A rather difficult genre to define, jazz has been described in every conceivable way. The word itself has been rejected, accepted and has been cause for ambivalence and confusion for even the most knowledgeable musician, fan and scholar who has tried coming to terms with defining the music. What is more commonly agreed among all however, is what jazz isn't.

'Jiver' Hutchinson. toured extensively with his jazz band

With the tremendous succes of the Air Jamaica Jazz & Blues festivals - ironically a music festival presenting everything that would be categorised in the what jazz is not, bag - Jamaicans have been touting a number of singers and players as jazz 'artistes'. This preferred noun 'artiste' is itself an ironic choice since it means 'someone who would like to be regarded as artistic.' But let me address the question posed in the title of this essay.

In an essay from the middle of the last century titled A Short History of Jazz, the question is asked, 'What is this thing called jazz?' The unnamed writer answered with the statement that jazz ". is roughly as old as the 20th Century and has undergone as many rapid and radical changes as the century itself.

The history of jazz is a long and exciting journey," he wrote, "which will eventually take us around the world. We start in turn of the century New Orleans, a bustling metropolis in the Mississippi delta. Jazz was a product of the American Negro's response to European music.' The essay went around the world and named eminent musicians who represented the face of jazz in the 20th Century and who continue to do so. Not surprisingly, he did not name a single West Indian.

But the man born Edward Kennedy Ellington, known to the world as Duke Ellington, knew better. Ellington understood the importance of the Caribbean and its musicians to the creation and development of jazz. "Before it reached New Orleans, the original African element had made itself felt in the West Indies." said he when talking about the history of jazz.

So while jazz was given birth to in New Orleans, it can be safely said that it was carried in foetus form to New orleans (which some historians and geographers characterise as a Caribbean city anyway). In other words, the Caribbean was the mother that delivered the young jazz in America. I guess it needed a green card or something. Anyway, that's what happened if we carefully check out the Duke's statement.

As early as the turn of the 20th Century, Caribbean musicians were contributing to jazz. Following Mount Pelee's volcanic eruption in 1902, musicians left Guadeloupe and were among the best performing jazz in France by the 1920s. By the time of the First World War (1914-18), there was an exodus of musicians from the Caribbean that settled in Europe and North America.

The first black band to record was a group led by Trinidadian Lionel Belasco in 1914 for the Victor Recording Company. In 1917, the Afro-American bandleader James Reece Europe recruited musicians for his Harlem Hell Fighters from Trinidad and Puerto Rico to travel to France. Known as the 369th Infantry Regiment, they performed music to lift the morals of the US Army, but also engaged in combat in Europe.

Between 1927-30, another West Indian, the Trinidadian Sam Manning made recordings that featured calypso fused with jazz. They included exuberant vocals, hot accompaniments and fiery, emotional swinging sides. By the 1930s, other West Indians, such as Ludric Cayton, Karl Berriteau and Ellington's trombonist Tricky Sam Nanton were important names in jazz on both sides of the Atlantic.

But our concern is even closer to home: what (or who) has Jamaica to offer or claim as part of the great jazz heritage. Well, to begin with, the island has since slavery, had an impact on North America's plantation system, making it seminal in the development of jazz.

This is so not only for the number of slaves that were transhipped from here to there but also for the number of musicians who have been a part of the music's heritage and who continue to be part of its many permutations.

By the time jazz was identified as such, Jamaicans were also being identified with it. The first great soloist of the genre, Louis 'Satcmo' Armstrong, on his 1927 recording King Of The Zulus, identified a Jamaican as a party crasher who demanded to have his music played.

Ellington(who was making reference to the then burgeoning Garvey movement) said the following of his aforementioned trombonist, Tricky Sam: "What he was actually doing was playing a highly personalised form of his West Indian heritage.

When a guy comes from the West Indies and he's asked to play some jazz, he plays what he thinks it is, or what comes from his applying himself to the idiom. Tricky and his people were deep in the West Indian legacy of the Marcus Garvey movement. A whole strain of musicians came up who made contributions to the so-called jazz scene, and they were all descended from a true African scene. bop is the Marcus Garvey extension into modern music."

The Garvey connection was carried on with the Jamaican trumpeter and trombonist Leslie Thompson, an active Garveyite, in British jazz during the 1920s, right through to his death in 1985. Thompson could have been the interloper at Armstrong's party for he had the distinction of touring with the master in Europe. Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson, Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter also called on him for similar duties. In that early era, but especially from 1930s through the 1950s, Bertie King, another Jamaican, was a fixture on the European scene.

King played clarinet, alto and tenor saxophone equally well and was an extraordinary arranger. King was on British piano legend George Shearing's first recording and also played and recorded with Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter. After performing with many of the top calypsonians in Britain, King returned to Jamaica in the late 1950s where he was a pioneer radio orchestra participant at the then Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation(JBC), where along with Sonny Bradshaw and Carlos Malcolm, he produced entire musical programmes. He was also responsible for the success of the hit mento recording Healing In The Balm Yard by the Ticklers.

Another 'Yardman' was Leslie 'Jiver' Hutchinson, a trumpeter regarded as a musician of enormous facility and professional character. In addition to leading his own band, Leslie 'Jiver' Hutchinson's All-Coloured Orchestra, 'Jiver' also toured, performed and recorded with the all-black band of Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson, Graeme Ball and Sid Phillips, Jamaica's Louise Bennett, and Mary Lou Williams and other visiting Americans.

Bassist Coleridge Goode, who still lives in London's Ladbroke Grove, was the bassist of choice during that era, performing with many British orchestras, while turning down an offer to move to the US to join Ellington's band (a move which almost certainly would have made him more celebrated than he presently is). Goode did record with hot jazz legends Stephan Grapelli and Django Reinhardt, but his most enduring and adventurous work was with fellow Jamaican alto sax man Joe Harriott.

With Harriott's quintet, Goode was able to fully utilise his perfected technique of humming in octaves around his bowed lines, creating a mysterious 'buzz' reminiscent of the approach of Slam Stewart.

This along with his clean plucked notes, articulated in broken time and disjointed rhythmic forays, locates his style between the surrealist and cubist schools of thought and earned him the moniker 'the prince.'

Herbie Miller is a cultural historian specialising in Caribbean music and jazz

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