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The 1960s and 1970s are regarded by some historians as being particularly creative decades for jazz in Britain, when British jazz developed its own sound that was distinct from that of American jazz. While not denying that this was a creatively fruitful period in British jazz, in this paper I argue that a ‘British sound' in jazz is difficult, perhaps impossible, to define, even though some authors have referred to a sense of ‘Britishness', particularly in the work of certain musicians discussed by Ian Carr in his book Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz in Britain. Some British jazz, performed largely by white (and mostly male) musicians at this time, was influenced during the 1960s by the contribution of immigrant black musicians from South Africa and the Caribbean; at the same time, musicians such as Michael Garrick and John Surman were drawing to some extent on British folk music for inspiration. Referring to examples from the period, I suggest that although much British jazz from 1960 to 1980 was innovative and became less ‘American', development of its styles was affected by many musical, cultural and political factors. To what extent this music sounds ‘British' is debatable, but its influence has led to the pluralism of jazz styles in Britain that continues today.

This article investigates W. C. Handy's collection of blues and jazz compositions Blues: An Anthology (1926) in light of Paul Whiteman's pre-eminent role in 1920s American popular music culture. It explores Whiteman's autobiographics, on the one hand, and the correspondence between Handy and the author of the anthology's foreword, Edward Abbe Niles, on the other, in order to demonstrate how Handy's self-determined voice asserted itself against both the discursive power of the Whiteman-led symphonic jazz movement and the appropriative impulse of primitivist jazz and blues historiography.

Historians and musicologists have described jazz diplomacy predominantly as a political and cultural practice with transnational reverberations that was launched by the US State Department during the early years of the Cold War. In her pioneering study of American jazz diplomacy, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Penny Von Eschen, for instance, details how the US government started to employ jazz as a diplomatic instrument in 1956 when it funded Dizzy Gillespie’s tour to the Middle East. Over a period of more than two decades, the State Department sent many of the most famous American jazz musicians abroad, often to the trouble spots of the Cold War. Encouraged by the success of Gillespie’s tour, the State Department sent Benny Goodman to Southeast Asia in 1957 and funded Dave Brubeck’s 1958 performances in Poland and the Middle East. In the following years, the growing list of American jazz ambassadors included Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, and Charles Mingus among others. US jazz diplomacy’s primary aim was to promote American culture in countries “where communism has a foothold,” as Adam Clayton Powell put it.1