Music - Richard Cook on how Billy Jenkins has created his very own modern sound
We can't boast many inventors, let alone innovators, in music, but we can lay claim to the creator of an entire area of modern sound: kitchen-sink jazz. Its progenitor is Billy Jenkins, who has lived and worked in Bromley in Kent for the past two decades and makes music about the place. There is no urban pastorale in Jenkins's music: it's Bromley as a home of the blues, a reality that is not about yearning for your baby while tooling down some interstate highway, but about refereeing a dispute between children fighting over Barbie dolls. As a guitarist, Jenkins spent years on the pub-rock circuit, but he found his metier as a focal point of much of the jazz that grew out of the eighties wave of new British players. Never quite restricted to rock, jazz or blues, his synthesis is homely and homespun, but as tough and needling as anything that a more obvious jazz environment can produce.
He has always signed on the best players, which is why his albums feature those such as Iain Ballamy, Mark Lockheart, Django Bates and Ashley Slater. They are all faintly comic, but hitched to the most mordant strain of British humour, and sparked by a lively, even furious intensity. There's no sloppiness in Jenkins's music. It's difficult to play and needs the best performers. His own guitar-playing has progressed from a sort of scratchy, left-field plangency to a full-blown mastery of all the recognised styles. He has done albums of lounge-suit jazz - where the guitar and vibes tinkle like ice in glasses - and big-band dates, which are a counter to Gil Evans's impressionism: as finely wrought, but coming to a completely different conclusion about how an orchestra should sound. One of his most popular projects has been the "Big Fight" series: two improvisers play at each other in five-minute rounds, with a referee ringing the bell and intervening when necessary.
Previous projects have rejoiced in song titles such as "Discoboats at Two o'Clock", "Sade's Lips" and "Greenwich One-Way System", but his latest album, Suburbia (Babel), is surely his masterpiece to date. Next to Jenkins, chroniclers of modern Britain such as Pulp seem like feckless dilettanti. Suburbia is both homage and resigned shrug of the shoulders. Jenkins knows that Bromley is always going to have its problems, but he makes this raw material into the stuff of dreams. It is, perhaps, to Tony Blair's society what The Eagles's Hotel California was to the Los Angeles of 1977. He has been playing some concerts to celebrate the record's release, but although he's an engaging performer, it's something he has come to see as "a charade", no different to Walt Disney wearing a Mickey Mouse outfit to promote his creation. It's difficult to see how the record can really work as a performance, anyway. It unfolds in beguiling fits and starts, the lines and squares of Jenkins's writing coming under siege from a neighbourhood of interrupting voices and instrumentalists with walk-on parts.
As music, it is Jenkins's grab-bag of styles finessed into a kind of suite. The surreal blues of "Pointless Adornments" sits next to the orchestral thrash of "Hello, I'm Your Next-Door Neighbour". References to pebble-dashing, cars parked across your driveway and empty coke cans being chucked into your garden would be mere kitsch in a pop-song setting, but Jenkins fashions them into the disparate lines of a tone poem. A track called "Silence Stalks the Sleeping Streets" turns out to be a rapturous piece of writing for strings, the composer finding his stairway to heaven in the essential quiet of suburbia when nobody is about.
That is Jenkins's trump card. He is not sneering at these not-very-mean streets. This is not satire. He trawls together the bits and pieces of a Bromley life, but without making fun of his neighbours - because he is one of them, as well as one of us.
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