From New Orleans To London
Oldtime Jazz, Skiffle Music, Musik, Ragtime, Swing Jazz, New Orleans Jazz,
Sonntag, 27. Oktober 2019
Sonntag, 20. Oktober 2019
Sonntag, 13. Oktober 2019
The Crane River Jazzband - 1950 - 1952
If you’re one of those happy souls who likes to remember important dates in social history here’s one to add to your list - July 13th 1954 when – just up the road from where you are reading this – the fuse was lit on the great British pop music explosion!
The story starts in 1948 when Ken Colyer, an amateur musician living in Hounslow, put together a band to play the old time jazz music of New Orleans. As they had been rehearsing in Cranford on the banks of the River Crane they called themselves the Crane River Jazz Band - and took the jazz standard ‘Down by the Riverside’ as their theme tune. By the summer of 1949 “The Cranes” were confident enough to start their own jazz club in the White Hart pub in Cranford. It was an immediate success. True to the spirit of old New Orleans instead of playing records during the interval Ken bashed out American folk songs on a guitar, accompanied by kazoo, washboard and double bass.
In 1952 Ken Colyer decided to make a pilgrimage to New Orleans to check out his favourite music at first hand. In his absence two of the former ‘Cranes’ - clarinettist Monty Sunshine and guitarist/banjo player Tony ‘Lonnie’ Donegan started a new band with trombonist Chris Barber. Hoping that Ken would join them on his return they continued with Ken’s popular ‘guitar and washboard’ interval sessions. But Ken wasn’t coming back so quickly. He was locked up in New Orleans for not having a work permit!
On July 13th 1954 the Chris Barber Band went into a studio to record an album. During the session Chris and Lonnie with Beryl Bryden on washboard recorded a couple of their ‘interval’ songs and in so doing changed the musical and social face of the U.K forever. Eventually released in December 1955 ‘Rock Island Line’ and ‘John Henry’ reached the Top Ten in both the UK and America and launched a musical revolution called Skiffle. In a world of primped and powdered professional singers, where musical tastes were determined by middle aged bandleaders and instruments were taught, not learnt Skiffle was exactly the musical rebellion that bored teenagers were looking for. It was wild, improvised and above all - very, very easy to play. That’s why anyone with a guitar, washboard or tea chest bass was doing it! Every school, every youth club, every coffee bar had at least one skiffle group thumping away in a corner. There were skiffle programmes on the radio and skiffle clubs in every basement. Its detractors may have protested that “skiffle was piffle” but it was selling a lot of vinyl and because of it thousands of young people were learning how to make music. From out of these primitive groups came some of the most famous and successful bands of the 60’s. The Shadows, the Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton and a thousand others have acknowledged their debt to skiffle. Ken Colyer may have identified it but it was Lonnie Donegan who demonstrated that anyone could play it – and so everyone did! Now, 50 years on, the children and grandchildren of those early skifflers are still picking up guitars, learning those first three chords and turning them into hit records. In 2002, a performer to the very end, Lonnie Donegan died as he lived - in the middle of a sell out tour!
This all might seem a long way from Ken Colyer and the murky waters of the Crane but there is a pleasing circularity to this story. In his later years Lonnie Donegan, the godfather of Britpop, stored all his guitars and tour equipment in a garage in Brentford Dock - just a mile or so from Old Isleworth where the River Crane lazily empties into the Thames. Ken Colyer died in March 1988, largely unrecognised and unrewarded for the part that he played in making British popular music the success that it is today. Still, he would have been pleased that the seed he planted in the mud of the River Crane nearly 60 years ago has done so well.
Sonntag, 6. Oktober 2019
Lonnie Donegan - Midnight Special CD Box
The man who had such a massive pop hit with My Old Man's A Dustman seems to have had a personality that stank. Negative, prickly, rude, difficult, mean, moany, suspicious and bitter are just a few of the words used by musicians and family members in an engrossing new biography to describe Lonnie Donegan. The list of musicians inspired by his work is prodigious and impressive. Van Morrison, George Harrison, Mark Knopfler, Paul McCartney, Bill Wyman, Brian May and Richard Thompson pay fulsome tribute in Lonnie Donegan and the Birth of British Rock & Roll, and Patrick Humphries's extensive and well-researched book is ultimately sympathetic to its subject.
But musicians who worked with Donegan tell of a dismally mean-spirited man. Jazz singer George Melly said that even before Donegan had his hits with Leadbelly's Rock Island Line, and Dustman, Donegan was "incredibly big-headed, conceited, arrogant and patronising".
Humphries, who has written musical biographies before of Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon, spoke to a lot of musicians and writers for the book and pieces together well the tale of how the working class lad from Glasgow became the world famous 'King Of Skiffle'.
He was born Anthony James Donegan in 1931 and his father was a good enough violinist to have played with the Scottish National Orchestra. The family moved to East Ham when Donegan was two and his father gave up music. The son's first break was playing jazz banjo with Ken Colyer's band, and early chapters evoke the atmosphere of 1950s London, with lost names such as Doug Dobell (and his record shop) and a world where actor Derek Guyler still played the washboard
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If you’re one of those happy souls who likes to remember important dates in social history here’s one to add to your list - July 13 th 1...
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The man who had such a massive pop hit with My Old Man's A Dustman seems to have had a personality that stank. Negative, prickly, rude,...