Recently I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a British jazz fan. I’d heard a lot about the drive for authenticity, which seems to mean playing the music with a certain purity of technique and/or spirit while explicitly acknowledging its roots in New Orleans, the blues, and ultimately slavery. As a white, middle-class, British jazz fan, this left me feeling a little marginalized—and yes, I do appreciate the irony of that statement. Was I guilty of cultural appropriation? Do people like me contribute anything to the idiom? (That’s a topic for a whole essay, I’ve decided, coming soon to a Syncopated Times near you.)
But then I heard the latest record from The Washboard Resonators. And believe you me, I’m not about to argue that jazz is not the quintessential African-American art form—but is anyone else out there doing exactly what these guys are doing? The two-man Anglo-Welsh outfit isn’t the first to take jazz and give it a British twist—my Kenny Ball LPs are some of my favorite old records. But British trad revivalists of the 1960s like Ball, Humphrey Lyttleton, and Chris Barber all had huge bands: Jack Amblin and Martyn Roper are their own band.
As their tongue-in-cheek name implies, Amblin and Roper play washboard and resonator guitar respectively. But the former is also a formidable jazz drummer (who recently toured with Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Juke
The Rise of a Jazz Vibraphonist: Evelyn Yosmali
Garry Berman
