Georgetown Dreamers

Maybe you should change your name from the Georgetown Dreamers, you know? It’s too remote. Maybe you should change your name to the Peckham Pixies.

Welcome to Guyana. We’re Caribbean, British (kind of) and also in South America, somehow. And the characters in Desmond’s are predominantly Guyanese immigrants and have nothing but love for the place; incompetent barber Desmond himself yearning to go back to the old country. He reminisces many times, frequently about performing trumpet in his old jazz band, the Georgetown Dreamers.

The show itself is groundbreaking in the sense that it showed the inner workings of black communities in the UK and how they interacted with each other, largely separate to any white influence. As harsh as it may sound, any sitcom scene prior to the 80s (and for a significant part of it also) that included a person of colour tended to have the punchline LOL BLACK PEOPLE LOL or thereabouts. Desmond’s did a huge service in dispelling that – the characters are rich, sympathetic and complex. As well as being cantankerous, vacuous and deeply fallible. In 1989, that wasn’t really explored on television in Britain. As such, Desmond’s remains an important and iconic part of British comedy canon that should not be ignored. It’s also, you know, incredibly funny.

Sooooo then, jazz. Where are we with that? Depends what you mean by jazz, really, doesn’t it? Does it need brass? Does the time signature change every bar? Did the artist die destitute in New Orleans? Or all / none of the above? I think I like jazz… I at least like the idea of it. Which seems to be ‘fuck it, let’s do whatever we want’. Like punk but with people that can play.

Either way, jazz as a movement is really hard to research in a design sense. Certainly Caribbean jazz from what I would assume is around the 1950s. It’s not going to surprise you to learn that there aren’t any major releases out there that would provide much inspiration. So what we’ve got here is some typography based on the cover of Miles Davis’ seminal 1970 album ‘Bitches Brew‘ and a smattering of Guyana flags.

I don’t think the Dreamers themselves would’ve spent as much time thinking about it as I have, tbh.