Arthur Briggs was the only Brit to help create jazz – so why did he pretend he was American?

The men who created jazz were musicians from New Orleans, Chicago and New York: Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver …Americans one and all.

Well, not quite. For among the pioneers was one British figure. Largely forgotten though he may be today, Arthur Briggs was playing cornet on the streets of Harlem before the first jazz 78-rpm disc was cut.

Later, he was among the first wave of black performers to bring “hot music” to Europe. He led bands in Berlin, Vienna, Paris and the Riviera. Marlene Dietrich insisted he play on her first foray into jazz. He helped discover Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt and French violinist Stéphane Grappelli.

As a trumpeter, Briggs had not only great natural talent, he was also an excellent improvisor. But above all he had superb technique – which he learned from classical musicians. Critics called him Europe’s answer to Louis Armstrong.

He was, in the words of his great-nephew James Briggs Murray, “the first, and indeed only, British subject to have participated in the creation and spread of jazz”.

I became aware of Arthur Briggs while researching jazz age Paris, and saw what a seminal, mysterious figure he was – perfect for a radio documentary. Arthur Briggs: The Brit Who Brought Jazz to Europe is broadcast on Radio 4 tomorrow.

The fact that no-one was aware of Briggs’s Britishness at the time – as indeed few are now – is easily explainable: he lied about it.

At the start of a 1982 interview with the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, he stated: “I was born in Charleston South Carolina, April 10, 1901. My parents were from Grenada, Mississippi.”

In fact he was born on the then British West Indian island of Grenada. The passports he used to travel around Europe in the 1920s and 1930s – and as far afield as Ankara in Turkey and Cairo in Egypt – were British ones. Eventually he settled in Paris and acquired French nationality. But right up to the end of his life in 1991, he refused to acknowledge publicly that he was British.

“It is very strange. He made up a whole back story for himself. He invented people he claimed to have known. Relatives that didn’t exist. It was a whole artificial biography – a second identity like in Le Carré,” says Reiner Lotz, a jazz historian, who interviewed Briggs several times.

Why did he do it? Part of the answer lies in the complicated – and still disputed – circumstances of his youth. When he was in his teens, Briggs’s father died in Grenada and he came to New York to live with his elder sister. But was this in 1913 or 1917? Both stories exist. Even Briggs’s date of birth is contested. Most agree now that it was 1901. But why then does his grave in Paris bear the date 1899?

What seems established is that at some point – probably 1917 – Briggs felt obliged to lie to the US authorities in New York, either to make himself out to be older than he was, or to qualify for membership of a US army marching band, or to get travel documents. Or perhaps all three. And having once told the lie, he spent the rest of his life scared that it might be discovered.

Even today, Briggs’s daughter Barbara, 62, who lives with her husband in her father’s Montmartre flat, is reluctant to address the question of his origins. “He didn’t want to say it to me, so I’m not going to say either,” she says.

But Briggs’s New York-based great-nephew, himself a musician and jazz connoisseur, recalls speaking to Arthur shortly after he gave the 1982 interview to Rutgers.

“I said, ‘Uncle Arthur, how could you tell them you were born in South Carolina? We all know that’s not the case’. And you know what he replied? ‘Do you think it’s OK to tell the truth now, son?’ ‘I said, ‘I don’t think anyone’s coming after you now.’ We had a good laugh,” says Briggs Murray.

Lotz thinks there may have been another reason why Briggs concealed his Britishness. “At that time everyone assumed that real jazz was only played by black Americans – not by a black Briton and certainly not by a Briton from a remote island,” he says. “For self-marketing purposes he had to be African-American.”

Briggs may have had a grounding in trumpet while a young boy in Grenada, but it was in Harlem during the 1910s that he came of age. He joined a church marching band, and was talent-spotted by the band-leader of the legendary black army regiment the Harlem Hellfighters.

When the First World War ended he was recruited (along with future jazz great Sidney Bechet) to the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, an all-black ensemble which took him on tour to London. After leaving the US in 1919, he only went back – briefly – on two occasions.

The seven-hour Rutgers interview is well worth an extended listen because it contains fascinating accounts of his adventures. At times it is like Briggs is a backstage witness to history, a privileged observer of great events – but always as the paid entertainer.

The first hint of this comes in May 1919 when on arriving by ocean liner in the port of Liverpool, he says he and his bandmates saw six black bodies floating in the river Mersey. 
These, he says, were victims of race-riots perpetrated by returning British soldiers.

In 1926, he was in Istanbul when orders came from a Turkish army officer to go straight to Ankara. There he and the band were ordered to play his hit tune Ca c’est Paris when a signal was given. Only later did he find out that this was a celebration to mark the public hanging in the city of opponents of President Ataturk.

In Paris in the 1930s, Briggs was part of the house-band at the nightclub of black impresario Ada “Bricktop” Smith. He was there when Cole Porter burst in with 
his newly-composed Night and Day, and asked him to be the first to play it. He knew Josephine Baker, but did not particularly like her. He helped set up the jazz group Hot Club de France.

In the Second World War, Briggs was detained by the Germans in a camp in the 
northern outskirts of Paris. He was allowed to run an orchestra, which performed a Beethoven concert before Nazi top-brass including army commander Otto von Stülpnagel.

In another interview, Briggs said that Stülpnagel approached him afterwards saying, “I never would have believed it possible” – meaning a black man playing Beethoven. Briggs replied to him – in German – “There are many things that men do not know.”

After the war, Briggs found that the music scene had changed. He gave up playing, got married and – aged 60 – devoted himself to his daughter Barbara.

“Mum worked all day and dad stayed at home with me,” she recalls today. “We were always together. He came to fetch me from school, took me to restaurants, helped me with my homework. We were very close.”

What he did not do was talk about his past. It was only when she was a teenager that Barbara discovered that her father had once been a famous musician.

Barbara remembers a kind and doting father, a conservative and observant Christian, a rare 
drinker of alcohol. Lotz describes him as courteous and unassuming. His great-nephew says Briggs was the type who would break up a fight, not start it; a man to whom – in an often violent and drunken nightclub world – other jazzmen would look to for stability.

“My uncle knew he was different. He knew that being British made him different,” 
Briggs Murray says. “He didn’t try to push that difference, but it helped him greatly because he knew how to conduct himself wherever he went.

“That’s why everyone considered him the ultimate gentleman.” The first gentleman 
of jazz.

Arthur Briggs – The Brit who Brought Jazz to Europe will be on BBC Radio 4 at 11.30am tomorrow 30 March