Circular Breathing

'A soundtrack to the insurrection': street music, marching bands and popular protest

“…I have written elsewhere of the development of 'a leftist marching music of the streets' in British postwar campaign circles, which took new sounds from different repertoires to accompany the demonstrations of generations of activists from before, through and after the counterculture. 26 Pivotal here is the Omega Brass Band, founded by the white English New Orleans-style jazz trumpeter Ken Colyer in 1955. The excitement for jazz fans of the Omega's establishment was clearly recalled and expressed to me half-a-century on, by now elderly members of the Ken Colyer Trust: 'We heard about it, all very excited, word spread like wildfire, through the rhythm clubs and record shops, through the LSE and St Martin's School of Art.…”

Alien invasions: the British Musicians' Union and foreign musicians

“…He continues that the ban:meant that for two crucial decades that saw every stylistic and technical development in jazz from Armstrong to Miles (Davis), virtually every one of the music's practitioners, nearly all of whom were black, was kept out of Britain by an overwhelmingly white organization, the Musicians' Union. (McKay 2005, p. 147)McKay (2005) says that while the ban was retaliatory, it effectively acted as a ‘colour bar’. However, McKay (citing Oliver 1990, p. 14) also notes that one effect of the restrictions was to increase the demand for resident black musicians, and that the ban applied equally to white and black musicians.…”

The social construction of a music Mecca

“…Moreover, it is music for dancing. Later, fellow musician Bob Wallis and others would draw out the links that could be made between this co-operative style of playing and socalled working-class solidarity and socialism (Ekins 2009). McKay (2003, in particular, makes much of the alleged links between Colyer's working-class origins and sensibilities, leftish politics in the 1950s, and the CND Aldermaston protest marches which Colyer often fronted with his New Orleans-style brass parade band, in the late 1950s and early 1960s.…”

“…3 1. McKay (2003McKay ( , 2005 has written about the interrelations between Colyer, traditional jazz and left-wing and CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) politics in the 1950s. On the class origins of the original UK revivalists, see Frith (1988) and Newton (1961).…”