If you are someone who is lucky enough to talk to people you are interested in for a living, you will sometimes get asked, ‘Who would you most like to interview?’ Usually when people do that, my mind goes completely blank. But on the rare occasions when it hasn’t, there has generally been only one answer: Val Wilmer.

It’s not just that Wilmer’s overlapping bodies of work as a writer and photographer offer a unique dual perspective on some of the most vital cultural developments of the second half of the twentieth century. Her fearless candour in detailing the circumstances in which these contributions were made opens up enough further lines of enquiry to have any self-respecting newshound straining at the leash.

From the pavement of the quiet Stoke Newington side street Wilmer has lived on for the past forty years, there is nothing to mark out her home as any different to those of her neighbours. But picking our way past the piles of books and magazines down the short corridor leading into her kitchen feels like stepping through the back of a wardrobe into jazz Narnia.

From button-holing Louis Armstrong at Heathrow airport as a starstruck teenager, to having the presence of mind to ask Jimi Hendrix about the blues in an interview for Downbeat, to achieving sufficiently full immersion in the US free jazz scene to facilitate her landmark written study of its major players in As Serious As Your Life, Wilmer’s career has been built on a happy knack for achieving a more enduring human connection with her subjects than the coalescing conventions of music journalism and photography generally allowed. The key weapons in her armoury? The ability to both write prose and take photographs in which people from undervalued and even perennially disrespected cultures could see themselves reflected without condescension or prejudice.

‘If you imply — like someone who wrote about me recently did — that I slept with everyone I ever interviewed,’ warns Wilmer before I have ever activated my recording device, ‘then I will find you and I will kill you.’ Wilmer’s somewhat prickly reputation in later life has been founded on a reluctance to tolerate those who neglect such essential niceties. There is a smile in the voice of this famously straight-talking 82-year-old, but also a plausible edge of steel.

Professional rivals speculating enviously about the levels of access she achieved would have done well to note an auxiliary attribute: a sure grasp of basic good manners. Time and again in Wilmer’s full and bracingly frank 1989 memoir Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This, she expounds the benefits of stepping outside the music industry’s racialised nexus of exploitation to treat jazz and blues players like actual human beings rather than living repositories of myth.

Whether writing long letters to ‘folk songster’ Jesse Fuller or persuading her mother to make tea for former members of Count Basie’s big band, the unique trajectory of her progress from tomboy Girl Guide in post-war Streatham to honoured guest at Ornette Coleman’s downtown loft was charted by acts of everyday human courtesy.

Once reassured that I have no plans to depict her as the Mata Hari of post-bop, Val Wilmer makes me a cup of tea. Today’s scheduled topic of discussion is a new collection of her photographs with the characteristically direct title American Drummers 1959-1988. It’s the second in a series of small books she has put together for the publisher Cafe Royal. ‘It’s definitely a small book, I don’t like the word pamphlet — I had an argument with someone who called it that the other day — and a booklet is something that comes with a new piece of equipment and is written in a language you can’t understand.’

While these 36 pages of black and white photographs in a handy A5 format come with minimal, factual captions simply identifying the main subject or subjects, time and location of each picture, they also offer a concise masterclass in storytelling.

On the front cover, there’s Max Roach, suited and booted and in full command of his kit at the Berlin Philharmonie in 1969. Open the book, and there’s a beautiful double-page spread of Wilmer’s friend Josiah ‘Cie’ Frazier wielding a huge bass drum in the far less plush surroundings of New Orleans’ Preservation Hall two years later. Then, on the back cover, there is a haunting street scene in which the avant-garde paragon Andrew Cyrille holds a snare and a couple of sticks by the trunk of his car in pre-gentrification 1982 Williamsburg.

Rather than being removed from their social and economic contexts, as is the custom in traditional live performance shots, Wilmer’s subjects are photographed in the real world where drums are cumbersome objects which have to be lifted in and out of cars and lugged up and down stairs. ‘Do you know the Lester Young story?’ Val wonders. ‘Lester started out on drums, and the only reason he switched to tenor saxophone was because he said by the time he’d packed up his drums, all the girls had gone.’

In Mama Said There’d be Days Like This, Wilmer recounted an unnamed publisher’s callous rebuff for a projected volume of interviews with one of the great names in jazz — ‘Why Elvin Jones? He’s only a drummer.’ And this book as a whole is an eloquent rebuke to those who would downgrade the significance of those whose job is to keep time. The fact that all Wilmer’s American Drummers (including Jimi Hendrix, snapped deftly wielding drumsticks left-handed at a rehearsal at the Royal Albert Hall in 1967) are black reflects her life-long struggle against the attribution decay for which the Anglophone music businesses have been justly notorious.

But while Wilmer’s life and work does have a clear political through-line — from a youthful flirtation with the Young Communist League to the superbly stark photos of the Grunwick dispute which recently stole the show at Tate Britain’s Women In Revolt exhibition (currently on display in Edinburgh) — she rolls her eyes at an attempt to impose an explicitly political interpretation on a great photo of a Papa Jo Jones in a New York drum shop. The words ‘the means of production’ have barely left my lips before she’s delivered the pithy rejoinder, ‘Don’t get too verbose, Ben, or I shall fall asleep.’

Would it be fair to think that some of her affinity with subjects who have been largely, although by no means uniformly, black men might come from a shared sense of being excluded by white male hierarchies? ‘There are so many different strands to that because, on the one hand — at least in terms of the musicians — as a woman, you were not seen as a threat, so obviously that helped. But then at the same time there was so much racism around, and white men — even some English men who would’ve thought of themselves as very progressive — didn’t like there to be contact of any kind between black men and white women, never mind anything sexual.’ She shakes her head disapprovingly: ‘Things would be said about me that were absolutely appalling in terms of the attitudes they reflected. Of course, the depth of some of my colleagues’ feelings on the matter suggested that some of them would rather like to go to bed with those musicians themselves, but if you said that to them directly, they would die.’

‘If a group of people walk into a room,’ Val warms to her theme, ‘white men will never know what’s going on in that room, but women always do, and black people always do — better than women — and gay people know maybe the best of anyone exactly what’s happening… because you have to, that’s why, but straight white men never notice anything.’

There’s a forgiving eye for human frailty in Wilmer’s work — both as a writer and a photographer — which rubs against the grain of professions in which the conscience has not historically tended to be the most active muscle. ‘I could show you all sorts of dreadful pictures of people picking their nose or scratching their arse, but I don’t want to. That’s the Diane Arbus school of photography, which for me is not about love for the human race…’

I suppose people who liked it would say it was.

‘Oh God, yes they would, but you know… to me it’s rather hateful. I want to try to tell a story about people striving to create something, whatever their place in the world. I hope that each one of those people, whoever they are — even the ones who might’ve been feeling a little messed up on the day I took their photograph — they’ll still be looking the best they can.’

Presumably this revolutionary idea of making editorial choices within a moral framework is equally applicable to written interviews? Wilmer, still very much embroiled in a magnum opus about the lives and works of black British musicians stretching over several decades back to the legendary Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and beyond, indicates that this can be taken as read.

I can’t think of anyone who has combined the two disciplines of writing and photography as harmoniously as Wilmer, though British fear of the polymath being what it is, she’d probably be better known if she’d just stuck to one. ‘It’s not always good to be able to do more than one thing,’ she explains patiently, ‘because people will always tend to write you off as a part-timer… It’s very annoying, but if I’m ever feeling too sorry for myself, I just think of Leonardo,’ she chuckles, ‘I’m sure he had the same problem.’