Valerie Sybil Wilmer (born 7 December 1941) is a British photographer and writer specialising in jazz, gospel, blues, and British African-Caribbean music and culture. Her notable books include Jazz People (1970) and As Serious As Your Life (1977), both first published by Allison and Busby. Wilmer's autobiography, Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This: My Life in the Jazz World, was published in 1989.
Early life Val Wilmer was born on 7 December 1941 in Harrogate, Yorkshire, England, where her family had been evacuated from London because of the outbreak of World War II. She is the sister of the poet and writer Clive Wilmer (1945–2025). As soon as the war was over, her family returned to living in London."Wilmer, Val", WIKI dob.
She began her life in the jazz world by listening to prewar 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.Wilmer 1989, p. 3.
Three years after these explorations in sound, Wilmer began writing about Black music, encouraged and inspired by Max Jones, Paul Oliver and others.Wilmer 1989, pp. 21, 46. 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."Wilmer 1989, p. 4.
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."Wilmer, 1989, p. xiii. 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."Wilmer 1989, p. xiv.
Since 1959, she has interviewed hundreds of musicians, written previews and criticism. Her work has been cited and used in research for many books, articles and films, including several biographies of major musicians. Her early interviews with Earle Warren,Wilmer, Val, "Earle Warren's Story", Jazz Journal, August 1960, pp. 11–12. Lee Young,Wilmer, Val, "The Lee Young Story", Jazz Journal, January 1961, pp. 3–5. and Paul "Polo" BarnesWilmer, Valerie, The Face of Black Music, New York: Da Capo, 1976. are cited in Douglas Henry Daniels's biography of Lester Young.Daniels, Douglas Henry, Lester Leaps In: the Life and Times of Lester "Pres" Young, Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. Interviews with Thelonious Monk, Nellie Monk and Billy Higgins are cited in Robin D. G. Kelley's biography of Thelonious Monk.Kelley, Robin D. G., Thelonious Monk: the Life and Times of an American Original, New York: Free Press, 2009. Other examples of the use of Wilmer's early interviews include "Texas Trombone: Henry Coker"Wilmer, Val, "Texas Trombone: Henry Coker", Jazz Journal, October 1962, vol. 15, no. 10. in Dave Oliphant's books Texan Jazz and Jazz Mavericks of the Lone Star State.Oliphant, Dave, Texan Jazz, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996; Jazz Mavericks of the Lone Star State, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007.
She was later to gain recognition for her interviews of saxophonists Joe Harriott and Ornette Coleman,McKay, 2005, p. 77. 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 or 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."Wilmer, Val, "Monk on Monk", DownBeat, 3 June 1965, p. 58.
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".Wilmer, Val, "Kitty Grime", Jazz Journal International, p. 18.
In her writing, she continuously keeps jazz history at the forefront, and presents herself as a devout listener, admirer and lover of music. Nevertheless, she 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".Wilmer, Val, "Spirits Rejoice: Albert and Don Ayler", Coda: The Journal of Jazz and Improvised Music, March–April 1997, p. 4.
Although Wilmer's forte is jazz and blues, she is 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, Val, "Jimi Hendrix: An Experience", DownBeat, February 1994, p. 38.
Wilmer has been a contributor to a vast array of publications,Wilmer, Val, 'I learnt to eat curry goat, rice-and-peas'; and Wilmer, Val with Williams, Richard, 'Conversation: how to cover lesser known musicians and musics in the mainstream music press and topics arising'; both in Sinker, Mark (ed.), A Hidden Landscape Once a Week: The Unruly Curiosity of the UK Music Press in the 1960s-80s, in the Words of Those Who Were There, London, 2018 including Melody Maker, DownBeat (she was its UK correspondent, 1966–1970), Jazz Journal, Musics, Double Bassist, Mojo, Jazzwise, The Wire,Val Wilmer at The Wire. and regularly contributes obituaries of musicians to The Guardian.Val Wilmer at The Guardian.
Jazz People (1970)
Wilmer's first book, Jazz People, was one of the first books published by Margaret Busby at Allison & Busby in 1970 and is now often referred to as one of the "three or four finest books ever written on jazz" (subsequently issued in the US by Da Capo Press).Jazz People at Google Books. It features interviews with American musicians who include Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Art Farmer, Babs Gonzales, Jimmy Heath, Billy Higgins, Thelonious Monk, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Clark Terry, Big Joe Turner and Randy Weston, and as Kirkus Reviews noted: "The emphasis is on the people in these fourteen interviews, the personalities behind the jazz, their moods, ambitions, influences....The author observes well and the profiles are short and sharp with high notes for the buff.""Jazz People", Kirkus Reviews, 1 April 1971.
The Face of Black Music (1976)
Rated "as important a photographer as she is a writer", Wilmer is the author of the photograph-led The Face of Black Music (Da Capo Press, 1976), which like Jazz People is considered a canonical and influential text in music criticism.Christopher Robinson, "Firing the Canon: Multiple Insularities in Jazz Criticism" (dissertation), University of Kansas, 2014.
As Serious As Your Life (1977)
Wilmer's book As Serious as Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz, first published in 1977 by Allison and Busby, is considered by some a classic of jazz, writing"As Serious as Your Life" at Goodreads. though not beyond some criticism; its title references something said to Wilmer by McCoy Tyner: "Music's not a plaything; it's as serious as your life." One of the first accounts of the revolutionary "free jazz" and its practitioners, it also documents women's experiences in relation to the "new jazz" in African-American communities, and deviates from the "masculinist rule of exclusion".Fischlin, David, and Ajay Heble. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, 1st edn (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), p. 230. Presenting sexual politics in the world of jazz, Wilmer 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".
As Serious As Your Life was reprinted by Serpent's Tail in 2018 (endorsed on the cover by Nat Hentoff as "An exceptionally illuminating book on jazz"), with the subtitle: "Black Music And The Free-Jazz Revolution, 1957–1977". Michael J. Agovino wrote in The Village Voice: "During the 1960s and '70s 'counterculture', much of which became a massive cash register, Val Wilmer fixed her strobe lights onto a musical and political landscape that really did in fact run counter to the culture. A shame so few — blacks and whites — were paying attention at the time. But her book, and the work it documented, remains as serious, and necessary, as ever."