Circular Breathing

In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webbs Dixielanders in 1943 through the burgeoning British bebop scene of the early 1950s, the Beaulieu Jazz Festivals of 195661, and the improvisational music making of the 1960s and 1970s, McKay reveals the connections of the music, its players, and its subcultures to black and antiracist activism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, and the New Left. In the process, he provides the first detailed cultural history of jazz in Britain.McKay explores the music in relation to issues of whiteness, blackness, and masculinityall against a backdrop of shifting imperial identities, postcolonialism, and the Cold War. He considers objections to the musics spread by the anti-jazzers alongside the ambivalence felt by many leftist musicians about playing an all-American musical form. At the same time, McKay highlights the extraordinary cultural mixing that has defined British jazz since the 1950s, as musicians from Britains former coloniesparticularly from the Caribbean and South Africahave transformed the genre. Circular Breathing is enriched by McKays original interviews with activists, musicians, and fans and by fascinating images, including works by the renowned English jazz photographer Val Wilmer. It is an invaluable look at not only the history of jazz but also the Left and race relations in Great Britain.