The opening chapter explores the role of jazz in the first decade of British broadcasting from the BBC’s inception in 1923 as a commercial monopoly built around regional stations to a more centralised metropolitan public corporation which, from 1927, restructured itself through a process of organisational, technological and cultural centralisation built upon a commitment to a universality of a national radio service. Characteristic of this provision was the late-night relay of sophisticated jazz and dance music from Mayfair hotels in London’s West End to much of the UK. As the decade progressed, live broadcasts of jazz were supplemented by record-based ‘gramophone recital’ programmes of US and UK jazz. In mapping this jazz programming I aim to explore what jazz was understood to be within the BBC specifically, and in 1920s British culture more generally. Both radio and jazz emerge at the same time in most developed economies, and the chapter starts from a recognition that it is during this period that both jazz and radio are defined through a process of contestation. I seek to explore the complex ways in which BBC staff aimed to define what jazz was, struggled to place the unstable meanings of jazz within the emerging organisation of broadcast production and experimented with the ways it could help demarcate what radio would become. Building upon close reference to schedules in The Radio Times and ‘programme-as-broadcast’ logs at the BBC Written Archive, I produce a revisionist history of both jazz and radio in Britain exploring the historically-located processes of defining the cultural meaning of jazz and the very idea of radio broadcasting. In doing so, the chapter challenges the widely stated view amongst both jazz and media historians that, in the 1920s and 1930s, the BBC neglected jazz. In reinterpreting and reframing these debates about jazz in Britain, the broadcast of music labeled jazz and the positioning of jazz within the organisational structure of the BBC, I seek a more nuanced sense of two intertwined trajectories of cultural change in twentieth century Britain. Specifically, I show that music then designated as jazz constituted the largest category of output in the broadcasts of the early BBC; that there was no coherent BBC position on jazz; and that debates about the music within the corporation were unstable because jazz did not conform to the cultural certainties usually deployed in editorial decision-making. The chapter, therefore, focuses on music that later historians such as Godbolt (1986) have excluded from their definitions of jazz and reassesses the claim of Parsonage (2005) that in the 1920s the BBC was ‘creating and disseminating a stylistically unified music’. In establishing the foundations of British jazz broadcasting, the chapter also unveils a theme that runs throughout the book: that the history of jazz on the BBC and the way that it has been interpreted by listeners and critics alike is based upon arguments about the boundary between what is jazz and not-jazz. Such an approach encourages us to reassess all of the stories about the way jazz developed, was disseminated and mediated in the first half of the twentieth century..

This chapter examines a period beginning with the historic 14th June 1933 BBC radio broadcast of Duke Ellington and his Orchestra which in many ways was a watershed in the way jazz was presented on the BBC. I demonstrate that the way the BBC selected, framed and presented Ellington’s music in this, and the later broadcasts of his music, was part of a continuing process of defining jazz. The chapter explores a decade of change for jazz in Britain and for the BBC, the culmination of which can best be understood through a case study of the wartime programme Radio Rhythm Club. In particular, I explore the way that the content and presentation of Radio Rhythm Club embodied the newly dominant idea of jazz as a recorded folk music distinctly rooted in African American culture. Throughout, I continue the speculative and interrogative historiographical method I established in Chapter One. I return to well-used primary material, rethinking what it can tell us by focusing on the evidence itself, offering a more tentative and open reading of this evidence, moving towards conclusions, rather than starting from a predefined sense of what is the case. This approach reveals Ellington and his music as an ambiguous sign within a wider field of contested notions of the value of music and the challenge of new African-American originated culture. I recast Ellington’s appearance as a pivotal moment in the BBC’s early history, both in its own terms and as an index of something much more significant at play within the BBC; a moment in which BBC staff grappled with how to position a changing definition jazz within its own categories of music and variety programming. By contrasting the BBC’s presentation of Ellington with that of Louis Armstrong a year earlier, I determine two distinct conceptions of jazz offered by the broadcaster. They not only represent a rupture in the way that jazz was understood in Britain, but these two innovators of jazz come to personify the two main trajectories in which jazz played out in European culture through the 1930s and into the war years. Here, Armstrong is taken to represent the notion that jazz was a folk music understood through its origins, while Ellington is constructed as a modernist, and jazz as a new art form. While these two new discourses became the dominant perspectives of British jazz fans, a third trajectory (lost in standard jazz histories) is apparent within the BBC, where the early elements of jazz form were incorporated into the BBC’s idea of light musical comedy, which itself would form the basis of the later idea of light entertainment. The semiotic legacy of the small group Chicago sound, originally linked to Armstrong’s early recordings, becomes the foundation for the jazz fan Rhythm Clubs, their radio recreation in the BBC’s 1940 Radio Rhythm Club, and subsequently comes to define jazz in Europe in the immediate post-war period through the trade jazz movement. In the meantime it was to be Ellington’s approach which dominated both live and broadcast notions of jazz in Britain for a decade. The BBC’s role in using Ellington as the reference point for a model of symphonic jazz, and later swing big bands, created what became the prevailing notion of jazz in Britain in the 1930s. By the start of the 1940s jazz on the BBC struggled to contain the competing cultural meanings of popular swing commercial dance music, Ellington-derived modernism and Radio Rhythm Club’s folk conception of jazz as something to be studied, sustained and protected from commercial pressures.

Jazz Club is the programme which dominated post-war British jazz broadcasting up to the point of the arrival of commercial radio in 1973. This chapter explores the attempts amongst the BBC’s Jazz Club production staff to accommodate and cohere the conflicting definitions of jazz which were inherited from the two decades of BBC programming charted in the previous chapters. The very name of the programme attempts to resolve these very different musical and cultural definitions by simultaneously evoking the jazz-as-folk record collector’s rhythm clubs and subversive location of the modernist small group bebop cellar club. Jazz Club juxtaposed previously established ways of presenting jazz: episodes were initially presented as though ‘from the heart of London’s West End’ while later programmes expanded this metropolitan focus out to include regional jazz clubs/bands and separated coverage of trad and modern jazz, concentrating the latter within a regular ‘Jazz for Moderns’ feature. While previous chapters have traced the different discourses shaping jazz in Britain over specific time periods, this chapter takes an alternative approach, observing the changing and conflicting meanings of jazz that emerged within a single programme. In this way, trends that emerge through an analysis of Jazz Club are mapped in Chapters Four and Five onto the wider discussion of the period 1943-1974. The chapter builds upon a full textual analysis of Jazz Club broadcasts, made possible through access to the British Library’s Krahmer-Newbrook Collection, and will represent the first academic study using this important archive of recordings. The study plots the thirty-year development of Jazz Club in relation to shifts in BBC music broadcasting policy such as the greater concentration of dance music on the Light Programme from 1957 onwards and the creation of BBC Radio 1 and 2 in 1967. The relationship between BBC radio and television programming of jazz also forms an important thread of the narrative. Changes in production crew and presenters is given as much attention as the types of music played. As in previous chapters, the degree to which the programming and presentation of jazz is shaped by the discursive constructions of The Radio Times, Melody Maker and dedicated jazz publications is explored in detail. In anticipation of a fuller discussion of European jazz identity in Chapter Five, this account of Jazz Club considers arguments about the emerging ‘British-ness’ of home produce jazz which can be seen across the thirty-year strand of BBC jazz broadcasting.

This chapter describes a period of settlement for jazz at the BBC and looks at two decades of programming which sits outside the Jazz Club broadcasts which dominated postwar jazz broadcasting. In particular, the chapter explores the significant presence of jazz on the Light Programme which took more distinctive forms and permitted variation and experimentation within fixed generic boundaries. The phenomenon of trad jazz during the 1950s prompted numerous attempts by the BBC to engage with this movement, in programming such as British Jazz (1954-1955), At the Jazz Band Ball (1956-1957), Traditional Jazz (1955-1956), The Chris Barber Band Box (1958) and Trad Tavern (1961-1962). I argue that, in this era, the idea of ‘the radio personality’, particularly those of Dill Jones and Chris Barber, become instrumental in promoting an idea of what constitutes trad to BBC listeners. The way that these programmes explore boundaries between trad, folk and skiffle as musical forms and community activities become central themes of this analysis. The post-war period also sees a continuing rise in documentary radio programming about jazz, in which experts relate historical narratives that have come to dominate jazz discourse throughout the second half of the twentieth-century. I present two comparative case studies. On the Light Programme, I consider World of Jazz (1952-1957), a magazine format which attempted to reflect the current jazz scene through record selections, discussion segments and listener polls. On the Third Programme, I discuss Jazz Session (1957-1963) and its more academic approach to jazz, grounded in the Third Programme’s discourses surrounding the European classical tradition. I question to what extent twentieth-century jazz narratives have been shaped by a mode of historical story-telling particular to radio and consider the centrality of anecdote that accompanies a move toward specialist BBC presenters from the jazz world, including Humphrey Lyttelton, George Melly and Johnny Dankworth. Humphrey Lyttelton becomes a significant personality by the end of this period, both as a bandleader and radio presenter. He becomes the main, and then sole, presenter of Jazz Club from 1963 and is widely featured in other programmes broadcast by the BBC. It is, though, his advocacy for a mainstream jazz which combines instrumental, improvisational and playing styles of so called trad and modern forms which becomes the predominate form of broadcast jazz. By the mid-1960s it is this approach to jazz which comes to dominate BBC music broadcasting on both radio and television. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the post-bop return to modernism that occurs in the late 1950s, as jazz programming is reorganised in accordance with larger-scale changes to music scheduling across the Light Programme, Third Programme and Home Service. I will chart the considerable presence of Johnny Dankworth on the Light Programme during this period, arguing that his positioning is indicative of a turn away from the folk and bebop notions of community, and back toward the idea of the sophisticate bandleader, earlier associated with the BBC’s presentation of Ellington. Throughout the 1950s, Dankworth is the focus and presenter of a number of jazz programmes on BBC radio, most notably Johnny Come Lately (1958-1961). Dankworth is himself directly linked to the contemporary reappraisal of Ellington’s music (a connection he self-consciously cultivates), performing Ellington’s music on the radio and also composing long-form suites that attempt to invoke British national identity. The degree to which Dankworth achieves his aim, and the response of British jazz musicians to the idea of mainstream jazz, lay the foundations for the discussion of ‘new British jazz’ in Chapter Five.

On 8th May 1965 the Stan Tracey Quartet recorded Under Milk Wood, widely cited as the recording which announced British jazz as a distinctive form in its own right. Stan Tracey had made his first appearance on the BBC Light Programme’s Jazz Club the week before, billed as a Trio with Bobby Wellins, exploring the same adaption of Miles Davis-derived modal jazz that would define the LP. Tracey’s quartet had appeared weekly on the Ted Heath Show in the late 1950s, and in a variety of mainstream jazz programmes in the early 60s, but in the late 60s and early 70s he consistently broadcast three or four times a year as a stalwart of a new faction of British jazz musicians. This chapter explores the way that BBC radio husbanded the new jazz developing in Britain in the 1960s and early 70s. Tracey personifies the way a generation of British musicians developed a new approach to British jazz, and like contemporaries Don Rendell and Joe Harriott, regular broadcasts on the BBC track their engagement with US innovators and the collective emergence of 60s British jazz. If Tracey, Rendell and Harriott herald these changes, it was a younger generation that included Graham Collier, Mike Osborne and John Taylor who became increasingly associated with a new British jazz. Bands led by each were regularly featured on Jazz Club, and a range of other jazz programmes, including Jazz Scene, during the late 60s and early 70s, and their performances and the way they are presented within the broadcasts constitute an interesting construction of British jazz at a crucial point in its development. While retrospective histories of this period often present it as a crisis in which British jazz comes to terms with the challenge of rock-based forms of popular music, the BBC’s broadcasts of the new music construct a very different sense of the burst of creativity apparent during these years. Even while the BBC was responding to forms of music radio established in the US with the formation of Radio 1 and Radio 2 in 1967, the balance of jazz broadcasting across the stations reveals the challenge of defining each station against the other and positioning jazz within this new map of popular music radio. During this period jazz was given a significant place in the output of the BBC, which played an important part in making it accessible. As Radio 1 was increasingly constructed as a youth station and Radio 2 pushed much of its jazz output toward the territory of an older person’s music, there remained a thread of British jazz which related more strongly to a European identity and to a serious musical form.