[5] Three years after these explorations in sound, Wilmer began writing about Black music, encouraged and inspired by Max Jones, Paul Oliver and others.
I don’t think it ever crossed my mind to consider the usual female options, resolutely opposed as I was to anything that smacked of feminine pursuits and did not involve going places, being and doing.
Reflecting on how this piece originated, Wilmer states: "I was an inveterate letter writer, that's how the break with Jesse Fuller came about, me writing to him out of the blue.
These great musicians and characters from a black culture on the other side of the world writing back to this young suburban white girl in England.
"[9] Fundamental to Wilmer's work is her keen understanding and insightful expression of the disparity between male and female music writers.
"[10] Through her writing about music, Wilmer was able to provide a voice to a transatlantic, multicultural, and multiracial dialogue, delving into a "part of history, or [what] might very soon be.
"[20] Her essays and obituaries are notable for their ability to subtly reveal the underlying inequities that Black artists and women faced in the music industry, often using their own words.
Speaking of her friendship with the influential lyricist, music critic, interviewer and singer Kitty Grime, Wilmer demonstrates her love, respect and admiration, while also revealing the masculine bias in the world of music: "It was during this heady period that we met, at a time when the jazz scene was virtually an all-male preserve...her awareness and knowledgeability were something that most younger commentators would be hard put to emulate".
[22] Although Wilmer's forte is jazz and blues, she is versed in the larger movements in music history and reveals her versatility across genres when, for instance, she writes about how Jimi Hendrix's visit to England in 1966 gave "the floundering local scene a much-needed injection".
[23] Wilmer has been a contributor to a vast array of publications,[24] including Melody Maker, DownBeat (she was its UK correspondent, 1966–1970), Jazz Journal, Musics, Double Bassist, Mojo, Jazzwise, The Wire,[25] and regularly contributes obituaries of musicians to The Guardian.
[28] It features interviews with American musicians who include Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Art Farmer, Babs Gonzales, Jimmy Heath, Billy Higgins, Thelonious Monk, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Clark Terry, Big Joe Turner and Randy Weston, and as Kirkus Reviews noted: "The emphasis is on the people in these fourteen interviews, the personalities behind the jazz, their moods, ambitions, influences....The author observes well and the profiles are short and sharp with high notes for the buff.
[33] As Serious As Your Life was reprinted by Serpent's Tail in March 2018 (endorsed on the cover by Nat Hentoff as "An exceptionally illuminating book on jazz"), and Michael J. Agovino wrote in The Village Voice: "During the 1960s and '70s 'counterculture', much of which became a massive cash register, Val Wilmer fixed her strobe lights onto a musical and political landscape that really did in fact run counter to the culture.
'"[38] Wilmer's autobiography, Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This: My Life in the Jazz World (Women's Press, 1989), details her development as an artist/journalist, and includes her coming out as a lesbian in a largely heterosexist musical milieu.
The result is a social history of music like no other, and a no-nonsense account of the development from birth to maturity of a dynamic woman whose documentary arts deserve to be reappraised as a whole in the light of this book.
[53] She has written about photography and interviewed practitioners including Eve Arnold,[54] Anthony Barboza,[55] Roy DeCarava,[56] Terry Cryer,[57] Milt Hinton,[58] John Hopkins,[59][60] Danny Lyon,[61] Raissa Page (of Greenham Common fame), Coreen Simpson,[62] Beuford Smith[63] and James Van Der Zee.
[68][69] In September 2013, while Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Frith Street, Soho, was undergoing redecoration, a twelve-square-metre (130 sq ft) hoarding was erected on the façade with a tribute to its eponymous founder in the form of a massive photograph by Wilmer of him smoking a cigarette outside the club, and one of his legendary one-liners: "I love this place, it's just like home, filthy and full of strangers.
Whether it's Muddy Waters playing cards with Brownie McGhee backstage at the Fairfield Halls in 1964, Archie Shepp sitting beneath a Jimi Hendrix poster in his New York apartment, or a joyful couple whose names we'll never know at a blues dance in Bentonia, Mississippi half a century ago, she finds the essence of the human spirit.
[78] Photographic works by Wilmer are held by the Arts Council of Great Britain Collection;[79] the National Portrait Gallery;[53] Victoria and Albert Museum;[51] Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; Fotografiska Museet, Stockholm; Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library).