The republication, after 35 years, of trumpeter/author Ian Carr's landmark book Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz In Britain is bound to trigger some animated jazz discussion of the then-and-now variety. The British jazz world of the late 1960s and early 70s Carr originally described was characterised by creative freshness (independence from American dominance was still in its infancy) and growing idiomatic diversity across Europe, coupled with a widespread anxiety about how the struggling jazz economy might keep body and soul together. So what's changed in three and a half decades?
Last week, cottage-industry publishers Northway threw a launch party for Carr (also a fine trumpeter, visionary bandleader, and author of much-acclaimed biographies of Miles Davis and Keith Jarrett), joined by many of his musical contemporaries, and an impromptu student band playing his compositions at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
It could have been a ruminative occasion, for reflections on the ravages of time, but instead it was an immensely heartening one. Carr, a little frail now but visibly warmed by the presence of so many old and new friends, sat quietly on the stage and listened to the students crack briskly through his punchily lyrical pieces. Playing contemporaries including saxophonist Don Rendell, pianist Michael Garrick, bassist Coleridge Goode and drummer Trevor Tomkins swapped memories of the legendary Rendell-Carr Quintet - one of the groundbreaking British postbop groups of the 1960s, whose work has recently startled a new jazz generation through its re-introduction by BBC DJ Gilles Peterson on his Impressed reissue series.
Music Outside (check Northway Books) was a telling title - describing a hardy bloom that survived outside mainstream cultural economics and posh-art and pop-art assumptions alike. Carr had interviewed a group of cutting-edge 70s performers for it, including Evan Parker, Mike Westbrook and Mike Gibbs, and some late-lamented heroes like South African bandleader Chris McGregor and improv proselytiser and drum star John Stevens. They all believed they were in the middle of a musical renaissance, and they all wondered where the next penny was coming from.
From the perspective of the 21st century, much has changed, though not enough. For a start, the launch party's host venue, the Guildhall School, is one of many prestigious conservatoires teaching jazz alongside classical music - it was one of the first to embrace that sea-change. Tireless player-educationalists like the late John Stevens and Carr himself fought to put jazz and improvised music in the classroom, and now it's frequently to be found there, all the way back to primary schools.
Public arts funding for jazz, barely a trickle when Music Outside was written, is now an important income stream for many jazz players - even if still a small percentage of the provision for opera, classical music and dance. Jazz festivals, which barely existed except to showcase touring Americans in the early 70s, have now sprung up all over the UK, with those in London, Bath and Cheltenham among the most creatively-programmed in Europe. And, perhaps most importantly, the sentiment expressed by musicologist Wilfrid Mellors on Music Outside's frontispiece is that much closer to realisation, thanks to Carr and his impassioned ilk. "We have merely to recognise the creative spirit whenever and wherever we may meet it," Mellors wrote. "And this is why segregation of the genres, in our much divided and departmentalised society, is meaningful no longer, if ever it was meaningful."
.jpg?w=600)
