This is the beginning of Alyn Shipton's personal journey, starting with building a record collection in his schooldays, covering Fats Waller, Muggsy Spanier, and Artie Shaw. He hears the Ken Colyer band at 16, having already started playing the bass with various bands in Surrey and Hampshire. He cheekily invites Colyer to guest with his group, and ends up joining Colyer's band (with whom he records). He combines research into Colyer and such associates as the singer Rosina Scudder, with a widening appreciation of jazz. On the one hand, he plays with and gets to know Mike Westbrook and Lol Coxhill. On the other, he becomes lifelong friends with reseracher and trumpeter John Chilton and critic and singer George Melly. He plays in London with Mike Casimir's band first meeting such Americans as Kid Thomas and Alvin Alcorn.

Following the establishment of the modern circus in London and Paris during the later decades of the eighteenth century, the circus began its steady dispersion around the world. The global transmission of this new sort of public entertainment by peripatetic performers and entrepreneurs was in no small measure attributable to waves of colonialism, industrial advances in transportation and communication, and motivations arising from commercial interests. This chapter charts the transference of the circus to Australasia (Australia and New Zealand), the territories of Southeast Asia (including present-day Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines), and the South Asian territories of the Indian subcontinent and China in the nineteenth century. What is little understood about the processes of circus transculturation in these regions is that circus companies originating from colonial territories undertook transnational touring projects, thus enacting aesthetic and transcultural movements between territories on the periphery of empire. This chapter brings to light the ways that circuses were agents of colonialism and empire, as well as transcultural transmitters of aesthetic innovation in the period that was both the Age of Empire and the Age of Modernity.