Smoochy, ersatz, repetitious

He lacks respect for his guitar. He plays Carpenters songs. He enjoys a weird relationship with Bromley. Just what is Billy Jenkins's problem? And what's it got to do with Frank Zappa? By Stephen Graham

Spluttering along the quiet streets of his native Bromley in his brown Robin Reliant, the guitarist Billy Jenkins points out the street where parking meters first appeared, the spot where the new ring-road ate up a pretty little park and the terrace overlooking a pond where Bromley's hippies smoked dope en masse in a Kentish version of Goa in its finest hour.

Leaving the three-wheeler behind, Billy shows me the church hall where he played with punk rocker Billy Idol (Broad as he was then) at his first gig in the early Seventies.

"Before it started, I was outside at that phone box," he said pointing to the spot. "I was phoning the parents of my girlfriend at the time to apologise for smoking pot in their house. They were going to report me to the police unless I could sweet-talk them out of it."

Jenkins has a thing about Bromley, where he lived until his teens and music took him away. It was in Bromley that the blue-rinse brigade at the Churchill Theatre booed his band off stage years ago.

But beyond Bromley, the reaction to Jenkins is different; this grown- up rocker with improvising tendencies has gained critical respect for his iconoclastic recordings and has just completed an Arts Council-backed tour of England in the company of the Fun Horns of Berlin and his own group, the Voice of God Collective.

Jenkins's maverick angle on jazz has set him out as an English eccentric who loves the music but who can't stand its wine-bar smoochiness, ersatz romanticism and repetition of old tunes. He released Scratches of Spain in 1987, sending up one of the most sacred records in the modern jazz canon, Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain. On Jenkins's record, you'll find tracks such as "Benidorm Motorway Services" and "Donkey Droppings". On the pastiche artwork, you'll find a donkey.

Live, Jenkins messes about. At a gig in London's Purcell Room recently, drummer Martin France did what drummers do: he launched into a solo. Jenkins listened for a while, stopped the band and shouted at France to shut up. Instantly, Jenkins became a kind of patron saint for audiences bored by interminable drum solos.

If nothing else, Jenkins is spontaneous. Two novelists, Nicholas Royle and Simon Ings, discovered this as they prepared for a gig with Jenkins recently at the Bath Literary Festival. Ings, a "cyberpunk" novelist, quotes Jenkins: "If it's extemporised, nothing will go wrong." For Ings, Jenkins's music is "doing what people were touting Frank Zappa's music as doing, which is questioning taste". Royle, whose novel Saxophone Dreams about jazz musicians coming together from East and West is published in June, sees Jenkins's method as surrealist. "I met Billy for the first time just before he played at the Vortex in Stoke Newington one night last summer. I'd never seen anyone perform with such energy before and with such an unusual approach. In an old-fashioned bebop group, when it was someone's turn to stop playing their solo and they hadn't realised it, there'd be a discreet wink or a nod. But Billy jumps on someone if it's time for them to shut up. He's mad, charming and exciting."

Jenkins is not to everyone's taste, however. To the conventional mainstream jazz fan, he doesn't play jazz at all. But then Jenkins does call his music not jazz, but "spazz" - a word of his own coinage which he insists is derived from the German word Spass, meaning fun. To his critics, this is just a smoke-screen: Jenkins isn't serious enough, doesn't respect his guitar, sings songs by the Carpenters, occasionally performs with glove puppets and even runs toy cars up and down the fretwork of his instrument. There is a considerable gap between what Jenkins does and the methods of other free-form improvisers in this country - the more abstract and remote soundscapes of fellow guitarist Derek Bailey and saxophonist Evan Parker, for instance.

But like them, Jenkins sees improvising as an end in itself, an antidote to the cosy certainties of commercial music where musical creativity is barely an issue. "Let's face it," he argues. "We're living in a society that lives on crappy music."

It's the sort of society that finds musicians like Jenkins and drummer Steve Arguelles performing in dubious function bands for weddings, barmitzvahs and corporate drink-ups. In Blue Moon in a Function Room (1990), Jenkins's Voice of God Collective (motto: The Religion is Music) celebrate and parody beloved but fossilised jazz tunes such as "Take Five", "Bye Bye Blackbird" and "Baby Elephant Walk". Live, this kind of material is mildly ridiculed then transformed into an ironic theme park designed to entertain instead of stultify. The British jazz boom of the Eighties, in Jenkins's view, has made jazzers turgid and dull: "The educational system has been quite benevolent towards jazz, so if the boom has had any effect at all it's to make each new generation slicker and blander."

You could never accuse Jenkins of being bland. As he approaches his 40th birthday, he neither looks nor plays like his contemporaries. His "Piccadilly Weeper" sideburns and greying hair tied up in a bun are not classically jazzy in style ("He looks like a woman," said one saxophonist recently), but it's his thrashy contempt for conventional method that makes this unlikely son of Bromley the most original jazz-guitar improviser in Britain today.

n `East and West Now Wear the Same Vest' by Billy Jenkins and the Fun Horns of Berlin is released on 1 April by Babel