6 CLUBS IN THE CITY, PARTIES IN THE VALLEYS
The presence of Colonial seamen is socially undesirable. The police are anxious to get rid of them. It would be safer and better to place all the men in concentration camps.
— Chief Immigration Officer’s statement on black males in Tiger Bay, Wales, 1919.
When I myself have appeared on a concert platform in Wales, the Welsh people have appeared to be the most responsive, there appeared to be a real link between us.
— Paul Robeson.
Following the success of In Dahomey, there was an increased presence of African-American musicians in London. This was partly the result of the formation of the Clef Club, one of the earliest known black artist collectives, which was set up in 1910 in New York by the composer, arranger and bandleader James Reese Europe. As a meeting place, forum for ideas and an informal labour exchange, the organization yielded a number of progressive ensembles that made their mark on the European continent during the First World War. Reese Europe formed the High Society Orchestra, which played imaginatively scored ragtime that met with critical acclaim, and then led the Hellfighters, an all-black military band of the 369th US Infantry that enjoyed enormous success when it played in French cities. Reese Europe’s ability to compose and arrange rags, marches and cakewalks to high orchestral standards did much to enhance the reputation of black music as a burgeoning force abroad. Europe’s legacy was also the existence of satellite ensembles that were affiliated to the original Clef Club organisation and went some way to fulfilling its stated ideal of greater opportunity for black musicians. Unlike Europe, who died in tragic circumstances upon his return to America after the war, some of these bands travelled to Britain.1
In London, the Jamaican-born Dan Kildare (1879-1920) led a banjo group under the name of the Clef Club Orchestra, which had a residency at Ciro’s in the West End. As a bow to the lingering presence of minstrel vocabulary in popular consciousness, the band, one of the earliest Black string bands, whose recordings can still be found, was renamed Ciro’s Club Coon Orchestra and proved a successful draw with several remarkable musicians. One such, the drummer Louis Mitchell, known for his technical skill and charisma, later took his own group, the Syncopating Sextette, to Glasgow.
Dan Kildare was in London between 1915-1920. When the Ciro club was shut down for selling liquor without a licence, Kildare performed in a duo with a drummer called Harvey White. He married a pub-owner called Mrs Fitch, but then succumbed to drug addiction and alcoholism. His life in Britain ended tragically when he murdered his wife and her sister and then shot himself. 2
Ensembles like Kildare’s can be seen as part of a wider trend of African-Americans experimenting with instrumentation and personnel, as strings, horns and percussion were all used by black bandleaders. Another inventive combo that visited Britain was Joe Jordan’s Syncopated Orchestra. A brilliant arranger and composer, who had worked with James Reese Europe in New York and in minstrel shows in theatres all over America, Jordan (1882-1971) made his earliest appearances in the UK in 1905, and in the years that followed he returned many times. In 1915 he led his Syncopated Orchestra for the revue, Push And Go at London’s Hippodrome, bringing together singers, dancers and musicians. The ensemble included piano, banjo, cornet, trombone and drums, a bold choice of instrumentation that yielded rich timbres from upper to lower register. In other ensembles Jordan had used saxophones, trumpet, guitar and mandolin, evidence of his willingness to stretch his textural palette.
Following the London engagement, the Syncopated Orchestra embarked upon a tour of the regional network of grand Empire theatres before some of its members returned to America and others, pianist W.H. Dorsey and drummer Hughes Pollard settled in Britain. Jordan began working with the Clef Club drummer Louis Mitchell as “the Comedy Entertainers & Syncopators”. The return in 1919 of Will Marion Cook further expanded the African American London fraternity. Cook was already known to London audiences from the success he had enjoyed with the show, In Dahomey, in 1903. Joe Jordan had been both the assistant director and business manager of the New York Syncopated Orchestra Cook formed in 1918. 3
Perhaps the most influential of the visitors was the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, what the New York Syncopated Orchestra became (via being the American Syncopated Orchestra). In their earliest days the ensemble was booked for a six-month residency at the Philharmonic Hall in Great Portland Street, central London, playing two shows a day. They had a revolving door in terms of membership. The departures and arrivals of singers, players and dancers were sufficiently frequent to make it possible for audiences to see and hear new approaches. With soloists and vocalists who were set to become stars in their own right, the Orchestra became a prototype of the ensemble-as-institution that would nurture and launch new talent and develop new performance ideas.
The array of instruments SSO featured greatly widened the harmonic range of the bands led by Jordan, Mitchell and Kildare – violins, mandolins, banjos, guitars, saxophones, trumpets, trombones, bass horn, timpani, pianos and drums. Cook was evidently drawn to a sound that was both symphonic and rhythmic. This band also had a prestigious engagement from the Prince of Wales who requested its presence to perform at a specially drained lake in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. Although associated mainly with ragtime and syncopated music, the SSO developed an eclectic repertoire that reflected Cook’s concerns to dignify black culture. Hence, in addition to ragtime, Negro spirituals and plantation songs, there were European classical pieces by composers such as Brahms, Dvorak and Grieg. The latter’s Peer Gynt was given a syncopated arrangement. This was “blacking up” of a different kind to that of the Minstrel age. The fact that the SSO straddled many forms of music and dance, from the cakewalk and plantation melodies to banjo tunes and light classical music, made it a vital representation of the flexibility and versatility of black performers in the immediate First World War period, located as they were between high and low-brow worlds, the supposed dignity of European aesthetics and the energy of Black music. As much as the SSO can be seen as a forerunner of what would be termed the jazz big band or swing orchestra, all the available documentation on their repertoire, engagements and personnel, above all else flags up their eclecticism. Such diversity was paramount to the orchestra’s economic survival as well as a sign of the ongoing ambiguity over where black musicians should be located on the cultural exchequer, clear as it was that they were doing something that was capable of striking a chord with mainstream audiences in both North America and in Europe.
Of no less significance was the fact that the SSO was a truly Black diasporic phenomenon, as members were drawn from America, Africa, and the West Indies, as well as Black Britain, such as the vocalist Evelyn Dove. Of Ghanaian – or as it was known in Edwardian times – The Gold Coast – and English heritage, Dove, who studied pianoforte and singing at the Royal Academy of Music, became a highly successful artist whose career spanned early jazz and musical theatre. SSO was one of the first major gigs that she had in 1921, appearing with the orchestra in Glasgow.
The SSO had an impressive personnel and a wide-ranging songbook. There were some 24 players and 19 singers, and after its first three-year sojourn in Britain, the original American personnel changed extensively. To members from New Orleans, New York and Philadelphia were added players from Guyana, Barbados, Antigua, Sierra Leone and Ghana, giving the ensemble an international identity that was a precursor to the transcontinental collaborations that were a feature of the jazz scene in the 1950s.
The SSO was a touring band that also played in the regions. While the response to Cook’s musicians was largely positive, his aim of elevating the Negro race through music that eschewed the staples of minstrelsy still proved difficult to achieve seventeen years after he had encountered the same problems with the audiences of In Dahomey. A look at the publicity for a 1920 SSO show at the Albert Hall in Nottingham shows the continuing depth of racist sentiment of those engaged in the promotion of the ensemble:
To hear this Orchestra with it singers is to experience an entirely new sensation in Music, and in these days when a love of novelty is one of the most striking features of the human character, they should prove immensely popular wherever they go.
The Negroes are a race comparatively young to the complexities of modern civilization, and therefore nearer to nature than we are, and to this fact is probably due the spontaneity of their art.4
In spite of these assumptions, African-American musicians were proving to be a good deal more than naively spontaneous when it came to exploring the possibilities of their instruments and bringing new verve to American music. This was as Cook’s former teacher, Antonin Dvorak, had predicted in the 1890s. There was no greater symbol of innovative artistry than the young New Orleans trumpeter-vocalist Louis Armstrong, who was producing anything from tunes in “raggedy” time to the raucous polyphony of the New Orleans style, also known as Dixieland. With its frantic tempos, throbbing two-beat pulse, spiralling phrases and tightly meshed counterpoint, drawn from the overlap of clarinet, trombone and sometimes two cornets, his music crackled with an effervescence that was hard to ignore.
At this point, to understand later developments in Black British music, it is necessary to cross the Atlantic to look at a period of intense musical innovation in the USA.
Black music in America has always been marked by the diversity and complex relationships between its sub-genres. There was the sacred of the spiritual, the profane of the blues, but both feature the use of call and response and pitch-bending and emotional intensity in vocal delivery. Musicians drew on all these materials, and it was out of the ragtime groups, solo pianists, banjo ensembles, blues singers, marching-band brass players and the syncopated orchestras of the early 20th century that grew that grand African-American musical fermentation that became jazz, a singular word for a plurality of ideas.
Originally, a music of collective improvisation in the bands of New Orleans, one of the distinguishing features of the development of jazz was the extension of the solo break into longer passages of improvisation. This was the space that allowed and encouraged someone like Louis Armstrong, a prodigious soloist able to create an array of rich tones and potent, danceable rhythms, really to come into his own. Whether they used brass to evoke the joy of laughing or reeds to express the despair of weeping, or made the singing voice imitate a horn, African Americans showed that their music had a spirit of invention that rendered it “the sound of surprise”. It was this quality that led to its lionization, especially in Europe, where some critics were ready to give fulsome praise.5
However, the first real arrival of jazz in Britain came not from an African American group but from a white band, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, from New Orleans. This had a series of engagements in Britain at roughly the same time as the Southern Syncopated Orchestra. This all-white ensemble stayed for just one year rather than the SSO’s three, yet the synchronicity of the two groups together paved the way for the future growth of jazz culture in Britain. What was problematic were the alleged claims made by the ODJB’s leader, Nick La Rocca, that the “real” origins of jazz were actually white and not black. When the ODJB quintet (cornet, trombone, clarinet, piano and drums), appeared at the Palladium, the impresario Albert De Courville presented it grandiloquently as: “For the first time in England. The creation of jazz. The sensation of America.”6
Due to a lack of accurate documentation, the origins of jazz are anything but clear, but if these musicians called themselves Original Dixieland Jazz Band, then they were laying claim to a title that was undoubtedly not theirs, muddying the waters on who was really the first person to make the crucial innovations – which in all probability was Freddie Keppard’s Original Creole Band, operating a good decade before the ODJB. And then there was Buddy Bolden, going back to the turn of the century, but sadly never recorded.
To the question of “who” was added the “what”. The advent of this new form of black music was also shrouded in semantic confusion, for it was “jazz” to some, “jass” to others (possibly derived from jism – spunk or sperm, but with an undoubted sexual connotation), and also the lesser known jaz, which, according to an article published in the San Francisco Bulletin in 1913, meant “anything that takes manliness or effort or energy or activity or strength of soul.” This range of definitions reflected the birth of something maddeningly elusive, teetering on the cusp of invigoration, disorientation and adulteration.7 There was also debate on the need to plane down the rough edges of whatever jazz was and elevate it to fit European symphonic norms. Inevitably, so-called jazz bands were often programmed on variety bills, often to the dismay of some of the other acts – as well as certain audiences.
Pathé newsreels presented jazz as very much a form of novelty in which zany humour is foregrounded. In one clip, a group of saxophonists attempt to charm animals at a zoo and have the converse effect – “A little jazz has a very restless effect on Mr. Bear” – while in another, musicians are seen hanging off a plane in mid air like circus performers as they hit the “high notes”. Tellingly, all the musicians in these scenes are white.
Regardless of the legitimacy of their claim or name, the ODJB residency at the Palladium exposed the cultural fissures in British society at the time. Just below the band’s billing is an advert for Maud Gibson’s Academy, 20 West Kensington Gardens, W.14, which offered “classical dancing, rhythmic exercises, ballroom dancing and ‘grace culture’.” A tutor called May Vincent took singing and elocution classes. The entire advert suggests decorum and deportment, which chimes with one of the house rules right at the start of the programme: “Ladies are respectfully requested to remove their hats so as to afford greater comfort to those seated behind.” Sightlines are important and standards of behaviour must be maintained. At the end of the evening, which also included “comedy creations”, jugglers and a “grand orchestral selection”, the audience was expected to rise to lift their voices for a rendition of “God Save The King”. Whilst ladies were requested to remove their headgear and maintain a respectable stance, antics such as “shimmying” were not encouraged at all. How concert-goers behaved at a public performance, the extent to which they engaged, physically as well emotionally, their freedom of movement, was a vexed issue. Evidently, for some, the Victorian ideals of buttoned-up, if not strait-jacketed behavioural norms still held sway in the 1920s.
By contrast, the ODJB performed with “a jazz dancer”, Johnnie Dale, who according to one report “came in and wiggled himself about like a filleted eel about to enter the stewing pot”, which the reviewer dismissed as “the most discordant and uninteresting entertainments I have ever seen.”
The phenomenon of jazz dancing was seen as a threat to the moral order, because of its association with wildness and blackness. Thus members of the clergy in the south London suburbs felt that they had to take a stand against the frightful degradation creeping in through dance. An article published in The Times in March, 1919 recounted tales of racial bacchanalia in darkest Berkshire.
Presiding at the annual meeting of the Maidenhead Preventive And Rescue Association at Maidenhead, Canon Drummond strongly denounced Jazz dancing… a dance so low, so demoralizing and of such low origin – the dance of low niggers in America, and with every conceivable crude instrument, not to make music, but to make noise.8
Such racism both dogged black music – and provoked it. Levels of volume in jazz were perceived as cacophonous; bands were happy to endorse that perception – from the altitude of the notes reached by the brass and reeds, the theatrical stance of musicians who tilted their horns skyward, to the thunderous low thuds and sharp crashes issuing from the drum kit.9
It was the drum that perhaps became the key signifier of jazz, a source of consternation to jazz’s detractors precisely because of the amount of noise the instrument could produce and the violence of the action required to make it. In the 21st century, we are so used to the sight of a drum kit that it is hard to imagine how strange it might have appeared to an early 20th century audience, but it was indeed an unusual and, more to the point, a new mechanical invention. The earliest models were nothing more than one cymbal, a snare and a bass drum, but the latter was a huge dome that dwarfed the musician seated behind it. A foot pedal was needed to play the bass drum and later the high-hat, and these two contraptions underlined the fact that the drum kit engages the whole body of the musician, all four limbs providing the opportunity for an individual to exercise polyrhythmic creativity. This made the jazz drum kit revolutionary, a small orchestra within the larger orchestra of horns and piano. Players also added components to the drum kit as they saw fit, from tom toms to cowbells to timpani and, in some cases, gongs and Chinese temple blocks. So an instrument, which was really an aggregation of several instruments, could be set up and modified according to the vision of the individual drummer, enabling a degree of personal expression that was of enormous benefit to any band that was attempting to create a palette of original timbres. Early pioneers such as Warren “Baby” Dodds showed that the “traps set” could greatly enhance the narrative of an arrangement, and prove central to the jazz aesthetic, which in turn hugely shaped twentieth-century popular music.
Inevitably the sight of musicians moving, either crouching down, bending knees, or thrusting shoulders upwards as they produced new sounds, was troubling to a society that, just a few decades previously, had not looked kindly on gospel groups who stomped their feet during performances. What jumps out in early footage of Louis Armstrong is how much he shuffles when he listens to other musicians playing, as if he is absorbing the notes into every muscle of his body, like an additional source of energy that will ignite his own imagination as a soloist.
As compositions such as “Tiger Rag” (first recorded by the ODJB in 1919) and “Dippermouth Blues” (first recorded by King Oliver in 1923) became standards, pieces that were played so frequently that their appreciation assumed the status of core values for a growing audience in America and Europe, the arbiters of taste and self-appointed moral custodians found themselves in an invidious position, because this “extraordinary noise”, “crazy rhythm”, or whatever it was, this otherness and outlandishness, also carried great exhilaration. The net result was a bi-polarity of attraction-repulsion, embrace-censure, fascination-fear, to quote the scholar Catherine Parsonage, which led to a wide spectrum of behavioural and attitudinal responses to the so-called “Jazz Age”. On one hand, men of the cloth felt compelled to take a stand against the scourge of jazz dancing. On the other, moneyed men about town with a taste for fine tailoring were minded to take lessons in that same devilish new trend in swish apartments in Mayfair.
With the advent of the Parisian “vogue negre”, epitomised by the sensational success of Josephine Baker, the identification of black expression with modernity and freedom from social constraints had widespread currency. References, either implicit or explicit, to jazz in other artforms such as painting, dramaturgy and literature showed the extent to which the phenomenon was affecting all cultural discourse. In Britain, the debate around jazz showed clearly that social and behavioural norms were in a state of flux.
This is evident in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). The book broaches the subjects of class, education, social standing and the metropolitan-regional divide, as much as it does sexuality. In its latter stages, the story of Constance Chatterley’s affair with the gamekeeper Mellors in the “utter, soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands” is broadened to chart her tentative, stuttering liberation in the exotic settings of Paris and Venice. In Paris, the new Black music is seen as something both risqué and outré, a “drug” aligned with “hot sun, slow water… cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth”, as well as a potent, cosmopolitan eroticism that divides the modest Constance from her more openly hedonistic, if not “animalistic” sister Hilda.
Hilda liked jazz because she could plaster her stomach against the stomach of some so-called man, and let him control her movement from the visceral centre, here and there across the floor, and then she could break loose and ignore ‘the creature.’ He had been made use of. Poor Connie was rather unhappy. She wouldn’t jazz because she simply couldn’t plaster her stomach against some creature’s stomach.10
This evocation of “creatures” rubbing up, or rather “grinding” against one another would have outraged proponents of more chaste ballroom dancing, but the passage is also striking for its inversion of gender power. The men are casually objectified by Hilda, discarded after serving their purpose, and this is linked to the role that jazz dancing played in providing more freedom of movement for women. The post-war period was notable for imported Black dances from America and these tended to be centred on the individual rather than the couple (in which the man led the woman). Jazz and jazz dancing in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is portrayed as raw, unfiltered and unprecedented.
This appeal did not escape the record companies, so that new record releases were invariably associated with all of the latest “steps”. So a 1920 Columbia records list, featuring both jazz and Hawaiian titles, promised “joyous, sparkling up to the minute music” for the “newest and liveliest dances.” The Charleston, the jitterbug and the rubber legs were a must for anybody in tune with the times. A quick glance at the original sheet music of a landmark piece such as Jelly Roll Morton’s “Jelly Roll Blues” highlights this. Above the title is the slogan “Full of Originality”. Below it is the word “Fox-Trot”.11
However, the record companies were also guilty of presenting jazz in a way that trivialized and demeaned rather than legitimized its progenitors. For example, a promotional poster by the Victor label for the ODJB dramatically stated: “They say the first instrument for the first Jass band was an empty lard can, by humming into which sounds were produced resembling those of a saxophone with the croup.” This framing of the music chimed with complaints about “crude” noise, which had so exercised the conscience of some Home Counties religious leaders.
If promotional posters for the Southern Syncopated Orchestra could hail the band as an “entirely new sensation in music”, with the caveat that Negroes are a “race comparatively young to the complexities of modern civilization”, it was clear that the British musical establishment did not see Black artists as equals.
Trying to determine the exact social and cultural valuation of new black music around the 1920s is problematic, precisely because of the duality of thrill and threat it carried: the recognition of the power of African-American bands to affect white audiences countered by the projection of anything from outright suspicion to deep prejudice; from exoticisation to wilful racialised fantasy. What jazz meant as a form of musical expression was confused with the question marks that were still hanging over white evaluations of the “Negro type”. White they may have been, but the Original Dixieland Jazz Band were still playing Black music and, along with the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, were viewed by their detractors as distasteful, even if the smart set in Mayfair and various playboy royals were somewhat “gassed” by what they heard.
Beyond the social clamour, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that these jazz groups had members who were exceptional musicians, none more so than the SSO’s clarinettist, Sidney Bechet. His talent was too great to ignore and the endorsement given to him by the European classical establishment – such as the renowned Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet dubbing him a “genius” – was significant in moving jazz towards a greater legitimacy. As noted, the SSO not only played jazz, but classical music and music hall songs, and Bechet stood out as a player adept at handling such an eclectic repertoire.
His background was significant. Bechet’s grandfather, known as Omar, had been a slave who was both a dancer and drummer, who played an important part in the musical gatherings in Congo Square in New Orleans, and it was he that Bechet credited as a major source of inspiration. Sidney Bechet took up the clarinet as a boy and as a teenager he played in bands led by legends such as Bunk Johnson before eventually coming to the attention of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra’s leader, Will Marion Cook, joining the group on its visit to Britain. Along with Armstrong, Bechet embodied the ideal of the jazz soloist, showing the ability to operate within a dynamic that involved individual-collective interaction and improvisation. Reading scores did not suffice, as Bechet himself explained. “When you’re really playing ragtime, you’re feeling it out, you’re playing to the other parts, you’re waiting to understand what the other man’s doing, and then you’re going with his feeling, adding what you have of your feeling.”12
Other musicians recognised the creative avenues that Bechet and others were opening up in spontaneous improvisation, and the impression he made on them was increased by his willingness to teach others. He had several pupils to whom he passed on invaluable knowledge of his striking use of vibrato and his intensely lyrical, melodic approach to the art of soloing, thus joining the linage of expatriate African-Americans, such as the Fisk Jubilee singer Thomas Rutland, who also gave lessons in addition to their own activities as professional musicians.
An innovative thinker who purchased an instrument in London that proved to be a considerable asset to the players of his generation and beyond – the “straight” horn, the soprano saxophone – Bechet was also something of a hellraiser. His erratic behaviour eventually caused his departure from SSO, after which he joined another group called The Jazz Kings, who replaced the ODJB at the Hammersmith Palais and thereafter he played at a central London club called Rector’s whose clientele leaned towards the city’s seamier side. Arrested and charged with affray in 1922, Bechet was imprisoned and then deported, eventually settling in Paris where he became a national icon.13
In the Valleys
From the earliest days of minstrelsy and blackface, the language of New World Blacks, enslaved or free, was subject to caricature. Plantation life in America and the Caribbean did not provide formal education, so newly imported Africans had to learn the rudiments of English in an improvised way, which led to the creation of a Creole with a limited vocabulary and a grammar and syntax based on African rather than European models. This developing language was seen as corrupted or broken English, rather than a distinctive language growing from two parents, as English itself had developed as a Creole based on its Anglo-Saxon and Norman French parents. Black speech, like other “dialectal” speeches such as Irish English or Indian English became a target for ridicule. One example is the representation of the character of Cook, “the old black” in Melville’s Moby Dick as the speaker of an infantile, bastardized language:
“When dis old brack man dies,” said the negro slowly, changing his whole air and demeanour, “He hisself won’t go nowhere; some bressed angel will come and fetch him.”14
In the creation of language, the Black was seen as an imperfect imitator. The philosopher David Hume wrote of the eighteenth century Black Jamaican poet Francis Williams (who wrote learnedly in Latin): “In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.”15 The emergence of accomplished black writers such as Olaudah Equiano and others in the late 18th and early 19th century was one important counter to such prejudice.
On a lighter note, there is the story of J. Alexander, a St. Vincentian on a trip to England, who learnt Welsh from the ship’s captain. As well as reading prose, he learned a number of popular ballads, and as Ray Costello explains, when he arrived in Liverpool and settled there:
This was to stand him in good stead during the 1870s, enabling him to earn a living as a street-singer in the absence of other employment, literally singing for his supper.16
A West Indian singing Welsh songs in Liverpool in the late 19th century may seem unusual, but it is not wholly incongruous. Wales is an integral part of the story of Blacks in Britain. Cardiff, like Liverpool, is home to one of the oldest African-Caribbean and mixed communities in the United Kingdom.
With industrial growth, in the 1850s Cardiff exported large quantities of coal, iron and steel to Europe and subsequently became a thoroughfare for trade. Lord Bute, a wealthy landholder, invested heavily in the port and the dockland area was rechristened Butetown in his honour. This became the home of black colonial seamen who decided to stay in Cardiff after service around the world. ‘Black’ Butetown eventually became known as Tiger Bay, a name implying both danger and the exotic, and not entirely original, since it was also the name of the docklands settlement in Limehouse, in the east end of London. Scandinavian, African, Chinese and East Indian (or lascar) seamen settled there. As was often the case in Victorian England, street singers and fiddlers, very often African-Americans, and prostitutes were on hand to entertain deep into the night.
The inhabitants of Tiger Bay in Cardiff included Somalis, Arabs, Indians, West Africans and African-Caribbeans. In 1935, 2,179 black sailors were listed amongst its population, all in the British merchant navy.
Another source of black settlement in Wales was the African Institute at Colwyn Bay, on the north coast, long a popular seaside resort. This had been founded by a Christian missionary, William Hughes, who, after working in the Congo in the early 1880s, brought young boys and girls from all over the Africa to receive vocational training with a view to them returning to their homeland to assist in missionary work. Some, instead, settled in Wales.17
Wales was also on the vaudeville circuit, with venues in Wrexham and Cardiff. Many of the Black acts that criss-crossed England also visited hose places. The Fisk Jubilee Singers performed at Clydach, Aberavon and Ystalyfera, while Charles Johnson and Dora Dean, dubbed “A Merry Pair Who Make Things Hustle” brought their lively act to the Swansea Empire in 1905.
Some black musicians opted to make the land of “green valleys” their home and as early as the 1850s a handful of West Indian players were scattered around the country, making a living through performances in local theatres as well as making occasional tours.
Nonetheless, the biggest concentration of black people in Wales was in Tiger Bay, and this presence was not welcome to some. Whilst racial harmony was noted among the children of African and West Indian seamen and their white schoolmates who were waving Union Jacks to celebrate Empire Day in 1913, in the aftermath of the First World War, a period of economic decline and unemployment, creeping paranoia over miscegenation came to the boil. “Half-caste” children were seen as a sign of the eroding moral fibre of the nation, the result of white women being corrupted by black men, or as the Western Mail of 17 January 1918 delicately put it, “A Cardiff problem/White Women In Alien Boarding Houses.” The aliens were Somalis and Arabs, whose alleged sexual prowess so alarmed the local police chiefs that when a black cricket team was formed, white flannels were not deemed appropriate for the players because they were too revealing.
Tensions came to a head in a race riot in 1919, during which black Butetown suffered sustained assaults from the neighbouring white community. White attackers made it clear that Blacks should stay in their own quarter, or violent retribution would be visited upon them. The investigating Chief Immigration Officer reported:
The presence of Colonial seamen is socially undesirable. The police are anxious to get rid of them. It would be safer and better to place all the men in concentration camps.18
Things didn’t go that far, though repressive measures were taken against black sailors, including the 1925 Special Restriction Order of the revealingly named “Colonial Alien Seamen Act”. Black sailors had to register with the police and carry an ID card bearing their photo and a thumbprint. Their movements could now be tracked. Though born and bred in Cardiff, these seamen were to be treated as foreigners, and as Neal Evans eloquently put it in his article “Regulating The Reserve Army: Arabs, Blacks And The Local State In Cardiff 1914-15”: “Being black and British became almost impossible.”19
Having lost their citizenship, the black seamen of Tiger Bay found it increasingly difficult to find work on government-subsidized ships. In response, they formed the Coloured Seamen’s Union, which was an effective and constructive means of channelling the energy of the community. Desperate times called for solidarity and Neal Evans argues that these oppressive days for black Butetown fostered a great sense of togetherness. The union was less a labour organisation than the organiser of recreational activities. More than ever, song was a form of solace. Among the social activities was the house or “rent party”, where musicians would play for dances in exchange for food and drink. Sometimes a small fee would be charged at the door but for those wishing to socialize and to meet the opposite sex the levy was evidently worthwhile.
The phenomenon of rent parties had been established in African-American communities in Harlem at the turn of the century, where stories of musicians hopping from one engagement to the next, on increasingly full stomachs, were legion. Meeting in the homes of other black people offered a safe environment when the world outside their doorstep was hostile, and although the rent party had existed in Butetown prior to the riots and control orders, afterwards they assumed a greater importance. The strengthening of community also brought musicians together. Playing the part of the artistic patriarch in Butetown was Antonio Deniz (1878-1931), a black Cape Verdean seaman who had married a Cardiff woman of mixed race, Gertrude Boston. She was a pianist and he a guitarist and violinist and they taught these instruments to others, including their two sons Joe and Frank and another youngster, Don Johnson. Interviewed by the author/ photographer Valerie Wilmer, Johnson recalled:
I used to go to the Deniz house regularly. Their father played the quatro and was teaching Frank, and Joe could play the ukulele so I started to bring the mandolin over. All we could play at first were calypsos, Sly Mongoose, The Bargee. After about twelve months in the front room of Mrs Deniz’s house we became quite good. It was like a music shop in there, we were collecting all these instruments.20
Indeed, the Deniz household became the source of important developments in British jazz in the 1930s and 1940s, the sons playing in such bands as the Blue Hawaiians, The Spirits of Rhythm and the Hermanos Diaz Cuban Rhythm Band – discussed in a later chapter.
Given the large numbers of West Indian seamen who were living in Butetown it is inevitable that they should have been playing calypsos but the use of the ukulele and mandolin as well as the quatro lends the scene an wider cultural currency.
The quatro, used in the early calypso bands, was a small 4-string guitar introduced to Trinidad by Venezuelan bands in the 1850s, so when Don Johnson sat down to learn to play with Frank Deniz he was exposed to one of the earliest instruments in West Indian folk music, and a surviving Spanish element in Trinidadian music. The quatro also came out at Christmas when bands toured the villages playing and singing a very specific musical form known as parang, which had arrived with migrants from Venezuela. Moving from house to house in rural communities, the parang singers used instruments such as quatro, flute, maracas, toc-toc, scratcher and box bass and sang nativity songs and tunes on daily life. The families whom they entertained greeted them with food and drink such as pastilles, arepas, sorrel and ginger beer. Johnson recalls how his musical development unfolded in rather similar circumstances:
After a year or so we got a reputation as a calypso group. We would play at house dances for when the seamen came back. We’d play from ten at night ’til five or six in the morning non-stop. There’d be a long table with West Indian food, a lot of the men were good cooks or they’d teach their wives. The dances would be attended by all the local ladies of the night and all the West Indians, and, after a while we’d be playing three times a week. Calypso was mainly the music that we heard, these guys would get hold of as many West Indian records as they could.21
Eventually a coterie of very gifted black Welsh musicians emerged from these gatherings. In addition to Johnson and the Deniz brother there was George Glossop who, picking up the vogue for the Hawaiian guitar that swept the world in the 1920s, specialized in the languorous tremolo phrases of that instrument. There was also a talented double bassist, Victor Parker. These musicians formed a band that could play both Hawaiian music and calypso, though after a time the Deniz brothers left Wales to further their careers in London. Even so, the development of Black music in Britain was as much a regional as a metropolitan story.
For all the laurels heaped on artists in high society, Black communities on the frontline of working-class Britain were facing a worsening situation as “colonial” subjects at the end of the First World War. Soldiers had been recruited from all over the Empire to form units like the Gold Coast Regiment, the King’s African Rifles or the West Indian Regiment, and once military engagement came to an end, some were demobbed in Britain, pushing up the numbers of Blacks resident in Britain to unprecedented levels. Their valour on the battlefield was eclipsed by their presence in the high street, the dance hall or the labour exchange, and they became scapegoats for the difficulties faced by all demobbed soldiers who had to adapt to civvy street.
Racial tension was an inevitable consequence. The Cardiff riot in 1919 was not an isolated case. Disturbances also occurred in other cities with sizeable concentrations of people of colour – Glasgow, Liverpool, South Shields, Hull, Salford and London.
Notes
1. Mervyn Cooke, Chronicles of Jazz (Thames and Hudson, 1997), pp. 40-41
2. Catherine Parsonage, Evolution of Jazz in Britain (Ashgate, 2005).
3. Parsonage, op. cit.
4. Supplied by Nottinghamshire Country Library Service and reprinted in Black Music In Britain, Essays on the Afro-Asian Contribution to Popular Music, edited by Paul Oliver (Oxford University Press, 1990).
5. Whitney Balliett, The Sound of Surprise (JBC, 1961).
6. Words from the programme for the ODJB.
7. See Mervyn Cooke, op. cit.
8. Quoted in Cooke, op. cit.
9. What follows regarding the development of the drum comes from conversations the author held, particularly with older African American jazz artists, over a number of years.
10. D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Penguin 1997), p. 271.
11. From a 78 rpm Victor record label, 1915.
12. See Fairweather, Carr & Priestley, The Rough Guide to Jazz (Rough Guides, 2000).
13. On Bechet, see Daniel Sidney Bechet, Sidney Bechet My Father (Books of Africa, 2014), p. 14 and Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle (Da Capo, 2002).
14. Herman Melville, Moby Dick ([1851]Penguin Ed.) p. 290.
15. David Hume, footnote to “Of National Character” (1748), in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, Volume III.
16. Ray Costello, Black Liverpool: The Early History of Britain’s Oldest Black Community (Picton, 2001).
17. For more information on the black heritage of Colwyn Bay see Jeffrey Green’s excellent website, Jeffreygreen.co.uk
18. Quoted in Colin Prescod’s film Tiger Bay Is My Home (IRR, 2008).
19. Published on-line, 21 June 2010, as part of Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration And Diaspora.
20. Interview with Val Wilmer, “The Oral History of Jazz in Britain”, British Library Sound Archive, 1988,
21. Ibid.