The development of Jazz in Britain - Part 3
Extracts from The Bald Soprano, written by Jeff Nuttall and published by Tak Tak Tak

The late 40s, early 50s were a time when jazz hit London like an epidemic. What had previously been a spin off from the big commercial dance bands of Ambrose and Vic Lewis spread into a rash of cellar clubs housing their allocation of rival enthusiasts, some devoted to the angular discordances of be-bop, the re-bop, some of the nostalgic archaeology of the New Orleans revival. Coxhill, although situated in the modern camp, had, even then, a wayward enough sensibility to espouse heresy.

“About 1949 or so I started going round the clubs listening to Ronnie Scott, Johnny Dankworth. I heard Tadd Dameron about that time. Coleman Hawkins. I remember going to see him because I’d heard of him and knew that he wasn’t a be-bop player so therefore wasn’t really what I was into but he was so good that I instinctively loved what he was doing.”

Bechet was another figure whose brilliance crashed the perimeters of the sacred calling of the bop fanatic. Already the flash whimsical adolescent who struggled hopelessly to reproduce the virtuoso sound of his idols with Graham Fleming’s local modern jazz band, was developing that panoramic range of appreciation that ultimately became his means of composition. Bop was lyric romanticism spun off the nerve-ends in a post-war spasm of recklessness. Coxhill was to be a far more deliberate artist, certainly capable of intense lyric madness but always aware that to completely commit himself to the gut-impulse would be to lose site of the other areas of a spectrum of which belly-fire formed only one small part.

So it’s easy to see how the obsessive worrying at the structure of a piece by a wheezy old Chicagoan like Russell, his picking at the seams of the song by phrasing across bar-lines and placing his emphasis anywhere but on the “swinging” beat, precipitates Coxhill into wild flights, embellished superstructures whose arabesques always come to rest somewhere in the middle of the bar of any perfectly orthodox standard sequence for which Coxhill still has an effective use.

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