The British Audience

In April this year, the death was announced of the veteran Radio 3 jazz presenter Geoffrey Smith – who hosted Jazz Record Requests for over twenty years. To mark Geoffrey’s death, this week there’s another chance to hear a series of Essays from 2020 in which Geoff, as an American, explored his observations of the British relationship with Jazz.

In a culture obsessed with interpreting social signs, the British are fascinated by jazz as style, attitude, behaviour. In the 1920s, jazz was the vogue music of the Bright Young Things: the Prince of Wales himself was fond of sitting in on drums with visiting Americans. On the other end of the political spectrum, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm saw the music as the epitome of working class art. And the fixation with the purity of jazz's folk roots drove the trad jazz boom of the 1950s, a playing style that was once seen as a sign of hip progressive politics. For Geoffrey, all this signifying makes it harder to get through to the music.