Janet Weston is a second year PhD student at Birkbeck, researching the history of medical approaches to diagnosing, treating, and curing sexual offenders in mid-twentieth century Britain.
‘The world of jazz is so captivating,’ reflected Hobsbawm, ‘that everyone with an interest in humanity ought to be made to see its attractions’. In the final session of Wednesday’s programme, Professor Peter Bailey displayed some of these attractions, accompanying his account of Hobsbawm’s delight and enduring interest in jazz music and its musicians with performances at the piano of jazz classics from Billie Holliday’s Lover Man, to Fats Waller’s Stealin’ Apples, taking in the occasional original composition along the way.
Professor Peter Bailey at the piano, Copyright © Birkbeck Media Services Centre 2014
Hobsbawm’s experiences and views of the jazz scene in Britain and beyond were set alongside insights into Peter Bailey’s own initiation into the same world as a teenager in 1950s Coventry: the locus horrendous, as he put it. As one of a new generation of British jazz consumers that Hobsbawm sought to understand, Bailey’s own interest in the art form – its sex appeal and its potential to alarm and confuse his parents were potent attractions – and extracts from his teenage diary beautifully enhanced this history of jazz and Hobsbawm’s lifelong obsession with it. Inspired by Jelly Roll Morton, Bailey the jazz pianist became Porridge-Foot Pete and noted solemnly in his diary, aged 16, that ‘my life is jazz, and sex. I get a fair amount of one but none of the other’.
Hobsbawm’s work as the jazz critic for the New Statesman under the pseudonym Francis Newton provided ample material to access his opinions and thoughts on the ever-changing world of jazz music, as well as some of his wonderfully evocative writing. Initially wary of the Modern Jazz Quartet and their apparent aspirations to the gravitas of the classical world, Hobsbawm came to admire their pianist John Lewis greatly, and wrote of their music that it possessed a ‘dense, stately texture, like electrified fur’. Some of his pronouncements were memorable less for their poetry and more for their mistakes, given the benefits of hindsight. His low opinion of rock ‘n’ roll was epitomised in his dismissal of the Beatles as ‘an agreeable bunch of kids. In 20 years’ time, nothing of them will survive’.
For Hobsbawm, comparing the music of Count Basie to his great idol Duke Ellington was like placing the writing of William Cobbett next to that of James Joyce: it was ‘predictable, yet it lifted the audience out of their seats like a crane’. Peter Bailey certainly succeeded in lifting his audience, receiving a standing ovation, and dispatched us with the immortal lyrics of one of jazz standards made famous by Ellington himself, translated into Latin, of course, for gravitas: nihil significat si non pulsam.*
* ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If it Ain’t Got That Swing)’. Possibly.
History after Hobsbawm 
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