Throw another shrimp on the barbie.....

[charles t]

As for Michael Nyman...the saxophone piece he wrote for David Sanborn is a favorite of mine (on Laserdisc). I would argue over on the old bored, that Sanborn CAN play (Gil Evans' Priestess recording, for example) but, he chose an easier road.

[Tenor Freak]

I'd be interested to know if there is any discernible jazz activity in Shanghai, for example. J.G. Ballard, describing Shanghai in the 1930s, called it a "media city" when describing its nightclubs and radio stations, and I've no doubt it's the same today. It is the kind of cosmopolitan place that could potentially be a breeding ground for great jazz or improvised music.

[charles t]

Great, Bruce to wake up in this temporary land proceeding Noah's Ark, to see your mention of J. G. Ballard - the source for the only Spielberg flick, I would ever pay money to see - Empire Of The Sun. But the bordees herein know all about that fantastic autobiographical tale.

Shanghai which is now constructing buildings (more than 2) over 100 stories high...in fact, the tallest ever, would be a sci-fi setting for a jazz club.

For myself, it's easier to envision a symphony of those World Cup plastic horns emenating from the wind-swept pinnacles...

{Re] Ballard:

" NME’s musical appreciation, musicians readily eschewing nerd-dom:

Ballard’s work resonates with lyricists, too, because it is science-fiction without being ‘sci-fi’ in a naff sense. Pointedly, Ballard never used the phrase, he preferred to call it “speculative fantasy”. Hence, by borrowing his imagery, bands have been able to conjure a dystopian future without resorting to stale tropes such as spaceships and warpdrives. Without sounding like nerds, essentially. "

[Tenor Freak]

Yes Chas, JGB is one of my favourite (if not top) authors. How "Empire of the Sun" missed out on the Booker still mystifies me because rarely IMO has a novel discussed - at length - people, of all races and classes, living right on the razor's edge of life and death. Perhaps it was just too dangerous for the English literary establishment?

I also like Philip K. Dick and certain other sf authors like Joe Haldeman (really must read some more Dick sometime, also Burroughs). Did you ever meet PKD around Cali?

I once heard a documentary on the radio about WSB and thought he sounded like an interesting writer. Imagine my disappointment when I found nothing by him in my school library!

[Byas'd Opinion]

One musician who appeared a couple of times, with Clarion Fracture Zone and with Roger Dean's own band (Austrolysis?) was saxophonist Sandy Evans.

She lived in Glasgow for a year or so in the late 80s before returning to Australia with her husband, Scottish sax player Tony Gorman in tow. (Well, where would you expect them to settle? When was it last minus four through the day in Sydney?) Gorman was good as well, but she was the one who struck me as the real talent.

Her departure was a bit of a loss to the Scottish scene. Not only was she one of the best locally-based tenor players around at the time, but this was also the time Laura Macdonald was starting her career and it looked as if they might be the start of a wave of female instrumentalists.

Here she is playing soprano in the band she co-leads with Gorman (who sadly has been forced by illness to concentrate on composing rather than playing)

She also plays in a band called the catholics with Necks bassist Lloyd Swanton and trombonist James Greening. I've only heard their first album, but I think it's excellent - guitar-based Afro-Latin grooves with some splendid horn solos on top.

[charles t]

Greetings, Bruce. Speaking of PKD, have placed a hold at local library for:

"What if our world is their heaven? : The final conversations of Philip K. Dick".

Oddly enuf, one of his very earliest works (1958) and just republished - In Milton Lumky Territory - was one of my favorite reads this year.

I have spoken to Ray Bradbury (about Faherenheit: in particular concerning Truffaut's version) but that is about it, in our sci-fi La La Land...

[Ian Thumwood]

I'd be interested to know if there is any discernible jazz activity in Shanghai, for example. J.G. Ballard, describing Shanghai in the 1930s, called it a "media city" when describing its nightclubs and radio stations, and I've no doubt it's the same today. It is the kind of cosmopolitan place that could potentially be a breeding ground for great jazz or improvised music.

Bruce

I don't know if you have ever read Albert McCarthy's book "Big band jazz" as this is absolutely essential reading if you want to learn about the many bands that performed throughout the 20's, 30's an 40's. The interesting material concerns the lesser known groups (especially Territory Bands from throughout the different States) as many of these were quite certainly as good as some of their more famous counterparts. It makes fascinating reading as so many famous names started off in really obscure bands and I have always been intrigued by just how much jazz musicians drifted from one band to another. It is not surprising that new ideas were quickly passed on in this environment.

One of the chapters in this book is called "The Expatriates" and this concerns those musicians who found employment overseas , especially in Europe. Many of these musicians are well known and the recordings they have made have acquired Classic status. What staggered me was just how far afield some jazz musicians actually travelled to find employment where the lack of racial prejudice was an attraction. High wages in fancy hotels also was an obvious appeal. From about 1925-35, American musicians regularly worked in China and, as you state, Shanghai was highly "Europeanised" so that there was plenty of opportunity for employment in the hotel bands. Amongst the first coloured jazz bands to work in Shanghai were the likes of Bill Hegamin and Jack Carter, the latter's band including the New Orleans clarinetist Albert Nicholas in it's ranks. One of the first large big bands to play there was led by Buck Clayton in 1934 - about 3-4 years before he found fame as a trumpeter with Count Basie's band. According to McCarthy, the band was based in California and hired for a residency in the Canidrome ballroom in Shanghai.

The most celebrated of the "Asian" big bands was that led by pianist Teddy Weatherford who first went to China in 1926 as a member of Jack Carter's band. He is alleged to have been Earl Hines' only serious rival in Chicargo as a pianist in the 1920's. Throughout the 1920's and 30's he was largely based in Asia although his band visited Paris where he made some solo piano recordings. After this, he seems to have been based in Calcutta, Bombay and what was Colombo. He died from cholera in Calcutta in 1945 . The recordings he made with his band in India are supposed to be commercial and former Ellingtonian Rudy Jackson played clarinet for hiom throughout Woirld War 2.

Elsewhere, jazz musicians managed to travel far and wide reaching countries such as the Soviet Union and many of those in South America. I am intrgiued by just how quickly the jazz bug took hold and when you read the accounts of band leaders such as Sam Wooding or musicians like Garvin Bushell, it is incredible how quickly the music became universal. If you can get hold of the latter book ("Jazz from the beginning"), you will find it a brilliant read and a real insight into the life of a jazz musician during the 20's and 30's. Bushell's account is very good on his travels abroad although I love the fact that he could talk eloquently about vintage jazz, playing classical music or working with Coltrane. He was a total musician. Definately a musician I would loved to have had a conversation with!

Hope that this is of interest and answers your question to a degree.

Cheers

Ian

[John Wright]

Ian, thanks for reminding me about Albert McCarthy's book which I have but only read cover to cover once, must do so again.

The book mentions Frank Ellis who took over Art Hickman's band and I believe Ellis' band toured Australia before Sonny Clay.

I don't think Sonny Clay's departure from Australia was anything to do with racism in particular, as a general ban on touring bands was imposed around 1929.

One of the first British dance bands to play jazz in Australia was Syd Roy's Lyricals, and they toured the country East and West in 1928-29. There are some wonderful period photos on my webiste at,

http://www.jabw.demon.co.uk/lyonsgallery10.htm

http://www.jabw.demon.co.uk/lyonsgallery2.htm

John W

[Ian Thumwood]

John

Thanks for your input which is appreciated.

The McCarthy book is very good and benefits from the fact that he knew many of the musicians who helped compile this book. He was an interesting character and he did crop up in a discussion on the old BBC messageboard . I believe that he was also a celebrated anarchist as well as writer on jazz. The "Big band jazz" book is exceptional even if the author tends to smother some bands with purple prose and lacks good musical analysis. Like yourself, I love looking at the old photographs.

With regard to Hickman and Ellis, I need to check to be sure, but think he appears in another of McCarthy's books which concerns dance bands. I don't have this book as the lack of jazz means it wasn't very interesting but I was once loaned a copy. This tends to deal with white bands and covers many of the British bands of this period too. Both McCarthy and Wicki mention the nature of Clay's departure from Australia which followed a drug bust. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a racist element in hsi expulsion and Clay's musicians would not have been the first nor last to be expelled from other countries for dubious reasons. I believe the same fate befell both Sidney Bechet and the gentlemanly Benny Carter who were also unceremoniously kicked out of this country in the 20's and 30's. Even in the late sixties a black musician like Johnny Griffin was imprisioned for a error with his tax. You can't argue against the fact that this definately had racist undertones albeit probably not quite as blatant as would have existed 30-40 years previously.


Cheers

Ian

[John Wright]

Ian,

The McCarthy book I referred to is his 'The Dance Band Era' which really got me into the 20s/40s dance bands (some decades ago) when I stumbled on some particular 78s during a hunt for Elgar 78s!

Regarding Bechet and Carter I'll have to consult the British Jazz book that I have by Jim Godbolt and remind myself what he had to say. I have a few 78s by Henry Hall which benefit from music arrangements by Benny Carter, very few made it to disc, he mostly wrote for the tour performances and although the manuscripts still exist in the Hall family they haven't released them to anyone for performance, as far as I know.

Regards,

[Alyn_Shipton]

Ian
Carter was not unceremoniously thrown out, he was here on a succession of short term work permits, and did his European recordings during his enforced periods of absence from his job at the BBC. Bechet was thrown out for his part in an affray. The best account of this is in John Chilton's "The Wizard of Jazz" which remains the best Bechet biography. There is a lot of insight into Buck Clayton's period in Shanghai in his autobiography, Buck Clayton's Jazz World, which I published in 1988, the same year as I brought out Bushell's life story. I'm glad that that publishing endeavour of over 20 years ago is bearing some fruit today in a revival of interest in those books.
McCarthy was a good researcher, and for a long time the editor of Jazz Monthly, which commissioned some of the best writing on jazz, from a team that included Brian Priestley, Paul Oliver, Mark Gardner, Max Harrison and Mac himself. His last real achievement of note was the excellent series of mainstream records he produced in the early 70s for British RCA, documenting many survivors of the swing era. Sadly his personal life went into decline thereafter, and although his old friend Max Jones and I tried to cajole him back to writing, sadly this was not to be.
As a final note, in March I am touring a band playing some of Buck Clayton's unpublished arrangements, which he gave me in gratitude for publishing his life story. My German colleague Matthias Seuffert has done a lot of work on these to create a set of consistent charts for nine-piece band (Buck's original writing was for bands of various sizes). We're playing a number of UK concerts, finishing at Gateshead on 27 March which will be recorded by JLU for future broadcast on Radio 3.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

your gig list doesn't include Leicester does it Alyn?

[Alyn_Shipton]

Closest is Birmingham Symphony Hall commuter jazz - early evening on Friday 25th March. Maybe better atmosphere at Holywell Music Room Oxford on 23rd?

[Ian Thumwood]

John

I was supposed to be doing some work this morning before going off to the football but I got wrapped up following the links on your website. Once of the sections that fascinated me was a list which illustrated the number of American bands who toured the UK in the first half of the twenties. Some of the names like Paul Specht were familiar and there are some quite well known names amongst the side men too. I quickly noticed Joe Tarto's name and there were a few others as well.

As well as jazz, I am very interested in history and the data on your site suggests an absolutely fascinating story with regard to how jazz spread across the Atlantic during the first half of the 1920's. Amongst the listing of musicians there is information as to the age of each of the players (age group generally 18-25) as well as detail concerning the origins of the bands from various parts of the State. I suppose there are 78 rpms that give you some idea of what these bands sounded like and whether the jazz element was genuine or over-stated. As you have implied, most of these bands were almost certainly dance orchestras. It think it must be possbile to ascertain how quickly jazz spread across the various cities and countries by collating this information but , to my knowledge, I am not aware of anyone doing a similar exercise with jazz as (say for example) various experts have tried to calculate the population of Britain from the Domesday Book or Inquisitions post mortum for the effect of the Black Death. The number of bands, musicians, 78 records released and increase in the number of radio stations taken as empircal data would, I am convinced , produce some fascinating conclusions.

In a book called "The Jazz pioneers", the author Lawrence Gushee came up with a statistic regarding the number of people listed a "jazz musicians" in Chicargo in around 1921. I can't recall what the figure was but it was somewhere aound 25-50 from recollection. It is known that there were bands playing credible jazz before or around the time of the 1914-18 war and reading acounts by the likes of Albert McCarthy it is obvious that within 3-4 years of the ODJB making records, the music had taken a very firm grip of American popular music well outside of the main population centres let alone New Orleans, Chicargo and New York.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

ta Alyn i will try to get to one of them, i should think Holywell ... great room

Ian Saints had a good day, just reading a book on my new Kindle [ta santa] called Why England lose which applies that kind of analysis to soccer, great debunking stuff too ...