Oral history of jazz in Britain
Number of items in collection: 548
Short description:
Recordings in this collection are available for Higher and Further Education institutions only.
An informal and anecdotal history of the music, venues and people that defined jazz in the UK.
Oral history recordings provide valuable first-hand testimony of the past. The views and opinions expressed in oral history interviews are those of the interviewees, who describe events from their own perspective. The interviews are historical documents and their language, tone and content might in some cases reflect attitudes that could cause offence in today’s society.
Long description:
Recordings in this collection are available for Higher and Further Education institutions only.
An informal and anecdotal history of the music, venues and people that defined jazz in the UK.
Oral history recordings provide valuable first-hand testimony of the past. The views and opinions expressed in oral history interviews are those of the interviewees, who describe events from their own perspective. The interviews are historical documents and their language, tone and content might in some cases reflect attitudes that could cause offence in today’s society.
The late Derek Bailey began his 1987 interview for the Oral History of Jazz in Britain (OHJIB) by querying the very concept of history, remarking “history’s what people write, isn’t it?”. He alluded to the gap between historical fact and the author’s interpretation of it; discrepancies which are often amplified when historians rely on second-hand source material.
For this reason OHJIB, a collection of 200 interviews assembled between 1984 and 2003, were intentionally left unedited and untranscribed. The contributors were allowed to speak for themselves and to say what they wanted.
This approach also has its limitations, as American folklorist Alan Lomax discovered on making the first jazz oral history recordings in 1938. Although Jelly Roll Morton narrated a vivid and authentic account of his musical life and times, he also seized the opportunity to claim to have invented jazz.
The objective here has not been to construct a comprehensive, self-contained history of the music, but to create a complementary body of original source material to be used together with other resources.
Hence the exclusion of such figures as Humphrey Lyttelton and George Melly, who had already published autobiographies, or Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott, who passed on before the project could get to them.
The primary aim has been to shed light on the more neglected or less understood aspects of the subject, such as
- the influx and impact of musicians from overseas
- Britain’s crucial role in the development of free improvisation in the 1960s
- jazz in the regions
- the involvement of women.
The strength of the collection lies in the range and diversity of the contributors’ experiences.
All recordings on this site are governed by licence agreements.