Mainstreaming

There is little consensus over the term ‘mainstream’ as it pertains to music in academic and popular discourse. As a recent survey of academic literature on the topic shows, it is a profoundly ambivalent concept, often used to indicate an excessive pursuit of financial gain, or problematic, industrialised cultural production practices that pose a threat to more ‘authentic’ forms of music making (Steinbrecher Reference Steinbrecher2021). Crucially, though, when used in the context of popular music, it reliably connotes popularity. Popularity is a concrete, measurable phenomenon – indexed by official charts, streaming metrics, and ticket sales – and this makes ‘mainstream’ a ‘processual’ term: ‘something or someone crosses over into the mainstream, becomes mainstream, is brought to the mainstream or slips out of the mainstream’ (Steinbrecher Reference Steinbrecher2021, p. 409). Mainstream status in contemporary popular music, then, is often temporary and ambivalent, but relates directly to audience attention in the here and now.

In jazz, the term carries other implications. The concept ‘insists that the essence of jazz is to be found not on the cutting edge, but well back within the tradition’ (DeVeaux Reference DeVeaux1991, p. 551), specifically in the form of a well-established repertoire of jazz standards and a fairly stable aesthetic rooted in the musical idioms and performance norms of bebop as its ‘lingua franca’ (Fellezs Reference Fellezs2011, p. 60). This view places the centre ground of the jazz mainstream, historically and stylistically, at a (perhaps the) key inflection point in the shifting relationship of jazz to popular music, at the moment where bebop’s pioneers called into question the status of jazz as a ‘socially popular form’, asserting the status of their radical, forbiddingly complex and virtuosic music as autonomous art (Gendron Reference Gendron1993; Stanbridge Reference Stanbridge, Shepherd, Horn, Oliver and Wicke2012, p. 302). Following the terrain sketched out by Deveaux and Fellezs, we can see how ‘mainstream-ness’ in jazz, far from indexing broad audience appeal, invokes a defining instance of its rejection.

Rather than relitigate the ‘is jazz popular music?’ debate (Frith Reference Frith2007), this article adheres to Charles Keil’s premise that jazz has traversed ‘the tightrope between commodification and artification from the git-go’ (Keil and Feld Reference Keil and Feld2005, p. 296), with the music’s contested cultural position, and vexed relationship to the popular, being a foundational, generative tension threading through jazz history. As such, the paper focuses on how this balancing act has unfurled along the trajectory of the ‘London jazz explosion’ towards the popular music mainstream, and away from ‘mainstream jazz’. Drawing from primary interview data and secondary analysis of press, promotional, and social media discussion of ‘new London jazz’, I argue that precisely these unresolved tensions over the cultural status and ownership of jazz, and the relative legitimacy of its different forms, have been crucial in catalysing the ‘UK jazz explosion’.

In the next section, I provide some details on the corpus and research methodology underpinning this paper. I then provide some definitions and more detail on the social, sonic, and spatial contours of the ‘new London jazz scene’ (NLJS), showing how three distinctive features have been crucial in marking the scene as a thing apart within the British jazz landscape: a thoroughgoing fusion with Black Atlantic popular musics; a centrality of dance at live performances, and ‘danceability’ to some key NLJS recordings; and a notable prominence of musicians of colour within the scene, particularly Black women instrumentalists. I then trace how these same features have been central to readings of the scene’s mainstreaming as counter-hegemonic, whereby its very popularity is taken to destabilise the elitism and institutional whiteness perceived as structuring the British and European jazz ‘establishments’, focusing specifically on post-secondary jazz education. The paper then provides further explanation of how this anti-elitist institutional critique can be usefully interpreted as ‘jazz populism’ in evidence on the London scene, tracing how these distinctive cultural politics have been refracted through the prism of race, nation, and belonging. The paper concludes by discussing some limitations of this critique.

Methodology

This paper draws from a corpus of 36 formal, semi-structured research interviews conducted primarily between September 2020 and August 2021. The sample comprises a mixture of musicians and cultural intermediaries operating within the British jazz ecosystem, including gig promoters, photographers, journalists, artist-managers, record label workers, venue owners, and music educators, with many occupying a number of these roles at once. Interview participants ranged in age between early 20s and late 60s, with an approximate 60/40 split between male and female participants.Footnote ³ Interviews lasted between 60 and 180 minutes, and all but one were remote, as fieldwork largely took place during Covid-19 lockdowns. Interviewees were recruited through snowball sampling, using pre-existing connections to a few information-rich key informants, who provided initial access to the wider scene milieu and provided contacts for other potential participants (Patton Reference Patton2014, pp. 451–52). I also ensured that each of the five types of cultural intermediary identified by Lizé was represented in the sample (Lizé Reference Lizé2016).Footnote ⁴ This sampling technique reflected the central role of cultural intermediaries in articulating cultural creation with consumption, and in defining, promoting, mediating, and commodifying music scenes (e.g. Gallan Reference Gallan2012; Hracs Reference Hracs2015; Shank Reference Shank1994, pp. 191–238).

Following well-established norms of semi-structured interviewing (e.g. Fielding and Thomas Reference Fielding, Thomas, Gilbert and Stoneman2016, p. 296; Wengraf Reference Wengraf2001), I prepared participant-specific interview guides, using previous correspondence, social media content, and publicly available press coverage as question prompts. While question schedules were bespoke, all interviews involved discussion of participants’ place within (or absence from) the ‘London jazz scene’; the recent upswell in attention for British jazz; working conditions in British jazz; different jazz subgenres and spaces in London, and potential intra-scene tensions; and exclusions or elisions in dominant narratives about jazz in London. All participants were anonymised, and quotations provide only pertinent professional details, typically their role(s) and sometimes descriptions of professional experience.

My approach to multimedia analysis adopted a conceptual framework derived from ‘scene studies’ (e.g. Bennett Reference Bennett2004; Shank Reference Shank1994; Straw Reference Straw1991), which understands music scenes as constituted by a ‘broad spectrum of musical activities… includ[ing] performance, production, marketing, promotion and distribution’ (Bennett Reference Bennett2004, p. 96)’. To this end, I developed a holistic sample of media objects produced by and about the NLJS from across this spectrum. This included press coverage, public relations materials from the recording industries, liner notes, television, and radio documentaries; alongside social media content, primarily from Instagram. These materials, alongside interview transcripts, were imported into NVivo qualitative data analysis software, followed by several rounds of abductive coding and iterative theory generation (see Timmermans and Tavory Reference Timmermans and Tavory2012).

What’s in a name? The British/London/south-east London jazz scene

As the small sample cited in the introduction shows, media commentary has regularly treated ‘London’ and ‘UK’ jazz as interchangeable.Footnote ⁵ This uncritical conflation reflects London’s status as the culturally hegemonic capital, but ‘does a disservice to spaces and places that remain vital to British jazz’ beyond its boundaries, flattening a heterogeneous, but tightly interconnected, national jazz landscape (de Lacey Reference de Lacey, Havas, Johnson and Horn2025, p. 369). I am aware that this paper’s focus on the NLJS might appear to compound the neglect of UK jazz scenes in other regions, and I use the term advisedly (Hodgkins and Lawes Reference Hodgkins and Lawes2025, p. 42), working from the assumption that precisely these kinds of conflations (London and United Kingdom) and binary oppositions (‘new’ vs old jazz) are themselves pertinent to the recent mainstreaming of London jazz.

Additionally, it is the case that much of the music often clumsily bracketed as ‘UK jazz’ is a product of London’s unique social, spatial, and musical articulations, particularly concentrated around the south-east and east of the city. While a comprehensive overview of participants and sounds in the ‘new’ London scene is beyond the scope of this article, three defining features of the NLJS merit further explanation. First, viewed in the round, London jazz output is thoroughly polygeneric, drawing from a wide spectrum of popular music’s recent past, particularly Black musics of the late 20th Century: dub, Afrobeat, house, R&B, jazz-funk, hip-hop, samba, and more. Notably, the fingerprints of recent Black British dance musics previously absent from British jazz are unmistakeable in much London jazz, with the music of (for example) Moses Boyd, Sons of Kemet, or Yussef Dayes in overt conversation with UK underground club culture of the recent past, especially UK garage, broken beat, dubstep, and grime.Footnote ⁶

Second, and relatedly, is the centrality of dance to the NLJS. This speaks to crucial early spaces where many NLJS musicians began performing. Keystone sites in the scene’s formation such as Total Refreshment Centre, Steez, The Fox and Firkin, or Brainchild Festival, were in some ways accidental and temporary jazz spaces, where live instrumental music, DJs, and MCs co-mingled, no single genre took precedence, and performers played to standing, moving revellers (de Lacey Reference de Lacey, Havas, Johnson and Horn2025; Melville Reference Melville and Charles2023; Warren Reference Warren2019).Footnote ⁷ These formative spaces departed from performance norms and hushed, seated audiences of established jazz venues in London like Ronnie Scott’s or 606 Club, and posed a specific challenge for up-and-coming jazz performers. Rather than navigating genre-specific expectations of devotees at jazz clubs, NLJS musicians needed to hold the attention of audiences more accustomed to house, grime, drum’n’bass, and so on – and keep them dancing. Stylistically, this has made for tracks that are drum- and bassline-forward in much of the most dancefloor-oriented (and successful) NLJS output, with idiomatic aspects of jazz practice such as swing rhythms, extended solos emphasising individual technical virtuosity, or engagement with the genre’s tradition by playing ‘standards’ repertoire notable for their frequent absence. While there are exceptions,Footnote ⁸ the strong influence of aesthetics, forms of social interaction, and performance norms derived from sound systems and more broadly UK club culture have been crucial to the scene’s popularity, and its construction as a cohesive alternative to British jazz orthodoxy in press and promotional discourse.

Third is the visibility of prominent people of colour, women, and particularly Black women instrumentalists within the scene, and more broadly the markedly multi-ethnic character of new London jazz. As discussed above, this has been widely understood as an aberration in a British jazz landscape, where white men are perceived to be overrepresented onstage and an overwhelming presence in audiences. Although something of a caricature of the London and wider British jazz landscape, this ‘pale, stale, male’ framing is not a complete fiction, speaking to an actual, existing homogeneity on the national scene (Hodgkins Reference Hodgkins2013; McAndrew and Widdop Reference McAndrew and Widdop2021; Raine Reference Raine2020; Wilks Reference Wilks2013), and an environment where racism and sexism remains pervasive, often under the guise of ‘colourblind’ meritocracy.Footnote ⁹ To summarise: the NLJS is marked by a distinctive racial and gender diversity, genre fluidity, and influence from club and sound system culture. These features have made the scene sonically and socially accessible to wider audiences, driving the increasing mainstream profile of many of its leading lights. In turn, these facets of scenic practice and identity have become touchstones in discourse by and about the scene, held up as key points of distinction setting ‘new London jazz’ apart from the British jazz world at large – and, crucially, in opposition to an institutional jazz ‘establishment’ in the United Kingdom. Finally, it is necessary to emphasise how, as in other jazz scenes (Greenland Reference Greenland2016, p. 16; Havas Reference Havas2020; Jago Reference Jago2018, pp. 246–53), and urban music scenes more generally (Finnegan Reference Finnegan2007; Shank Reference Shank1994), the umbrella term ‘London jazz’ more accurately describes a nexus of multiple, interlocking subscenes, normally revolving around certain musicians, venues or subgenres. These collectively make up the heterogeneous performance ecology, soundworld, and social milieu of London’s jazz ‘art world’ (Lopes Reference Lopes2004).Footnote ¹⁰ And, in practice, the pathway into jazz for most figures associated with ‘new’ London jazz came through this wider, established art world, with many today habitually moving between different jazz (and other music) spaces and traditions within the city, playing free improvised music, soul jazz, bebop, composed contemporary art music, experimental rock, and so on. An illustrative sample of NLJS-associated musicians of this sort could include saxophonists Shabaka Hutchings, Binker Golding, and Cassie Kinoshi, trumpeters Yazz Ahmed and Mark Kavuma, drummer Moses Boyd, bassist Daniel Casimir, pianist Sarah Tandy, or guitarist Artie Zaitz. As a result, while accounts of the ‘London jazz explosion’ speak to an actually existing phenomenon with distinct spatial and sonic contours, its distillation into a binary, ‘them and us’ account of a discrete youthful jazz insurgency in London represents a drastic, but influential simplification – as does the growing tendency to conflate all jazz in London with the Afrodiasporic pop fusion aesthetics associated with the current ‘explosion’.

With this in mind, the paper uses ‘NLJS’ advisedly. Rather than uncritically reifying the purported newness of ‘new London jazz’, I use this term to highlight how assertions of novelty play a key discursive function in the scene’s mediation, neatly demarcating a specific set of spaces, sounds, and musicians and portraying them as coherent, discrete, and homogeneous. While out of step with the lived, messy reality of jazz practice in London, this construction has been essential in accounts of the NLJS as an oppositional, alternative formation.

Institutional education, the jazz ‘establishment’, and ‘new’ London jazz

Following a rapid expansion of programmes in both the United States and Europe during the 1990s, learning jazz via higher education has become the new normal across much of the globe (Chapman Reference Chapman2018, pp. 27–9; 217–18; Prouty Reference Prouty2005). However, this process has proved deeply controversial: ‘There are perhaps few discourses as contentious among jazz communities as those of jazz’s move into educational institutions’ (Prouty Reference Prouty, Ake, Garrett and Goldmark2012b, p. 46). Much of the controversy has stemmed from a widespread belief that there are ineffable qualities unique to improvisational jazz practice that can’t (or perhaps shouldn’t) be taught in a formal setting. While the bulk of research to date focuses on American jazz education, available literature on the UK context shows a wide array of British jazz musicians expressing concerns about formalised education, with jazz school representing a ‘potential source of “corruption”’ that threatens the values that they see as intrinsic to playing jazz: spontaneity, autonomy, self-expression, and community (Banks Reference Banks2012, p. 79; McKay Reference McKay2005). There are also pragmatic misgivings about the ‘supply-side problem’ generated by the expansion of jazz education, whereby the abundance of jazz musicians outstrips demand, driving down pay (Hodgkins and Fordham 2021, pp. 82–5; Umney and Kretsos Reference Umney and Kretsos2014). Nonetheless, in the United Kingdom, ‘the day of the autodidact is largely over, replaced by a new era of university educated jazz musicians’ (Riley and Laing Reference Riley and Laing2010, p. 27).

Importantly, this includes a large proportion of NLJS musicians widely understood as at the vanguard of ‘new’ London jazz (Clare Reference Clare2024). One case study succinctly illustrates this point. We Out Here is a compilation album released in 2018, explicitly marketed as a key document of a music scene on the rise that (at the time) had a limited footprint of official audio releases. Of the 32 musicians featured on the recording, 75% studied music at a specialist higher education institution, a large majority taking Jazz Performance or Jazz Composition courses. Of those who were educated to BA level or higher, the majority attended Trinity Laban in Greenwich, underscoring the pivotal role this single institution has played in drawing together personal and professional networks of young musicians who constitute the backbone of the scene.Footnote ¹¹

But despite the evident institutional embeddedness of much of the London scene, the NLJS–university relationship is regularly described in oppositional terms in commentary by and about the scene, summarised by jazz critic Nick Hasted as ‘intimations… that this is music made by street-level radicals, tearing up the rulebook of jazz’s academic establishment’ (Hasted Reference Hasted2019b). Such a perspective places purportedly staid, rote knowledge attained at music college (in one author’s words ‘the conservatory-honed noodlings of middle-aged musicians for affluent – and seated – audiences’ (Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson2018b)) in stark contrast with, and subordinate to, what is deemed the ‘real’ substance of jazz education: musicianship honed at jam sessions and club nights across the city (Bakare Reference Bakare2017).

Accordingly, institutional jazz education has been a focal point for much of the ‘anti-establishment’ sentiment circulating in London jazz discourse, with the curricula and pedagogical techniques common in institutionalised post-secondary jazz education understood as compounding perceptions of jazz as a marginal, elite pursuit. Koleoso, for example, has suggested that ‘jazz education, particularly at conservatoire level, almost uses jazz as a weapon against freedom’, encapsulated in an institutional hostility to popular music at large that implied ‘it wasn’t OK to like [grime MC] Skepta because there’s no 1-6-2-5-1 turnaround [chord changes] at the end of his verse’ (Vinti Reference Vinti2019).

This apparent inflexibility regarding contemporary music beyond the confines of jazz speaks to a broader critique regarding canon. One research participant, a trumpeter and Guildhall graduate, made this point, framing what she perceived as an overbearing emphasis on canonical American jazz as inimical to her own authentic self-expression:

Discontent with the US-centric parochialism of conventional university syllabi is a consistent theme in statements by NLJS musicians, with many suggesting that greater attention should be paid to the fullness of jazz histories closer to home. While a common refrain among observers of British jazz (Nicholson Reference Nicholson2014, p. 265 n10), within the NLJS, the university is cast specifically as complicit in a wider erasure of musicians of the African diaspora and their contribution to British jazz (Banks and Toynbee Reference Banks, Toynbee, Toynbee, Tackley and Doffman2014; Heining Reference Heining2012, pp. 219–72; Wilmer Reference Wilmer and Sinker2019). Prominent tenor saxophonist Chelsea Carmichael has offered this critique, suggesting that ‘the Conservatoire path is very American-focused’ at the expense of ‘the lineage of Black British excellence within jazz: “… we have our own history and legacy [in the UK] and we don’t do too much digging into it”’ (About: Chelsea Carmichael n.d.). Scene members have also singled out the absence of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti from British jazz syllabi (Awoyungbo Reference Awoyungbo2020; Lewis Reference Lewis2020), suggesting his neglect – as arguably the most obvious influence upon idiomatic jazz in London today, and an alumnus of London conservatoire Trinity Laban – is a particularly glaring example of institutional myopia. This came up, unprompted, during my conversation with an experienced pianist from the scene (themselves a former student at the Royal Academy) who suggested that ‘I hadn’t even heard of Fela until I started playing with Femi [Koleoso]’. Others have suggested that a perceived prioritisation of technical complexity in conservatoire settings militated against musicality. As saxophonist and Trinity Laban graduate Camilla George put it: ‘one thing I hated about some of the people at college was that they thought they were really clever writing stuff in 15- or 13-time signatures, but… it didn’t sound like music. It sounded like an exercise to me’ (quoted in Burke Reference Burke2021, p. 173). A prominent pianist I interviewed in 2021 framed the departure from the self-conscious efforts to appear ‘clever’ described above by George as a positive effect of the scene’s success:

Comments made by saxophonist and composer Cassie Kinoshi extend the widespread criticism of ‘impenetrability’, by folding it into a wide-ranging critique of the misplaced priorities of institutionalised jazz education:

Kinoshi’s critique exactly inverts the terminology used by early jazz advocates to tout the music’s legitimacy and artistic parity with the classical canon, for whom the music’s ‘refinement’ was a key indicator of its quality (Lopes Reference Lopes2004). These statements further indicate how many in the scene have deemed the hegemonic influence of pedagogical techniques, music theory, and schemas of cultural value associated with ‘mainstream jazz’ entrenched in university jazz programmes as complicit in the intertwined and enduring sonic and social inaccessibility of jazz. Kinoshi continues:

This is a succinct summary of the NLJS’s oppositional stance towards the alienating effects of ‘cold’ and ‘refined’ hegemony of institutional jazz education and its problematic treatment of ‘music separately from the social practices in which it is situated and therefore meaningful’ (DiPiero Reference DiPiero2023, p. 53).Footnote ¹² Kinoshi’s argument is notable for its refusal to separate aesthetic norms from questions of race or class, treating them as ultimately co-productive and self-sustaining. It also frames the premium placed on sociality and demystification in the NLJS as representing a return to the spaces, sounds, and communal experiences of authentic jazz: ‘lots of my peers, like Moses Boyd and Nubya Garcia, and promoters like Total Refreshment Centre, make sure they maintain that dance movement and energy in the music, which has brought people back’ (Hasted Reference Hasted2019a) [emphasis added]. Similarly, musicians such as tubist Theon Cross and saxophonist Binker Golding have explicitly cited the dance-friendly quality of their music as a means of, in Golding’s words, ‘giving back to people’ (Searle and Cross Reference Searle and Cross2019; Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2019).

Scene figurehead Shabaka Hutchings has also framed his work as driven by this same impulse, where he seeks to ‘break down the mystique of… cultural forms that are supposed to be so revered’ (Hutchings and Ghadiali Reference Hutchings and Ghadiali2021, p. 143). This strategy explicitly uses sonic accessibility, groove, and the importance of dance as a ‘gateway drug’ to draw new listeners to jazz: ‘my favourite thing… is to settle into a simple groove that everyone can dance to, and then go batshit crazy with free improvisation on the saxophone. If we do something accessible to the average listener, the pure jazz stuff is not so scary’ (quoted in Hodgkinson Reference Hodgkinson2018).

Taken together, we can see in the above statements how the vocabulary of mixture and essence are key in threading together anti-elitist and anti-racist commentary in the London jazz context. The NLJS’s polygeneric aesthetics are widely interpreted as a sonic expression of convivial youth multiculture, even as prominent Black British musicians self-confidently assert their right to ‘reclaim’ jazz, through assertions of its originary Blackness. Drawing on Paul Gilroy, we could call this an ‘anti-anti-essentialist’ strand in NLJS jazz populism (Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993, pp. 99–103), where actually existing hybridity is valorised (amid spiralling xenophobia in British politics), while also confronting the lived and historical reality of race, as a means to agitate for improved acknowledgement, representation and participation of people of colour in British jazz.Footnote ¹³

A further striking aspect of these statements is the candour with which NLJS participants discuss their efforts to widen audience reach through making more sonically accessible and commercially viable music. Such efforts at broad appeal have, historically, invited accusations of excessive artistic compromise in jazz, evident in, for example, the frequent denigration of commercially successful jazz-rock and jazz-funk fusion acts during the 1970s from many quarters of the jazz world (Fellezs Reference Fellezs2011; Smith Reference Smith2010). And concerns regarding the potential illegitimacy of excessive artistic compromise do surface occasionally in commentary about the scene or by its musicians. For example, during one interview I conducted with a notable saxophonist in 2021, he felt obliged to justify the dancefloor focus of some of his friends in the NLJS, through reference to their live performances:

Adjacent issues also came to the fore in Moses Boyd’s discussion of his breakout single, 2018’s ‘Rye Lane Shuffle’, where he adopted a specific, bass-heavy production style to help the track ‘to reach more people than the stereotypical jazz audience, without dumbing it down or selling out’ (Considine and Boyd Reference Considine and Boyd2019). Boyd’s reference to ‘selling out’ – once a cornerstone of discussion, debate, and belonging in popular music culture, but taken to be of dwindling contemporary relevance – suggests a degree of sensitivity to accusations of ‘going pop’ that are otherwise few and far between in NLJS discourse (Klein Reference Klein2020).

But I would suggest that for Boyd and other notable figureheads in the London scene, these potential issues are ameliorated by the breadth and genuine depth of their musical syncretism. Records such as ‘Rye Lane Shuffle’, Yussef Kamaal’s Black Focus, or The Comet is Coming’s Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam provide recorded examples of the London jazz scene’s characteristic, unselfconscious musical and cultural hybridity at its most total, with multiple aesthetic traditions meeting on equal terms. Within the polygeneric value system of the London scene, while a commercially savvy strategy, precision-tooling jazz recordings such as these for club environments is also artistically legitimate. Here, the club orientation of these recordings incorporates the values and aesthetics of electronic music into the project of anti-establishment accessibility, inverting what Scott DeVeaux called the ‘implicit entelechy’ of jazz institutionalisation by once again re-embracing the music’s ‘utilitarian associations with dance music, popular song and entertainment’ (Deveaux Reference DeVeaux1991, p. 543). Such a framing situates the NLJS simultaneously as legitimate heirs to the jazz tradition and cutting-edge innovators responsible for ‘finally breaking… the boundary between jazz and club culture’ (Peterson Reference Peterson2018).

Ultimately, this prioritisation of fostering communal energy and dance, often through the simplicity of groove, has proved successful. It has not only garnered substantial, growing audiences but it has also provided an essential ‘hook’ for press accounts, which have then been indispensable in the scene’s international mediation and subsequent growth. We can see this in Piotr Orlov’s glowing profile of the then-emergent scene for Rolling Stone in 2018:

Jazz populism and counter-hegemonic mainstreaming

The vocabulary used in the above examples puts forward a fairly coherent anti-elitist critique of a purportedly out of touch British jazz establishment. Given the consistency of this discourse, I frame this critique as ‘jazz populism’.Footnote ¹⁴ It is worth pausing here to restate the cosmopolitan and predominantly left-leaning character of the London jazz scene. As such, the use of the term in this paper is distinct from its use in political science analyses of the sharp rightward turn in contemporary British politics (e.g. Inglehart and Norris Reference Inglehart and Norris2019), and the role that the vocabulary of populism has played in euphemising and legitimating contemporary far-right politics (Mondon and Winter Reference Mondon and Winter2020, pp. 107–99). There are myriad examples of material and commentary from NLJS musicians that ironise and reject the upswell of nationalist and xenophobic sentiment in the United Kingdom (Kalia Reference Kalia2019). The tendency towards ‘jazz populism’ evident in NLJS discourse is thus closer to a left populism of the sort advocated for by theorists like Ernesto Laclau (Laclau Reference Laclau2005) or Chantal Mouffe (Reference Mouffe2018).Footnote ¹⁵ This current is characterised by a scepticism towards established institutions, a redistributive economic agenda, and the pursuit of a broad popular coalition (the ‘people’) through the ‘identification of a common enemy’ and the use of political symbolism that ‘tends toward ambiguity’ (Borriello and Jäger Reference Borriello and Jäger2023, p. 45). It is also, crucially, politically protean, at times lacking ideological coherence beyond a strident antagonism directed towards the ‘unholy alliance between economic and political elites’ (Borriello and Jäger Reference Borriello and Jäger2023, p. 45).

Popular music scholarship on populism has provided some instructive theorisation of the relationship between the two fields. Scholarship on rap, in particular, has demonstrated how musical populism is not confined to the political right (Savvopoulos and Stavrakakis Reference Savvopoulos and Stavrakakis2022; Way Reference Way2022). Lyndon C.S. Way’s analysis of political messaging in Turkish and American hip-hop, for example, draws out how the ‘people’ serve as a potent, floating signifier that can at once take on a ‘local’ accent and articulate opposition to a globally dominant political order (Way Reference Way2022). This example of ‘counter-hegemonic’ musical populism that mobilises transnational or diasporic political discourses for distinctly localised ends offers a model for the analysis that follows.

With these definitions and caveats in mind, I suggest that ‘jazz populism’ in the London context comes in both aesthetic and discursive forms. The aesthetic strand is evident in the valorisation of groove- and dancefloor-oriented music and the unselfconscious, polyglot blending of a wide range of contemporary popular musics. We can see the discursive inclination towards populism in disavowals of the ‘jazz elite’ (of which prestigious conservatoires are emblematic) and corresponding claims to be reclaiming jazz music for ‘the people’. As detailed above, commentary from prominent Black musicians associated with the NLJS has linked this political project specifically to a project of racial justice, highlighting perceived problems with institutional whiteness in the jazz world and the need to reconnect with Black musicians and audiences.

Further examples of this populist impulse arise in jazz journalist Nick Hasted’s 2019 profile of London’s ‘new jazz generation’. Hasted frames the scene’s practice as a ‘reversal’ in a manner similar to Kinoshi, setting the NLJS against the ‘1960s drive to take jazz out of clubs and into concert halls’ as a form of ‘black classical music’ – a process that drummer Moses Boyd understood as born from ‘an inferiority complex. I don’t mean to seem arrogant. But I don’t need that validation’ (Hasted Reference Hasted2019c). London jazz figurehead Shabaka Hutchings has also articulated a similar impulse when discussing his ‘Kofi Flexxx’ project, ‘apparently inspired by Hutchings’s experience of the exuberance of school bands in the Caribbean’ (Muggs Reference Muggs2022). He has described Kofi Flexxx as ‘assical’ music, using instrumentation and styles of arrangement derived from the European classical tradition, but pointedly ‘with the class connotations removed’, and intended to make the listener ‘move [their] ass’ (Muggs Reference Muggs2022). Here, again, we can see a succinct summary of the wider NLJS project, whereby the scene’s trajectory towards the popular mainstream is directly positioned as iconoclastic, posing a challenge both to European elite culture and canonical features of contemporary mainstream jazz in pursuit of dance. As such, we can characterise this as a kind of counter-hegemonic mainstreaming, where the popularisation and inventive mixing of musical cultures otherwise marginalised in British jazz history (as seen in the work of artists like George, Hutchings, or Boyd) take on the kind of critical, decolonial valence outlined by Carmichael. At the same time, these interventions are also fundamental to claims of the NLJS’s oppositionality – crucial to press and promotional accounts that posit ‘new’ London jazz as a vital and novel artistic intervention in the jazz world, reversing the historic drift of mainstream jazz from its roots as a popular form. This has not been without moments of tension. For example, Camilla George has suggested the scene’s efforts at rendering jazz more accessible through genre fusion and dance have been fraught, creating fractures within the jazz world at large:

This commentary resonates with findings from other ethnographic studies of jazz scenes. Ádám Havas, for example, has singled out the jam session as a key site of ‘intra-genre distinction’ between ‘mainstream’ and free jazz musicians in Hungary, with the latter group describing similar dynamics to those outlined by George (Havas Reference Havas2020, pp. 632–33).Footnote ¹⁶ A notable move made by George here is to call into question these critics’ criteria for assessing ‘artistry’, suggesting that these unnamed ‘establishment’ jazz commentators mistake a proximity to mainstream pop aesthetics for a lack of sophistication. Interestingly, she positions the scene as channelling the ethos of past Black jazz innovators whose practice was also misunderstood:

Evoking bebop in this context is surprising given, as discussed, its centrality to ‘mainstream jazz’ as the moment when ‘jazz had become art… no longer a music tied to the mundane realities of social dance or popular song’ (Deveaux Reference DeVeaux2005, p. 16). But rather than drawing links either to bebop aesthetics or its cultural status, the NLJS is here being rhetorically positioned as an inheritor of bebop’s symbolic status as a cultural movement defined by its oppositional stance vis-à-vis jazz orthodoxy, placing the NLJS at the forefront of an ongoing cycle of Black musical innovation and white belittlement and misinterpretation.

George’s response demonstrates the malleability of the jazz tradition as it is employed by both the scene’s detractors and advocates. The principal discursive mode through which scene members conceptualise their relation to the jazz world and the music’s history is in terms of reclamation and rejuvenation, often expressed through a depiction of the jazz tradition as, at its essence, rooted in dance and entertainment. This is a claim that is up for debate (Jones Reference Jones1963, p. 65; Ramsey Reference Ramsey2003, p. 106) – but rather than reflecting a concern with historical accuracy, such a framing of the scene employs what jazz scholar Nicholas Gebhardt calls a ‘poetic’ approach to the music’s ‘myth of origins’ (Gebhardt Reference Gebhardt2011, p. 13).

Here, the NLJS’s engagement with jazz histories recalls Raymond Williams’ suggestion that the invoking of tradition is, first and foremost, ‘an aspect of contemporary social and cultural organisation’, whereby any such ‘vision of the past is intended to connect with and ratify the present’ [emphasis added] (Williams Reference Williams1977, p. 116). Placing NLJS aesthetics and performance conventions within the jazz tradition serves to ratify the populist overtones of discussions of the ‘return’ to the dancefloor and ‘to the people’, serving as post-hoc ratification for the scene’s incorporation of pop aesthetics. This in turn further cements an understanding of the mainstreaming of London jazz as counter-hegemonic: dissolving generic boundaries and cultural hierarchies, and drawing from an institutionally marginalised legacy of jazz as entertainment to create a sound palette that is present tense and future-facing.

The limits of populist critique

In this context, NLJS musicians can successfully draw upon two otherwise contradictory sources of legitimacy. They simultaneously reify the art-versus-popular binary to articulate their critique of elitism in jazz and position the scene as upending the ‘cultural ladder’ described by Fellezs; and confound this same binary, confidently moving between genre conventions, jazz styles, and performance venues at either end of the spectrum. Kinoshi is a perfect example here: her work runs the gamut between heavy metal-inflected small-group jazz with her band Brown Penny, touring the world as a member of viral Afrobeat group Kokoroko,Footnote ¹⁷ and producing commissioned work for the London Sinfonietta (Cassie Kinoshi, n.d.). Rather than a playful puncturing of the prestige assigned to highbrow culture through juxtaposition with popular forms, I would argue that the enduring distance between the two is precisely responsible for providing the gap within which the scene has flourished. While institutional music education has subsumed (certain kinds of) jazz, it continues to be structured by what Loren Kajikawa has termed the ‘possessive investment in classical music’ and remains both the preserve of a material elite and a site for the reproduction of elitist, Eurocentric cultural ideals (Kajikawa Reference Kajikawa, Crenshaw, Harris and Lipsitz2019). This provides NLJS artists with a distinctive musical offer and a countercultural aura of alterity, providing a competitive edge in a jazz marketplace that is overcrowded and (typically) commercially unviable.

It is in this process of narrativisation or branding where the often thoughtful and nuanced critiques of musical elitism and institutionalisation evident throughout this paper lose some acuity. Press and promotional literature have played a key role here, tending towards a simplistic, readymade narrative whereby the NLJS are ‘reclaim[ing] the genre from its storied old guard’ (Whitehouse Reference Whitehouse2018). These narratives at times risk reintroducing the essentialisms that the NLJS is framed as undercutting. A 2018 profile from British broadsheet The Times is representative, opening by describing British jazz as typically ‘the preserve of piano-doodling dads in turtlenecks… a world that brings with it clichés of ageing bohemians sporting complex facial hair arrangements whose natural habitat is an attic in Stoke Newington’, against which the author approvingly contrasts the NLJS to demonstrate that ‘a jazz revolution really is afoot’ (Hodgkinson Reference Hodgkinson2018). Another prominent example here is the satirical 2019 discussion of a stereotypical ‘new’ London jazz fan in the online magazine Vice. Footnote ¹⁸ Journalist Niloufar Haidari offers a light-hearted celebration of the ‘youthful jazz resurgence happening in south-east London’, while sardonically pitching the titular ‘Nu Jazz Lad’ as a neophyte enthusiast attracted to the perceived cultural capital surrounding the London jazz zeitgeist. But crucially, in this telling the ‘Nu Jazz Lad’ is ‘distinct from those weird young people who are into Actual Jazz – the ones who wear porkpie hats and a general air of condescension and involuntary celibacy… [who] goes to Ronnie Scott’s in a waistcoat and laments that he wasn’t around during the Prohibition era’ (Haidari Reference Haidari2019).

Such colourful collections of class, status, age, spatial, and perhaps even tacit racial signifiers mobilise a recurrent archetype (and figure of ridicule) for the bulk of the music’s history: the affected white jazz ‘hipster’ (Monson Reference Monson1995). These tropes serve as journalistic shorthand through which the purported novelty and oppositional valence of ‘new’ London jazz is asserted. But doing so via a reflexive treatment of ‘actual’ (or indeed ‘mainstream’, ‘establishment’) jazz as a punchline also reifies stereotypical understandings of the genre (as irrelevant, self-indulgent, and prescriptive) that, elsewhere, the project of London jazz populism discussed above nominally seeks to break down.Footnote ¹⁹ Returning to Haidari’s account for example, the author goes on to suggest that ‘Nu Jazz’ is distinctive due to its escape from the ‘rigid frameworks’ of ‘classical jazz’ through which ‘a new, exciting sound’ has emerged, ‘liberated from the strict musical orthodoxy of its forebears; what’s important here is freedom of expression and musical collaboration’ (Haidari Reference Haidari2019). This relies on a portrayal of ‘orthodox’ jazz practice as typically unconcerned with freedom or collective musicking – a glaring misunderstanding of jazz values and history that amounts to an off-hand dismissal of core practices of its subject matter.

It bears repeating that many prominent figures within the ‘new’ London jazz scene are at pains to provide nuance to excessively neophiliac or amnesiac accounts that overlook continuities between the current ‘UK jazz explosion’ and older generations or more ‘mainstream’ sounds (e.g. West and Kavuma Reference West and Kavuma2023). Nonetheless, the institutional critique advanced by NLJS constituents themselves at times contains traces of these same stereotypes employed in external commentary about the scene.

If we return to Kinoshi’s statements about conservatoire jazz teaching being a ‘cold’ and ‘refined’ process that stunts ‘communication’ and ‘emotion’ as an example, we can see how her efforts to differentiate the open, accessible, and anti-elitist qualities of the NLJS from the British jazz landscape at large rest upon a set of nested binary essentialisms. These interlocking oppositions are a ‘somewhat rudimentary but remarkably persistent’ feature of jazz discourse, and permeate commentary of and about the NLJS (Stanbridge Reference Stanbridge2023, p. 6). We can visualise them as follows:

We can see here how the elite/popular distinction, which serves as a keystone of the scene’s collective identity and ‘unique selling point’, in turn maps onto a whole series of far-reaching oppositions, which the discourse surrounding the scene serves to simultaneously prop up and undermine. But the presence, and tying together, of these essentialisms in the discursive construction of the NLJS as rightful inheritor of jazz as the once and future popular dance music raises real problems.

Significantly, tying musical Blackness so tightly to dance and entertainment as Kinoshi does – and ascribing this move with an inherent progressive politics – sidelines vital, radical currents in jazz that themselves have been intimately connected to Black politics. One obvious example is the close connection between free jazz and Black Power, which emerged in America during the late 1960s. A core group of influential artists and writers associated with the Black Arts Movement inaugurated this connection between jazz aesthetics and radical politics, understanding their approach to free improvisation as an assertion of ‘jazz as the preserve of African American musicians and as speaking most directly and meaningfully to an African American audience’, in direct ‘defiance of European aesthetic discipline and rejection of integrationist ideology’ (Anderson Reference Anderson2012, p. 98). African American cultural production formed a central thread in Black Power movements, with music particularly valued as a method of fostering radical black consciousness, instigating social struggle, and uncovering suppressed ‘continuity with the African past’ (Ramsey Reference Ramsey2022, p. 202). And indeed, this exact moment in jazz history has been deeply influential for some NLJS figures. Most notable here is Shabaka Hutchings, whose wide-ranging musical output is held together by a common thread of pre-colonial musical excavation, militant anti-racist critique, and the strong influence of African cosmology. While Hutchings’ work is singular and profoundly contemporary, it also clearly sits within the musical, intellectual, and political lineage of 1960s Black American free jazz radicalism.Footnote ²⁰

Free jazz in this moment was understood as militantly political, avowedly Black, and (importantly) antagonistic to the commercial music business, representing, according to musicologist Guthrie Ramsey, ‘the most insistent consummation of social, cultural, and identity politics in jazz’s history’ (Ramsey Reference Ramsey2022, p. 204). The Black Power–free jazz connection established in the late 1960s and 1970s, then, provides an influential model of a direct assertion of musical Blackness in jazz, directly antithetical to its status as popular music, entertainment, or high art. This therefore offers one significant instance where a deliberate dislocation from the status as popular music, entertainment or dance music, and antagonism towards the commercial music business, has itself expressed a far-reaching social-aesthetic critique and explicit political praxis – rather than reflecting the stultifying effect of academic capture or colonisation by European norms. These significant nuances are lost when the ‘jazz populism’ of the NLJS is simplistically discussed, and lauded, as a return to the music’s purported ‘roots’ as a form of Black dance music through recourse to ahistorical essentialism.

Undoubtedly, the pragmatic willingness evident in London jazz discourse, to engage with and critique both sides of the high/low divide and its correlates, has often proved beneficial for the scene. But without a coherent critique of the inequities and elitisms that pervade the cultural industries under capitalism, the oppositional politics analysed in this paper can only go so far. The tendency to laud the liberatory potential of jazz-as-entertainment overlooks the many potential drawbacks that accompany an embrace of the popular music mainstream. The demands of commercial record labels, cultural intermediaries (human and algorithmic), and mass audiences can be every bit as detrimental to artistic expression, sociability, and the long-term durability of a musical collectivity as those of ossified institutions and what jazz scholar Alan Stanbridge calls the ‘dead weight of tradition’ (Stanbridge Reference Stanbridge2007). While the growth in audiences, and diversity, augured by the NLJS is something to be celebrated, the ‘jazz populism’ evident in the NLJS also at times shares the shortcomings of its capital-P Political equivalent: a reductive analysis of its ‘elite’ opponent, and an inattention to material concerns in favour of the symbolic (Ege and Springer Reference Ege, Springer, Ege and Springer2023; Gilroy Reference Gilroy2002, pp. 41–84).