Description
Book Synopsis
An exploration of the political and cultural experience of jazz performers in Britain from the 1950s 'traditional jazz boom' onwards
Trade Review
“
Circular Breathing is a marvelous book. I admire George McKay’s knowledge of jazz, the British left, and cultural history. His ability to blend those elements is to my knowledge unique and unprecedented, and his interviews with jazz musicians enrich immeasurably the story that he is telling.”—Dennis Dworkin, author of
Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies“
Circular Breathing is quite simply the best book so far on jazz in Britain. George McKay acts as a cultural archaeologist, digging up traces of a ninety-year musical presence and writing them back into history. He comments acutely on a music which can be peripheral and exclusive but which he rightly sees as vital to the story of Britain’s social and political evolution.”—Andrew Blake, author of
The Land without Music: Music, Culture, and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain“George McKay's book plugs a significant scholarly gap and provides a much-needed cultural history of jazz in Britain. . . . This book is a hugely impressive, detailed, and fascinating cultural history of jazz in Britain and should be recommended not only to cultural historians but also to historians of the Cold War, the British Left, and those interested in race relations and national identity in twentieth-century Britain.” -- James J. Nott * American Historical Review *
“McKay has written an excellent study of one of the many new cultures and cultural spaces of postwar England. His emphasis on space and culture, gender and space, and race and identity make this a strong work well worth the time to read. . . . [H]is book places the playing and study of jazz music in clear class terms as few scholars have before him.” -- Gordon J. Marshall * Journal of British Studies *
"It is only by reading
Circular Breathing, George McKay's skillful examination of race relations, gender issues, and the Left in relation to British jazz, that we can understand why British jazz wasn't at the center of the European free-jazz revolution. . . . [V]aluable and imaginative scholarship." -- Stephanie Hanson * Bookforum *
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Jazz, Europe, Americanization 1
1. New Orleans Jazz, Protest (Aldermaston), and Carnival (Beaulieu) 45
2. Whiteness and (British) Jazz 87
3. Jazz of the Black Atlantic and the Commonwealth 129
4. The Politics and Performance of Improvisation and Contemporary Jazz in the 1960s and 1970s 191
5. From "Male Music" to Feminist Improvising 243
Conclusion 297
Notes 305
Bibliography 333
Index 349
