ABSTRACT

This chapter progresses into a discussion of the extent to which Winifred Atwell is a limit case of jazz in the developing pop world of the 1950s on. Atwell came from a supportive middle-class family background in Trinidad, where her parents worked in the health services, mother as a nurse and father as a pharmacist. She was something of a child prodigy on piano, but, following a post-war period studying music in New York City, it was not until she was in her thirties that she arrived in London, in 1946. She arrived to study classical piano at the Royal Academy of Music, and quickly began to support herself by playing ragtime and boogie-woogie at London clubs and hotels in the evenings. Here she drew on her experience and expertise developed playing at the airbase and club frequented by US servicemen in Trinidad during the war. Atwell's class and very particular musical background probably helped her in London.