Knights of the Turntable
Going forward by going backwards....
This is not a photo from the 1930s, it’s a 1986 photo of Manchester’s Jazz Defektors, who were an important part of the scene created in the UK by innovative DJs, the Knights of the Turntables, daring to play jazz fusion next to the disco, funk, soul and jazz funk releases from an earlier time, like this one:
The streams that flow into the river of Jazz are numerous, as are the styles that have branched off from it. Inspired to play harder grooves and faster tempos by the dancers themselves, it was the Knights of the Turntables who moved jazz forward and launched in the UK a new branch, Jazz Dance.
Last week, we looked at the first two of the three things most responsible for my Jazz embarkation: two record shops and the Blue Note LP reissues; and The Wire magazine. This week, we’ll look at the final one: the 1987 Soho Jazz Festival and the Jazz Dance scene I found there….
When I was in about 7th grade, after watching a Fred Astaire movie, I told my mom I wanted to be a tap dancer and asked her if she could find me a dance teacher. Many months went by, with many reminders, before she finally gave in and signed me up with the dance teacher in town. All throughout junior and senior high school I performed dances at places like Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor, local beauty pageants, Diamond Jim’s nightclub, and finally the Minnesota State Fair. In fact, my senior year I won the Minnesota State Tap Dance Championship. But once I left for West Point, my dancing days were over. Until I walked into The Wag club in London. Here’s what happened….
It was at the 1987 Soho Jazz Festival that I discovered the Jazz Dance and Acid Jazz music scene. I first heard about the festival from a full page ad in The Wire magazine. So I put in for a long weekend pass, was lucky enough to get it approved, and headed off to London.
Before going on, it’s important to remember that during the 1980’s Cold War, Germany was divided into sectors: the southern American sector around Frankfurt, which was very influenced by the American Armed Forces Network radio stations; and the northern British sector, where I was. Musically, these sectors were very different from each other. The small village I lived in was nearby the large British Bergen-Hohne Garrison, so I could pick up all the BBC stations and was able to listen to the great Jazz shows that the Knights of the Turntables were putting out over the airways. So I was lucky to have been able to be a part of this new late 1980s Jazz resurgence in Northern Europe, spearheaded by London DJs.
To keep with the upbeat “feel” in clubs when he followed House DJs, young DJ Gilles Peterson started playing faster Jazz music with a Latin-rhythm. Shortly afterwards, Gilles started the Acid Jazz record label and became known on the London circuit as a DJ specializing in the new breed of "Acid Jazz", drawing on the jazz, funk, Latin fusions and Brazilian music of the 1970s.
Chicago’s Farley “Jackmaster” Funk and Jesse Saunders House song Love Can't Turn Around was the first US club hit to cross over into the UK mainstream. The track entered the UK singles chart on August 27, 1986 and five weeks later it peaked at #10. The following year, the Acid House song Acid Tracks by Phuture was released in Chicago and its popularity soon expanded. When they started experimenting with a Roland TB-303 synthesiser, Phuture probably didn’t think it had stumbled across the squelchy, jagged sound of Acid House – House music’s weirder, cooler, wide-eyed sibling. But they had and it sounded great. Acid Tracks was the first and fiercest of many early tunes to pioneer UK House music and shape the sound of rave.
Gilles Peterson
Throughout his career, Gilles Peterson played a pivotal role in promoting genres such as jazz, hip-hop, and electronic music. Here is Gilles in the first K-Jazz pirate radio studio with a classic Oscar Pettiford LP.
Living in the South London suburbs, Gilles grew up listening to Level 42, Earth Wind & Fire, Central Line and the heavier, deeper pirate stations such as Radio Invicta, London’s first black, soul music pirate radio station. Their slogan was Soul over London.
At 14, he set up his own station - literally an aerial suspended between a tree and a phone booth - playing an eclectic mix of jazz, funk, reggae, soul and early electro from the highest point in South London. When Radio Invicta got busted, they knew he had a transmitter and asked if they could borrow it. He agreed, but only if they’d give him a show.
At 17, he was choreographing cross-rhythms of Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, and Jazz at Camden Town’s Electric Ballroom. Here’s some excellent footage of that scene:
Here’s the type of thing Gilles would do: Play a classic Shaft soundtrack:
…and follow it up with this Stefano Torossi Italian movie soundtrack:
…followed by something from Oscar Pettiford like this:
In 1985, he DJ-ed for K-Jazz, London’s original pirate jazz music station. Later he joined legal stations in London, first the newly founded Jazz FM, and then onto the dance music station Kiss FM. In 1986, he went on to host Mad on Jazz on BBC Radio London, which is about the time I became aware of him.
“BBC Radio London was the first legal station I worked on. There were only a few legal stations at that time. I had my own show Mad on Jazz. We'd do live percussion, spoken word and we'd mix it all up.” After leaving Radio London, Gilles started his Sunday sessions - Talkin' Loud & Sayin’ Something - at Camden's Dingwalls. These ran for five years coinciding with the emerging Acid House scene and became a natural magnet for post clubbing come-down kids.
“Those five years were the best of my life as a DJ. Musically I did exactly what I was into, the Real Gilles Peterson trip. We put on this old 7-inch by Mickey and the Soul Generation which was a rare groove record with a mad rock guitar intro and no beat. I started vary speeding it so it sounded all warped. Chris Bangs got on the microphone and said, 'If that was acid house, this is acid jazz'. That's how Acid Jazz started, just a joke!”
However, the Jazz Dance Scene did not start with Gilles Peterson in London. It was already popular in Northern UK, where DJs associated with the rare groove movement, like Colin Curtis, started playing obscure jazz records in the clubs.
Colin Curtis
As a teenager in the 1960s England, Curtis developed a passion for music through listening to offshore radio stations such as Radio Caroline and through a friend’s sister who would listen to Tamla Motown records at their house. He then became interested in collecting black American music through attending Northern soul all-nighters at clubs such as the Twisted Wheel in Manchester. He began DJ-ing in the late 1960s, first at the Crystal Ballroom in Newcastle-under-Lyme and later became part of the resident DJ line-up at the Golden Torch all-nighters. The Northern soul scene had been a revivalist movement built around obscure US recordings from the 1960s which conformed to a certain rhythmic and vocal template.
In 1978, Colin DJ-ed at all-day soul festival events at venues such as the Manchester Ritz and the Blackpool Mecca, regularly playing before crowds of between 1500 to 3000 people. Around the years 1982 to 1983, while continuing to DJ at events around the country, he began to move towards more exclusively jazz sets at clubs such as Berlin in Manchester and is credited with pioneering the UK Jazz Dance scene in Northern England.
In the mid-1980s, Curtis became interested in the latest developments in dance music emanating from the US including New York electro and hip hop and the first wave of House music from Chicago, typified by artists such Chip E, Steve “Silk” Hurley and Farley “Jackmaster” Funk. In 1986, he became one of the earliest British DJs to play these records at venues such as Rock City in Nottingham.
It was during this time that the old-school Jazz Dance style sprang up in the clubs, including the dance groups The Jazz Defektors, Brothers in Jazz, The Backstreet Kids, and IDJ.
IDJ, or “I Dance Jazz”, were arguably the most successful dance crew of the genre, appearing in music videos, films, and eventually performing in front of millions at a Nelson Mandela production. Their interests were in the fringe of jazz fusion, jazz funk, and the soul jazz of the 1950s and 1960s. Particularly significant were records from the Blue Note catalogue.
I think without Colin Curtis and later Paul Murphy introducing Jazz, Be Bop, and Latin music to the London club scene and Gilles Peterson’s legendary Dingwalls sessions a whole new generation to funk, soul, and hip hop may not have happened.
Paul Murphy
When asked how he got the DJ bug, he said, “I was working at United Artists music. They threw out a load of LPs from the library. I took some home and it was stuff like Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Art Pepper and the like. All LPs which had never been available in the UK. I was also really into Soul music, strictly American of course.”
Lauded by Gilles Peterson as “the original messenger of jazz who found almost every dancefloor classic”, Paul began DJ-ing in 1970s London. His passion and unique playing style placed him at the epicenter of an emerging Jazz Dance scene in the city, taking off in spots like The Wag (which we’ll get to later), The 100 Club, The Blue Note and The Electric Ballroom.
Murphy’s sessions were characterized by jazz dancers in suits, hats and spats, and spinning well-known jazz dance classic tracks from Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders, Freddie Hubbard, Airto, Herbie Hancock, and the anthemic In The Fast Lane by Jean-Luc Ponty; but the jazz was fused with hip-hop and more experimental tracks.
Paul’s influence on UK Jazz culture simply can’t be overstated, from his short-lived but much beloved Paladin Records to his unswerving support of home-grown talents such as Working Week. Here’s one from Working Week that was a huge hit:
As a DJ, his musical selections still live large in the memories of those who experienced them.
The Wag & Baz Fe Jaz in London
Paul Murphy said this about DJ-ing at The Wag, “Well it was the '80s... The WAG was the trendiest club IN THE WORLD at the time, so I had to do it. It was a lot of fun too. Very interesting people there always.”
You have to remember, back then there was no technology –no iPhones or internet. You had to try hard to find out about places like The Wag, and most people had no interest in doing that so it ended up being quite a small band of people that actually attended – people who were actually looking for something different. The only way you would find out about these places was hanging out at the right record shop. It was either word of mouth or from homemade flyers tacked to bulletin boards.
The first time I went to The Wag was not for a specific DJ. It was to see Slim Gaillard. I knew about him from his Slim and Slam days from the late 1930s and 1940s:
Here’s one of their a 78rpm hits from 1938:
I read about the show from club listings in The Wire magazine. As it turned out, I went to see Slim Gaillard, but discovered Baz Fe Jaz. At that time in Soho, DJs were playing Jazz and Latin music in the clubs and there were lots of people dressed up like Fred Astaire in the Girl Hunt Ballet scene from The Band Wagon:
They were Jazz Dancing in a kind of soft shoe style. You could basically tap dance to jazz music in the clubs. That was cool and something I could do.
Here’s what it was actually like in The Wag in 1986 at just the time I was there:
The Soho Jazz Dance scene really was an important part of my Jazz journey. It allowed me to rediscover my dancing roots in a new setting. In the end, it was a melding of two art forms I loved: Jazz and Dance. More importantly, It drove me deeper into the current of that Big River called Jazz.
One last video. This awesome one really sums up the whole scene at that time and covers most of the themes in this leg of our journey.
Next week, we’ll head back over to Den Haag for the 1988 North Sea Jazz Festival, where a stretch of the river of Jazz starts to get a little more wild….
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Until then, keep on walking….
OK...I am loving this and had an idea. How about creating a Spotify channel with these awesome example tunes along the journey? This could work the other way by also pointing folks here.