School and
Community Music
Elementary,
what we now call primary, education was introduced by the Education Act of
1870. Compulsory secondary education was introduced in 1902. Provision comprised
two elements: church and state schools. In London, including Lambeth, they came
under the oversight of the London School Board, then the London County Council.
In 1965 Lambeth came under the Inner London Education Authority, until its abolition
under Margaret Thatcher and transfer of responsibilities to the Borough
Councils in 1990. Music was taught in schools and public performances in the
community were held. Alongside was different forms of music promotion and
activities in the community. Here are some examples of both school and
community music since 1966.
1966 saw the Norwood Music Festival and the launch of the Lambeth Youth Orchestra for boys and girls leaving schools in the Lambeth Borough which went on to hold annual concerts each years and is still running. Nettlefold played an important function as a venue bringing to local audiences the Berlin Philharmonic in 1970, John Quirk in 1971, and Semprini in 1973.
Lambeth Schools
Music
In 1967 the Lambeth Schools Music Association held its 28th Annual Concert.
The Scratch Orchestra was founded in July 1969 following a series of music composition classes held at Morley College. It played in town and village halls, universities, youth clubs, parks, and theatres until 1974.
The Lambeth Art and Recreation Association was active running events like a John Williams concert of guitar music in 1971.
Ladies’s Jazz
In 1973 the Musician’s Action Group was formed, the first organised pressure group composed solely of Jazz musicians. Its founders were Jackie Tracey and Hazel Miller along with their jazz musician husbands Stan Tracey and Harry Miller. They opened a club for jazz musicians to perform within Lambeth.
Steel Orchestra
The Lambeth Community Youth Steel Orchestra was founded in April 1979 but folded in 2001. Its recordings include Bob Marley’s Redemption Song.
Nettlefold
Festival was founded in 1984 with the aim to provide concerts of new music at
the Hall, but by 1989 it was moved to Clapham Common to be more in line with
the organisers needs for it to prosper. From 1993 it was called the Colourscape
Music Festival.
Individual Composers
Brendan Beales, the composer and animateur, became the artistic director for Musicworks in Brixton in 1987 and two years later was made responsible for organising its In-Service Education for Teachers programme. As a lyricist he worked with Paul Patterson to produce the Little Red Riding Hood Songbook, and with Hugh Shrapnel on the opera War Games. He worked on a series of infant cantatas for Lambeth Council. Shrapnel who had been a member of the Scratch Orchestra was appointed Composer in Residence at Musicworks in 1994
Hugh Shrapnel, a composer who taught music in comprehensive schools in Lambeth in the1970s, led classes in experimental music in community centres in Brixton in the late 1980s. During 1993-4 he wrote South of the River, a piano duet based on emotions reflected on the areas that he had lived.
In October 1993 the Children's
Society held its annual national service in St. Albans Cathedral. Taking part
were children from Lambeth singing their own song I have a place of my own as part of a church-based research project called
Children in the Neighbourhood. It was commented on the Lord Bishop of St.
Albans in a House of Lords on the Single Regeneration Budget: Inner Cities in
February 1995.
Anna Best’s Projects
The
2000s saw two projects produced by Anna Best used music as part of community
action. In In 2008/9 used 50 singers at Vauxhall Cross explored the
relationship between political protest and entertainment, traffic and
pedestrians, pollution, breathing and song. She also produced
PHIL in which 15
musicians from the London Philharmonic Orchestra played their individual parts
of Mozart’s Eine Keliener Nacht Musick on separate occasions in the
homes of 15 people whose names included 'phil'. They were filmed and shown as
an orchestra of televisions in the Beaufoy Institute on Black Prince Rd.
Stockwell resident David Tuckey began composing at the age of 14 on the harmonica, the guitar and then piano. He worked at Lambeth’s Brixton and West Norwood Libraries. He has written his own Requiem Mass.
The Government backed volunteer organisation The Experience Corps employed the services of record producer Charles Bailey to write a special recruitment song Join Up and organise a live event which was held at Lambeth Town Hall in February 2003 in front of 400 invited guests from the Afro-Caribbean community.
In 2001 the Council established the Lambeth Music Service based at Bonneville Primary School to help raise musical standards and increase access to music in Lambeth. It still operates today at the Brixton Hill Music Centre.
Bob Chilcot
Lambeth schoolchildren gathered in March 2005 in
the new Evelina Children's Hospital in Lambeth Palace Road for the premiere of
a specially commissioned song cycle Songs
for Seven Storeys by Bob Chilcot. It reflected on the seven themes of the
natural world around which the new hospital - with its seven storeys. The
concert also featured extracts from Initiation
Songs by Juwon Ogungbe, commissioned for the South Bank Centre’s 's Africa
Remix season by Royal Festival Hall Education and Lambeth Music Services.
In a separate development from
the music service local primary school children recorded in 2005 a version of
the 1980s Free Nelson Mandela in support of a parental campaign to build
a the Mandela secondary school in Brixton. Songwriter Jerry Dammers, founder of
The Specials, helped the children rewrite the lyrics.
Trinidadian composer and classical guitarist, Dominique Le Gendre trained as a classical guitarist. She ran composition workshops with primary school children at the Lambeth Junior Centre for Young Musicians.
The Lambeth Youth Orchestra was founded in 2018 and played at the Brixton Library Windrush Choir Programme that October.
Black Music
The history of black music and black musicians in Lambeth is a story in its own right.
The music hall circuit provided
lots of opportunities for black performers, especially from the United States.
Examples include Belle Davis at the Brixton Empress in May 1905, June 1906,
August and December 1917, and Will Garland in July 1921.
Duse Mohamed Ali
Duse Mohamed Ali was the British based North African Moslem black rights advocate, actor, playwright, literary agent, promoter of better understanding of Islam, and editor of The African Times & Orient Review at various times between 1911 and 1920 acting as a voice for Pan-African views. By 1911 he was living at 55 Victoria Mansions on South Lambeth Rd and by 1915 at Langley Mansions on the corner of Langley Lane and South Lambeth Rd. In 1909 he produced the musical Lily of Bermuda by the actor/playwright Ernest Trimingham. Born in Bermuda in 1880 Tringham went on to become one of the first black actors in British film. His last recorded appearance was in London’s West End in 1941. He died in 1942.
Winfred Attwell & Claudia Jones
In the early days of the Windrush Generation calypso was popular and was often performed on BBC television. The pianist Winifred Attwell was also very popular on TV and in the charts. She opened The Winifred Atwell Salon" 82a Railton Road in 1956.
If
you walk down Fentiman Rd into Meadow Rd you will arrive at No.6, which was
from 1956 to 1960 was the home of Claudia Jones at perhaps her most creative
period as an exile from the United States: the founding of the West Indian Gazette in 1958 based at 250
Brixton Rd, and the seeding of Notting Hill Carnival. The Gazette later moved to Station Rd, Loughborough Junction. Following the
Nottinghill race riots of 1958 she set up indoor cultural events to
raise money for their legal costs, called ‘Claudia’s Caribbean Carnival’, the
first being held in January 1959 at St Pancras
Town Hall. It was televised by the BBC, subtitled ‘A people's art is the
genesis of their freedom’. The 1960 event included the calypsoist Lord
Kitchener, the former RAF pilot, actor and singer Cy Grant, and the novelists
Samuel Selvin and George Lamming.
Dave Godin
One of the people who made early 1960s black American music popular in Brian was Dave Godin. Born in Peckham and raised in Lambeth, he moved with his family to Bexleyheath to escape the bombing. In 1964 he founded the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society. In his October 2004 obituary in The Guardian in 2004 Richard Williams says that Godin’s ‘support for America's civil rights movement underpinned his belief that blues and soul music gained their special force from the social and historical context in which they were created.’
Linton Kwasi Johnson & Bob Marley
Theatre and music were important at the former Tulse Hill School. The first Head of music was S. Drummond Woolfe who then went to be in charge of music at Hamilton Cathedral in Bermuda. Pupils include Linton Kwasi Johnson and David Victor Emmanuel, known as Smiley Culture. The School band played in neighbouring Primary Schools and at exhibitions. Its Concert Band won the London Weekend Summer Arts Festival in 1984.
In 1977 Bob Marley visited the Rastafarian Temple in St Agnes Place while recording Exodus. He played football in Kennington Park.
Record
Shops
Important promoters of black music included record shops like the Trinidadian Joe Mansano’s Joe’ s Records at 93 Granville Avenue from 1963, Desmond’s at 55 Atlantic Rd in the late 60s and 1970s, and Red Records on Brixton Rd.
Conclusion
I hope that I have been able to
share some sense of the richness of the history of music in Lambeth. There is
an enormous amount more research that can be carried out into the themes I have
discussed, but also into the role of pubs as venues for live music including
the Effra Hall Tavern, the commercial venues like Electric Brixton, The Fridge,
the 02 Academy and Hideaway in providing live music, the use of music in the
roller skating rinks from the Victorian period, community festivals, etc. There
is plenty of scope for community and school projects on aspects of these.
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