The development of Jazz in Britain - Part 1
Extracts from The Bald Soprano, written by Jeff Nuttall and published by Tak Tak Tak

Throughout the 30s and 40s precision was achieved by referring to hot jazz and sweet jazz, later to hot jazz and cool jazz. This last was after swing had yielded it’s wilder offspring bop and jazz was suddenly applied once more to a wide range of developed directions extending from Stan Kenton to Lu Watters. When this scene expanded into so-called free improvisation in the late 50s the term still applied as a distinction between jazz and the rapidly developing rock tradition. In the late 70s, we had a hybrid music involving elements from the electronic music of Stockhausen and Varese, of twelve-tone composition, of Boulez’s percussion clusters, of bop, of blues, of rock, of various folk traditions, Celtic, Spanish, American, of Indian and African modes and rhythms. Lol Coxhill is situated right in the middle of this area for which jazz, the term still in use, is becoming vague to the point of redundancy. This is probably because an appropriate substitute term has not yet been coined....

I would say, looking back over 45 years that have coincided almost exactly with these developments in music, that jazz most properly refers not specifically to music, but to the quality of indigenous American urban culture during a certain period of expansion, a quality that is certainly most closely crystallized in the best improvised music of the period but not exclusively to it. Jazz is a particular brash, buoyancy, a particular flaunted eroticism, a precise kind of mischief, a National back-alley wit and an alcoholic melancholy. It celebrates areas of crude sensibility which other cultures eschew. British music hall hasn’t got it. European cabaret is different. And it leavens this crudity with a highly articulate erotic lyricism. By this understanding the Bowery Boys have more right to be called jazz that then Chico Hamilton Quartet. Certain comic strips - Bringing Up Father, Krazy Kat, are more properly jazz than John McLaughlin. Bogart is jazz. Cagney is jazz. Astaire is jazz. The talk of Louise Armstrong is the most definitive jazz. Sun Ra, Chick Corea, Evan Parker are artists in whom the jazz is all but disappeared. Lol Coxhill, on the other hand, is an artist who has sufficient respect in passing for that boozy old idiom that he is able to play, not jazz, but music about jazz. Passages in the “Vorblifa Exit” track from “Ear of Beholder” or “Soprano Derivativo” from “Oh Really” slide into a New Orleans march style, a churchy soul-jazz style or the militant belligerence of Archie Shepp (who, in the hybrid scene, retains jazz as the main ingredient in his style) with crafty ease.

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