Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
From royal trumpeter to rap artist
TONY BURKE applauds an exhibition that excavates the history of black musicians in Britain
black
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Beyond The Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music
British Library, London
THOSE of us of a certain age will be familiar with newsreel film of the calypso singer Lord Kitchener embarking in Tilbury in 1948 on the Empire Windrush and giving an impromptu performance of London Is The Place For Me.
That historic event is seen by many critics as the starting point for the development of black music in Britain, but this exhibition traces things back to the black trumpet player John Blanke in the courts of Henry VII and VIII in the 1500s; a tour of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a group of free slaves who sang spirituals in 1873 to raise funds for a black university and sang before Queen Victoria, and 1930s jazz band leaders such Guyana’s Ken “Snakehips” Johnson.
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