Most American jazz musicians who tour England worked with John Cumming and the production company that he helped found, Serious. 

I spoke with John at his home in March 2019. After I sent him an edit, John expressed satisfaction with the result but wanted to, “Fact check a few things and correct a few spellings.” I kept waiting for that edit but, sadly, John passed away of cancer a month ago…

Richard Williams contributed an excellent obit for the Guardian. For the interview below, Richard fixed several spellings, while John’s widow Ginnie advised on a few details as well. Thanks to both for their help, and I believe this document as as accurate as can be considering the circumstances. Helena Kay transcribed the interview. Helena is also from the UK; in John’s memory, I left the British spellings unnaturalized.

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Ethan Iverson: Tell us about where you grew up and the first time you heard some jazz.

John Cumming: I was born in 1948. A friend of mine says 1948 is a charmed year because we avoided everything and got the benefit of everything else. I grew up in Edinburgh, which is known as a beautiful tourist destination but it’s also a little rough around the edges as well.

There’s always been an interesting community of jazz musicians that have come out of Scotland. Sandy Brow was a clarinet player, and his kind of sidekick was trumpeter Al Fairweather, the ran a mainstream band in the fifties and sixties. Brown was an acoustic architect and was quite a pioneer in that field. There was this kind of community of them that went to the same school; I also went to that school for primary school. A neighbour of ours was the cousin of Al Fairweather, also one of my father’s friends enjoyed traditional jazz particularly and his nephew was a trombone player who played in a trad band.

Little bits and pieces came together. At the end of the fifties/beginning of the sixties there was a kind of traditional jazz revival that had been going on since the war with people like Humphrey Lyttelton, Ken Colyer, and a few other musicians. It became commercially very successful, and by the end of the fifties/early sixties it was like pop music. Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball, Chris Barber were charting at the same time as American rock and roll. They were touring a lot, big club circuit, there are stories about that generation being on mixed bills during the early sixties.

When Ginnie and I first moved to this house thirty years ago, I heard this clarinet playing coming through the wall and thought, “Hmm, that’s actually alright.” It turned out to be Ian Christie and we became good friends. He was a clarinet player who had been part of that generation. He was a very funny guy, and very erudite. He was from the North of England, and he had been a clarinet player with Humphrey Lyttelton and with George Melly and people like that during the fifties. Then when the trad boom collapsed, he sort of continued to play but he went into journalism and became a film critic.  One night we I asked him, “Who was the one that made it for you, Johnny Dodds or Barney Bigard?” He said, “No, I was an Albert Nicholas man.”

A lot of my generation in the UK came out of that sort of traditional jazz. But also you then found out about bebop and modern world and John Dankworth was charting with “African Waltz.”

EI:  Dankworth was a bit more like modern jazz.

JC:  That’s right, yes. Ian’s brother, Keith Christie, played in the trombone section with all the modern jazz big bands at the time, he was playing with Tubby Hayes and Stan Tracey. At one stage Ginnie and I hosted Stan and his wife Jackie for lunch with Ian and Belinda, and they knew each other, and we wish we had a tape recorder on hand just at that moment because it was also very revealing about that kind of divergence between the traditional jazz community and the modern jazz community at that time. The stories that come out of that period in terms of the British jazz scene are fascinating because there was an orthodoxy about the trad school. The orthodoxy was that it was a trumpet, trombone, clarinet front line and a banjo, bass possibly sousaphone, drums, just about OK with a piano in the rhythm section.

Humph introduced a very fine musician called Bruce Turner on alto saxophone. Oops. A friend of mine, Tony Dudley Evans (who’s been involved with the Cheltenham Jazz Festival and the Jazz in Birmingham for many years) was at a famous concert in Birmingham Town Hall where Humph played and the real “traddies” unfurled a banner saying, “Go home dirty bopper.”

EI:  It’s like Dylan goes electric.

JC:  Yeah, very similar.

EI:  That’s amazing about, “Go home dirty bopper.” It says something about something, I’m not sure what though.

JC:  When I was a teenager I started listening to all sorts of different stuff.

Every twenty or thirty years there’s a kind of British jazz revival, and there’s also that point where a generation of musicians are curious about opening out. In the sixties the British jazz scene was definitely doing that. There was a real connection between the modern jazz players and the R&B, British blues community that is documented well through the history of the Rolling Stones and people like that, but also with artists like Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames that were breaking into interesting territory and working with musicians from different disciplines.

Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames had a hip jazz horn section with a Caribbean trumpeter called Eddie Thornton and a conga player called Speedy Acquaye. It was an interesting take on how modern jazz and R&B communities were connecting into the immigrant communities, the African and Caribbean communities especially, and then a bit later the Asian communities as well.

A lot of us were hanging out together by the time we were teenagers and listening to a lot of what was going on in the States so we would be catching up with what was going on, particularly on Blue Note. Brubeck was charting; we were beginning to be aware of what was going on in terms of the avant-garde as well, what was changing with Coltrane and Albert Ayler and the musicians that were coming through. How Miles Davis was changing. It was pretty much a melting pot of things.

In this country we were also seeing artists that were breaking into understanding that territory but also connecting with a culture that was specifically emanating from the UK. You had Caribbean musicians like Joe Harriott.. To me, Harriott was one of the real game changers here.

The Scottish thing was interesting as well. Joe Temperley settled in the States and became a stalwart of the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra, but he also played with Woody Herman and depped with the Ellington band. Joe was revered in Scotland. There were also people like Bobby Wellins and Jimmy Deuchar from the modern side…also long history of trad going back into the thirties, musicians like George Chisholm and Tommy McQuater. So there was a kind of sense that the music had a root in Scotland. Once you started listening to the music you kind of realized that there was quite a strong sense of identity locally as well.

EI:  Did you play an instrument?

JC:  I played pretty awful piano.

EI:  And how long did you stay in Edinburgh before you moved?

JC:  I went back and forth a bit. I didn’t quite get into university after I left school, I sort of aimed high and didn’t quite make it. My other main passion was theatre.

I worked a bit with the Traverse Theatre, an experimental theatre club that had started in Edinburgh during the sixties, very much part of the counter culture. I used to do jazz gigs there when I was still at school, I was running jam sessions and stuff like that. My mother was a member and I started to go to a lot of shows there. Eventually I got offered a job there, a sort of stage management job after I left school, I virtually walked into it the day after I left school.

When I got the exit interview from the rector, the headmaster, he said. “What are you going to do, you haven’t got into university, boy?”

I said, “I’ve got a job, working in the Traverse Theatre for the Edinburgh Festival with the La Mama troupe from New York.”

He went, “Oh, get out of my sight, you stage door Johnny!”

A week later,  I was helping screw 300 cinema seats into the floor of a church hall for director Tom O’Horgan (who went on to direct Hair) at the Edinburgh Festival. I was the boy, doing everything, screwing seats, then stage management. But I learned a lot there about lighting design, which became something that I continued to do for a long time after that, it became a useful professional skill.

One of the other shows that was going on in the same “pop up” theatre involved Soft Machine. They had just come back from the Pataphysics Festival in the South of France without Daevid Allen, who was an Australian, and couldn’t get back into the country because of visa problems. It was a trio of Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge and Kevin Ayers. I ended up working on a show with them and the inventor of the liquid light show, Mark Boyle. Boyle went on to be quite a major conceptual visual artist with his family and an extraordinary series of pieces of work called Earth Probes.

In the midst of all this I was working in theatre, listening to a lot of music, and beginning to work with musicians as well. I was nineteen.

I then went off to become a student stage manager in a repertory theatre outside London, then went to the West End and stayed six months as a lighting technician in a small theatre in a Victorian music hall.

EI:  So you got to London through theatre?

JC:  Yes, although I’d been going to London on and off. I went with my family in the early sixties. I think I first went to Ronnie Scott’s when I was still underage, I was probably seventeen or something and I saw a double bill Johnny Griffin and Sheila Jordan. At the Festival Hall I saw the Gerry Mulligan Quartet and the John Dankworth Big Band in 1963 I think. something like that. In the early sixties the Labour party were the ascendent party, it was leading up to the Wilson government, and they put a jazz tour out to promote the Labour party. and it was the John Dankworth Big Band and a trad band led by Terry Lightfoot who was a clarinet player and weirdly a flamenco duo called Dorita y Pepe in the middle, not quite sure why they were there but they were presumably Labour party supporters, and they really came from somewhere like Surrey.

Around that time it was clear that we were living through change. Finding out about what was going on in the States with civil rights, reading James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver, finding out about similar activists who were in the UK. There was a connection with artists like Joe Harriott and Harriott’s trumpet player Shake Keane who was a poet  — a very good writer actually —  who went on to be the minister of culture in St Lucia. That community was very interesting.

When I was first working in London, I was working a job in a theatre which paid a decent wage, and because of the way that the West End worked in those days, you could pick up all sorts of additional work. You could do stuff, go and do a changeover at the Royal Opera House or work on a matinee doing props or fly gallery or whatever. Because the word had got round and if somebody needed a dep or if a crew needed to do a changeover at one of the theatres you just got onto the phone list.

But it meant that I had money and I was going to Ronnie Scott’s and seeing Sonny Rollins, Roland Kirk, Hank Mobley, and that was great.

EI:  Ronnie Scott’s is a legendary place. Americans don’t always realize the importance of the central club in a major city somewhere else outside of America.

JC:  Ronnie’s was set up by a saxophone player and his sidekick, Pete King — who was a saxophone player as well! They were against the odds. Now the club is sixty this year, 1959 was its first year, it started off in a tiny basement on Gerrard Street in Chinatown, and then moved in the mid-sixties to where it is now on Frith Street. It’s expanded a little bit since then.

It was originally set up as a place for the British modern jazz community to play. It was where you’d get Tubby Hayes and Ronnie and Peter King, Tony Kinsey, Joe Harriott — that generation of musicians were effectively given a home by the club.

In those days there was very little access to Americans because there was a union issue after the war and through the fifties that made it almost impossible for American musicians to play in the UK. That lasted for a surprisingly long time. The exact history of that pre-dates me, but Ronnie’s was one of the rule-breakers at the end of the day, they negotiated with the musicians union to enable American artists to come and play at the club, initially with British rhythm sections.  I think the first one was Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, and then I think Sonny Rollins was quite early on as well.

And then I think they finally managed to get the Bill Evans trio to play with Larry Bunker and Chuck Israels, and then the club was able to build from that.

However, the important thing was that the club was also still committed to enabling British musicians to play there. Then a dialogue occurred between the British scene and the visiting Americans, because the Americans would come over for three weeks and have time to meet all the British musicians.

Sonny Rollins forged a relationship with Stan Tracey. I saw Sonny playing with Stan in the sixties, those sessions were sort of legendary really because they were quite exploratory. Ben Webster also struck up a kind of musical vocabulary with Stan Tracey. Stan was the house piano player for years and years.

EI:  A great piano player, too.

JC:  Indeed.

On a Sunday night, the club would often be open for British musicians to do something different. I remember seeing Tubby Hayes’s big band and Stan’s big band on a Sunday night…

It was a very fertile time. For a lot of my generation it was like university, you heard so much, so many artists at close quarters. As time went on the club really became established, it also went through some ups and downs, I know Pete and Ronnie had financial problems during the seventies and got helped out by Harold Davison one of the big jazz and rock promoters at the time. Today the club is doing well and still a way for American and British musicians to meet each other at the jam sessions.

EI:  Let’s talk more about how you first started to become a promoter.

JC:  That was probably at school when I was putting on gigs in the Traverse Theatre bar on a Sunday afternoon.

EI:  What made you want to do it when you were at school?

JC:  I was sort of playing a bit then, but it was also just a generational thing. I was hanging out with my contemporaries listening to the music in different ways and there was quite a strong scene in Edinburgh but there weren’t that many places to play. A couple of us just thought it would be interesting to start up a Sunday afternoon jam session and I found the space at the Traverse Theatre bar. It wasn’t used and it wasn’t licensed, the licensing laws didn’t quite work in the way they do now in that in the afternoon, the bars were closed. So subterfuge had to be engaged, people used to bring in hip-flasks and cans of beer that they would disguise. But it was a way that some of the older generation of musicians could meet a lot of really talented younger players coming through at that point.

There was also a sort of nascent free improvisation scene. I remember we did a gig at the Traverse Theatre bar one time with a group of improvisers from the scene in Edinburgh but the guests that came in were Kenny Wheeler and Evan Parker.

During the Edinburgh Festival, the same theatre bar would host poetry and music afternoons. Poets like Adrian Mitchell and Michael Horovitz and Adrian Henri, the Liverpool poets, a lot of the Scottish poets like Hamish Henderson and Pete Morgan, a generation, it was like contemporaneous with Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti in the States, were in the same zone but from a very British point of view. Some of the Scottish folk and jazz musicians would get involved in Festival, they would just turn up because there was something going on in the afternoon. A pivotal figure was Pete Brown, who went on to be the lyric writer for Jack Bruce and Cream.

When I returned to Edinburgh, I eventually ended up opening a theatre in the West End in Edinburgh. West End in Edinburgh is not the same as the West End in London, West End in Edinburgh is just called the West End, just the West side. It was set up to do lunch time theatre, but with new plays and new writing. People like David Hare and David Edgar and Howard Brenton, but there was something going on in London as well, there was a lot of fringe theatre.

So that also gave us a venue that we could do other things with. I started running jazz and folk gigs there. It was another way of creating an economy, it was very practical. And that just grew.

I then moved south when I was offered a job to run the theatre at a new art centre outside London.

I was always interested in audiences — and actually how you expand an audience. There’s the promoter, and there’s the artist, and our job is to connect with the third stake-holder, which is the audience.

That is the triumverate.

Finding those connecting points is what I’ve always been fascinated with. I like being in the foyer before a gig, just getting a sense of who the audience is, and then if there’s an interval or afterwards, just getting the buzz. Just seeing if you can kind of get the feel. How you communicate to an audience and fascinate an audience has always been something that I’ve been fascinated by, it’s always been a puzzle, and it’s also been something that I think I’ve spent a lot of time achieving, a way of expanding the reach of whatever you’re doing.

During the early seventies there was a move to create a bigger picture in terms of the performing arts. There was a big context for touring alternative theatre. I suppose you could call it a formalisation of a movement of multi-art spaces that were started off in the sixties through the arts labs and what have you that peppered the country: local community arts, experimental arts, organisations where creative work was the important thing.

EI:  You met your wife Ginnie in the theatre?

JC:  I was mostly directing and lighting, and Ginnie was on the design and costume side. There was a crazy mime artist who died last year called Lindsay Kemp, who is credited for having influenced David Bowie in his early days. Kemp was a larger than life figure and I was his lighting designer for some years, and I remember Ginnie having to sew him into his tights because he wasn’t quite as lissome as he might’ve been.

When I moved South to run the theatre in this Bracknell art centre, Bracknell was a new town. The director was an old colleague of mine, we’d been on a committee about student drama before, and we’d worked together with a rather seminal visual theatre company called The Welfare State. That’s also a fairly important little milestone along the road because I brought them into my theatre during the Edinburgh Festival to do a piece of work and I broke with them being doing their big outdoor piece in a community arts festival in Edinburgh around the same time.

The Welfare State asked me if I’d light one of their big site specific works, which involved the Mike Westbrook band. I’d been listening to his music for some years by then. He’d always had this connection into an area of British performance history: circus and variety and fairground and kind of street vernacular culture. Earth Rise was a big multi-media show with visuals and slide, film, live music. The director of The Welfare State, John Fox, had a knack of discovering surviving fairground performers who did everything from acrobatics and contortionism to knife throwing and sword swallowing and fire eating and all the rest of it. I got involved in a whole series of pieces of work with Westbrook and Phil Minton and Lol Coxhill.

The director of South Hill Park in Bracknell, Peter Stark, had just been appointed. He rang me and asked, “How long do you want to continue running your theatre in Edinburgh?”’

Maybe it was time to have a shift. It had gotten to the point where we were winning awards and were funded and all the rest of it. Both Phil, my original partner, and I were just beginning to get to the stage where we actually had done all that and that sense that that needed to move on and pass it on.

That led to us looking at a Victorian mansion house in Bracknell which had lots of different spaces and a big landscape garden with a lake. We spent all the autumn and winter and spring in small spaces indoors in this building. We had a theatre and a cellar bar, a recital room, creative art spaces…

And then we came up with this idea to use the grounds for summer season. We could get thousands in rather than hundreds. So we just threw it open. What was great about working in an art centre was that even when you were running a theatre, we were all talking to each other about our different disciplines, how we could actually figure out how you can fuse stuff and react. It was also interesting because there was a political reason, this was actually also part of a new development of creating a community in a new situation. People were being encouraged to come into a new town with new industry and a lot of new technology.

I fancied doing a jazz festival. Back in the sixties, I’d been to a couple of British open air jazz and blues festivals one in Richmond and one in Windsor. There was a thing called the National Jazz Federation who did these open air festivals; they started off in the trad era but then they ended up going into rhythm and blues during the blues revival. I saw the very first performance of Cream at one of these festivals. It was amazing. I’d never seen the level of noise and excitement that was coming out of that band. But then I saw The Crazy World of Arthur Brown with Arthur Brown being delivered on stage, from a crane, with his head on fire. Those were the days!

The art centre was called the South Hill Park, but that became the Bracknell Jazz Festival, which started in 1975 and continued through into the late eighties. A friend of mine who worked in the youth and community department alongside doing under fives festivals, he and I would do rock gigs and jazz gigs in the cellar bar at the same venue. That was a momentum that started. And then at the same time as starting up a jazz festival we were doing folk festival, festival of English music, open air theatre.

The lake was pretty important. I decided we wanted to use the lake. The lake had a fountain in it that was operated with a button at the side of a tree beside the lake. The fountain went way up into the air.

So we got one of the young writers that I’d worked with in Edinburgh, Bart Lee, and he put together a version of Moby Dick. We recruited a band of horn players playing sea shanties and a local cast of mixed amateur dramatics. Some of our own staff did this, that, and the other. It also involved also commissioning an inflatables artist to create a whale that lay beneath the lake, connected to the shore by an umbilical cord of see-through plastic and an industrial fan. We built the end of a ship out into the lake.

“Thar she blows!”

Press the button: The whale appears and Captain Ahab gets into a rowing boat, much dry ice, electronic walls of sound, free improvisation, and disappears under the whale.

The actor in question was an old friend of mine, Brendan Donnison. Brendan had no fear, he just loved it. We had to pick the leeches off him every night, but, hey.

Many years later I was in a bus, wandering through Germany with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. Ruth Cameron was Charlie’s wife and she’d worked as an actress. We started talking and she said, “I used to work in California: One of the guys I used to work with in California I saw in the UK playing in this crazy production of Moby Dick…”

…And I said, “I directed that Moby Dick!” at which point we just fell out laughing, it was hilarious.

EI:  What were the odds!

JC:  The odds of that happening, on a bus in Germany with Mrs. Haden….

I remember the very first jazz festival we produced. We had Mike Westbrook and Clark Terry. I booked Clark Terry from Ronnie’s, actually, it was the first time I really got to know the club because I just rang them up and said, “You’ve got Clark Terry on, can I have him on a Saturday afternoon before he plays in the evening?’”

“Yeah, sure.”

That’s the way I met Brian Theobald who was the agent that worked out of Ronnie’s. He died some years ago but we became good friends at the end. Our relationship was fueled by many evenings in bars and a shared sense of bad jokes. Not bad jokes, good jokes, it depended on what side of the fence you came from…

Brian taught me a lot, especially about the old-school commercial approach to business. Public support for the arts is vital, but it can exist side by side with a more entrepreneurial approach. You can produce work that also is designed to connect with an audience. How you create the connecting points between entrepreneurship and the use of public funding is pretty important.

Bracknell Jazz Festival got to a point where we were able to raise quite a lot of funding towards it specifically. It was also situated in a major arts centre, which was important to me because it was placing I was fired up by in a much bigger cultural picture. We could look at change in the arts, how the arts related to a bigger community, how you could use culture to represent social change — social inclusion. That political dimension seems intrinsic to the creative process, either implicitly or explicitly.

EI:  It’s probably true of all disciplines, but certainly if we’re talking about jazz….

JC:  Yes, of course.

EI:  There’s no way around it.

JC:  It’s a no-brainer, actually.

Ian Christie, the trad clarinet player who lived next door, was part of a post-war generation that was very much about social change in this country, about opening out of society, as it were. And traditional jazz — and modern jazz, for that matter — as it evolved in this country was very much a leveller in many ways. To some extent it broke down the way the class system works in this country. Like many others of his generation, Ian was working class, but his command of political thought and his interest in change and the way hit talked about it very much out of a left wing background, a socialist background.

In the sixties I was hanging out at a specialist record shop called Dobell’s in London and got to know these lefty jazz musicians and jazz fans. The guy who ran the second hand department underneath used to give me stuff, he’d say, “You should check this out.” I still have an original Charlie Parker Savoy on 78 that I bought from him. The wonderful Ray Bolden who ran the folk and blues shop next door; Ray was not a big guy but he was very funny, he was larger than life, and I learned a lot from him. They knew the scene, they were all hanging out with the musicians at Ronnie’s, so every now and then I met Ben Webster through them and that was pretty interesting as well.

EI:  It’s interesting what you’re saying about jazz in England being connected to social action.

JC:  Traditional jazz was the music of CND, the campaign for nuclear disarmament. The traditional jazz musicians who formed themselves into marching bands, that was part of it. Ian, next door was solid Labour.

It was connected to what was happening in America. In 1967, at George Wein’s festival, I saw Archie Shepp. In fact it was a double bill of Archie Shepp and Miles Davis at the Hammersmith Odeon, where Miles opened. Reportedly Miles said, “I’m not going on after that motherfucker.”

EI:  If you’re talking about traditional jazz and then you talk about Archie Shepp, there’s actually so much that connects, especially how they connect to the audience. Conventional bebop might not connect in quite the same way. Avant-garde sounds and presentation can reach out and touch someone who doesn’t know anything technical about music. Well-played small group modern jazz will go over the heads of much the audience, but that same audience will understand, for example, Archie Shepp.

JC:  Yes. It’s very interesting.

I suppose part of that is to do with the fact that New Orleans jazz, the jazz tradition as we kind of define it now, emerged as social music first. It emerged through whatever alchemy that was going on in the 19th century and into the early 20th century and then became defined as jazz. Records started to be available, and the music traveled that way. It wasn’t like a piece of classical music with sheet music, it was a different process.

EI:  Absolutely.

JC:  Early jazz was social music, it was dance music, it engaged with an audience in a very direct way. That’s true of a lot of folk music as well from different parts of the world, there’s a participatory side to it as well.

EI:  To continue the thread, Archie Shepp is almost social music too, but in this other kind of way, right? The audience gets on the same page politically. Today we might say, “Jazz for social justice.”

JC:  Interesting. Yes, there’s an important thread, but I also think that there’s that sense of sheer energy that you get from a player like Archie that is purely musical.

In the the sixties, the kind of in your face music Albert Ayler was creating was harking back to a marching band tradition. That was a critical dialogue of the sixties.

The Art Ensemble in Chicago was also so exciting. The first time I worked with them I was knocked sideways. They were supposedly an avant-garde jazz group, but the importance they placed on was profound. There was integrity, and the creative urge, but also they had to connect. In addition, their slogan “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future” was really smart. It real rigor as to why it was there, but it also was a marketing slogan. It was really good, intellectually very well-conceived

EI:  You came from theatre. The Art Ensemble of Chicago flows naturally with that world.

JC:  We just did a show with Archie at the end of last year, it was his Art Songs and Spirituals program with a choir and Amina Claudine Myers. Even at the point where he was really rooted in the black avant-garde of the sixties, there was a sense that he was relating back into that much more vernacular tradition of the music. I say vernacular in the way that is respectful, There is an argument that says that vernacular culture is somehow inferior to establishment culture, but that’s wrong, that’s an elitist view which I don’t buy into. Part of the value of vernacular culture is it really does connect people in a much more immediate way.

EI: This is part of how you get people into the tent to see the show…

JC:  Bracknell was an outdoor festival with indoor spaces, so we used the art centre, every space we could find to put music on. We had a tent that held 2000 people pr something like that and we had grounds that held more and then we had a bunch of spaces within the building that held about 100 to 120 people, and they were all pretty much acoustically independent, so you could programme across a number of different styles and approaches. You were trying to react not just to the core of the music — which remained obviously kind of the critical point, to make sure that there was a very strong programme of music that related to the mainstream — but also that documented the evolution of the music.

In the seventies one of the most profound influences on the British scene were South Africans, the community that came over in the late sixties with Chris McGregor and settled in London. It was also part of a growing awareness in the UK of its own cultural responsibilities and the communities that lay within it. There was an emergence of black community arts groups working in different parts of the country.  One year at Bracknell, a major theme was about the connection into Africa, and that included a pretty spectacular drum and dance ensemble that were working in the community in Bristol at the time.

We could do all sorts of things. In 1976, Bracknell’s second year, we were pretty much the first producer or venue or festival in the UK to book an ECM artist, in this case Ralph Towner.

The ECM musicians in Norway were fascinating. The black musicians in Paris were fascinating. I started working with some Eastern European musicians in the late seventies: the hoops that you went through because it was almost like two economies at play, you had to book them through the culture ministry, whether it was Hungary or East Germany or Poland. If you think of what was going on in Poland… the whole history of Tomasz Stańko and Krzysztof Komeda in the sixties. There’s that one album that’s a seminal album that they made in the mid-sixties. I first worked with Tomasz in the late seventies. You’d book them through the Ministry of Culture, agree to a deal, but you knew the deal was nonsense because the musicians weren’t going to see any of it. There was always another brown paper envelope that we produced to the musicians to make it a bit more feasible.

European festival producers started coming over to visit Bracknell, so that’s where I think I met people from Moers, people from Norway and that slowly evolved into us now: Serious Music, We started up as a company in the mid-eighties and we were very quickly joined the early days of the Europe Jazz Network.

Britain can look both East and West simultaneously. Bracknell was the first time that Garbarek ever played in the UK, but at the same time I was putting on Ornette with Prime Time, who hadn’t been to Britain for years. We were able to kind of cover the spread of how the music was opening out in that period.

EI:  In those you didn’t even have a fax machine.

JC:  Right.

EI:  You made an international phone call, or sent a letter, or…?

JC:  Both. Mail was quite important, Trying to get hold of somebody sensible on a phone in Poland was another matter entirely. We did a famous tour with the Ganelin Trio in the mid-eighties with the arts council The Contemporary Music Network. The CMN were sort of “without walls,” it was “contemporary music,” so it enabled artists like Kronos Quartet and Philip Glass and Steve Reich to tour Britain for the first time, but it also enabled us to bring George Russell to the UK.

The Ganelin Trio  was another two economy job, which had to run through Goss Concert which was the then Russian state arts agency, who mostly  did things like the Red Army choirs, or Cossack dancers trundling around the world. The Ganelin Trio were more Lithuanian apart from anything else, they kind of bucked the system. I see [Vladimir] Tarasov the drummer still quite often, he and I are in touch. That tour was pretty interesting because there were smoke and mirrors attached to that tour, where the Russian embassy here there and everywhere with a minder from the state agency who obviously had a “function,” shall we say — who I got quite friendly with in the end. This minder was called “The Coat” because he always wore a big leather coat — but he was also given the name ‘The Coat’ because he was always around you. He ended up being their tour manager after Gorbachev and end of the Soviet Union. The last time I bumped into them was actually after the whole thing had, the wall had gone and all the rest of it, I bumped into them at the North Sea Jazz Festival and he was still their tour manager! He’d kind of just seamlessly transitioned from state minder to tour manager.

EI:  I have to hear some of those records again. I did listen to some Ganelin Trio records when I was young. It’s been a while, but I liked them at the time.

JC:  Yeah. Live they were a pretty interesting band.

I’ve seen so many transitions. In the eighties you got this extraordinary moment where DJs like Giles Peterson and a guy called Paul Murphy and a few others were playing sixties Blue Note records by Art Blakey, Kenny Dorham and some of the organ bands very loud on sound systems in clubs with a new generation of kids dancing to them. Dance groups were formed, one called I Dance Jazz I DJ.

Sometime around the late seventies/early eighties I realized that my career had flipped over and become more to do with music than theatre.

EI:  I know you were a proper tour manger at some point.

JC:  I did a lot of tour management, particularly for the Contemporary Music Network. The first one I did was a double bill of Gil Evans’s band and Stan Tracey’s octet, we did big theatres outside London and we sold the Festival Hall out. I remember that well. Gil’s band was unbelievable. The trumpet section was Ernie Royal, Hannibal Marvin Peterson and Lew Soloff. And then also in the band were Bob Stewart and John Clark and the saxophones were David Sanborn, George Adams and Arthur Blythe. Gil presided over it in a kind of shambolic father figure way. I had to introduce the band because Gil very slyly said to me, “Man, would you mind coming on and just telling everybody who the band are because I’ve just got new teeth and I’m afraid they’ll come out.”

Yeah right! Did I ever see Gil introduce a band on stage? No! So I had to pick my moment because nothing ever stopped, everything would immediately segue into another bit, so you’d have to pick your moment to come out, and that was hilarious, it became a game between the band and me.

At around the same time I got to know Carla Bley. I tour managed Carla’s ten-piece band and then that led to me going out on the road with Carla a lot over the years, around Europe and in the States.

EI:  Carla would have been in Haden’s Liberation Music orchestra as well. One of my favorite albums is The Ballad of the Fallen, and you told me that you were working for the band on that very tour.

JC:  Yeah. It was a bit like herding cats. Some of the nicest people, but it could be challenging to get everyone in the same place at the same time.

I helped Carla produce her opera with Jack Bruce and Steve Swallow and Don Preston in LA for the New Music America project. We’ve also commissioned a lot of work from her.

Meeting George Russell was also pretty important. I’ve always been interested in how the big band evolved. Over the years I’ve managed to work with Gil Evans, George Russell, and Carla Bley. That’s a hat trick, in football terms.

For me, connecting musicians from outside the UK to musicians inside the UK is important, and live big bands can be part of that dialogue.

EI:  How did you start Serious?

JC: Serious kind of evolved into a kind of partnership between the late John Ellson and myself in the mid-eighties because I was picking up so much work I couldn’t handle it all. We got to know each other when he was wheeled in to help out on Bracknell, as a sort of weekend escape from his day job.

EI:  What was his day job?

JC:  He was a youth careers officer in West London. He and I just hit it off and after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, we just ended up with a partnership. Did a mixture of tour management and I was continuing to programme Bracknell even as a freelancer and I was also programming the festival in Camden which eventually evolved into the London Jazz Festival.

At first it was just me and John. And then we kind of took on a few people and expanded and expanded and expanded, then in the early nineties we joined forces with David Jones who was a similar co-director and then Claire Whitaker joined us a few years later. John Ellson decided he wanted to go off in his own direction. John was a bit of a maverick in a very nice way and he and I were good friends and stuff.

EI:  You told me something interesting about the name Serious. Part of it comes from Val Wilmer’s book As Serious as Your Life…?

JC:  I recommend that book to anybody interested in the evolution of jazz in the late 20th century. Val has become quite a good friend and that was a book that really made me think.

It was a mixture of Val’s book, and also that in the eighties “serious” had become a piece of contemporary slang. People used to come up and say, “That’s a really serious piece of work.” It came out of black street culture but the city had picked it up and was talk about about serious money. It was a mixture of all that. It was serious fun, for serious reasons.

The music that we are committed to had a resonance that was to do with a lot of political and social change over the last century. We were operating at a microcosm. That sort of sat at the background of the way that we evolved the festival in the early days. “A festival of jazz and all the music it touches and is touched by.”

Somebody once referred to jazz being the original world music.

To be honest, I don’t like the term world music because I don’t think it was ever originally conceived as a genre, I think the original guys who conceived were it in a pub round the corner from the Serious office in Clerkenwell. They were much more interested in creating an acceptance within the media in the days when the big record stores had classical departments and jazz departments and folk departments and there was a whole realm of music across the globe that was not represented properly.

I don’t really buy into that generic branding, but I do buy into the fact that jazz has got this ability to connect into so many different traditions. It’s got an incredible core, but it also provokes dialogue with just about anything that is also solid.

There’s an issue around this as well. I’ve been phoned up by artists saying, “Oh I see you did quite a lot of world music on your programme, and I’ve got a world music project.” And I said, “You’re actually just after a gig, you are just grafting on an oud player because it actually gives a bit of another color.”

I think Manfred at ECM was doing some very visionary work back in the seventies even, like placing an artist like Naná Vasconcelos with Ralph Towner and Jan Garbarek. Because what came out of that would be something that had its own rigor.

EI:  It’s nice to talk to a promoter who understands that rigor is so important, because the core of jazz can be lost at certain jazz festivals, buried beneath so many kinds of world music and everything else.

JC:  The core is so important, whatever that American thread is that started in the late 19h century — although I guess the Art Ensemble of Chicago would say it actually goes back much further.

EI:  Before we wrap up I’d like to bring up something you said to me about a year ago that made me think about something a little differently. You felt like there was this new interest in jazz from young people in England that was connected to “going to the club and enjoying the party.” It was social music again, as compared to “knowing all the names on the classic Blue Note records” being the entry point. I’m paraphrasing what you said…

JC:  There is that jazz orthodoxy which is an anorak tendency…

EI:  Can you explain what an “anorak tendency” is to us Americans?

JC:  OK. An anorak is a waterproof jacket with a hood. If you’re walking in the open air and the rain is beating down upon you it’s good to have an anorak. But it’s also used over here in the same vein as trainspotters (another very English thing). People sit on train stations and take down the numbers of engines. It’s collecting stuff. The anorak is the geek or the nerd. Being the collector and the box ticker.

EI:  Near Covent Garden there’s that row of specialised bookshops. Quite specialised, I would say.

JC:  Oh yes. I think there’s one that’s just about transport.

EI:  Yeah, exactly. When I walked in I thought, “Well, a whole bookstore about transport does seem quite English.”

JC:  It’s a tendency of the Brits to file things. And actually I share some of that.

EI:  Well I do too! And this would is maybe a point to mention that a lot of the best jazz criticism has been by English writers.

JC:  Leonard Feather….Stanley Dance…

EI: One of the first “classical music” people to sort of say something good about Duke Ellington was the British firebrand Constant Lambert.

JC:  The late Max Jones who was part of the generation of British left wingers who got into the music in the thirties. Max was the Melody Makers jazz writer for many years, and was very close to Billie Holiday. He got to know the Americans. Max was a wonderfully shameless name-dropper and a fearsome drinker. He was writing about the music and talking about the music back in the thirties and he was a good writer as well.

EI:  When I wanted to expand my jazz collection I bought the Penguin record guide by two Brits, Brian Morton and Richard Cook. There was no comparable item by an American author.

JC:  That’s very interesting.

Richard Williams, who I love to bits as a writer, also found that ability to write about the music in a way that it’s not just about what it is: it’s also about where it sits in a bigger world.

EI:  Right! Perhaps Richard is the perfect bridge to connect to what’s happening with the younger scene.

JC:  It’s not just here, but you’re seeing it in the States as well, but the reaction to people like GoGo Penguin or Shabaka Hutchings or Nubya Garcia and a few others. There is a generation that’s grown up listening to the music in a way that doesn’t have much to do with an academic perspective. I think it’s partly to do with the fact that there’s a generation of musicians who aren’t bound by just playing the music that is taught, as it’s taught. I think there’s an issue there.

EI:  My friend Hyland Harris told me that Kamasi Washington doesn’t sound like the kids who studied jazz in college, A lightbulb went on in my head. There’s this element in that sound which is undeniably fresh.

JC:  In recent years we’ve worked with Robert Glasper a lot and done some really good shows with Robert. What he’s done has helped to define that relationship between jazz and dance music and hip hop culture in a way that people had been edging towards. There was certainly a certain amount of work being done on that with bands like Gang Starr and a few others in the eighties.

EI:  Roy Hargrove.

JC:  Yes, Roy is very important. Several people were and are looking for the meeting point, but Robert really understands the dialogue somehow.

In this country it’s also come out of a community in London that has grown up together and has been listening to afrobeat and British rock. There’s a lot of different strands and they’re all interconnected.

EI:  This goes back to Dudu Pukwana and Chris McGregor and even Joe Harriott, in its way.

JC:  Yes, that lineage is very much out of a London, particularly London but also other cities in the UK, have had the same cultural mix. Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, all of them, and Leeds and Bradford have all had this melting pot.

EI:  You’ve stepped back from Serious a bit and are now working on a consultancy basis.

JC:  Oh, well that’s just to do with generations. I’ve done twenty-six London Jazz Festivals, a whole bunch of things before that, and I think it’s time to pass on to the next crew. I have a lot of listening to do! As a full time promoter, you end up listening to what you need to listen to rather than what you would maybe want to.

Projects will come along.