Most jazz history is written from the archive. Valerie Wilmer wrote hers from the room. A British photographer and journalist, she documented the new black music of the 1960s and 70s from the inside — in the lofts, at the gigs, in the musicians' homes, camera round her neck and ear wide open. As Serious As Your Life is the product of that presence, and irreplaceable because of it.
The book holds together two things usually found apart: the music and the material lives of the people making it. The portraits are here — Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, the AACM community — but so, above all, is the human and social context: how these musicians paid the rent, ran the lofts, met the racism of the industry and the critics, built for themselves the structures the market denied them.
For the spiritual-jazz reader it is the human ground underfoot. The independent black labels I write about in the chapters — Strata-East, Tribe, the New York loft scene — did not come from nowhere. They came from precisely the conditions Wilmer describes from within. To read her is to understand why those musicians chose to own their own music.
First published in 1977 and reissued by Serpent's Tail in 2018, the book has lost none of its urgency. The prose is lean, direct, never academic; Wilmer's own photographs, scattered through the text, are worth the price on their own.
It is called As Serious As Your Life because for these musicians the music was as serious as life itself. Wilmer is the witness who took them at their word, and stayed in the room to the end.