of the music, its players, and its subcultures to black and antiracist activism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, and the New Left. In the process, he provides the first detailed cultural history of jazz in Britain.

McKay explores the music in relation to issues of whiteness, blackness, and masculinity-all against a backdrop of shifting imperial identities, postcolonialism, and the Cold War. He considers objections to the music's spread by the anti-jazzers alongside the ambivalence felt by many leftist musicians about playing an all-American musical form. At the same time, McKay highlights the extraordinary cultural mixing that has defined British jazz since the 1950s, as musicians from Britain's former colonies-particularly from the Caribbean and South Africa-have transformed the genre. Circular Breathing is enriched by McKay's original interviews with activists, musicians, and fans and by fascinating images, including works by the renowned English jazz photographer Val Wilmer. It is an invaluable look at not only the history of jazz but also the Left and race relations in Great Britain.

$38.90

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 376
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 22 Dec 2005
ISBN 10: 0822335735
ISBN 13: 9780822335733
Book Overview: An exploration of the political and cultural experience of jazz performers in Britain from the 1950s 'traditional jazz boom' onwards

Media Reviews

Circular Breathing is a marvelous book. I admire George McKay's knowledge of jazz, the British left, and cultural history. His ability to blend those elements is to my knowledge unique and unprecedented, and his interviews with jazz musicians enrich immeasurably the story that he is telling. -Dennis Dworkin, author of Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies
Circular Breathing is quite simply the best book so far on jazz in Britain. George McKay acts as a cultural archaeologist, digging up traces of a ninety-year musical presence and writing them back into history. He comments acutely on a music which can be peripheral and exclusive but which he rightly sees as vital to the story of Britain's social and political evolution. -Andrew Blake, author of The Land without Music: Music, Culture, and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain
George McKay's book plugs a significant scholarly gap and provides a much-needed cultural history of jazz in Britain. . . . This book is a hugely impressive, detailed, and fascinating cultural history of jazz in Britain and should be recommended not only to cultural historians but also to historians of the Cold War, the British Left, and those interested in race relations and national identity in twentieth-century Britain. -- James J. Nott * American Historical Review *
McKay has written an excellent study of one of the many new cultures and cultural spaces of postwar England. His emphasis on space and culture, gender and space, and race and identity make this a strong work well worth the time to read. . . . [H]is book places the playing and study of jazz music in clear class terms as few scholars have before him. -- Gordon J. Marshall * Journal of British Studies *
It is only by reading Circular Breathing, George McKay's skillful examination of race relations, gender issues, and the Left in relation to British jazz, that we can understand why British jazz wasn't at the center of the European free-jazz revolution. . . . [V]aluable and imaginative scholarship. -- Stephanie Hanson * Bookforum *

Author Bio

George McKay is a professor of cultural studies at the University of Salford in England. He is the author of Glastonbury: A Very English Fair and Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties; the editor of DiY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain; and a coeditor of Community Music: A Handbook and Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Political Protest.