Discovering jazz, as the Czech writer and jazz-buff Josef Skvorecky has said, is, for most people, rather like first love—on the whole it is more lasting—and it usually happens at much the same time. In the case of the present writer it happened at the age of sixteen, in the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. My family had just returned to England after a few years in the movie business in Berlin, and a losing struggle against the slump. My old man brought back a copy of Carl Laemmle’s biography by John Drinkwater, a forgotten but on this occasion evidently well-paid minor English literary figure, personally signed by Uncle Carl—and practically no money. Until we could find a suitably cheap apartment, we stayed with relatives in Sydenham, a Victorian white-collar suburb in Southeast London.

My aunt Cissie, living in undefined detachment from Uncle Lou, who was permanently absent pursuing business across the Atlantic, taught school. Her married daughter, also living in the same house, was trying to teach dancing and elocution to the daughters of aspiring mothers in the neighborhood. Her husband was not making a living and was therefore uncommunicative. The one member of our host-family who seemed to be a human being in the full sense of the word was a young man of my own age, my cousin Denis Preston. We had known of one another before, because our families—this is the way of families—had told us to write letters to each other. There had been a half-hearted correspondence between London and Berlin, from which both sides concluded that the other guy was a drip. When we actually met, we were agreeably surprised to find that the other guy was OK. I undoubtedly tried to convert him to communism to which I had been converted while living through the rise of Hitler. He converted me to jazz.

How he had come to jazz I don’t know, but in retrospect it is not surprising. He conformed exactly to the type of the 1930s British jazz fan which is sketched in the chapter on the ‘jazz public’: the intelligent, self-educated young man from the lower middle classes, preferably a little bohemian. (My cousin had dropped out of high school and was studying to be a viola player.) Jazz, of course, meant exclusively the few 78 rpm records the British companies released every month which had to be sorted out from the larger mass of contemptible dance-band noises to which they were attached. Still, there was by then a small British public for jazz and even a reliable guide to what was good, Spike Hughes in the Melody Maker, my cousin’s bible. My cousin bought these, played them until the grooves groaned and, when money was short (it usually was) made a part-exchange deal with the local record shop. At any time he was likely to have perhaps twenty of these heavy black discs, in brown paper or cardboard covers—sleeves were a generation away.

These were the records we played in a sparsely furnished attic, on the heavy hand-cranked box which in those prehistoric days was not even yet called a record-player but a gramophone. In between records and intensive discussions about how great they were, we restored our strength with potato crisps and spoonfuls of heavily sugared canned milk, the kind that was firmly labelled ‘unfit for babies’. We preferred to have these sessions at night. When the days were too long, we drew the curtains.

In retrospect, the jazz we came to through these British releases of the early ’thirties, was as good an introduction to the music as any that was available. The first jazz records I remember were the Fletcher Henderson band’s (‘Sugar Foot Stomp’, ‘House of David Blues’), Don Redman’s (‘Chant of the Weeds’), the Mills Blue Rhythm Band, Bix and Tram, of course, the Mills Brothers—I wonder how that ancient vocal group stands up to rehearing—and the accepted geniuses, Armstrong and Ellington. The Armstrongs we heard were not yet the Potato Head Blues Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, but how could we complain when the Armstrong-Hines combinations, St James Infirmary, Knockin’ a Jug and West End Blues were already available? And, fortunately, the great man had not yet been tied up in the strait-jacket of New Orleans archaeology. Though we sighed over the commercial corruption of true art in records like Confessin’ and Song of the Islands, we were lucky to be introduced to a great artist at the very peak of his form. As for Ellington, could anyone hearing Black and Tan Fantasy and Creole Love Call not be captured for life?

Then Ellington came in person. He was, by this time, a composer taken seriously by the hipper sections of the British musical establishment. He was also a greatly appreciated figure in the younger aristocratic and even royal circles, which probably pleased him at least as much. Two suburban teenagers, who belonged to neither of these groups, could only express their devotion in a suburban way. We made the pilgrimage to the Streatham Astoria in South London, a ballroom where the band was booked for what was then called a ‘breakfast dance’, midnight to morning. (Of course we knew the great man’s record Breakfast Dance forwards and backwards.) I assume our elders had pity on us, because the tickets were far beyond our normal financial reach.

There we sat, from midnight till dawn, nursing the glass of beer which was all we could afford, the image of the band burning itself on our brains forever. Maybe, after almost sixty years, I can no longer without prompting recite the entire personnel of Ellington 1933, including Ivy Anderson whose Stormy Weather was the hit of the season (as with the other women singers of the band, except Adelaide Hall of the unforgettable Creole Love Call we could live without them), but to this day I can see Hodges, impassive as what in those politically uninformed days we used to call a Red Indian, stepping forward to wind his sounds round our hearts. We walked home four miles in the dawn—the money had run out—and I was hooked for good.

For the next twenty-odd years, like most British jazz fans, I subsisted on records—on the old, heavy, three-minute shellac 78s, because a dispute between the two musicians’ unions kept American musicians out of Britain. (We were convinced that only Americans, preferably black, were worth listening to.) In this stored and unreal form the music was available, at least to the network of aficionados, sufficiently small for everyone to know somebody who supplemented the excellent selection of commercial releases by importing discs directly from the United States. It was an artificial situation, though it gave the core group of British fans a considerable influence over the development of the music in Britain. Since they virtually controlled what they heard, they were the taste-makers. To take the most obvious example: The first kind of live native jazz that developed on any scale, from the later years of the war onwards, was that typical phenomenon of collectors and fans, the Dixieland revival. However, whereas Lu Watters and Bob Wilber were peripheral to the U.S. jazz scene, the British revival bands were absolutely central to it. These bands, largely recruited from amateurs, in turn took over from the original aficionados a passion for the country and city blues, some of which had come to Britain via the American communist and radical repertoire of the black folk-protégés (Leadbelly, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Josh White et al.), and some via the small but passionate groups whose collectors’ hearts had always been in Clarksdale rather than New Orleans. As I point out in the 1989 Introduction, a lot of British rock music’s ability to capture the world was due to the fact that the average white British 18-year-old was much more likely to have heard Muddy Waters than the average white U.S. teenager.

The downside of this state of affairs was that the British jazz authorities (like most of those who had developed their taste in the 1930s, notably the French) were taken aback by bebop and to be honest, most of them disliked it intensely. It came, not out of the milieu of enthusiastic and, in general, musically illiterate appreciators, but of young professional big-band musicians. (The young British band musicians were much more receptive to bebop, but theirs was a very small scene.) It was a revolution, and European jazz fans didn’t need one or want one. They wanted ‘authenticity’. Moreover, the wartime recording ban in the U.S.A. broke that continuity of record releases that got even unadventurous fans used to thinking the spectacular transformations of jazz between, say, 1926 and 1941 (few arts have changed more rapidly) not as a series of revolutions in the avant-garde manner, but as just growth. After all, the Pope of the Church of Jazz Tradition, Hugues Panassié himself, who denounced the ‘modernists’ as agents of Satan, had found neither Lester Young nor Charlie Christian unacceptable. The bop revolution caught Europe unprepared, although in suitable countries (notably France and Scandinavia), a new generation of intellectual champions of the avant-garde soon appeared. They were rewarded by the expatriate U.S. bop players who settled there in the desert years.

During all these years I had been no more than a fringe observer of the jazz scene. I was no expert. I was neither a collector nor the sort of guy whose name collectors knew, and I neither wanted to write about jazz nor did anyone ask me to. Not even in any of...