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Jazz Britannia: mediating the story of British jazz on television

This analysis of a key music history documentary had an important place in two long term activities within our research centre: to develop a body of work on mediated histories of popular music that I have worked on with Paul Long; and collective work on jazz, and especially European jazz, that I have been developing with Barber and Dubber, and latterly Gebhardt, in collaboration with colleagues within the Birmingham Conservatoire. Parts of this larger endeavour can be found in our published analysis of the rest of the Britannia music series, in our work on director Tony Palmer, and work that has emerged from our participation in the HERA Rhythm Changes European Jazz project, like my collaborations with Barber on jazz collectives. The Jazz Britannia three-part television documentary was significant in terms of both British jazz history (as the first comprehensive television analysis of the music) and BBC documentary form (as the first in a series of prominent music history documentaries), and the analysis sought to examine both the way it was positioned as ‘cultural history’ and ‘quality television’. By publishing in an international jazz journal we aimed to establish a more developed approach to studying popular music history and music mediation within a fast changing field. Working collaboratively with Long allowed us to synthesise approaches from cultural history and television studies and locate them in a wider debate usually set by the US-documentary series Jazz.