1. Louis Armstrong and Ella FitzgeraldPorgy & Bess
Both my parents are very into music and they love the blues and jazz. I was born to the sound of ‘Summertime’ so my dad used to sing it to me a lot. That album means a lot to me and has done my whole life. It’s written by a Jewish man, George Gershwin, so my dad connects with that. And now there’s a lot of controversy about it, which I didn’t know about until recently, saying ‘Is it right that a Jewish man was writing for all these Black characters?’ Well, I don’t know – it was at the time I guess? I mean he did an all-Black opera; you can’t just discredit that…
But a big part of my growing up took place where my grandmother used to live, near Freshfield in Brighton. There was a small African American community there, and one of the musicians who lived there was
