ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book charts a developing intersection between African, Caribbean and British popular music. The African music that was brought to Britain had influences from African-American music and British popular music taken to Africa by the colonisers. British popular music of the post-Second World War period was influenced by both white American pop music and African-American music which themselves had always had productive interactions and, indeed, sometimes common origins in the nineteenth century. The book demonstrates how the black British experience might re-orient us to black popular music more broadly, away from the dominance of American perspectives. It discusses the intersections of race and identity as the surviving players developed their careers in the post-war period. Jazz in Britain, along with its black and its white practitioners, is viewed as important in its multiracial form and complex racialised history.
