Val Wilmer

Valerie Sybil Wilmer (born 7 December 1941, Harrogate, England) is an internationally noted photographer, jazz historian and writer, also specializing in gospel, blues, and British African-Caribbean music and culture.

Wilmer began her life in the jazz world by listening to pre-World War II recordings of jazz classics, being led to "many important recordings through the discography of Brian Rust". Wilmer became enticed by records such as Bessie Smith singing "Empty Bed Blues" and Fats Waller. Aware of the earliest records of jazz and blues, Wilmer wrote about avant-garde and free jazz, focusing on the political and social messages of the music. Her first article (a biography of Jesse Fuller) appeared in Jazz Journal in May 1959 at the young age of eighteen. Reflecting on how this piece began, Wilmer states: "I was an inveterate letter writer, that's how the break with Jesse Fuller came about, me writing to him out of the blue. Woe betide any American musician who was foolish enough to have a contact address published somewhere--I'd find it and fire off a letter. The amazing thing was really, I mean really, that so many would reply! These great musicians and characters from a black culture on the other side of the world writing back to this young suburban white girl in England".

She was later to gain recognition for her interviews of saxophonists Joe Harriott and Ornette Coleman, and become a photographer, writer and music critic. Wilmer is as important a photographer as she is a writer, having worked with hundreds of singers, jazz musicians and writers, and has taken some of the most noted photographs of artists such as Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, and Duke Ellington.

Wilmer has contributed widely to a vast array of publications, including Melody Maker, Down Beat (she was its UK correspondent, 1966–70), Jazz Journal International, Double Bassist, The Wire, and regularly contributes obituaries of musicians to The Guardian. She is the author of Jazz People (Allison & Busby, 1970), The Face of Black Music: Photographs by Valerie Wilmer (Da Capo, 1976), which are considered canonical and influential texts in music criticism.

Her book, As Serious as Your Life (1977) documents women’s experiences in relation to the “new jazz” in African-American communities, and deviates from the “masculinist rule of exclusion”. Presenting sexual politics in the world of jazz, Wilmer also unearthed sexual politics in music criticism itself. In her work, Wilmer presents a “superb descriptive journey that moves the reader through a number of seemingly incommensurable communities simultaneously...This is the vision and possibility of community when the struggle toward freedom recognizes the intersections of sexual difference, gender, and sexuality in addition to race and class, as the basis for improvisational practices”. She is also the author of Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This: My Life in the Jazz World (Women's Press, 1989), an autobiography that details her development as an artist/journalist and her coming out as a lesbian in a largely heterosexist musical milieu.

In addition, she has written biographical articles on Black British musicians from the 1940s and 50s and about photography. Wilmer compiled and edited the "Evidence" issue of Ten/Eight devoted to the work of African-American photographers. With Maggie Murray, Wilmer founded Format (agency), the first all-women photographers’ agency in Britain, in 1983. Her photographs have been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1973) and are held in many photographic collections, including the Arts Council of Great Britain; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris; Fotografiska Museet, Stockholm; Smithsonian Museum, Washington, DC; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library), New York; National Portrait Gallery collection.

Her essays and obituaries are notable for their ability to subtly reveal the underlying inequities that Black artists and women faced in the music industry, often using their own words. In a July 15, 1960 obituary in Jazz News, Wilmer quotes Memphis Slim: "I also wanted to get my own publishing company, but the record men don't want to hire a guy who's got his own publishing company," revealing the difficulty he faced as a black artist. Speaking of her friendship with the influential lyricist, music critic, interviewer, and singer, Kitty Grime, Wilmer demonstrates her love, respect and admiration, while also revealing the inequities in the masculine world of music: "It was during this heady period that we met, at a time when the jazz scene was virtually an all-male preserve...her awareness and knowledgeability were something that most younger commentators would be hard put to emulate".

Wilmer demonstrates a deep and passionate understanding of music and the individual intricacies of each artist. Writing of the changes in Thelonious Monk's style, she says, "For the last 10 years of so, Monk's music has become easier to listen to, though it is not necessarily any simpler. What he is s doing is as engaging and profound as ever, though seeming to be less provocative than when he was upsetting rules". In her writing, Val Wilmer continuously keeps jazz history at the forefront, and presents herself as a devout listener, admirer and lover of music. Interviewing Albert Ayler and his brother Donald Ayler, Wilmer admits to interviewing the Ayler brothers as a journalistic exercise and not a fan, yet eventually "would come to admire Albert Ayler as the last major jazz visionary". And although Wilmer's forte is jazz and blues, she is also versed in the larger movements in music history, such as Jimi Hendrix's visit to England in 1966, giving "the floundering local scene a much-needed injection". In such instances Wilmer reveals her versatility throughout genres, and her effortless dexterity when writing about the music she loves.

Currently, Wilmer is working an extensive historical project, focusing on the lives and works of black British musicians.

Val Wilmer's brother is the poet and writer Clive Wilmer.

Bibliography

• Jazz People. (Indianapolis: Bob-Merrill Co., 1970).
• The Face of Black Music. (New York: Da Capo, 1976).
• As Serious as Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz. (London: Allison & Busby, 1977).
• Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This: My Life in the Jazz World. (London: Women's Press, 1989).

External Links

• Bayley, Bruno. "England is the Place for Me: Val Wilmer's Hidden Photographs Uncovered. A Forgotten History of Black London." Vice Vol. 15, no. 5
• Carney, John."They Made Magic. Part 2: Val Wilmer" Tangents: The Home of Unpopular Culture(2006)
• Rasheed, Kameelah. "'Space is the Place': Val Wilmer Photographs Sun Ra". The Liberator Magazine
• Valerie Wilmer Obituaries. The Guardian
• Wilmer, Val. "Jazz and Blues and Blues and Jazz" Vice Vol. 16, no. 7

Sources

• Davies, Sue. Contemporary Photographers, Martin Marix Evans Ed. (New York: St. James Press ,1995).
• Fischlin, David, and Ajay Heble. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue 1st ed. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
• Gannon, Robert. "Wilmer, Valerie",The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Barry Dean Kernfeld, Ed. (London: McMillan Press, 1988) p1299; entry revised by B. Kernfeld (2nd edition, 2002).
• Mathieson, Kenny. Encyclopaedia of Blues. Komara, Edward Ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006).
• McKay, George. Circular Breathing : The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain (Durham: Duke University Press 2005).
• Olipanth, Dave. Jazz Mavericks of the Lone Star State. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007).
• Tyranka, Paul (Photographs by Val Wilmer). Portrait of the Blues. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997).
• Wilmer, Valerie. "Spirits Rejoice: Albert and Don Ayler." Coda: The Journal of Jazz and Improvised Music March-April 1997: 4-7.
• ---. "Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This: Valerie Wilmer Responds to Max Harrison's Review of her Book." Jazz Forum 4 March 1990: 4-5.
• ---. "New York is Alive! Report and Photography by Valerie Wilmer." Jazz Forum 1973: 47-49.
• ---. "A Blue Mariner's Legacy." Double Bassist 2005: 24-26.
• ---. "Jimi Hendrix: An Experience." Down Beat Feb. 1994: 38-40.
• ---. "Coleridge Goode: Improving with Age." Double Bassist 2003: 12-15.
• ---. "Roswell Rudd and the Chartreuse Phantasm." The Wire 2004: 28-31.
• ---. "Monk on Monk"Down Beat June 3, 1965: 20-22.
• ---. "Rudolph Dunbar." City Limits Mar. 1986: 84-86.
• ---. "Kitty Grime." Jazz Journal International 2007: 18-19.
• ---. "How We Met: Lauderic Caton and Louis Stephenson."The Independent on Sunday Review Feb. 7, 1993: 61.
• ---. "Gilmore and 'Trane: The Sun Ra Link." Melody Maker, December 27, 1980. Vol. 55: 16-17.
• ---. "Rock and Roll Genius." Melody Maker. February 5, 1977, Vol. 52: 8, 44
• ---. "The First Time I Met the Blues." Mojo. September 1995. 22: 84-85

Bibliographical listings

• Ford, Robert. A Blues Bibliography (Bromley: Paul Pelletier Publishing, 1999; 2nd edition, New York: Routledge, 2007).
• Gray, John. Fire Music: A Bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959-1990 (Westport: Greenwood, 1991).