‘Jazz populism’ in London and the counter-hegemonic mainstream

This paper re-animates debates over the unsettled relationship between jazz and popular music through an exploration of the recent ‘London jazz explosion’. It explores the framing of London jazz’s mainstreaming as counter-hegemonic in press/promotional coverage, showing how the prominence of Black musicians and Black popular musics in ‘new London jazz’ is widely interpreted as a rejoinder to perceived elitism and institutional whiteness in British and European jazz ‘establishments’. It also examines interpretations of the scene’s relative commercial success as a meaningful reversal of jazz’s institutionalisation as art music since the 1980s. I define this discourse as ‘jazz populism’, through which the very fact of the scene’s mainstream appeal is used to promote London jazz as a musical – and cultural-political – ‘alternative’. The paper provides overdue analysis of a significant development in 2020s European popular music, and deepens our understanding of the complexities of contemporary musical mainstreams.