British Jazz Explosion - Journeys in Modern Jazz: Britain 1965-1972 review | John Fordham's jazz album of the month

The Guardian 0

(Decca)
A wide-ranging compilation featuring Kenny Wheeler, John Surman and Michael Garrick kicks off the celebratory British Jazz Explosion series of releases

The reverberations of the youthful British jazz boom that detonated in the mid-2010s echo on, despite the hindrances of the past year – as do its inventive crossovers between jazz and the worlds of hip-hop, Afrobeat and funk. Its freshly stirred stew is the latest of the cyclical events that have characterised the century since the music’s birth, when the very first jazz boom directed improvisation’s unruly heat toward amalgamating the diverse musics of Africa and Europe.

Decca is reissuing key British albums from a pivotal period in the 1960s-70s under the banner British Jazz Explosion: Originals Re-Cut, celebrating a time when original repertoires began to displace the once obligatory mimicry of American jazz. This half-century-old music filtered down to contemporary UK global-jazz innovator Shabaka Hutchings, who has named early recordings by Michael Garrick, John Surman and others as a great inspiration for his work.