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Black Musical Internationalism in England in the 1920s

1995; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/779323

1946-1615

Howard Rye, Jeffrey Green,

Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

In 1920s and 1930s hundreds of thousands of people in Britain danced to music played by black instrumentalists, watched shows with black dancers, were amused by black entertainers at parties and night clubs, purchased sheet music and played melodies created by black composers, and listened to performances by black people on phonograph discs. Stage shows imported from United States played to packed houses in British theaters. The London and provincial press carried advertisements, reviews, comments, photographs, and interviews associated with these shows. British entertainers complained of employment problems because of success of black Americans in Britain. This success enabled others of African descent, born in Britain, Caribbean, or Africa itself, to join American-led bands and shows or to copy them. Yet Jim Godbolt, in his History of Jazz in Britain, wrote that the black contribution to British jazz was slight (Godbolt 1986, 195). One explanation for this comment could be that, at least as far as instrumental music is concerned, dominant source of jazz was phonograph disc. A three-minute, ten-inch, 78 rpm shellac disc enabled listener to hear a performance time and time again and thus to absorb details that were more difficult to appreciate in public performance. Much of study of jazz in Western Europe resulted from careful listening to reissues of discs recorded in and for United States (Collier 1979, 317; HOWARD RYE is an independent British researcher whose numerous articles on American musical visitors to Britain in years 1919-1940 have been published in English jazz research magazine Storyville. He contributed to The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz and was an advisor to BBC radio series Salutations (1993). JEFFREY GREEN is author of a biography on South Carolina-born composer Edmund Thornton Jenkins (Greenwood, 1982). An independent British researcher, he has contributed to Black Perspective in Music, Black Music Research Journal, Storyville, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, and Musical Times.