Various

British Traditional Jazz: A Potted History (1936-1963)

(Lake)

THROUGH the late ’50s and early ’60s the phenomenon of “trad” seized the spirits of many thousands of British youths.

It was music to listen to certainly, but dancing music too, and hundreds of “trad jazz” clubs opened up in pub rooms and social halls all over Britain, many of them proudly regional and local, as the names of their regular bands attested — the Merseysippi Jazz Band, the Avon Cities Jazz Band (from Bristol), the Clyde Valley Stompers, the Yorkshire Jazz Band, the Second City Jazzmen (from Birmingham), The Saints (from Manchester) or the Crane River Jazz Band.

They were a very British amalgam of New Orleans revivalist bands and Dixieland, with Ken Colyer’s faithful and purist Crescent City-emulating band at one end, and the Ilford Dixieland sound (later stretching into the Hit Parade) of Kenny Ball at the other.

Some were costume bands like Dick Charlesworth’s City Gents or Acker Bilk’s waistcoated and bowler-hatted Paramount Jazz Band or the Bob Wallis Storyville Band, who turned out in the imagined garb of Mississippi gamblers.

But mostly the musicians performed in modest short-back-and-sides and occasionally bearded appearance, unlike some of the “trad” zealots who danced to them, rocking back on their heels with their loose pullovers, pre-Levis turned-up jeans and sandalled or brogued feet.

I loved the music and when a school friend’s dad opened up the St Louis Jazz Club in the side hall of the Elm Park Hotel in 1960, I volunteered all of my adolescent 17½ stone as doorman and cloakroom attendant.

I heard  the bands for nothing every Friday and Sunday night and became powerfully addicted to their enormous spirit, skilled musicianship and sheer sonic verve, as well as their comradeship with each other and those who came to hear them — and their respect and love for the black genius which they emulated.

Colyer, for example, had joined the Merchant Navy to get to New Orleans, jumped ship and lived and learned with the Creole musicians there, who were still suffering racism and division.

He seemed to blow his Derby-muted choruses with a special authority and when I heard he had marched with his band to Aldermaston to “Ban the Bomb,” he became my first jazz hero, a bearded white trumpeter from Great Yarmouth.

At the St Louis there were always surprises, such as the great ’30s Islington-born hornman Nat Gonella bringing a band of veterans, a one-man-band performance from the bluesman Jesse Fuller singing his renowned San Francisco Bay blues — the first black musician I ever heard live — and blueswoman Beryl Bryden buying me a pint at the bar and educating me about the history of the blues. And all in Elm Park.

This world is brilliantly relived in Paul Adams’s evocative and superbly chosen musical three-disc anthology British Traditional Jazz: A Potted History 1936-1963, and he has managed not only to be broadly inclusive in his choices, but to have dug out many previously unreleased tracks which reveal the real heart and occasional brilliance of the music.

The first CD stretches back to the ’30s and George Chisholm and Nat Gonella’s Georgians, but the post-war optimism is vibrant in the beauty of east London clarinettists Cy Laurie (in the 1950 Mike Daniels Jazz Band rendition of Gatemouth) and Monty Sunshine before Colyer’s muted chorus in the Crane River Jazz Band’s 1953 version of Get Me Out of Here.

Future bop trumpeter Dickie Hawdon takes the lead on the Yorkshire Jazz Band’s Camp Meeting Blues and Johnny Dankworth is Humphrey Lyttelton’s front-line clarinet partner on a 1946 rendition of That Da Da Strain.

Tony “Lonnie” Donegan is plunking his banjo on the Colyer band’s 1954 Carolina Moon and the virtuosi Scottish horns, trumpeter Al Fairweather and clarinet man Sandy Brown are stoking it up on 1953’s I’ll See You in My Dreams.

Bruce Turner and his seething Saltburn clarinet are on hand in Freddy Randall’s At Sundown of 1952.Disc 2 introduces the blueswomen with Beryl Bryden singing West End Blues with the Alex Welsh band of 1957 and Belfast’s Ottilie Patterson aching through Sobbin’ Hearted Blues with the Chris Barber Band in 1958.

The future Cream drummer Ginger Baker turns up on the Terry Lightfoot Band’s Ole Miss Rag of 1957, and George Melly warbles his way through Muddy Water with Mick Mulligan’s Magnolia Band in 1956.

The St Louis favourite front line of Kenny Ball (trumpet), Dave Jones (clarinet) and trombonist John Bennett give an east London sound to Satchmo’s Potato Head Blues on Disc 3, while the young clarinet pretender Sammy Rimington blows his way, with Colyer, through Creole Bo Bo of 1963.

Acker’s clarinet  is effervescent on Creole Jazz on 1961 and when Bryden sings Bessie Smith’s Young Woman’s Blues with Sunshine’s band and Johnny Parker’s rolling piano and proudly declares: “I’m as good as any woman in this town,” you believe it too.

There’s a whole pre-’60s world in this vivacious music, full of hope, nerve, audacity and artistry too — all acoustic and not an electric note in nearly four hours of stomping sound.

Of course, the Beatles and Rolling Stones were around the corner, but the long moment of “trad” had its own brief era of cultural glory and it is held forever in Adams’s considered selection and detailed sleeve notes. A piece of history here and earfuls of sheer pleasure.