You don't hear much these days about the jazz riots of the early
1960s, which is a shame because they're certainly up there – and we all
have our favourite – with the best sensibly sweatered youth cult
disturbances of the postwar era. Rabble-rousing, dangerous, in that
pre-pop interval jazz filled the skies as the teenage beat music du
jour. Although like all youth movements there were schisms, the most
obvious between trad fans, marked out by their long jumpers, beards and
sandals, and those of the Charlie Parker be-bop persuasion, accused by
the tradders of vulgarity, Americanism and generally being
insufficiently appreciative of cider. Events finally came to a head at the notorious Beaulieu jazz festival in Hampshire in 1960.
Trouble broke out during a modern jazz set with hundreds of bearded and
sandalled trad enthusiasts storming the BBC live broadcast, leaving 39
people hurt, destroying a piano and only calming down when Acker Bilk played his clarinet at them for a bit.
A terrifying spectacle in every sense – and an image that sprung to mind unexpectedly this week in the wake of Chris Gayle's wondrously indolent high‑speed hundred for the Royal Challengers Bangalore in Pune: the fastest hundred ever made in professional cricket and also surely the most notable innings ever played by a man who appears to be constantly on the verge of giggling. I watched every ball of Gayle's innings, which was devalued only slightly by a set of simperingly compliant opposition bowlers who seemed to view themselves as no more than stagehands and fluffers, assistants to Mr Gayle.
Although to be fair, Gayle's talent undercuts itself on these occasions: he is the most brilliantly unhurried of sporting geniuses, a man whose basic skill is geared to making the very hard look very easy, thereby opening himself up to charges of doing something that is simply very easy. In fact Gayle, in his role as travelling impresario of the six-hit, is the closest we have to a short-form Bradman, with 11 Twenty20 hundreds, an average of 46 runs and a strike rate of 155. Just page his bat‑phone and here he comes, strolling out of the nearest disco, rolling up his sleeves, unsheathing his polo mallet.
It was, as ever, a bizarrely inflammatory innings, too, inspiring the usual froth of snark and counter‑snark among cricket's commenting classes. This is a well-worn debate now, one that states in its most reductive terms that if you didn't enjoy Gayle's innings you must be a curmudgeon, a square, possibly even a racist. Whereas if you did enjoy it you're a pervert, a state‑of‑the-art barbarian, slumped in your La-Z-Boy recliner like an onanistic chimpanzee, cramming great salted handfuls of maize-based snack between your revolving jaws, ravenously insensible, an unwitting instrument of creeping global moronism.
Naturally county cricket, bastion of long-form cricketing constancy, finds itself in the opposite corner here. And under these terms it would seem to have got its retaliation in first this time, producing its own historic moment of anti-Gayle last week as Derbyshire's Billy Godleman scored the slowest half-century in County Championship history, facing 244 balls for his fifty (on current form Gayle would have made 813 not out in the same time). And there we have an apparently indissoluble opposition: Gayle versus Godleman, a clash of tempos, textures, and the basic interpretation of what exactly this most jealously guarded sport is allowed to look like these days.
At which it is time to put up a hand and say stop, to call a halt. Not only is this an increasingly tedious argument, a dispute between people who basically like the same thing, but which is based around notions of control, provenance and cultural governance. It is also a largely false opposition. I went to The Oval the day after Gayle's innings fully expecting to be struck by some sense of enduring cultural difference. As it happened this coincided with Surrey's Schools Day, an initiative that brought 4,000 London kids in through the gates to shriek and yelp and chat and generally create their own miniature IPL enclosure, an amusingly menacing counterpoint to the usual scattered diehards – sweaters, sandals, surviving veterans perhaps of the first jazz wars – huddled by the pavilion with beards twitching and faces drawn.
Here it was: together under one roof, a county cricket Beaulieu. In the middle of which the children's IPL stand was a lovely thing, a shifting, churning be-bop accompaniment to a scene so inherently trad, on a day that above all emphasised the stupendous depth and range of modern cricket, a sport that can take place simultaneously amid the concentrated urban excitements of Delhi and here in this lozenge-shaped secret garden buried within earshot of Westminster and Lambeth.
It was still an agreeably slow occasion. The crowd got to see Chris Tremlett clanking in to bowl, a magnificently imposing figure, shoulders blotting out the sky, approaching the crease like an iron giant with a tractor in his right hand. Plus there was the enduringly fascinating spectacle of Monty Panesar fielding, the best part of which is not so much when he has to touch the ball as the moments when it comes nowhere near him but he still scampers alarmingly, legs splayed, like a cat startled by a sneeze.
And as the afternoon slipped away and Sussex crept to 106 for two off 48 overs, there was even a sense of these two worlds crashing through into one another, the Oval's IPL stand with its chants and jeers beginning to overlap with the shuffling, sighing ancient mariners of the corned beef sandwich enclosure, and given further fuel by the sudden appearance of Kevin Pietersen, not actually playing cricket, just being Kevin Pietersen, signing autographs, grinning in a cap, providing his own peculiarly compelling bridge between these not so disparate worlds.
Strip away the fear and the spin and this is a golden age to be a cricket lover, a golden age for watching the game. By now the conjoined worlds of Gayle and Godleman should be feeding off one another, a mutually beneficial pincer movement, the be-bop fecundity of the new world and enduring trad of the old. As it happens, the summer after that crowning Beaulieu jazz riot the Rolling Stones started appearing on festival bills. Pop was coming, and within three years the whole self‑contained furore had been pretty much washed away. Who knows, cricket too may not get this chance again. Align the schedules. Dismount from that high horse. Give in to the commercial inevitability. Let's stop the jazz wars now
A terrifying spectacle in every sense – and an image that sprung to mind unexpectedly this week in the wake of Chris Gayle's wondrously indolent high‑speed hundred for the Royal Challengers Bangalore in Pune: the fastest hundred ever made in professional cricket and also surely the most notable innings ever played by a man who appears to be constantly on the verge of giggling. I watched every ball of Gayle's innings, which was devalued only slightly by a set of simperingly compliant opposition bowlers who seemed to view themselves as no more than stagehands and fluffers, assistants to Mr Gayle.
Although to be fair, Gayle's talent undercuts itself on these occasions: he is the most brilliantly unhurried of sporting geniuses, a man whose basic skill is geared to making the very hard look very easy, thereby opening himself up to charges of doing something that is simply very easy. In fact Gayle, in his role as travelling impresario of the six-hit, is the closest we have to a short-form Bradman, with 11 Twenty20 hundreds, an average of 46 runs and a strike rate of 155. Just page his bat‑phone and here he comes, strolling out of the nearest disco, rolling up his sleeves, unsheathing his polo mallet.
It was, as ever, a bizarrely inflammatory innings, too, inspiring the usual froth of snark and counter‑snark among cricket's commenting classes. This is a well-worn debate now, one that states in its most reductive terms that if you didn't enjoy Gayle's innings you must be a curmudgeon, a square, possibly even a racist. Whereas if you did enjoy it you're a pervert, a state‑of‑the-art barbarian, slumped in your La-Z-Boy recliner like an onanistic chimpanzee, cramming great salted handfuls of maize-based snack between your revolving jaws, ravenously insensible, an unwitting instrument of creeping global moronism.
Naturally county cricket, bastion of long-form cricketing constancy, finds itself in the opposite corner here. And under these terms it would seem to have got its retaliation in first this time, producing its own historic moment of anti-Gayle last week as Derbyshire's Billy Godleman scored the slowest half-century in County Championship history, facing 244 balls for his fifty (on current form Gayle would have made 813 not out in the same time). And there we have an apparently indissoluble opposition: Gayle versus Godleman, a clash of tempos, textures, and the basic interpretation of what exactly this most jealously guarded sport is allowed to look like these days.
At which it is time to put up a hand and say stop, to call a halt. Not only is this an increasingly tedious argument, a dispute between people who basically like the same thing, but which is based around notions of control, provenance and cultural governance. It is also a largely false opposition. I went to The Oval the day after Gayle's innings fully expecting to be struck by some sense of enduring cultural difference. As it happened this coincided with Surrey's Schools Day, an initiative that brought 4,000 London kids in through the gates to shriek and yelp and chat and generally create their own miniature IPL enclosure, an amusingly menacing counterpoint to the usual scattered diehards – sweaters, sandals, surviving veterans perhaps of the first jazz wars – huddled by the pavilion with beards twitching and faces drawn.
Here it was: together under one roof, a county cricket Beaulieu. In the middle of which the children's IPL stand was a lovely thing, a shifting, churning be-bop accompaniment to a scene so inherently trad, on a day that above all emphasised the stupendous depth and range of modern cricket, a sport that can take place simultaneously amid the concentrated urban excitements of Delhi and here in this lozenge-shaped secret garden buried within earshot of Westminster and Lambeth.
It was still an agreeably slow occasion. The crowd got to see Chris Tremlett clanking in to bowl, a magnificently imposing figure, shoulders blotting out the sky, approaching the crease like an iron giant with a tractor in his right hand. Plus there was the enduringly fascinating spectacle of Monty Panesar fielding, the best part of which is not so much when he has to touch the ball as the moments when it comes nowhere near him but he still scampers alarmingly, legs splayed, like a cat startled by a sneeze.
And as the afternoon slipped away and Sussex crept to 106 for two off 48 overs, there was even a sense of these two worlds crashing through into one another, the Oval's IPL stand with its chants and jeers beginning to overlap with the shuffling, sighing ancient mariners of the corned beef sandwich enclosure, and given further fuel by the sudden appearance of Kevin Pietersen, not actually playing cricket, just being Kevin Pietersen, signing autographs, grinning in a cap, providing his own peculiarly compelling bridge between these not so disparate worlds.
Strip away the fear and the spin and this is a golden age to be a cricket lover, a golden age for watching the game. By now the conjoined worlds of Gayle and Godleman should be feeding off one another, a mutually beneficial pincer movement, the be-bop fecundity of the new world and enduring trad of the old. As it happens, the summer after that crowning Beaulieu jazz riot the Rolling Stones started appearing on festival bills. Pop was coming, and within three years the whole self‑contained furore had been pretty much washed away. Who knows, cricket too may not get this chance again. Align the schedules. Dismount from that high horse. Give in to the commercial inevitability. Let's stop the jazz wars now
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