Labyrinth British Jazz on Record 1960-75By Richard Morton Jack

MASSIVE 375 page 4kg hardback book, quarter bound in cloth, debossed cover!

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‘This utterly engrossing feast focuses on the ‘golden period’ of British jazz, when boundary-breaking and experimentation first broke through. Featuring large sleeve reproductions (both front and back), period reviews, historical overviews and vintage music press adverts, Labyrinth finally puts the music on the pedestal it rightly deserves’ – JW

Aficionados have come to regard the 1960s and 70s as ‘the golden age’ of British jazz, but it remains a largely neglected aspect of our culture. ‘Its development has been as radical as that of pop,’ the critic Tony Palmer wrote in 1975. ‘But its commercial success has been comparatively insignificant, so it has attracted less attention.’

Almost fifty years on, little has changed - other than the sums music lovers will pay for original records by the likes of Ian Carr, Joe Harriott, Stan Tracey, Michael Garrick, Don Rendell, Norma Winstone and many others.

The massive Labyrinth: British Jazz On Record 1960-75 aims to increase awareness of this extraordinary era in British music. The most comprehensive overview of the subject ever published, it celebrates over three hundred albums, offering masses of high-quality images that reproduce their fabulous artwork at near-full size, detailed background information about each, and excerpts from many original reviews. It also features a personal introduction by the brilliant double bassist Tony Reeves (who played with the Mike Taylor Quartet, the New Jazz Orchestra, Colosseum and many others).

Covering mainstream jazz, abstract jazz, avant-garde jazz, serial jazz, free jazz, Indo-jazz, jazz-rock and more, Labyrinth tells a story Britain should be proud of: open-minded and creative musicians pushing the boundaries of their art in the face of penury and indifference, and welcoming influences from a range of other cultures via immigrant musicians such as Joe Harriott (Jamaica), Amancio D’Silva (India), Guy Warren (Ghana) and Harry Beckett (Barbados).