Inspiring Older Readers
posted on 06 Nov 2024
Music Outside by Ian Carr
This book is something of an obscurity, but to anyone interested in the British jazz scene as it evolved from roughly the mid-1960s to the early-70s it may be revelatory. It was researched and written during 1972/3 by the late, great trumpeter and band leader, Ian Carr, and first published in 1973. The tiny specialist jazz publishing house, Northway Publications, rescued the book from oblivion by reissuing it in 2008 – just a year, as it turned out, before Carr died.
Musician, composer, writer, educator, jazz-activist, band leader, Ian Carr was a considerable presence in jazz music and beyond, especially with the band Nucleus, which he formed and led for twenty years. Nucleus were at the forefront of extending jazz by fusing it with swaggering rock rhythms, classical composition, funk, blues and emerging electronic music and from 1970 on released a string of ambitious and inventive records that still sound fresh and exciting. And Carr’s band did this while sounding quite unlike the other sorts of jazz-fusion that were happening here, in Europe and across the US.
The British jazz scene, still relatively young at the time when Carr’s account begins, was doubly hampered. Small and to a very large degree dependent (then as now) on the efforts of volunteer organisers and local jazz societies, it was a scene that was also convinced that it was inferior to everything that was coming out of America. Consequently, Carr and some other players of the time who were in the forefront of jazz and improvised music wanted to establish a variant of jazz that was autonomous and reflected life in Britain rather than the USA. They were seeking, he says in Music Outside, ‘the emancipation of British jazz from American slavery’. But even as this struggle to assert the primacy of home-grown jazz was going on, audiences were already abandoning ‘mouldy old jazz’ in favour of rock and pop and what Carr bitingly calls ‘music created for business purposes’.
His intention in writing Music Outside, then, was two-fold: first, to document the evolving British jazz scene from the perspective of those at its heart (in itself notable because no one had ever thought to do this before); and second, and more importantly, as a polemic explicitly in support of the aims of the Musicians’ Action Group, the lobbying and self-help organisation begun in 1972 largely as a result of a meeting called in desperation by pianist and band leader Stan Tracey. Tracey – who died in 2013 aged eighty-six and who was gigging and recording right up until the end – is now widely revered as the godfather of British jazz, but in 1972 was an out-of-work musician who by his own admission had been on the dole for so long that the Dept of Social Security were badgering him to retrain for another occupation. Many feared that without the sort of ‘official’ recognition and support routinely accorded to the other arts, jazz would die.
This was the background against which Carr was writing. It is all the more extraordinary, then, that what could – and in other hands probably would – have been little more than a dull and lacklustre ‘report’ should be so vibrant: of minority interest, perhaps, but despite that a little classic of its kind.
This is almost certainly due to Carr’s passion for the music he played and for the enthusiasm and determination with which he approached the formation of a new – and a new type of – jazz band, Nucleus, which he led for over twenty years. But it is also testimony to Carr’s abilities as a writer – for he seems to have been incapable of writing a dull or inelegant sentence. Here he is, for example, explaining reactions at the time to his decision to form his new band, Nucleus:
‘Nucleus had simultaneously broken several taboos. First, there was the impersonal, un-jazz name. Then, we were as electronic as possible, with electric guitar, piano and bass, and a PA system for the horns. There was much muttering about the purity of acoustic instruments, and the unmusical thing we were doing. And finally, we were exploring the ostinato rhythms of rock music. During the 1960s, the jazz scene had an almost medieval hatred and dread of rock or pop music. There was a very widespread feeling that, in an almost religious sense, one could be tainted by contact with rock music. The whole attitude seemed to spring from a residue of dogged, provincial puritanism. The sensual pleasure of rock rhythm, which Nucleus has always revelled in, was anathema to the sack-cloth-and-ashes approach of the more self-conscious experimenters.’
Carr’s cogent and insightful analysis, his numerous interviews with key players (superbly edited and brilliantly chosen – they too speak intelligently and coherently about their aims and motivations), and his method – part polemic, part cultural history, part biographical portraits, part memoir – means that Music Outside adds up to far more than its slender 180 pages might suggest. It reminds me again of how much was lost when Carr died aged just seventy-five in 2009 – by which time, as John Fordham said in his beautiful obituary in The Guardian, ‘Alzheimer’s disease had…turned him into a spectator at other people’s celebrations of his achievements’. A fine, modest and wonderfully engaging book by a very rare individual.
Alun Severn
November 2024
Music books elsewhere on Letterpress:
Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British folk and blues revival
Collected Lyrics 1970 – 2015 by Patti Smith
Ten Years In An Open Necked Shirt and other poems by John Cooper Clarke
White Bicycles: Making Music in the 60s by Joe Boyd