Val Wilmer

Early life

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 Rudi Blesh's Shining Trumpets, a history of jazz, and Jazz by Rex Harris. Wilmer became entranced by recordings by Bessie Smith ("Empty Bed Blues") and the singing of Fats Waller – going to the Swing Shop in Streatham, South London, at the age of 12, combing through the jazz records until she found something she wanted to hear.

Three years after these explorations in sound, Wilmer began writing about Black music, encouraged and inspired by Max Jones, Paul Oliver and others. She attended concerts accompanied by her mother, who believed her too young to go on her own. Wilmer states that it was a “tribute to [her] mother's tolerance" being allowed to explore her interests so freely, especially during a time when little girls were often informed of the limitations of their own future options: "Little girls, we are often told, want to grow up to be ballet dancers ... I don’t think it ever crossed my mind to consider the usual female options, resolutely opposed as I was to anything that smacked of feminine pursuits and did not involve going places, being and doing."

Writing career

Aware of the earliest records of jazz and blues, Wilmer began to write about jazz and other African-American music, 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 when she was still only 17. Reflecting on how this piece originated, 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."

Fundamental to Wilmer’s work is her keen understanding and insightful expression of the disparity between male and female music writers. Entering this world in 1959, she understood that writing about music was “something that men did. There was a penalty to pay for being a woman in a man’s world…[and] for a white woman to be concerned with something that Black people did meant to experience additional pressure." Through African-American music Wilmer was able to immerse herself in realities that would have stayed undiscovered had she remained within the margins of her comfort-zone. For her, these experiences were fundamental and life-changing. Her perseverance in this difficult sphere and her devotion to the music led her to a path of self-discovery and personal growth, and the understanding of "the potential for personal change that exists in us all." Through her writing about music, Wilmer was able to provide a voice to a transatlantic, multicultural, and multiracial dialogue, delving into a "part of history, or [what] might very soon be."

Since 1959, she has interviewed hundreds of musicians, written previews and criticism. Her interviews have been cited and used in research for many books, articles and films, including several biographies of major musicians. Early interviews including "Earle Warren's Story", "The Lee Young Story", and Paul "Polo" Barnes are cited in Douglas Henry Daniels's biography of Lester Young. Interviews with Thelonious Monk, Nellie Monk and Billy Higgins are cited in Robin D. G. Kelley's biography of Thelonious Monk. Other examples of the use of Wilmer's early interviews include "Texas Trombone: Henry Coker" in Dave Oliphant's books Texan Jazz and Jazz Mavericks of the Lone Star State.

She was later to gain recognition for her interviews of saxophonists Joe Harriott and Ornette Coleman, and become a writer, music critic and photographer. Writing in 1965 of the changes in 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 doing is as engaging and profound as ever, though seeming to be less provocative than when he was upsetting rules."

Her book As Serious as Your Life (Allison and Busby, 1977), now considered a classic of jazz writing, also 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, she 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". Wilmer 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. This includes her coming out as a lesbian in a largely heterosexist musical milieu.

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 15 July 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 masculine bias in the 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".

In her writing, she continuously keeps jazz history at the forefront, and presents herself as a devout listener, admirer and lover of music. Nevertheless, Wilmer admits to having interviewed the brothers Albert Ayler and Donald Ayler as a journalistic exercise and not a fan, yet eventually she "would come to admire Albert Ayler as the last major jazz visionary".

Although Wilmer's forte is jazz and blues, she is also versed in the larger movements in music history and reveals her versatility across genres when, for instance, she writes about how Jimi Hendrix's visit to England in 1966 gave "the floundering local scene a much-needed injection".

Wilmer has contributed to a vast array of publications, including Melody Maker, Down Beat (she was its UK correspondent, 1966–70), Jazz Journal, Musics, Double Bassist, Mojo, The Wire, and regularly contributes obituaries of musicians to The Guardian. In addition to the works already mentioned, she is the author of Jazz People (Allison & Busby, 1970), The Face of Black Music: Photographs by Valerie Wilmer (Da Capo Press, 1976), which are considered canonical and influential texts in music criticism. In addition, Wilmer has written biographical articles on Black British musicians from the 1940s and '50s and about photography.

Wilmer was a member of the advisory board for The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2nd edition), edited by Barry Kernfeld, and the author of 63 entries. Wilmer has written more than 35 articles for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The British Library Sound Archive contains 35 of Wilmer's interviews with black British musicians and women musicians in its Oral History of Jazz in Britain.

Wilmer has amassed a collection of historic photos of black people in Britain, some of which have been on public display, and she is working on a project to research the lives of black British musicians, which she has been documenting for many years.

Photography

Wilmer is as important a photographer as she is a writer, having worked with hundreds of singers, jazz musicians and writers, and she has taken noted photographs of artists such as Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, and Duke Ellington. Her photographs were exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in the 1973 exhibition Jazz Seen: The Face of Black Music, and form part of the V&A's photographic collection. Her photographs are also held in the National Portrait Gallery collection.

She has written about photography and interviewed practitioners including Eve Arnold, Anthony Barboza, Roy DeCarava, Terry Cryer, Milt Hinton, John Hopkins, Danny Lyon, Raissa Page (of Greenham Common fame), Coreen Simpson, Beuford Smith and James Van Der Zee. In the 1980s she compiled and edited the "Evidence" issue of Ten.8 magazine devoted to the work of African-American photographers. Her work has often been used in conjunction with music albums, as in the digipak booklet for Honest Jon's London is the Place for Me no. 4 CD, which includes photographs by Wilmer that "are full of warmth and immediacy".

With Maggie Murray, Wilmer founded Format, the first all-women photographers' agency in Britain, in 1983.

In September 2013, while Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Frith Street, Soho, was undergoing redecoration, a 12-metre-square hoarding was erected on the façade with a tribute to its eponymous founder in the form of a massive photograph by Wilmer of him smoking a cigarette outside the club, and one of his legendary one-liners: "I love this place, it's just like home, filthy and full of strangers."

Collections

Works by Wilmer are held by the Arts Council of Great Britain Collection; National Portrait Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; Fotografiska Museet, Stockholm; Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library), New York.