Beyond the bassline

Curated by Aleema Gray with Mykaell Riley

 British Library (26 April – 26 August 2024)

Review by Maame Blue

A strong narrative begins with a captivating character. For the exhibition Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music that character is John Blanke from the 1500s, the earliest recorded Black musician in Britain. He was a royal trumpeter in the courts of King Henry VII and King Henry VIII, and often received gifts from the royals. The scarcity of historical records of black people in Britain quickly becomes apparent when the exhibition introduces its next character, some two hundred years later – black writer, composer and abolitionist Ignatius Sancho, who lived in the 1700s. Amidst correspondence and sheet music from the time, we speed onwards to the 1800s, where a handful of black composers are fusing western classical music with indigenous African and Caribbean influences. By the time we reach the early 1900s, jazz has been introduced to Britain following the arrival of African American musicians in London, attracted to the buzz of Soho. Via the establishment of public venues, new music from across the pond becomes a larger reason for black people to gather.

The exhibition, too, seems to find its stride from this moment of social and cultural gathering – in part because of the wealth of archival material that exists for the twentieth century, but also the boom in recording technology, capturing history as it happened. Televised variety shows featuring trailblazing Black British singers such as Shirley Bassey and Evelyn Dove play out alongside live reporting of the arrival of the Windrush generation. There are radio interviews and talking heads on the street as new clubs and bars with a mixed clientele open to host popular black musicians and DJs, providing a more eclectic soundtrack to Britain in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

Black success is often celebrated when safely confined to the arenas of sport and the halls of entertainment, but Beyond The Bassline attempts to challenge this containment by proceeding to spotlight the Black British musicians who dared to do more than just entertain – using their music to respond to injustice, while simultaneously turning the tide of the British music scene. From around its halfway point, the exhibition begins to generate a map of changing attitudes and beliefs. The importation of reggae as a sound of protest, and the development of its intimate subgenre lovers’ rock, hailed as ‘the first Black British music genre’ in the 1970s, signalled this change both within and beyond Britain’s Caribbean communities, becoming the soundtrack of a generation of British people. The homegrown genre of electronic jungle music in the 1990s, demanding freedom for the body and the soul, gave youthful expression to an edgy, urban dance culture emerging out of the rave scene and giving rise to drum and bass, a new way to dance off the slough of oppression. And more recently in the 2000s, the rise of grime music came as a new response to the question of what it means to be Black and British today. 

If you look past the nebulous timeline, Beyond The Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music is vast and ambitious as an exhibition, attempting to grasp what Black British music is, was and possibly could be in the future. Like the MOBO – Music of Black Origin – Awards, it struggles to separate what is Black and what is British.

https://beyondthebassline.seetickets.com/timeslots/filter/beyond-the-bassline

Maame Blue

Maame Blue is a writer and podcast host.