First, a word about ‘British Progressive Jazz’. While this genre category may prompt feelings of alarm in the uninitiated—conjuring the daunting spectre of cowl-clad saxophonists essaying double album suites inspired by Tolkien—it’s a very serviceable retrospective designation for the remarkable flowering of homegrown (or at least London-based) jazz talent, both captured on and nurtured by the mid/late ’60s Lansdowne Series of album recordings supervised by maverick producer and impresario Dennis Preston.

Although pressed in only relatively small quantities at the time, the best of these recordings—Stan Tracey’s Under Milk Wood and Joe Harriott and John Mayer’s Indo Fusion albums notable among them—have not just endured, but attained a significance in the global history of jazz that goes far beyond the feverishly inflated prices original copies command in the collector’s market. Any music lover of an even vaguely leftist disposition might have already (at least unconsciously) pegged British Progressive Jazz as a Hegelian synthesis of the two preceding waves of domestic jazz endeavour—Trad Jazz’s back-to-New Orleans-basics revolt and the deracinated Be-Bop of Tubby Hayes et al—but Matt Parker’s book makes stark and startling claims for it as an explicitly Gramscian ‘counter-hegemonic project’.

Those who prefer their jazz served without a side-order of revolutionary praxis will no doubt throw up their hands in horror at this prospect, but Subversion Through Jazz contains more than enough fascinating original research to reward the attention of readers who may wish to draw slightly (or at some points, at least in my case, diametrically opposite) conclusions from the wealth of evidence Parker presents. At the heart of the book is the on the one hand clear and on the other seductively mysterious connection between British Progressive Jazz’s compellingly problematic patriarch Dennis Preston and the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.

Although Hobsbawm made no public acknowledgement of the fact until decades later, the two men were first cousins, whose youthful determination to convert each other to their respective causes (jazz in the former case, communism in the latter) would bear undeniably substantial fruit, upon whose exact nature Parker speculates liberally and with instructive reference to private correspondence and never-before-reprinted journalism.

One fact that is not in dispute is that under the pseudonym Francis Newton (a name borrowed from the communist trumpeter who played on Billie Holliday’s harrowing agitprop landmark ‘Strange Fruit’), Hobsbawm contributed a regular jazz column to the New Statesman (then an avowedly left-wing publication) for many years, which he expanded into book form in the landmark 1959 volume The Jazz Scene.

Although this double life had been an open secret for some time in the cafes and bars of Bohemian Soho which were Hobsbawm’s preferred milieu when he wasn’t teaching at Birkbeck, it came as news to the MI5 surveillance operatives whose heavily redacted files provide some of Parker’s most eye-catching (and occasionally comic) primary source material. I particularly like the newly cognisant spook who suspects almost admiringly that Hobsbawm’s extra-curricular activities in the realm of ideologically-determined jazz criticism would have supplied him with ‘a canny screw’. Those were the days.

Even the most sceptical reader will probably be persuaded by Parker’s contention that Dennis Preston seems likely to have been the unnamed industry insider who supplied the facts and figures which made The Jazz Scene such a vivid and detailed analysis of the means of British jazz’s production. Hobsbawm’s role as a key early adopter of Gramsci’s prison writings is also not in doubt. A significant passage from his address to a 1987 Gramsci symposium quotes Italian communist leader Georgio Amendola’s account of conveying the precious original texts from safe keeping with Hobsbawm’s Cambridge mentor Piero Sraffa to Comintern stalwart Togliatti in terms which would need little or no adjustment to become a description of a late fifties jazz fan’s first contact with Miles Davis’ A Kind Of Blue – ‘I can still see him getting pale and with trembling hands trying to undo the knot…’.

Hobsbawm’s jazz writing has certainly lasted a lot better than Gramsci’s. The 1928 prison letter to the Italian revolutionary’s sister-in-law which is credited as a lightbulb moment in his British-based disciple’s developing understanding of jazz’s potential as a medium for subversion is actually an unquotably unreconstructed nightmare of essentialist racism. Yet Hobsbawm’s attempts to reboot reflex CPGB hostility (ascribed here to ‘Soviet ignorance and misplaced puritanism’) toward this particular manifestation of ‘Americanised popular culture’ reflect a far more nuanced approach, discerning an unmatched potential for ‘breaking down class lines’ in the happy spectacle of ‘a table full of sax players from a West Indian orphanage, American soldiers from a Black neighbourhood in Cleveland, journalists, dons, salesmen and sounters [sic] single-mindedly debating the stylistic differences between East and West schools of jazz’.

Just how directly transferable Hobsbawm’s model of ‘jazz solidarity’ (‘The subaltern group already had a successful underground network of fanatics’) would prove to a more explicitly political arena was, and still is, open to question. A cloak and dagger element does undeniably have a place in this narrative (not least in the revelation that Ghanaian Afro-jazz drummer Guy Warren had been recruited as an agent by US intelligence agency the OSS—soon to become the CIA—while still in his mid-teens). But where the smoke and mirrors gets slightly out of control is in the reading between the lines that causes the great Jamaican saxophone player Joe Harriott to be presented as if not quite a crash-test dummy then certainly a willing vessel for Hobsbawm’s ideas about the dialogue between continuity and revolution.

Parker is right to make bold claims for Harriott’s huge standing and influence among his British jazz peers, and has an authoritative contemporary source in writer and photographer Val Wilmer to back up his contention that Harriott (educated like so many Jamaican greats by the musically inclined nuns of the Alpha Boys School) probably co-starred in Hobsbawm’s above-quoted vignette of jazz-facilitated class fluidity. But Wilmer’s clear if limited evidence of the two men’s friendly acquaintance is given a Cold War twist too far when Parker posits her suggestion that they met on numerous occasions ‘but not, I think, in each other’s homes’ as evidence of a clandestine aspect to their association.

Hobsbawm’s awareness that he was under surveillance undoubtedly conditioned the ‘no names, no packdrill’ aspect of many of his recollections, both public and private, but the impulse to join the dots is fraught with danger for the historian, and it is certainly hard to see the phrase ‘the importance of these facts was made conspicuous by their omission’ as anything other than a blank cheque for unsubstantiated conjecture. It’s all too easy to confuse interpretation with intentionality under such imprecise circumstances, but Parker’s occasional propensity to put the cart before the horse does not prevent this from being an extremely informative and entertaining book.

The case for a subversive British jazz Holy Trinity, with Preston the father (or at least, the cousin), Hobsbawm the son (ditto), and Harriott the Ayler-anticipating holy ghost, conspiring to produce unabashashedly Gramscian ‘anthems for the new left’ may not be definitively made here, but the incidental pleasures of this volume are legion. And the eye-popping 50 pages or so on Preston—the outspoken huckster/idealist who delighted the Kray Brothers with bootleg tapes of Englebert Humperdinck, and financed his impeccable stable of progressive jazz virtuosi by recording the music for The Black and White Minstrel Show—are, in themselves, a revolutionary biopic waiting to happen.