I recently made a programme about the British jazz pioneer Arthur Briggs. Yes, I know. Arthur who? The much-missed Jeremy Clarke told me: ‘If only he’d been called Arthur “Big-Boy” Briggs or “Honeydripper” Briggs, maybe things would have turned out differently.’ As it was, his name always suggested a painter-decorator from Edwardian Brixton rather than one of the hottest cornetists on the prewar jazz scene.
Briggs was a Caribbean child of empire who, as a teenager, fell in with makers of the new music in New York, then after the first world war helped bring jazz across to Europe. His various adventures – seeing black bodies in the Mersey after Liverpool race riots, playing in Ankara at the execution of Atatürk’s enemies, defying a Nazi camp commander – are for another day. What he did for me was kick-start a collection of prewar shellac. Back in the early pre-plastic days of recorded discs, they made them from a resin called shellac. Each side lasted about three minutes, and they were played at 78 revolutions of the turntable per minute (as opposed to 33 for later LPs and 45 for singles).
We needed a few Briggs ‘sides’ to illustrate the programme, preferably with mood-enhancing crackle. And that was when I discovered that for a few quid, you can get yourself a genuine piece of musical history. My first ‘78’ was Freddy Johnson and his Harlemites (featuring A. Briggs) playing ‘Harlem Bound’, recorded in Paris in 1934. Now I have about 300. Nothing compared with the real collectors, but plenty enough for a lot of wistful dreaming and the occasional rug-up dance-a-thon.
One of the things you quickly discover is that most early jazz was basically dance. But not all dance was jazz. How to distinguish the two? Well, it beats me. I am quite as happy with a Louis Armstrong as I am with a (to pick a name from the pile beside me) Blanche Calloway and Her Joy Boys.
And I am encouraged to see that the leading authority on the period – the jazz discographer Brian Rust – was also often uncertain about where the line lay. I follow Philip Larkin, whose taste in jazz ended with swing, and who said he knew he liked a piece if it had him doing a kind of war-dance round his desk.
Rust’s book is one of the two things you need for the hobby. His exhaustive two-volume discography of prewar jazz means you can place your new acquisition in its historical and musical context, and clear up any niggling doubts over whether it was Miff Mole on trombone in that Red Nichols number. The other thing you need is a record player that plays at 78 revs per minute. There are plenty of modern turntables around today that do.
My Rust copy is full of pencilled annotations from previous owners, people for whom this music was presumably part of their formative years. For me, the records provide connection with a time that has just disappeared over the horizon of history, but still somehow lingers – like a sunset. I imagine a 1920s flapper handling the same heavy disc of black, lowering the needle, and – with a whoop of joy – shim-shamming it round the living room with her friends. Happy days.
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