{"id":3857,"date":"2017-10-06T12:08:23","date_gmt":"2017-10-06T11:08:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennywilson.org\/?p=3857"},"modified":"2017-10-06T12:08:23","modified_gmt":"2017-10-06T11:08:23","slug":"the-day-jazz-fans-had-a-riot-telegraph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/2017\/10\/06\/the-day-jazz-fans-had-a-riot-telegraph\/","title":{"rendered":"The day Jazz fans had a riot |Telegraph"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Beaulieu Jazz Festival 1960<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

As he looks forward to the A Love Supreme festival, Ivan Hewett looks back at the day in 1960 that jazz fans went on the rampage at the third Beaulieu Jazz Festival<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outdoor jazz festivals have an air of wholesome, clean fun. It\u2019s hard to be cutting-edge when there are infants pottering about and midges biting. The ambience is best suited to trad jazz played by chaps of a certain age, dressed in ties and with bald pates reddening gently in the sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next week something more ambitious and up-market takes place in rolling meadows in Sussex. This is the second instalment of Britain\u2019s only green-field jazz festival, A Love Supreme, which is set against \u201cthe gorgeous backdrop of Glynde Place,\u201d an Elizabethan Manor House. Top-flight acts including Gregory Porter, De La Soul, Laura Mvula and Dave Holland will be there. You can bring a tent, or go for a superior \u2018Glamping\u2019 experience complete with hot showers, Pamper Parlour and 24-hour security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those with very long memories, this might remind them of a somewhat less upmarket event more than 50 years ago, when some jazz fans went on the rampage in front of a similarly \u201cgorgeous backdrop\u201d. The year was 1960, the occasion was the third Beaulieu Jazz Festival, which took place at Lord Montagu\u2019s estate at Beaulieu near the New Forest. Lord Montagu was something of a jazz fan, and thought this was a risk-free way to indulge his enthusiasm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately it all went wrong, when specimens of a new and puzzling sort of human being \u2013 the teenager – invaded the stage. Stuart Nicholson, now the distinguished columnist of Jazzwise magazine, remembers that as the lighting gantry collapsed \u201csomeone grabbed a microphone and demanded ‘free beer for the working man’.\u201d A lone figure made it to the top of the stage, a converted merry-go-round complete with fairground horses, and once the crowd realised he was on television, a mass climb began to join him.\u201d There\u2019s some tantalisingly brief footage on this Path\u00e9 newsreel<\/a><\/strong>.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How wonderfully British. It wasn\u2019t an end to bourgeois hegemony the young rioter was fighting for, or even more power for the unions. It was just some free beer. However the invader wasn\u2019t some lone eccentric. Jazz at that time was a hotbed of competing styles, with deep antagonisms between different sets of fans. These were driven by class differences as much as musical tastes. The jazz historian Duncan Heinen has uncovered these simmering tensions in his fascinating history of jazz in the Sixties and Seventies, entitled\u00a0Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers, and Free Fusion<\/a>G<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book shows that the 1960 Beaulieu festival was really more a tail-piece to the Fifties, that edgy decade of beatniks, CND marches, Angry Young Men, pop art, and race riots (it\u2019s only because the Sixties have been so mythologised that people automatically think of the Fifites as drab). Jazz was in the thick of it, though witnesses of the period never seem to agree whether a fondness for drainpipe trousers meant you were anti-nuclear power and for modern jazz, or despised Dizzy Gillespie and preferred skiffle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The jazz festival’s stage was a converted merry-go-round. Pic: GETTY IMAGES<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some say it was a working class thing to like modern jazz, and that middle-class rebelliousness came out in \u2018jiving\u2019 to trad. One indubitable fact is that the rock and roll, R&B and jazz scenes were closely interlinked, and players such as Ginger Baker could migrate from one to another. Look closely at this film clip of the 3rd Beaulieu jazz festival and you\u2019ll catch a glimpse of a very young Rod \u201cthe Mod\u201d Stewart among the eager crowds.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So with competing styles of jazz on the platform, plenty of beer on tap, and the provocative backdrop of a stately home, the stage was a set for a classic British class confrontation. One imagines some of the youth were just itching to feel aggrieved, like the character in Colin MacInnes\u2019s novel Absolute Beginners, who describes the Beaulieu festivals as \u201cgarden party\u2019s (sic) for the ooblies and Hooray Henries.\u201d (According to the poet Jeff Nuttall, \u201cooblies\u201d was Humphrey Lyttleton\u2019s term for devotees of the \u201coriginal purist trad subculture\u201d. George Melly preferred the term \u201cmoron\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finding out what really happened that day at Beaulieu is like asking what really happened at the riotous premiere of the Rite of Spring. Some say it was the bearded trad fans versus the modern jazzers. Other say it was nothing to do with music at all. One witness insists it was Teddy Boys shouting \u201cWe want Acker!\u201d (meaning trad jazz clarinettist and singer Acker Bilk), while the correspondent for Melody Maker sniffed about working-class \u201cmobsters\u201d coming from Portsmouth and Southampton. Once the stage had been invaded, chaos quickly ensued. A building was set on fire, 39 people were injured, and the BBC pulled its outside broadcast feed off the air six minutes early. \u201cThings are getting quite out of hand,\u201d said the announcer primly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That wasn\u2019t quite the end of the Beaulieu jazz festival. Lord Montagu was game enough to try again the following year, but the cost of the increased security meant the event was no longer financially viable. And that was it, for \u201cgreen-field\u201d jazz festivals in the UK \u2013 until Love Supreme came on the scene. More than 50 years on, will this stir the same passions? Will someone grab a microphone after Gregory Porter\u2019s set and demand \u201cfree champagne for the working man\u201d? Somehow I just can\u2019t see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source: The day Jazz fans had a riot – Telegraph<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As he looks forward to the A Love Supreme festival, Ivan Hewett looks back at the day in 1960 that jazz fans went on the rampage at the third Beaulieu Jazz Festival Outdoor jazz festivals have an air of wholesome, clean fun. It\u2019s hard to be cutting-edge when there are infants pottering about and midges […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,34,35],"tags":[261,317,368,372],"class_list":["post-3857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beatniks","category-mods-and-hippies","category-music","tag-jazz","tag-music","tag-politics","tag-protest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}