ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the process of the translation and reinvention of jazz on British soil. It provides a detailed discussion on the social and political climate in Britain after the First World War, placing the arrival and reception of jazz in this context. The chapter explores specific themes in British jazz reception, particularly as they pertain to the control and transformation of national, racial, gender-based and class-based identities. Fascinating patterns emerge, including the twinned and seemingly contradictory association of jazz with modernity and primality, as well as gendered rhetorics of subversion, liberation, intoxication and war. The chapter sets out to explain what jazz meant to British people in the 1910s and 1920s. It provides a study of Jazz, with a capital J, the engulfing network of discourses, ideologies, assumptions, judgements and assessments that surround jazz with a small j, the music itself.
