Russia and the creation of jazz in the British everyday imaginary

This article presents an alternative account of the initial reception of jazz in Britain. It suggests that jazz and the contemporaneous Russian Revolution were equally seen as the latest threats to indigenous British music and culture. The reminiscences of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart in Russia initiate a discussion of early twentieth-century anthropology. A theory of primitivism is applied to Russian music, programmed from 1895 by Sir Henry Wood for Promenade Concerts aimed at a popular audience. The final section of the article examines press responses to (1) pre-war Russian ballet and ragtime, and (2) Bolshevik violence and jazz dancing in the early months of 1919. Newspapers encouraged their readership to combine images of the Russian Civil War and jazz, with the result that the first appearance of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in London was greeted as 'organised Bolshevism in music'.