Unapologetic Expression : The Inside Story of the UK Jazz Explosion

by Marmot, Andre | Music
Published 02/05/2024 by FABER & FABER in the United Kingdom
Hardback | 432 pages
242 x 156mm | 660g

Publishes May 2nd - Hardback

This books comes with a big recommend from me.  UK jazz has given me so much listening pleasure over the last few years, all starting, for me, with gigs at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival by Melt Yourself Down, Nubya Garcia and Joe Armon Jones (the latter two in a low roofed basement of Cavendish House bizarrely). This book successfully places new UK jazz within the context of London's melting pot of post colonial musical influences and within the wider social and political context of jazz history itself.  More than anything, it accurately conveys the excitement these amazing young jazz musicians have created, in what was a fairly moribund genre (in the UK at least), for many years.

A lively, subversive history of the new UK jazz wave, encapsulating its revolutionary spirit and tracing its foundations to birth of the genre itself.

By the end of the last century, jazz music was considered by many to be obsolete and uncool, a genre appreciated only by out of touch white men with deeply questionable taste. And yet, by 2019, a new generation of UK jazz musicians was selling out major venues and appearing on festival line-ups around the world. How has UK jazz rehabilitated its image so totally in twenty-five years? And how did it ever become uncool in the first place?Reaching back to the roots of jazz as the 'unapologetic expression' of oppressed peoples, shaped by the forces of slavery, imperialism and globalisation, Andre´ Marmot places this new wave within the wider context of a divided, postcolonial Britain navigating its identity in a new world order. These artists have crafted a sound which reflects the nation as it is today - a sound connected to the very origins of jazz itself.

Drawing on eighty-six interviews with key architects of this jazz renaissance and those who came before them - from Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd to Gilles Peterson, Courtney Pine and Cleveland Watkiss - Unapologetic Expression captures the radical spirit of a vital British musical movement.