Humphrey Lyttelton with a dancer, 1949
Book Details
Dave Gelly
AN UNHOLY ROW
Jazz in Britain and its audience, 1945–1960
176pp. Equinox. £25.
978 1 84553 712 8
The unruly post-war years of jazz in Britain
RUSSELL DAVIES
The first undisputed jazz recordings were made in 1917, so a century has not yet passed since the industrial spread of the music began. But even that thought gives no real idea of the historical compression that jazz underwent. Take the fifteen-year period covered in An Unholy Row: Jazz in Britain and its audience, 1945–1960 by Dave Gelly, the journalist, broadcaster and tenor-sax player. It ends in 1960, the year Ornette Coleman's album Free Jazz heralded a decade when everything jazz had been thought to offer – persuasive swinging solos, agreed chord patterns, musical wit etc – would be jettisoned by the avant-garde in favour of a kind of informed chaos. People were asking "Is jazz finished?"
Yet the start of Gelly's era came just twenty-eight years after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band went into the studio. In 1945, gramophone records spun at 78 rpm, and broke if you dropped them. Jazz still stuck to a seemingly linear course of development, though the speed of change had lately accelerated – the newest style or method being bebop, with its agitated lines and bewilderingly extended harmonies. Some young British experimenters worked their way to New York to see how "bop" was really done, and in later years, the likes of John Dankworth and Ronnie Scott would exchange memories of the musical indignities they had suffered mid-Atlantic, playing waltzes and hokey-cokey in the ballroom bands of "Geraldo's Navy". (Geraldo, alias Gerald Bright, a cockney tailor's son, was one of the better commercial band leaders of the day, but also a booking agent for ocean liners.)
Back in Britain, meanwhile, musicians of a similar age went the opposite way. Their concern was not to learn how Charlie Parker was fangling new musical phraseology in Manhattan, but to rediscover, by attempted recreation, how the New Orleans pioneers, pre-eminently King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, had chosen to express themselves on record in the 1920s. Gelly is right to insist, early in his argument, on the importance of recordings in post-war British jazz of all types. When the modernists returned from their oceanic jaunts laden with early bop masterpieces, they brought enlightenment, not simple entertainment.
But the true "record collectors" were usually to be found among traditionalists, who exchanged, at their rhythm-club meetings and published in their journals, endless questions about the minutiae of long-ago recording sessions. This still goes on. How many takes survive of such-and-such a number? Was a third cornet to be heard lurking in the ensemble? Who contributed that dreadful vocal chorus? The collectors' habit of interrogating the past had unfortunate consequences later on, when veteran American musicians began to appear regularly in British clubs and concert halls. All too often, a tired touring instrumentalist would stagger off stage and be buttonholed by a provincial jazz scholar accusing him of being the phantom slide-whistle player on some record he probably had not made, on a forgotten August afternoon in 1928.
In fact, opportunities to meet revered creators rarely arose in the period Gelly discusses, for the foolish reason that the Musicians' Union had banned American jazz instrumentalists from appearing in the UK. The Union view, passed on to the Ministry of Labour, which enforced it, was that the visitors would take work from British players. Even the uniqueness of Louis Armstrong was denied in the service of this dreary veto. When it was suggested that the Festival of Britain might benefit from Armstrong's instrumental uplift, the MU's General Secretary, Hardie Ratcliffe, rejected the proposal with an appeal to what he saw as reason: "Why do we need Louis Armstrong when we've got Kenny Baker?" Baker was powerful and a much-loved trumpet virtuoso, but he himself would have bought a ticket to see Armstrong in 1951. Two years earlier, an impudent exception to the no-Americans ruling had been contrived, and Gelly misses a trick, perhaps, in not mentioning it. Humphrey Lyttelton's band gave a concert at the Winter Garden Theatre, in the course of which the great New Orleanian Sidney Bechet (clarinettist and soprano saxophonist, or "clt, sop" as the discographies put it) was discovered in the audience, allegedly on holiday and enjoying the show. Naturally, he was "persuaded" to join the band on stage, so that the spectacle turned briefly into the showcase event it should have been in the first place. Lyttelton and his men cannot have been wholly stunned to see Bechet in his stage-side box, since they had recorded with him for the Melodisc label earlier the same day. Bechet's approach to that session, authoritarian but not wrong-headed, both impressed and amused Lyttelton and it is notable that Lyttelton's own band "got its act together", in the most literal way, shortly thereafter.
Without being burdened explicitly with the task, Lyttelton acts as a guide through these unruly post-war years. Gelly's account begins with the scene outside Buckingham Palace on VE Day, where a trumpet could be heard (still can, on a BBC recording) bleating "Roll Out the Barrel" above the tumult of the revellers. This was Lyttelton, making a precarious circuit of the Victoria Memorial in a handcart, heralding the dawn of peace. A few years later, it was Lyttelton again who, simply by giving a saxophone houseroom in his band, provoked the waving of a concert-hall banner reading "Go Home Dirty Bopper" – the most celebrated expression of the Trad vs Modernist antagonism. By the late 1950s, Lyttelton was leading a small swing band, and, as Gelly points out, this was in chronological terms the same sort of revivalism that the diehard traditionalists had undertaken. "In 1945, George Webb's Dixielanders had dedicated themselves to playing the classic jazz of twenty years before, and now here were Humphrey Lyttelton and his Band, in 1957, looking back twenty years to the swing era."
For explorers who wished to move faster, Ronnie Scott and Johnny (as he was known then) Dankworth were also useful guides. If you kept your eye on these three men, you would know roughly how British jazz was faring. Dankworth's big-band ambitions quickly made him an expert arranger, with involvements in film and television, and his domestic partnership with Cleo Laine encouraged the wider view of musical engagement which eventually acquired the name of the "Allmusic Plan". Scott kept pace with American developments, as bop moved into hard bop; he pioneered, with his nine-piece band, a take-it-or-leave-it school of stage presentation (Rule One: make every effort to avoid ingratiating yourself with the audience); and developed, through the medium of Britain's best-known jazz club, an internationalist view of the jazz fraternity. At Scott's memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields – as close to Soho as could be arranged – the critic John Fordham said in the Order of Service that Scott "would announce the arrival of performers like Coleman Hawkins and Dizzy Gillespie in an exasperated, gravelly East End drawl, as if their presence on his premises were somehow interrupting some absorbing private pursuit, like watching the racing in the back room".
The connections between personal eccentricity and musical individuality or style are extremely strong in jazz. The names suggest as much: I remember feeling as a newcomer to the genre that any art form treasuring the contributions of Jabbo Smith, Eddie Lockjaw Davis and Spanky DeBrest must be worth further research. Britons seldom matched Americans in nomenclature, though the foibles could be just as weird. Gelly celebrates several oddballs, notably Bruce Turner, the excellent saxophonist who attracted the "Dirty Bopper" protest. It is true, as Gelly recalls, that Turner called everyone "Dad", but that does not quite suggest the extremes to which he could take the habit. A fellow bandsman of his once told me that Turner's idea of a chat-up line was to loom over a young lady and hiss in her ear, "Gotta have you, dad!" – a tactic which must surely have remained perpetually innocent of success.
In each available style, there were post-war British musicians who emerged as magnificently "different" in ambition and immediately identifiable in sound – the best things most jazz performers can hope to be. Some, like the clarinettist Sandy Brown, and saxophonists Joe Harriott and Tubby Hayes, lived much too short a span, all of them still developing in their last years: Brown in the direction of African music, Harriott towards his own notion of free jazz and Hayes beginning to enjoy an international virtuosity only compromised, in the end, by drugs and general ill health. To keep up with the likes of Hayes required formidable technique, though he himself was self-taught and outspokenly proud of it.
If there was one attitude British jazz fans of most persuasions shared, it was a suspicion of music that sounded like the outcome of academic programming. It was rather like the sporting public's fondness, in those years, for productive waywardness in cricketers and footballers. Audiences favoured a kind of organic tang in their soloists and were prepared to put up with a certain amount of erratic playing in the search for it. This didn't matter too much to most jazz listeners, but among the New Orleans devotees it amounted to an obsession with "authenticity" (the watchword of their purism) and an almost moral matter.
Their theory was that the original jazz of the Crescent City – the streets, the picnics, the rudimentary dance halls – had been uprooted and taken north to Chicago and New York, where it was contaminated by the demands of showbusiness. That much was true; the argument was really about the musicians who stayed behind. They, for the authenticists, were still the guardians of the mysterious essence of New Orleans, and their work, valuing the ensemble texture over bravura soloing, should be revered and emulated. For those who contrastingly favoured the Oliver/Armstrong/Morton traditions, the stay-at-homes were limited players who knew their chances of making it in Chicago and beyond were slender. As if to prove it, some of them did venture briefly north, only to retreat to Louisiana and stay there.
Thus the charge against the British purists was that they were imitating inferior and now elderly, musicians – possibly because these unpolished results were the best they could hope to achieve. But they defended their position passionately, with the bandleader Ken Colyer as their symbolic leader. Colyer had not only spent time in New Orleans, but had overrun his shore leave there and been jailed. Sin and saintliness were satisfactorily combined, and Colyer naturally continued to follow the same uncontaminated musical path until the end of his life.
Colyer did not participate in the brief, mad spell when the "Trad Boom" elevated a music-hall parody of early jazz into the hit parade. Comical outfits, banjos and commercialism – and yet, one of the worst offenders, Acker Bilk, with his striped waistcoat, bowler hat and press agency (the Bilk Marketing Board) turned out to be a maturing soloist, whose best music was yet to be heard. Once a Colyer acolyte, Bilk survived to make affecting records with Lyttelton, among others. But that belongs to a later story, which Dave Gelly will perhaps tell. Sadly, he no longer has Philip Larkin to compare notes with, as he did in 1985. The correspondence gave rise to this rueful note, which Gelly keeps for his envoi: "During our exchange of letters I preferred not to tell Philip Larkin I was sorry to learn that he had found one particular record 'not to be jazz as he understood the word', since I was one of the players on the record in question". Larkin once wrote of the sax-man Cannonball Adderley that he "has the rare virtue of sounding neither screwball nor neurotic, yet always pushing towards excitement". He might well have said the same of this book.
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