A New Awakening - Adventures In British Jazz 1966-1971 (Clamshell Box)

The 2025 anthology New Awakening: Adventures in British Jazz 1966-1971 spotlights a vibrant and transformative era for jazz in Britain. Whether it was a passion for New Orleans trad jazz in the 1940s or a mod take on blues, rock, and Motown soul in the 60s, Britain has a long history of adopting American musical traditions and making them their own. The same creative and cultural process happened to post-bop and avant-garde jazz beginning in the late 60s. Fueled by the already potent influence of artists like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Ornette Coleman, British jazz musicians began pushing the boundaries of their own playing. Throw into the mix the cultural melting pot of cities like London, where immigrants from Africa, India, and the Caribbean commingled their own musical traditions right alongside the burgeoning psychedelic and progressive rock movements, and British jazz musicians were poised for a creative explosion. New Awakening illuminates this heady period, digging into the forward-minded work of artists like trumpeter Ian Carr, bassist Graham Collier, and saxophonist Dick Morrissey, the latter of whose minor blues "Storm Warning" opens the box set, smartly setting up the collections tone of dark-sunglasses-in-the-nightclub hipness. Like that track, these are often rhythmically kinetic, harmonically sophisticated recordings that straddle the line between hard-swinging acoustic jazz and sonically textured electric fusion. Its a vibe that grows even more avant-garde as the collection moves forward, revealing the sprawling big-band orchestrations of John Dankworths "Return from the Ashes," the blown-out Hammond organ reverie of the Graham Bond Organizations "Wade in the Water," and the spacey free-jamming of Nucleus "Elastic Rock." They delve further into this genre-crossing style towards the latter half of the set, showcasing progressive tracks like Brian Augers electric fusion take on Herbie Hancocks "Maiden Voyage" and Julie Driscolls acid-rock hippie-freak anthem "A New Awakening" (from which the box set borrows its title). As if to underline the connection between the experimental jazz and progressive rock in Britain at the time, they even include Cream bassist Jack Bruces wholly improvised free-bop number "Over the Cliff," from his sole 1970 instrumental album, Things We Like. ~ Matt Collar