Moment Form: The Emergence of British Improvised Music

On 2 July 1974 an American and an Englishman met in front of an audience at the Royal Hotel in Luton, a satellite town located 50 kilometres north of London, and made music together. They were as unalike as could be. A generation as well as an ocean separated them – if we count a generation as 15 years, the way sociologists do. The Englishman was born in 1930, the American in the last year of the Second World War. Both crucially grew up away from metropolitan culture. Though the Englishman, guitarist Derek Bailey, spent much of his working life in the capital, he was not a Londoner. Born and raised in Sheffield, Yorkshire, he never lost the character of his hometown in his manner, his bluntness carrying a very specific, home-honed edge. Anthony Braxton, the saxophonist, or multi-instrumentalist, who completed the duo, was a Chicagoan, outwardly professorial and disarmingly polite, episodically volcanic, a Gemini to Bailey’s Aquarius (but what does a Yorkshireman care about astrology?), and a man who seemed already to be pursuing an intellectual and creative project of darkling complexity and rigour.

The music they made together was recorded and issued a decade later by Incus Records, the company jointly run by the guitarist, on an LP called Royal Volume 1 (Royal Volume 2 was allocated an Incus catalogue number but never released). Those who were present remember it as an important moment in the evolution of free music in Britain. Those who heard the recordings subsequently understood them to be important survivals from that process. Many in both parties, though, sensed that the pairing was something of a misalliance. At the most obvious aural level it was clear that Braxton’s declared baggage included bebop phrasing and areas of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic concern associated with bop and post-bop masters as various as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, as well as Paul Desmond and the two supposedly representative saxophonists of the so-called ‘Tristano school’ (Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz), while Bailey’s music seemed to avoid anything that could possibly be identified as melody, cadence or groove and instead pursued an absolute autonomy of sound.

But emphasising stylistic differences between the two men merely obscures more interesting and perhaps more profound differences between them, or between their defining contexts, ones that help to define what has been distinctive about British free improvisation since the turn of the 1970s.

The defining differences are in fact mostly extra-musical. Britain ended the Second World War a notionally victorious nation, one which had made a sudden and mostly reactive lurch towards welfare socialism. But its infrastructure was badly damaged, and its social demographic had been warped by two major overseas conflicts that occurred within a quarter of a century of each other (not just with regard to the dead, but also the returning imprisoned and those whose native stoicism, if not progressivism, had been fundamentally compromised). Post-war Americans, by contrast, were representative of a superpower whose military, economic, political and cultural hegemony was so great and overdetermining it was even capable of creating the terrifying illusion of a rival superpower, a Manichean put-on that defined world politics for the next 45 years. Though jazz had been America’s unique contribution to 20th century music, the dominance of post-war American cultural forms was more apparent than actual. Elvis Presley’s allegedly paradigm-shifting appropriation of African-American music was actually no more than a raucous, non-metropolitan extension of Frank Sinatra’s bel canto approach. Much of what Presley sang had its roots in trans-Appalachian folk musics that drew substance and sustenance from Scots and Irish settlers. What galvanised American popular music more than anything was a wave of British acts – Herman’s Hermits and The Beatles, most obviously – whose own roots lay, as did the roots of much of what was to happen a little later in British improvised music, in regional music hall traditions. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were never faux-American performers like their carefully manufactured darkside twins in The Rolling Stones. They were Lancashire Catholic entertainers of a particular stamp.

US Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s oftquoted and largely misleading comment about Great Britain – that she had lost an empire and not yet found a role – was actually a comment about America, which had taken on a vast international role but without a deep-rooted imperial ideology to support it. American isolationism, established by George Washington, had only begun to wane around 1898 and was only conclusively and finally ended in 1941. Americans abroad were still, according to Henry James’s formula, unequipped by history. Perversely, this meant that they came weighted with history. What separated Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton in 1974 was not so much stylistic or purely musical difference but a much wider attitude. One might say that while the older man had shed any and all semblance of mythology, the younger man, whose purview was complicated by an African-American heritage, was desperately trying to acquire or construct one. Like Sun Ra’s, Braxton’s philosophy was a mixture of Nilotic para-history, early 20th century black nationalism, and science fiction. Braxton was conscious, too, that vaudeville, minstrelsy, doo-wop or ‘old town’ music were also part of his heritage. Arguably, Braxton’s great presentational problem was that nothing seemed to be alien to his cultural make-up. Mention a musician and they had probably influenced Braxton. Mention the same musician to Bailey and he was more likely to deny ever having heard them. In something like a dozen separate interviews with Bailey, this writer only ever once got him to admit to being influenced by another musician, and that, improbably, was the guitar- and tiple-playing Teddy Bunn of The Spirits Of Rhythm.

British improvisation emerged in a highly specific socio-cultural context. Its first generation, which exerted a powerful, and perhaps restrictive, influence on the succeeding generation and whose own hegemony is perhaps only slackening now, emerged in a welfarist but not yet post-military environment, in an economy where pre-war depression had given way to post-war austerity rapidly followed by a boom that seemed addressed only to youth. The experience of war and/or National (ie military) Service was the shibboleth that divided one generation from the next. The youth culture represented by pop music flaunted hedonism, was defined by the conspicuous presumption of Swinging London, and was resisted by a generation of improvising musicians whose livelihood as jazz or commercial players had largely been taken away by the reduced- personnel demands of electric music, the decline of live music for dancing and the parallel rise of recorded music as the primary source of aural entertainment.

To say that British improvised music, unlike its still jazz-derived and largely African-American counterpart, lacked a mythology is not to say that it lacked ideology. Indeed, perhaps because it had no overarching and sustaining myth, it became unusually susceptible to ideological conflicts, often those which illustrate what Freud defined as the narcissism of small differences, one approach to ‘non-idiomatic playing’ being not so radically different from any other, except in the eyes and ears of those involved. The most profound irony of the end of Britain’s imperial adventure is that the Empire returned ‘home’. Far from cutting ties with the cultures of the Raj, or West Africa, or the Caribbean archipelagos, Britain became the focus of a vast and steady migration that steadily reshaped the country’s musical (though not, interestingly, its literary or visual) culture in relation to more or less audible derivations from South African, Hausa and Yoruba, Carnatic and Antilles traditions, all of them absorbed through specific human relationships but emerging mostly unattributed. (It’s a footnote only, this, but perhaps worth considering: when a highly intelligent musician such as Eddie Prévost developed a research-and-practice interest in a form like Korean court music, was it because such a tradition had no imperial associations whatsoever?)

It is approaching a truism that while the majority of American players, certainly those hailing from major cities, learned their art and craft by performing in jam sessions, pick-up date extended rehearsal situations and the like, the majority of British free players learned their craft from records. Many, including Bailey and his two compeers in the seminal Joseph Holbrooke trio, bassist Gavin Bryars and drummer Tony Oxley, derived their concept of freedom not from any scorched-earth philosophy or rejection of academic tradition, but from the exigencies of working class entertainment, in which a musician was required to respond, moment by moment, to the course of a variety bill, in which a crooner might be followed by a speciality paper-tearing act, then a comedian, then an eccentric dancer or virtuoso whistler. For Bailey, and for Bryars, this was what defined ‘free’, and Oxley has pointed out how his drum kits, with their increasingly elaborate amplified add-ons, derived from those of speciality theatre percussionists. This, plus an experience shared with very many Americans of musical training in a military band during National Service, was an important component of British improvisation and a key factor in its regional and provincial variety, but it was the sometimes vexed issue of recording – documenting an improvised performance seemed to some as contradictionary as what Mary McCarthy discerned in the term ‘action painting’ when she pointed out the impossibility of hanging an action on a wall – which really defined the course of British improvisation.

Interestingly, the leading practitioners – Bailey, Oxley and saxophonist Evan Parker with the first incarnation of Incus; percussionist Eddie Prévost with Matchless; George Haslam with Slam; Parker with his own Psi imprint (formed long after the quarrelsome break-up of Incus); even saxophonist Paul Dunmall with his limited edition CD-R Duns label – have taken the documentation and dissemination of their music seriously and made it a central concern. Enthusiasts like Martin Davidson (to be fair, there are few with even a measure of Davidson’s commitment) and his Emanem imprint have promoted new improvised music and excavated or preserved its earliest manifestations with equal emphasis.

The self-mocking, sometimes self-hating, sometimes cheerfully sardonic view of a ‘typical’ British Improv gig of earlier decades is a version of the ‘two men and a dog’ audience for roots folk music at the same period, but with the additional detail that performers had to outnumber paying customers by a certain mysterious ratio if the event were to have the necessary authentic aura. In reality, improvised music was never as badly and always as loyally attended as any other niche or minority form, and the mocking or complaining tone adopted by many of its practitioners actually disguised a wish: for in order to separate itself completely from the commercial music culture, improvised music was required to separate itself not just from ‘idiomatic’ playing or generic forms but also from the conventional nexus of artists-and-audience. In later years, Bailey frequently questioned the worth of playing ‘gigs’ at all, and while this was largely a personal idiosyncrasy, perhaps even a facet of an adopted persona, curmudgeonly and anti-social, it did express a profound desire to sustain a ‘craft and guild’ philosophy of improvisation as a dialogue between its participants rather than a public performance. John Stevens, another of the pioneers of British improvisation with his and saxophonist Trevor Watts’s Spontaneous Music Ensemble (which survived in various forms until Stevens’s death in 1994), showed a deep ambivalence towards performance, sometimes indulging in puzzling showmanship, sometimes demonstrating a profound disregard for the presence, understanding or taste of the audience.

It is probably impossible to define or even demarcate British improvised music in exclusively musical terms. Its history is now both synchronic and diachronic, having passed through occasional ‘booms’ of reassessment and raised public profile (sometimes sparked by obituary, sometimes by slumps in creativity elsewhere), longer and more sustained periods of severe economic marginalisation, accelerating contact with overseas musicians of all nationalities and cultures (not just Americans, but increasingly Dutch, German, Scandinavian, even French), and greater ease of dissemination through CDs and then the internet. The youngest British generation of improvisors is further removed in time and temperament from the first than Charlie Parker and John Coltrane were from Buddy Bolden. The flat, ‘mixed’ economy of the 1990s and 2000s, the confidently proclaimed ‘end of ideology’, Europeanisation in foreign policy and Balkanisation in domestic affairs have led to a curious and ambiguous creative dispersal in the British Isles. In 1971 Britain was still a ‘tadpole’ nation in cultural terms, with a vast head and attenuated body. That situation is now partially reversed, with improvisation and related creative forms pursued over an encouragingly large spread of towns and cities, north and south, east and west. What is lacking now, perhaps, is that sense of sometimes fraternally, sometimes antagonistically sustained common purpose that made the early years of British improvisation so exciting, and early contact with like-minded improvisors in other countries – one should mention bassist Peter Kowald, saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and Dutch percussionist Han Bennink as important facilitators – so consolatory and expansive.

Today’s ‘postmodern’ situation is not to be compared negatively with the founding years, nor should these be given nostalgic superiority to the present rich ferment. Both belong to the same history, marked by deep continuities and occasional fractures, both tied to national narratives at both the surface and deeper levels, down-current, cross-current and anti-current, but always instinctive and responsive to the imperatives of a still-evolving culture. When Britain lost an empire, it was its creative musicians who took on the task of constructing and defining a new role, setting aside 900 years of island history and the obloquy of being ‘das Land ohne Musik’, in order to live and work in the historical moment.