Don't Stop the Carnival

Black British Music: Vol 1 from the Middle Ages to the 1960s (Black Music in Britian)

Kevin Le Gendre

• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781845234454
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Black British Music and the people who made it, from Tudor times to the mid '60s.
This is a story of empire, colonialism and then the new energies released by the movements for freedom and independence of the post second-world-war years; of the movements of peoples across borders; of the flow of music around the triangle that takes in Africa, the Caribbean, the USA and Great Britain; of temporary but highly influential visitors like Paul Robeson; and of the settlement of ex-colonial peoples who brought their music to Britain, and changed its forms and concerns in the new context. It is the story of institutions like the military that provided spaces for black musicians, but it is also the story of individuals like John Blanke, the black trumpeter in the court of Henry VIII, Ignatius Sancho the composer and friend of Laurence Sterne in the 18th century, early nineteenth century street performers such as Joseph Johnson and Billy Waters, child prodigies such as George Bridgewater and composers such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in the later 19th whose music is still played today. Above all, it is the story of those individuals who changed the face of British music in the post-war period, who collectively fertilized British jazz, popular music and street theatre in ways that continue to evolve in the present.
This is the story of the Windrush generation who brought calypso and steelband to Britain's streets, Caribbean jazz musicians such as Joe Harriot and Shake Keane, or escapees from apartheid South Africa, such as Chris McGregor and Dudu Pukwana who brought modernity and the sounds of Soweto to British jazz, and a later generation who gave ska and reggae distinctive British accents. Based on extensive research and many first-hand interviews, one of the great virtues of Kevin Le Gendre's book is lack of London-centricity, its recognition that much important development took place in cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Bristol. As a noted reviewer of black music for the BBC, the Independent, Echoes and other journals, Le Gendre brings together both a sense of historical purpose and the ability to actually describe music in vivid and meaningful ways.

1 DRUMMING UP BUSINESS

These blacks – as they were designated on the muster rolls – displayed great ability and agility in the handling of their ‘tools’, as Wagner would have said.

— Henry George Farmer

Perched on metal stands, thin and straight as a stork’s legs, the silver half-circles of the steel drum can sometimes be heard on the concourses of shopping centres from Kent to Yorkshire, Lancashire to Essex, Sussex to Tyneside. People may stop and listen to a lone ‘pan man’ on a pavement. They might throw a coin into the leather basket which serves as a carrying case for the instrument, which was initially much maligned when its homeland of Trinidad was under British rule.

It is also not uncommon for bigger bands, steel orchestras, to play an afternoon programme of soothing Yuletide themes as shoppers enter Westfield or Bluewater on Christmas eve to secure last minute gifts. Pan is a staple of the urban consumer experience in the UK.

A competent player will play anything from mainstream pop, jazz or calypso. Music by Sparrow, Kitchener, Miles Davis, The Police, Gnarls Berkeley or Billy Ocean may be supplemented by improvisations that highlight the tonal richness of the instrument, which, when played well, can attain the warmth of a church organ or the piercing clarity of a vibraphone.

If not every Briton has seen a pan player on the street, there can be few who have not watched the spectacle of a steel band on TV during the Notting Hill carnival – “Europe’s biggest street party”. Many children have experienced pan workshops in their schools. There are pan groups of pupils in Seven Sisters, North London and pan groups of pensioners in Gateshead, in Tyneside.

Now a national phenomenon, steel pan is an emblem of something distinctive in the cultural life of the UK that came from outside. Most associate its arrival with mass migration from the Caribbean beginning in the late 1940s, part of our national culture shaped by the arrival of people of colour.

But pan is not the beginning of the story, and this book sets out to answer the question about when, how and with what effects black musicians reached these shores. Even so, the lone pan man who busks on the street is a good place to start. Busking implies entertainment by performers who are generally unknown, rarely documented, and the paving stone on which they stand is anything but spotlit. For the most part, theirs is a hidden history and this book sets out to uncover what can still be found, remembering that much is forever lost to view. Black street musicians are a significant part of the story.

How far back does the story go? Who were the first musicians to be seen and heard on these shores? What instruments did they play? What were the first melodies, harmonies and rhythms brought to life by the hands, feet and breath of earlier black arrivals in Britain?

One thinks of jazz trumpeters in the 1920s and 1930s, gospel singers in the 1890s, or maybe fiddlers in the 18th century, but what of Africans at the time of the Roman Occupation?

There is convincing evidence of a black presence in Britain during the Roman Occupation, quite probably North Africans enlisted in the legions (dispatched to ‘civilize’ the local unruly tribes), who may well have brought their music with them. Indeed, documentation for this period is much better than for the ‘Dark Ages’ after the Romans left, when a researcher intent on uncovering the presence of the first black musicians in Britain hits silence rather than sound.

For the earlier period there is written evidence, albeit sketchy, of the lives of the earliest arrivals from Africa, a vast territory, whose cultural and ethnic spectrum is so wide that qualification is required when identifying an individual as an African. The differences between North and South Africa are as marked as those between East and West; Tunisians, Nigerians, Ethiopians and Ghanaians: the diversity is immense.

The Romans in Britain had access to peoples from around the world, and many were co-opted for military service. In Staying Power, The History of Black People in Britain, Peter Fryer notes that ‘Among the troops defending Hadrian’s wall in the third century AD was a “division of Moors” [numerus Maurorum Aurelianorum]from North Africa. This unit was stationed at Aballava, now Burgh by Sands, near Carlisle.’¹

The word ‘Moor’ has been enshrined in the English language by way of Shakespeare’s powerful tragedy, but before we picture Ira Aldridge, the legendary 19th century London-based African-American stage actor (or latterly Chiwetel Ejiofor) in the title role of Othello, we should clarify what is meant by the term. It referred to the inhabitants of a vast geographical region rather than a single country, covering Morocco, Western Algeria, Western Sahara, Sicily, Malta and that part of the Iberian Peninsula once known as Al-Andalus. In the popular imagination, the Moors were Muslims against whom valiant Christian crusaders waged war in the Middle Ages. But their existence reached much further back in time. Classical literature tells us that the Romans led military campaigns to Mauritania as early as the second century AD, which is why there could have been Moorish soldiers enlisted in the Roman legions sent to retain control over British territory, whose conquest began in AD 43.

Ethnically, the Moors were Arabic or African. Whilst this is sketchy and imprecise, what mattered in Britain was that the Moors were not white. They did not look like the Romans, Celts, Norsemen, Angles, Saxons or other people who inhabited early Europe. Moor, which may be an adaptation of the Latin word Mauri, became common currency in Britain over time and the orthographical variation of Mor, More and Moore reflects its passage into the formal written language.

While the presence of Africans in Roman army units appears an historical fact, there are no accounts of how the Moors acquitted themselves in service, what responsibilities they shouldered, or what relationship they may have had with their Roman colleagues, how they were regarded by the native Britons or what became of them after the fall of the empire in 410 AD.

What is known is that the Romans used brass instruments as a means of communication. The straight trumpets and tubas, cornu – g-shaped with a supporting bar between the two curves – and buccina (a smaller cornu) sounded the orders of charge and retreat, gave signals to adopt a specific battle formation, and featured in grand victory parades and funeral processions. Military historians think that the different units or divisions of the Roman army was each assigned at least two or three drummers or horn players, so it is very likely that a division of Moors – of some 500 persons – would have had musicians.²

Between the fifth and eleventh century, there came wave after wave of invasions from Frisians, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Danes, Norwegians and the Normans who landed in 1066. How many Moors might have remained in Britain during that period is something on which historians cannot agree. Some take the view that there were very few. Others believe there was a residual community from Roman times, perhaps bolstered by the arrival of Moors from parts of Spain, Portugal and France.

Moorish culture, and music in particular, exerted an influence on Spain and Europe that survives to this day. What is considered to be classical Andalusian music has its roots in Arabic music introduced in the 9th century, when Cordoba was a caliphate. There is evidence that by the 11th century a wide variety of string instruments such as the oud, rabab quithara and naquereh were all in fairly regular use. Knights returning from the crusades carried some of these devices back to England, but what also furthered their dissemination were minstrels, itinerant musicians who criss-crossed the land performing for king and queen at court, the lord and lady of the manor as well as the serfs in the public square or the market place.

The term “minstrel”, derived from the word menestrellus, did not particularly denote a singer or player of an instrument. Originally meaning a minor court servant, the term encompassed entertainers of all kinds – acrobats, dancers, jugglers, actors, conjurers, puppeteers, oral poets and tellers of tales.³ The Register of Royal and Baronial minstrels in the 13th century mentions Conrad the geige player, Gillot the harper, Bestrude the vieille player as well as numerous players of the tabor, a small hand drum. Minstrelsy was not an exclusively male occupation. Mathilda, a saltatrix – acrobat or tumbler – appeared at a 1306 Pentecostal feast. There was no rigid separation between these different skills; poetry and storytelling were often performed by or with a musician, which was in the lineage of the poets of antiquity who accompanied their stanzas with instruments such as the lyre.⁴

Players could give “the men light hearts by thy pipe and the women light heels by thy tabor”, but not everybody viewed minstrels benevolently. There was a sharp divide between religious and secular song and harpers or tumblers were, in the eyes of the church and the pious, to be scorned. The 12th century scholar John of Salisbury lumped together court entertainers with other figures of ill repute: “Concerning actors and mimics, buffoons and harlots, panders other like human monsters, which the prince ought to exterminate entirely than foster.”⁵

Even so, because they were in demand for social events, the numbers of minstrels increased to the extent that the state felt it necessary to legislate the conditions of their existence. Minstrel guilds thus formalized what was hitherto informal. There were specializations. Players had to take tests in competence after a minimum of four years training. An officially recognized trumpeter under the patronage of the King or another member of the royal court was a post of prestige, and the principle of high standards was enshrined in the practice of various guilds.

As Henry George Farmer, an authority on early music in Britain, observes: “The minstrel guild system of Medieval and Renaissance times played a notable part in the development of wind music, since the organizations were not only protectors of the artists but also conservatories of the art.”⁶ This more regulated existence raised musical standards at a time when the arrival of new instruments and musical ideas from abroad led to a growth of particular types of players. Generally speaking, the Middle Ages were marked by the rise of trumpeters and kettle drummers, both in the court and in the battlefield. The trumpeter announced the arrival of a nobleman, signalled meal times or indicated specific hours during his watch, and was an essential cog in the machine that kept order in a royal life.

This is the context for one of the earliest and most iconic images of a black British musician, or at least a black musician in Britain. In 1511, Katherine of Aragon, two years into her marriage to Henry VIII, gave birth to a son, Henry. To mark the occasion a tournament was held at Westminster and a gorgeous hand-painted scroll shows the pomp and circumstance in fine detail. Mounted on horses are three trumpeters adorned by splendid royal livery with ornate fleur de lys ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. Drumming up Business
• 2. From Street Song to Sonata
• 3. Africa, America, Victoria
• 4. War Songs and Hiawatha
• 5. Dahomey Dance
• 6. Clubs in the City, Parties in the Valleys
• 7. Atlantic Crossings
• 8. Calypsonian Manning, Trumpeter Thompson, Hitman Hutch
• 9. Charing Cross London and Charing Cross Glasgow
• 10. From Radio Days to Movie Nights
• 11. Ocean ’n’ Midlands
• 12. Clambering on a
• 13. Calypso, Creole, Conflict, Cricket
• 14. Scaling Dizzy Heights
• 15. North by Northwest
• 16. Oriental Balls for Absolute Beginners
• 17. British Steel from Abroad
• 18. Do Start the Carnival
• 19. Fascinating People, Great Music
• 20. The Beat Turns Blue
• 21. Gospel Train: Running All the Way Home
• 22. Black Rock, Blacks Rock
• 23. Drums Unlimited
• 24. Exile on Gerrard Street/ Don’t Stop the Carnival
• 25. Epilogue: …With that Gun in your Hand?
• Index