Works on the history of British culture after the Second World War have increased dramatically in the past few years, with several excellent studies being published. George McKay's examination of jazz culture from the war to the 1980s places the study of music within the larger structures of race, class, gender, and politics in the postwar period. More important, McKay expands his study beyond the confines of England, attempting to write a history of British jazz that takes not only its American beginnings but also its roots in the Caribbean and Africa into full account.
This English postwar jazz culture did not spring fully formed in 1945. McKay argues that the development of a shared culture between England and the United States in the form of film, music, literature, fashion, and other forms of mass culture allowed the British to use or modify American culture as if it were their own. McKay refers to this type of cultural exchange as an exchange of commodities or an “export culture” rather than cultural imperialism or cultural hegemony. Viewed in this way, the British were open to the culture of postwar America because not only did they share a common language but the English were well versed in American culture, what McKay labels a “Lingua Americana.”
McKay begins by tying what he argues is authentic jazz, the early twentieth-century New Orleans or Dixieland style, to the political protest movement of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and to the jazz festival of the 1950s. McKay argues that the bands had a left-leaning politic, and such jazz was naturally lent to postwar protest. Further, that jazz provided a space, both physical and cultural, for the postwar left and affiliated groups to collect both in and around. This space was further expanded in 1956 by Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, who held an annual jazz festival on his estate for six years. McKay attempts to tie gay culture in England to jazz by positioning Montagu's festival as part of his larger challenge to England's laws against homosexuality.
McKay's analysis of whiteness and British jazz culture in the second chapter is much clearer than his analysis of the left and jazz culture. He argues that even if the audience and other jazz musicians accepted musicians of color (in this case coming from India, Africa, the Caribbean, and America), the established jazz writers and the musical establishment did not and, moreover, felt it in their interest to continue this rift. This leads to white British musicians, in the case of Dixieland bands, imitating white American bands, who in turn imitated African American bands. This white cloak over black culture limited both the impact of newer forms of jazz and the dissemination of jazz culture in England. More avowedly black forms of jazz (such as bebop) emerged in England, as musicians of color and their culture could not be kept out permanently. But with that culture came some of the same problems of American racial identity. Yet, McKay claims, it is these very racial codes that reshape British whiteness in the transgression of them.
As much as jazz and the influx of immigration of people of color from the Caribbean and Africa shaped a new white identity in England, it also shaped a new understanding of black identity, at least by whites. The influx of Caribbean immigrants to England after the war included a number of musicians and jazz enthusiasts who would expand the English scene dramatically. Already marginalized racially, these immigrants could mix freely with African American servicemen stationed in England after the war in a way that whites could not. Further, the musicians brought a more nuanced understanding of American jazz culture since they had been geographically closer to the United States and had access to jazz records and radio that the English were denied. Development of jazz culture in England beyond the New Orleans style required the influence and involvement of musicians from the edges of the empire.
Shifting from New Orleans to bebop and again to improvisational style, jazz music in England moved dramatically over the first thirty years of the postwar period and by the late 1960s was being forced toward obscurity and political irrelevance. With the revival of folk music and the development of a counterculture rock music tradition in England, jazz had to evolve or give way as a dominant form. In this case it both evolved into the new improvisational style and at the same time became less relevant as a political music of the left-wing movement.
By far the strongest chapter in McKay's book examines the role of gender in postwar jazz culture. It begins by tracing the history of all-women bands in England, moving to a nuanced discussion of the space of gender, especially manliness, in both jazz culture and generally in postwar England. While McKay attempts to explain the lack of women in both traditional jazz music and their role in the new improvisational style and its links to feminism, his discussion of male sexuality, both gay and straight, is better argued and explained. Returning to his discussion of jazz culture as both a physical and cultural space, McKay explains that it is the actual space of jazz, the smoky pub or men's club, which literally kept women out of the scene; when allowed in, women transgressed social, cultural, class, and racial lines that led them to forfeit their respectability as white middle-class women. Ultimately, female performers were drawn toward the folk and rock scenes of the 1960s and 1970s, which were established in less heavily gendered space.
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. While his attempt to imbue jazz music and jazz culture with left-wing political struggle seems to fall short, he is successful in the reverse: his book places the playing and study of jazz music in clear class terms as few scholars have before him.
