The roots of the problem

'But what native store of music can an English jazz musician turn to? Music hall? Northumbrian pipe music? Morris dancing? Please!'

Some time in the late 1980s, I was driving across Scotland with Neil Cameron, a young BBC TV producer. We were coming from Fort William, where we had just finished filming a programme about the West Highland railway, and we were discussing what music we might use for it. Something a bit Scottish, something a bit jazzy, we kept thinking, but what?

We were driving through a little town when I noticed a poster for a concert by a group I'd never heard of called The Easy Club.

"Mixes Scottish music traditions with the swinging sound of the Hot Club de France!" said the slogan.

"Take their phone number," said Neil.

"Better still – I'll take the poster," I said, and jumped out of the car to do so.

"Vandals!" cried an old man, waving a walking stick at me. "Coming up here and taking our property! Bloody Sassenachs!"

I reflected after we escaped that you could never have had such an experience in England, and I'm thinking music, not racism. "Blends the sounds of English music with the hot swing of Django and Stephane!"? Excuse me. I don't think so.

In many countries, when you become a jazz musician, you have the option of using your own native sounds as part of your style. The Swedes have done it, operating on the border between folk and jazz, and so have the Poles, the Bulgarians and the Brazilians. The South Africans can do it. (Think of the haunting sounds of Abdullah Ibrahim. Think of Dudu Pukwana and Chris Macgregor, when they still remembered their township roots.) The French can do it, whether accordion-style or gypsy-style, which is why Django Reinhardt is the only guitarist in jazz whom the Americans venerate for doing things no American could ever do.

But what can an English jazz musician do? What native store of music have we got to turn to? Music hall? Northumbrian pipe music? Morris dancing? Please! The truth is that we sold out on our heritage years ago when we decided to buy American. We did a total blood transfusion on our music and went transatlantic. That way we could produce The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and all that mock-American stuff, and the French couldn't. Great. What we couldn't do any more was native stuff. We couldn't sound like us any more.

The one part of the UK where this wasn't true was Scotland. Scotland has never quite sold out. They have kept piping, and they have kept folk singing and fiddling, and they have kept Jimmy Shand and all his works, and even though it was a patchwork conservation scheme, it was enough. It was enough to ensure that music with a Scottish accent survived. I always thought that some Scottish jazz musicians, such as Sandy Brown and Bobby Wellins, unconsciously had a northern keening sound to them, but now the process is deliberate, and bandleaders like John Rae are cultivating their Scottish garden to produce haunting records such as Celtic Feet.

Almost all the worthwhile stuff to be heard from the Scottish scene – people such as John Rae, Colin Steele, Brian Kellock etc – is on the Caber Music label, a new native growth run by the drummer Tom Bancroft, and just to show that Scottish music is not necessarily a solemn affair, you should have heard what he said on Radio 3 about their attempt to launch the new Caber CD by Brian Kellock in London. Well, obviously you didn't hear it, so here it is.

"... We did this launch at the Vortex in June, and we'd planned it weeks in advance so that John Fordham [big English critic] could come along, and all that, and we found out later on it was the same night that Max Roach [iconic black American drummer] was playing on the South Bank, and nobody came! None of the critics came! We thought it was a disaster! We'd spent all this money on getting two bands down – Celtic Feet, as well as Brian – we'd got a whisky sponsor, and nobody came!... But then what happened was that the Max Roach gig was a bit... I don't want to slag it off because I wasn't there, but apparently a bit BORING... and our gig was fantastic, and the word got out that everyone had gone to the wrong gig. "What was the Scottish gig like?" "Fantastic! AND they had whisky!"... We realised it was better to have nobody come to your gig and and wish they had, than if they'd actually come, so this huge buzz went round the London jazz village, and everyone was talking about Brian Kellock, and we'd known how fantastic he was for about 15 years up here... "

I have accepted no money from Caber Music. I just love what they're doing up in Scotland, and I wish more people knew about it. What? Their website? Oh, it's www.cabermusic.com. Good luck.