ABSTRACT

This chapter proposes the consecration of jazz, in its distinctively British high art form, was only achieved once it became recognized as akin to European classical music, as a vernacular expression of European experimental art music. The elevation of British jazz to the status of high art, while welcome in terms of exposing jazz to the possibility of public financial support, was also an act of reduction in so far as it served to disguise the emerging diversity of musical forms and peoples that actually underpinned the British jazz scene in the conjuncture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Thus, consecration not only involved a rejection of the trade or mainstream popular idioms that had hitherto been seen to mark the customary style of British jazz, but also the raced and nationally specific history of jazz, both as a black American music and as an emergent British post-colonial form.