The Arts Society Salisbury Lecture: The Roots of Jazz

Emma Johnson is coming to St Francis' Church on Beatrice Road on Tuesday 10 November, for a lecture on the roots of jazz. It's part of The Arts Society Salisbury's programme, and Johnson is an accredited lecturer with them, so this is one of their regular sessions rather than a one-off.

The talk is a bit of a deep dive into where jazz actually comes from. She traces the threads back to African Blues, Cakewalk, American Classical, Vaudeville, Latin American Dance and Middle Eastern Klezmer, and shows how they all came together to shape the music, with New Orleans at the end of the 19th century as the backdrop. From there, she takes you through the twentieth-century giants who built on it: Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. It's less of a history lesson and more of a map of how all those different sounds ended up in the same place.

Johnson is a big name in her own right, too. She's an internationally acclaimed clarinettist with 30 CDs to her name, one of the few to have performed as a soloist all over the world. She was awarded an M.B.E. by the Queen in 1996 and studied Music and English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where she was the first woman to be made an Honorary Fellow. This isn't her only area of interest, either: she gives talks on music, 'Woodwind Wizardry' and 'The Poet John Milton' — both of which were broadcast by BBC radio — and runs the Emma Johnson Music Foundation, which gives workshops in primary schools.

The lecture runs from 13:50 to 15:00, so it's a mid-afternoon session rather than an evening one. Tickets are £8.00, and that's waived if you decide to become a member of The Arts Society on the day.