Valerie Sybil Wilmer was born on 7 December 1941 and is a British photographer and writer specialising in jazz, gospel, blues, and British African-Caribbean music and culture.
22 Facts About Val Wilmer
1.
2.
Val Wilmer was born in Harrogate, Yorkshire, England, on 7 December 1941.
3.
Val Wilmer is the sister of the poet and writer Clive Wilmer.
4.
Val Wilmer 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.
5.
Three years after these explorations in sound, Val Wilmer began writing about Black music, encouraged and inspired by Max Jones, Paul Oliver and others.
6.
Val Wilmer attended concerts accompanied by her mother, who believed her too young to go on her own.
7.
Aware of the earliest records of jazz and blues, Val Wilmer began to write about jazz and other African-American music, focusing on the political and social messages of the music.
8.
Fundamental to Val Wilmer's work is her keen understanding and insightful expression of the disparity between male and female music writers.
9.
Val Wilmer's work has been cited and used in research for many books, articles and films, including several biographies of major musicians.
10.
Val Wilmer was later to gain recognition for her interviews of saxophonists Joe Harriott and Ornette Coleman, and become a writer, music critic and photographer.
11.
Val Wilmer has been a contributor to a vast array of publications, including Melody Maker, DownBeat, Jazz Journal, Musics, Double Bassist, Mojo, Jazzwise, The Wire, and regularly contributes obituaries of musicians to The Guardian.
12.
Val Wilmer has written biographical articles on Black British musicians from the 1940s and 1950s, and articles about photography.
13.
Val Wilmer was a member of the advisory board for The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, edited by Barry Kernfeld, and the author of 63 entries.
14.
Val Wilmer has written more than 35 articles for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
15.
Val Wilmer has amassed a collection of historic photos of black people in Britain, some of which have been on public display, and she is working on a project to research the lives of black British musicians, which she has been documenting for many years.
16.
Val Wilmer is as important a photographer as she is a writer, having worked with hundreds of singers, jazz musicians and writers, and she has taken noted photographs of artists such as Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, and Duke Ellington.
17.
Val Wilmer's photographs are held in the National Portrait Gallery collection.
18.
Val Wilmer has written about photography and interviewed practitioners including Eve Arnold, Anthony Barboza, Roy DeCarava, Terry Cryer, Milt Hinton, John Hopkins, Danny Lyon, Raissa Page, Coreen Simpson, Beuford Smith and James Van Der Zee.
19.
In 2009, Val Wilmer was honoured with a Parliamentary Jazz Award for Services to Jazz.
20.
In 2020, Val Wilmer became a Patron of the National Jazz Archive.
21.
In October 2023, Val Wilmer was interviewed by Cerys Matthews for The Blues Show on BBC Radio 2, featuring musicians whom Val Wilmer met and photographed such as Muddy Waters, Buddy Moss and Aretha Franklin.
22.
Val Wilmer had previously appeared with Matthews on a 2018 BBC Four television programme, Blues and Beyond, selecting their favourite blues musicians.