Abstract
If you’re seeking the history of a people, listen and hearken to their music, the sounds that have followed and expressed their periods of oppression, their key moments, struggles and victories. This is what the Trinidad-rooted writer, music critic and jazz sage Kevin Le Gendre has done in his vibrant account Don’t Stop the Carnival: Black music in Britain, and as a result he has created a wise work of engrossing and groovy cultural scholarship.
For an old music-loving geezer like myself, as I read his book it was as if Le Gendre was telling the story of my very British life too: jumping up to Trinidadian Lord Beginner’s ‘Victory Test Match’ calypso after the West Indies cricket team crushed England at Lords in the summer of 1950 and all ‘West Indies Voices were blended’; listening to Trinidadian Winifred Atwell’s honky-tonk piano hits on the radio as a child; hearing Trinidadian Edric Connor singing ‘Hill and Gully Rider’ as the crew of the Pequod rowed out to harpoon the white whale in the 1956 film of Melville’s Moby Dick; grooving to the doo-wah sounds of St. Lucian Emile Ford’s 1959 number one hit ‘What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?’ as we played table tennis at our suburban London youth club; marvelling at Cardiff’s Tiger Bay Shirley Bassey’s soundtrack recording of ‘Goldfinger’ in an Essex Odeon cinema; dancing as a clumsy teenager to Jamaican Milly Small’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’ with Ernest Ranglin’s irresistible guitar accompaniment in 1964; gripped by Jamaican Harold McNair’s swooping flutesong to the images of Ken Loach’s Kes in 1969; or discovering the cool jazz sound of Windrush trumpeter Dizzy Reece, alto saxophonist Joe Harriott or Vincentian trumpeter Shake Keane, transforming the gut of British postwar music and giving British jazz its own emboldening identity.
And not only from the Caribbean: Jimi Hendrix and his storm of guitar who came to London from the US in 1966; Nigerian Fela Kuti who brought Afrobeat in post-1958; Mulatu Astatke, the founder of Ethio-jazz who honed his skills at Ronnie Scott’s with Guyanese guitarist Frank Holder. Or there was the huge influence of the South African band the Blue Notes, exiles from Apartheid in 1965, whose combination of fiery African improvisation by trumpeter Mongezi Feza and alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana; the melodies, often church-inspired, of pianist Chris McGregor, and the rampant rhythmic propulsion and inventiveness of drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo and bassist Johnny Dyani, that virtually reinvented the London jazz scene.
Le Gendre covers a huge musical acreage in his book. He goes back to the earliest-known black musicians in Britain, from those blowing their cornu (G-shaped trumpets) in the Roman imperial armies, to John Blanke – a hornman who blew at the christening of the son of Katherine of Aragon in 1511, to the eighteenth-century ‘Negro tambourinist’ on an engraving of the Coldstream Guards in full regalia. He writes on the street musicians who performed in English market towns and John Bridgetower, described as ‘an Abyssinian from the West Indies’, who played classical violin, gained a Bachelor of Music from Cambridge, was tutored by Haydn and died in Peckham, South London in 1860. Le Gendre’s account is full of such revelations.
For the author, true to his Trinidadian and calypsonian roots, is a skilled griot and prime teller of tales. And he takes his reader across the cities of Britain. There is tenor saxophonist Andy Hamilton, born in Port Maria, Jamaica, who took his horn to Birmingham, England where he emulated jazz’s first great tenorist, Coleman Hawkins, from the 1950s onwards. He tells of the epochal Trinidadian calypsonian, Lord Kitchener, who lived, sang and played bass in Manchester, or his compatriot, Lord Woodbine, whose organising skills helped form and dynamise the Beatles in Liverpool in the early 1960s, or Arthur France of Nevis, steel-bandsman and one of the founders of Leeds Carnival.
All this, Le Gendre writes, was happening at a time when the ‘hostile environment’ against black Britons was in creation by the British state – witness Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech-Jones’ post-Windrush comments of 1948 that further movements of Caribbean people to Britain must be ‘detected and checked before they can reach an embarrassing stage’. The consequences of such imperial-minded sentiments covered the entire postwar period, including May 1959, when the Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane was stabbed to death on the streets of Notting Hill.
For Le Gendre and his Trinidadian heart’s-blood, the metaphor of Carnival is crucial to his long story. ‘Carnival is not just something that West Indians do. Carnival is what West Indians ARE’, he exclaims. And Claudia Jones, campaigner, communist and carnivalist, whose own Trinidadian/New York/Notting Hill life was wrapped in music, the struggle for justice, community power and revolution, becomes one of the icons of his book. The determination to never stop the Carnival is a symbol of never abandoning the struggle for black justice, now, too, in post-Grenfell Britain.
It has taken a deathly virus to stop Carnival in its very tracks. But you can be sure, that sometime, on the streets of Port of Spain and Notting Hill, determined and creative human life will bring it back, stomping, rampant, dancing and continuing its never-ending narrative.