Going marching in ... yesterday's protest outside the Mobo awards. Photograph: John L Walters
Outside the Royal Albert Hall, the band paused for a moment. Trumpeter Abram Wilson, pink shirt soaked in sweat, asked us for the time. "Six thirty-eight," shouted someone. "OK, we have SEVEN MINUTES to SAVE JAZZ," bellowed Wilson, and the band cracked back into action, with a boisterous New Orleans-style street jazz jam.
Thirty minutes previously I'd been walking across Hyde Park towards the RAH, the venue for last night's Mobo awards. I didn't have a ticket for the ceremony: I wanted to know what was happening on the street.
I'd heard from Janine Irons, co-owner of the Dune jazz label, that there would be a protest about the Mobo organisation's foolish decision to drop the jazz category from its annual awards (previous jazz winners have included Dune artists Denys Baptiste and Soweto Kinch), and it was thrilling to hear the jazz grow louder as I approached the Albert Monument.
Wilson's street band, which included Kinch, several members of http://www.tomorrowswarriors.org/">Tomorrow's Warriors and the redoubtable Dave Powell (of Loose Tubes and Balkanatics) on funky sousaphone, presented jazz as a good deed, full of humour and shared values, in contrast to the uptight world of bouncers and bling. I If I ran a right-on company with a sponsorship budget, I'd sooner be associated with jazz than categories so boring that the winners can't be bothered to turn up.
So it was appropriate that the protest was musical and good-humoured. They pumped out a joyful racket for the best part of an hour, throwing in bebop tunes and feisty solos, while Wilson, bidding for the title of the hardest-working man in showbusiness, blew his horn and sang and strutted right in front of the queues for the event: "We want jazz. Bring back jazz."
Later I chatted to a jazz musician with misgivings about the protest. He mused that it might just bring more attention and notoriety to the Mobos. Yet in the long term, jazz is bigger than a squib like these awards.
Jazz is a big, renewable natural energy source that's there for everyone's benefit. It's not a product or brand that can be bought or sold. But in the contemporary culture of celebrity and money, jazz's weakness is that it is easily intimidated, bullied or just ignored. So I'm glad that Wilson chose to make his stand - it won't be the last.
