John Petters

Interviewer: Okay, so, if we could just start with some basic background information, so, just start with your full name and if you could spell that for me too, please.

Petters: Yeah, my full name is John David Petters. P-E-T-T-E-R-S.

Interviewer: Okay. And can you just tell me your date of birth and where you were born.

Petters: Yeah, 13th of April 1953 in Stratford in east London.

Interviewer: And if you could just tell me a little bit about your background in music and your parents?

Petters: Right. My parents – my father used to like singing, but he never did anything in public. It was just a pure thing he did for pleasure. My grandfather on my father’s side used to play mandolin and piano a bit, and that’s as far as that goes. But on my maternal side of the family, my Uncle Mick had drum lessons – he’s eight years older than me – and I was growing up at around the time that he was having them, and he had his drum kit in his bedroom in Leyton in east London where he lived, and I got my first experience of banging drums by banging his drum kit. And that’s where I heard some of the first jazz that I heard. The actual first jazz I heard would have been when I was very very young, and it would have been Louis Armstrong’s Basin Street Blues, which was the 1954, 55 recording that was on two sides for 78, and I was always knocked out by the drumming on it, which was by a guy called Kenny John, though I didn’t realise that at the time. I collected 78 RPM records as a kid, so I had all sorts of different types of music from classical to opera to dance bands to sort of country music, and all of that, rock and roll and that sort of stuff. And some of the records that I had were jazz 78s, and I can remember having Bunk Johnson’s recording of When the Saints and Darktown Strutters, all on His Masters Voice 78, so those are sort of early influences as I was growing up. I heard Gene Krupa through my Uncle Mick’s record collection, so that was a name that stuck with me as well, but it wasn’t until about 1968. So when I was growing up I was always out of step with my contemporaries who were into Beatles and Hendrix and all that sort of stuff. And I was into rock and roll then, and it wasn’t until about 1968 that I really rediscovered jazz and got into it properly.

Interviewer [02:54]: Thank you. Could you just tell me, then, a little bit about the nature of your jazz activities over the years then?

Petters: Right. I was self-taught, that’s the first thing, and it started at college. I went back to college as a… well, let’s say an “immature student”. [laughs] After I’d left school, I went back when I was about 18 or 19 or thereabouts, and a friend of mine, David Bondy, was very enthusiastic about jazz and music in general, and he had instruments. He played clarinet, some drums, and so on. And when we were at college, we got together with a couple of other like-minded musicians and just had a college jazz band, and that’s when I actually started playing. I had come to the drums as a result of having my Uncle Mick’s cast-off drum kit, which he had given to my brother and my brother didn’t take it up. And I got these out and I started to play along with the records, because I had this romantic notion that you didn’t need to read music, you didn’t need to have a proper technique or anything like that, and I started collecting early jazz records from about 1968, 69 onwards. And I used to practice by playing – trying to accompany these records. It started from there, when I was at – I left college in 73 and decided that I wanted to be a jazz musician, so I got into a local band in Harlow with, we found some musicians. I used to go to a jam session at a place called the Railway Hotel in Bishop’s Stortford, which was run by Bill Cornell, who’s still playing drums at the age of 84 or so now. And he always encouraged young people. He was one of the people that gave Martin Taylor early exposure when he was a young lad. And these jam sessions used to enable us to work. You’d get playing experience with other musicians. I then started going to gigs of other bands, and I used to sit in with a band called The Original Eastside Stompers in London, East London, and various other places where I could cadge a go on the drums. So gradually built up from there. Then, I’d met the trumpet player with Eastside Stompers, was Bill Brunskill, famous bandleader from the traditional jazz period, and Bill offered to come and play with me if I got any gigs. So I found a gig in a pub called The Plough in Little Ilford Lane, this would be about 1976-ish or thereabouts, and that was the first paid gig that I ever did, and Bill was in that band and it went from there. A little while later I got a gig in a pub called The Essex Skipper in Harlow, which was where I lived at the time. Through that, I met the cornet player Ken Sims, clarinettist Dave Bailey, who were long-term musicians who worked with me over many many years. Do you want me to go on? [laughs] So from there, I started the band I then called The New Dixie Syncopators, and we did a gig at Harlow Tech. I had to persuade the student union at the time that they needed a jazz band, and they thought it was ridiculous cause it was old men’s music, and I said, “Give me half an hour.” They gave us half an hour set. We ended up playing for about an hour and a half and took the place down, you know, it was very very successful. Of course, that didn’t last, because by the time the next student union secretary got in, he couldn’t see any future in having jazz bands there. So from then on I gradually built that scene up. We did some festivals and venues in Guernsey, and after going to Guernsey, I made my first recording, which was called Red Hot Jazz, and that had my wife Tessa at that time on bass, Ken Simms on cornet, clarinet player called Eddie Brockwell, Len Baldwin trombone, John Gill the ragtime piano player who went off to Australia, who is sadly no longer with us, and Doug Boyter on banjo. So that was 1977. It was a self-promoted thing that we put out, and I started to get gigs. Then Ken Simms formed a band called The Dixie Kings and he had a residency in The 100 Club in Oxford Street, so I used to do regular Saturday nights at The 100 Club, and we’d be the second band on, you know, and we would play opposite whoever the lead band was. I had a day job then repairing TVs and audio equipment, and I was semi-pro playing and so on, and the next real big step was in the early 80s, about 83, because I was always interested in Benny Goodman small group music, as a devotee of Gene Krupa’s drumming, sort of just what I was interested in. I got together a swing band, which was a quartet recreating that original Goodman line-up with clarinet, vibraphone, piano and drums. These were local musicians to Harlow. Chap called Derek Winter who’s still playing, John Boumphrey who’s no longer with us, and it was usually Julian Marc Stringle who of course is well known on the scene these days, or Pete Neighbour who’s playing in the States mostly these days, or sometimes both of them. And we were doing gigs in the pubs, and we got in touch with Eddie Blackwell who ran Essex Radio, which was the local county independent station then, and he was very enthusiastic and gave us an awful lot of encouragement. And a little bit later, we had the two-reed line-up, Tessa came in on bass so we had six pieces for that, and we did a concert at the Towngate Theatre at Basildon, which Eddie recorded. This was in 1983, seminar concert, and this was broadcast on Essex Radio, and he gave me the master tapes from that, which we put out on the second LP, which was just called Stealin’ Apples. It was in a brown paper sleeve, and I think Derek Winter managed to get it produced and everything. We sold those around on gigs and that sort of thing. And gradually it was picking up. We played in Munich in a place called the Volvikschaff [inaudible] with a variation of a swing band line-up. We played at the Caveau de la Huchette and the Slow Club in Paris and had, you know, quite good success there. And then gradually it sort of started to fizzle out. But I’d started to get interested in working with different musicians and not necessarily on a regular line-up situation, a regular band. I’d tried various venues to set up a jazz club in Harlow. Most of them had failed, and then I found a place called The Square, and The Square was an Essex County Council-run venue, and the manager of that, guy called Vic Moody, was very keen to have a Sunday night jazz gig there. It was more or less a pop rock venue the rest of the time. He had a budget and he gave me some money and he said, “Do what you like.” So I started booking a programme of weekly jazz concerts. More or less a semi-stable rhythm section. I’d met by that time the pianist Marty Litton, and Keith Donald who had been with me, you know, very early on and we’d started playing together, he was there on bass, because by that time Tessa had stopped playing music as our first son had been born, so Keith came in as my regular bass player. And I started to book the… all of the existing established names in the traditional jazz world that were around at the time in the 80s, so we had Humphrey Lyttelton, Terry Lightfoot, Monty Sunshine, Ken Colyer, George Chisholm, Cy Laurie – pretty well anyone that was around and still playing, I would get as a guest. That was a great experience of playing with musicians of a different level. And the other thing I seized on was the opportunity of getting Americans over. Brian Peerless, was bringing people like Kenny Davern and Al Casey and those sort of people from the States, booking them on one-night tours with various bands all over the country. So I started booking the Americans, and that was a real eye-opener. I had a bit of experience of that in 83 because we’d had a little scene going at Ted’s Wine Bar above the playhouse theatre in Harlow, and we’d got Wild Bill Davison over to play with us there, and that was a tremendous experience, because I’d grown up listening to Wild Bill’s recordings with Sidney Bechet and Art Hodes in the 40s on Blue Note, and to actually be playing with one of my idols was unbelievable. Anyway, at the time we’re talking now – 84, 85, I think, and it finished in 86 – I ended up getting Slim Gaillard, whose centenary is this year. He came down a number of times, and he was an outrageous character. He was living in London at the time, and he played clarinet, guitar, piano… He played piano with his hands upside down. He was a bit of a cult figure on the London jazz scene at that time. He’d been obviously famous in the 40s and had made up this ridiculous language called Vout. So he was great fun. Organised a festival in I think it was 86, and I had Al Casey and Fats Wallis as guitarists, Slim Gaillard on the stage at the same time, we had Digby Fairweather and Terry Lightfoot and a whole host of others having this massive jam session. We also had Yank Lawson and Billy Butterfield, who had both been with Bob Crosby’s orchestra in the 30s. Kenny Davern – we recorded with Kenny Davern, there again under the auspices of Essex Radio and Eddie Blackwell. Kenny was a strange character because he didn’t like to be regarded as anyone’s clone. He wanted to be regarded as he was his own man, he had his own original sound, and he hated people requesting, “Could you play George Lewis?” And he’d say, “I’m not George Lewis.” “Could you play Peewee Russell?” “I’m not Peewee Russell.” And he hated being pigeonholed, and I’d taken a bit of a chance because I’d booked him with a Benny Goodman-type swing band, which he hadn’t done before. So we had Roger Nobes on vibraphone, Martin Litton on piano, and Keith was on bass. And it could have gone either way. He could have been really awkward or it could have gone smoothly. Well, luckily it went smoothly, except that he had a shout-up with someone in the audience because Kenny wouldn’t play using microphones, he wanted to play totally acoustic, and he turned all the PA off. And you could hear everything, you know, you didn’t need PA in The Square, and he said, “Can you all hear me?” And someone shouted, “No.” He said, “Well go and hear a goddamn rock band.” [laughs] So we did that, and that came a week after we’d done a trio recording, which James Asman had set up – James Asman was one of the early pioneers, he ran a record shop in London, James Asman’s Records, and he was a great enthusiast for early jazz and a great enthusiast for encouraging young people and so on, and he’d been on the scene for years and he was well connected. Well he’d suggested that we do this trio recording because Martin Litton was staying with him at the time, he was living in his flat, and he was regarding Martin as a bit of a protégé, so he wanted to push Martin as well. So we did five or six trio dates around London and Essex with Kenny, and the trio just worked like a charm. All acoustic, and it just swung like the clappers. And we set this recording session up at the Pizza Express in Dean Street, and we turned up, and Kenny was in a bad mood. Martin’s natural style was to play in the influence of Jelly Roll Morton, and Kenny turned round to him the first time and said, “Cut that lumpy Jelly Roll crap.” And I played old style drums, you know, press rolls and that sort of stuff, and he didn’t want that either, so both of us were on edge, and it was a very uncomfortable session. Turned out okay, and subsequently it was released on Jazzology records in the States, and the very next day we were playing at the Royal Festival Hall in the foyer, because I used to do those sessions regularly, and it was back to how it had been before. We were just playing what we wanted, and Kenny was in fine form, so he could be temperamental. Whether he was nervous about recording, I don’t know, but he used to give a lot of other people a hard time. I put a photo of him on Facebook the other day, and someone came back and said, “Kenny Davern smiling – that’s unusual!” [laughs] So anyway, we did the swing band set at Harlow at The Square, that would be in November 85, and it went down very well and we got a very good recording on it. Eddie had recorded it using the early Sony F1 digital recording system, because we’re looking at the early days of CDs. And he gave me the Betamax master tape, and we issued that – I’d started a label up called CMJ Records with two friends, Terry Maytom who was a friend of mine, we were connected via amateur radio, Louie Lintz who was a banjo player, so we formed this company called CMJ Records, and we issued half of the Kenny Davern set called Live and Swinging as the first CD in that series. It went off very well. We got another half that we issued later to go with a session that I recorded in 1986 with the American trumpeter Yank Lawson, so we got those on a back-to-back CD. So that was The Square. Also at The Square – the first time Kenny Davern played there, in the audience was George Chisholm, and of course I knew George Chisholm by reputation, and that was my intro to meeting George. We got George along subsequently as a guest, and George in the late 80s, he was 75 in 1989 so he was, you know, getting on in years, and he’d had a period of very bad ill health and he’d had a bypass surgery and everything. He’d come back as a spring chicken, you know, he was really really going for it musically, and he was doing a series of dates all over the country. So I got on friendly terms with George and we started looking at possibilities of working together, and around the time as well we were living in a one-bedroom flat in Harlow and my son David had been born in 83. Around the time I was organising The Square it was getting quite difficult to do all of this, and I’d met a retired lady called Gwen Main who was really enthusiastic for jazz, and she said, “Well I’ve got a spare room in my house. You can use it as an office.” So that was that, and Tessa was delighted – she got me out of her way and everything, and we went off to Gwen’s and set the office up there. I was just expecting to use the office, but it turned out that Gwen had been a very very talented saleslady, so she got actually quite involved in helping me run the business and sell gigs and all of that. And that went on for a number of years until she became unwell and sadly passed away. I’d also been in touch with, I’d known an agent called Martin Ross, who had been Max Collie’s Rhythm Aces manager, and Martin wanted me to go and work with him in his agency selling gigs for myself and selling gigs for Max and other artists he’d got. So I went to work with him in Bromley for a while and we put together a touring show called the Queens of the Blues, that’s a tour in 1987 because this was the fiftieth anniversary of Bessie Smith’s death, so it was a tribute show to Bessie Smith, and we had three female singers. Beryl Bryden, Rusty Taylor, and a singer called Helen Gould. It was a nightmare because Rusty was jealous of Beryl and it was just… it was just a nightmare, but we did quite a number of shows including the Cork Jazz Festival, so that was my first intro to Cork. That show ran for most of that year. I was looking around for something else in 1988 to put on to follow it on. In the meanwhile, in 86, Wild Bill Davison was over again, and Dave Bennett, who was the recording engineer who had recorded the Davern Trio, suggested to me that I might like to co-finance and co-produce a recording with Wild Bill, which I readily jumped at. We went to the Pizza Express again, we did it over two sessions. Dave wanted to put the young French soprano saxophonist Jean-François Bonnel against Wild Bill, because he had this idea that we were going to recreate the Bechet/Wild Bill Davison Blue Note recordings, which was nonsense, really, because it just wasn’t going to happen. Bill at that time must have been about 81 or so, something like that, and he’d been ill – he’d had bleeding ulcers and he’d had to stop drinking and all of that. His lip wasn’t in great shape. And the recording was… well, shall we say, iffy. There were some reasonable things. We had not my choice of bass player, the recording was distorted and he didn’t swing or anything like that. Martin Litton was on piano – that was fine. And we did another session. Dave Bennett wanted to get Bill playing in an old Bix Beiderbecke-style band, but that didn’t really work because we’d got I think it was four horns. Jean-François, Keith Nichols on trombone, John R.T. Davies the record restorer on… what was he playing? Alto sax, I suppose. And Johnny Barnes on bass sax. Paul Sealy on guitar, I think Martin Litton on piano again, but the frontline was… we’d got no arrangements. And you can’t actually have that size band unless they’ve really been working together for a long while and get them to make music that’s not going to be a mess. So we never did anything with that recording. It was put out on a cassette and forgotten about, really. Probably the best thing. 1987, through Martin Ross, I got to do the Soho Jazz Festival. We were a marching band and our purpose was to go around the city of London first of all and play in the streets and get, you know, a lot of enthusiasm, which we did and that gave us quite a good spin-off with extra private gigs and so on, which was very good. And then he got us into the Soho Jazz Festival, and the Soho Jazz Festival was run by Peter Boizot of the Pizza Express and so on – and again, this was with the marching band – and to open the festival they got in Soho Square in the park, I think, the little area they’ve got. They put a piano in there, and Art Hodes was there, so that was the first time I met Art Hodes, and again, that’s the connection between Wild Bill, Art Hodes, and those records that I’d been listening to long, long before. So I got to talk to Art Hodes, and I said, you know, “Would you like to do a trio recording?” I was working with a very fine clarinettist and soprano saxophonist called Trevor Whiting, and Art was readily up for it, so we again arranged with Dave Bennett for a venue, tiny studio in Chiswick, which had a Steinway grand piano. And we turned up to do this date and it went very, very easily. Art was very comfortable, and he turned round and said to Dave Bennett, “When you book me next time, I want to work with these guys”, which we were quite pleased about, ‘cause at the time both Trevor and I were johnny-come-latelies, and there was a sort of jazz mafia in London, and certain faces got all of the gigs. If you were a newcomer, you didn’t get a look-in. So of course, when he came over the next time, we didn’t get the gigs. Oh well, you know? That’s the way it goes. I’ll promote them myself. I got a call from two venues. One was at Cambridge. They ran a regular session somewhere in Cambridge. Would I like to come up and play drums with Kenny Davern and Art Hodes? Because again, Davern and Hodes had worked together and they’d made a wonderful album with a drummer called Don Demichael in the States that had been released over here, and so of course promoters were putting Kenny and Art together in trio format. So yeah, I jumped at it. I would have paid them to do it. So that was the first one. And then the guy who ran the library at Eastbourne Museum, I think it was, regular jazz sessions down there, he asked me if I’d go and play drums with them down there, and I said yes. Well, I got cancelled out of the Cambridge one because they got an American drummer who was also over on tour and they wanted to put him in there. So I was really dischuffed [sic] about that because, yeah, I wasn’t worried about the money, the money would’ve been useful, but it was just the kudos, the pleasure of playing with those two together. Anyway, the next day we were at Eastbourne, and Davern came up to me and he said, “Listen.” He said, “Don’t listen to what Hodes is playing. His timing is all over the place.” He said, “We did it with so-and-so the night before, and he was following Art Hodes all the time and it was a disaster.” [laughs] I felt quite good about that. So anyway, we recorded that session as well, and it went extremely – it was a good, you know, driving session, and that was never released either. I might do it at some time, but there’s quite a lot of stuff, Kevin and Art together, and to finance recordings these days is, you know… Strangely enough, the recordings that I’ve done with the Americans are not the best sellers. The best sellers have been the ones where we’ve had a show and gone round with them. But it was a great session. We all enjoyed it and it was wonderful. So that was 87. I’d also worked with Al Casey first of all in 85, and Al of course had that wonderful history of being Fats Waller’s guitar player on, I don’t know, 500 probably records from the 30s. Don’t know how many there were, but loads of them. And he’d gone on to be an Esquire Award winner, I think in 1944, as a guitarist. He was over here on tour with the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band and doing a solo tour, and there was a gap where he’d got some dates lined up, about three weeks’ worth of dates lined up somewhere in England or Europe, and it had collapsed. So he was stranded in England, didn’t want to go back to the States, so we put him up. So I had him for a week. He went to Gwen Main’s house a week, and there was a young guitar player called Paul who was, you know, really desperate to have him stay with him for a week. So he had this jazz legend, you know, sort of in our midst for three whole weeks. Playing with Al, everything he did was sort of infused with the blues. You know, you just got that wonderful blues feeling. So, what I would say is that working with those Americans gave me a sense of space, not too many notes, you know, you’ve got room for the music to breathe and all that. And of course it’s a direct route back to the origins of the music. Art Hodes and Wild Bill – well, Art was born in 1904, he’d gone to Chicago from Kiev Nikoleav as it was known then, in the Ukraine now as a six-month-old Jewish exile, and grew up on Chicago’s South Side listening to all the black blues piano players and that sort of thing. Very intelligent man. He wrote books and presented shows and so on. Al Casey was born a little bit later in 1915, so he’s a slightly later generation, and Wild Bill had been born in Defiance, Ohio, in 1906. So, you know, okay, we could’ve gone back to a few years earlier, but you’re virtually talking about almost first-generation musicians, the roots if you like of that music. I was getting the benefit of that, that many years later, and having that direct sort of ability of playing with these guys that had been there in the important early years. So that’s Al Casey. We did… 1988, 87, I did a gig with Wild Bill when he was over here then at a place called Burnham Beeches in Buckinghamshire, and I was talking to Anne, his… well, his… her card said “Anne, Davison’s slave.” [laughs] She’d been a 20th Century Fox starlet and given up her film career to become Wild Bill Davison’s fifth wife. They went everywhere together and they were like Laurel and Hardy, always arguing and all of this. So anyway, during the interval Anne was saying that Bill would like to do the Cork Festival. I said, “Well, I’ve got an in with the Cork Festival”, because I’d played there the year before with Beryl Bryden and Co. I said, “I know Jack McGurrin and he liked what we did,” so I said, “I’ll try and get Bill a date there for 1988.” And I had the idea of getting Art Hodes and Bill together again, which they’d only done once or twice since those classic records in the 40s. And Jack McGurrin at Cork thought it was a great idea, so they came over in late October, I think it was, and we went over to Cork, and we played at the Cork Opera House and brought the place down. It was a very, very successful concert and the two old boys worked very well together. And when we came back… it was either just after or just before we went to Cork, we decided we were going to record them and call it The Legends of American Dixieland. Trevor Whiting on reeds and a wonderful trombone player from Essex called Jackie Free, who’s still playing now, he’s about 84, and he played with Louis Armstrong in the 50s and lots of other things and he’d got a wonderful sound. And Keith Donald on bass. And we went to the Bulls Head at Barnes and this time Terry Maytom, who was one of my partners in CMJ Records, and I had invested in one of these Sony F1 digital recording systems, and we hadn’t actually tested it and we didn’t want to take a chance of, you know, having this recording session and blowing it by not getting the recording right, and we were talking about using just two microphones and not the sort of multi-tracking you think of these days, because you had to record it direct to the digital tape. And you couldn’t edit it, so once it was down, it was down. If it was out of balance, you couldn’t do a thing about it. So we got Dave Bennett to come along with his eight-track analog gear and mic everything up, and we set it up running, and as it happened we did have a problem on some of the tracks. They were distorted. So we used a mixture of our digital tracks and Dave Bennett’s eight-tracks. When we issued the CD, I sent a copy to George Buck of Jazzology Records in America, in New Orleans, and there was on one of the tracks from the digital sessions, someone had come in the door at the back of the room and there was a squeak, and you could hear it quite over Art Hodes’ piano introduction. And George Buck was blind, so when he was playing this recording in his office in New Orleans, he heard the squeak and he thought he was being burgled. [laughs] Anyway, that’s a side issue. We thought – because of what Bill’s lip had been like in 86, when we did the previous recording, we thought if we could just get him on one or two tracks, so that we can say we got them together, that’d be fine. His lip was in brilliant shape and he was on most of the recording, and it wasn’t the Wild Bill of, say, 1945 but it was still identifiable as Wild Bill, and it was real good stuff. So we did that, and they had such a good time that they said that they would like to come back again. And I thought, well, the way that most promoters bring these American solos over, they put them with different line-ups, so you don’t get any sense of regularity, and they put them in jazz clubs. And I thought, that’s not really the right – because you can’t get enough money, because of your airfares from the States and all of this sort of stuff to consider. I’d been working in the theatres with Queens of the Blues, and Gwen and I decided that we were going to try and sell it as a package to the theatres. We’d come up with the title The Legends of American Dixieland, and we’re both sitting on the phone, and I was mentioning it to all these managers. Wild Bill Davison and Art Hodes? Who? Never heard of them. And Gwen said you’ve got to have a unique selling point, so she said, “What are their unique selling points?” So I said, “They were around in the Roaring Twenties and they both played for Al Capone in speakeasies.” That’s it! And on the strength of that, we sold the tour. We took a flyer on some of them, percentage deals, but most of them gave us fees. We ended up, I think, with about 11 dates. We played Norwich, Harlow, 100 Club, Bridgend, Bournemouth International Centre, Falmouth Green Lawns, Bolton Albert Hall. We played in Oxford, we played two dates in Northern Ireland and all of that, so it was a really good tour and we recorded most of it, and George Buck bought a couple of the sessions from me and issued them on the CD Coalition on Jazzology Records. So that was that. It didn’t start in a very good way, because we went to meet Wild Bill at Heathrow and he came through customs in a wheelchair, and I thought, “This is going to be difficult”, because he’s got to do all of these dates in the back of a bandwagon, and he’s already in a wheelchair. Of course we didn’t know when we were booking the shows. He was then 83 and Art was 85. Whether they’d be alive, whether they’d be well and everything, and everything just clicked into place and it went marvellously well. The last date was the Albert Hall date in Bolton. That was in May 89, and Bill went off and Art went off, and Bill died a few months later in November 89. So we got some of the final recordings of Wild Bill. I don’t know whether they are the final ones, but certainly some of the final recordings there. So running parallel with that, I’d also been talking to George Chisholm and we did a concert on a percentage deal at the Croydon Fairfield Hall with George and Kenny Baker, a trumpeter, as a guest as well and a lovely singer called Maxine Daniels from Essex, who’s sadly again no longer with us. And I had Pete Neighbour on reeds and Trevor Whiting on reeds with Martin Litton and Keith Dole, and that was the line-up. And we called it the Fabulous Forties Show. It didn’t really gel as a title, so we were kicking around the idea of a vehicle where we could use George and Maxine together as a sensible touring package. Either Gwen or I came up with the idea of Swinging Down Memory Lane, and that was it. We got together the poster, we did a recording, and we started touring that to mark George’s 75th birthday in 1989. That went on until about 91 when George had to retire due to ill health, and we had, I don’t know, 100 or so dates in that time. We had a broadcast on BBC Radio 2, which was sadly right at the end of the period and George was in pretty poor form, and the recording’s not anything like as good as it would’ve been had it been done a year or so earlier. So George retired, and by that time I was looking for another vehicle to follow that show on with. So I went back to the roots of traditional jazz, and… selling the word “jazz” in anything is the kiss of death, actually, you want to avoid it if at all possible because no one knows what it is, you know, it means different things to different people. So I came up with the idea of a show called The Legends of British Trad. Now, I say at this point that I do not like British trad, and I’m talking about the stuff that was popular in the 50s and the early 60s. There was an awful lot of bad music. There’s some good stuff, people like Ken Colyer and Acker were making some good records and getting quite an authentic American sound, as opposed to some of the other bands that sound British, you know, rhythm sections that are stiff, don’t swing. As I think Wally Fawkes coined it, “dancing around the maypole music”. [laughs] Anyway, I liked the idea of the title Legends of British Trad, or Leg-ends, as it got abbreviated to. I handpicked a bunch of musicians together. The trumpeter was Alan Elsden, who’d been sort of a fairly minor star during the trad period. Campbell Burnap on trombone, who at that time was broadcasting with Jazz FM, so he was quite well known. Dick Charles was on clarinet, who had been up in the trad boom with a band called The City Gents, who all used to dress as city gents. The piano player was Neville Dickie, who had had a minor hit with a thing called The Robin’s Return in the 60s. And Tim Phillips on bass, and Tim had been a young banjo player that I’d met first of all and had used him at The Square, played banjo, guitar, and double bass and drums and sung a bit. So he was in on bass on that, and we started to tour that, and that was in 91, 92. It wasn’t as successful as Memory Lane because it was a more limited audience. The thing about Memory Lane was that we were selling it as a celebration of the American songbook so you had a real wide choice of people that you could reach, whereas with the Legends of British Trad, it appealed to that particular audience. And we did a recording of that and so on. And then I was scratching around for an idea to do the next show, and 1993 was the 50th anniversary of Fats Waller’s death, so that was as good a label to put it on as anything. We were thinking, what could we do as a show title? And one of Fats’ hits being called The Joint is Jumping, I thought, well, that’s a good title, but we decided to call it This Joint is Jumping. And again I used Neville Dickie, and this time the veteran bassist Mickey Ashman came in, and we had a two-piece front line. Wonderful New Orleans-style trumpet player called Cuff Billett, who is one of the finest trumpeters around. He’s got wonderful ideas and phrasing and time. And a reed player called Goff Dubber. And we set about… we did a recording of that, almost recreating the sound of Fats Waller’s rhythm, but without the rhythm guitar. For economical reasons, it needed to be a five piece. So we recorded the CD for that in the theatre at Hounslow, Paul Robeson Theatre, and started touring that in 93. And again that was very well received. We had a very good poster, which helped sell the show. But we were starting to hit the early 90s recession, and the theatres lost a lot of money and there were government cutbacks. You know, I could get on the phone and sell five shows maybe in a day at good fees, while they were saying, “We’ve got no budget. You can come and do the show on a percentage, or you can hire the venue from us”, and then once you did that, they didn’t bother doing the publicity. So you’d end up – you can’t be everywhere all at once and do a proper job, so the theatre scene started to fall off in the early 90s. We did a follow-up show called Boogie Woogie and All That Jazz, which we concentrated down to a trio, that was first with Neville Dicky and Mickey Ashman, and then latterly after that with a wonderful piano player called Duncan Swift, who sadly died in 97 far too young, and we did that. By the time… what are we now, 95-ish. It was getting tough. I was still doing gigs, and we were living up here by this time. I’d moved out of Harlow in 89 to live in a place just up the road called Tyd Gote We were looking for the next opportunity, where it could be. I’ve always been shall we say a risk taker. I could’ve, if I’d stayed in Essex, I could’ve scraped a living playing drums. It’s not a great living and you’ve got to go all over the place to do it. But we’d moved up here and my extra gigs had disappeared, because there’s nothing in the Fens. There still isn’t, really. And we were just… it was like I’d be in Scotland one night with a show and Cornwall the next, so living up here didn’t matter. So the next idea that we had was to look at doing residential jazz festivals. We were looking at a venue, there were a few going at the time, and all of them were using a string of semi-pro trad bands. Musical quality of various, you know… I got the idea that it would be nice to do a weekend jazz break, but put together hand-picked musicians and put them into doing themed concerts over the weekend. And Gwen found a place called Mundesley Holiday Centre in Mundesley in Norfolk. Held about 250 people, chalet accommodation, pretty old and basic, but had a wonderful ballroom and a good piano and a very good manager, guy called Michael Watson who was really enthusiastic about it. So initially they hired me to go in there and put the festival on. And we did that and it was very successful. That would have been 95, I think, the first one. And then I’d also somewhere around that time or a little earlier made contact with the broadcaster Paul Barnes, who does the Late Paul Barnes Show on BBC Norfolk, which goes all over East Anglia. He had at that time had a nightly show on… I think it was just on… no, it was all of the eastern counties. He’d coined a phrase called Gold for Grownups, so we decided we were going to do a Gold for Grownups, or music that matters, festival at Mundesley as well but concentrating on the American songbook and swing and that sort of thing. So for a while we had the two festivals going, one in November and one in December, and that went on for a little while. And then I was head-hunted by Pontins. They had a promoter that was putting their traditional jazz stuff in, and it was tired and not doing very well, and they wanted me to put on to take one of the venues at their Blackpool holiday centre. That would be 96, 97 I think. So we did, and I went up there and put it on and we sold the place it out. It was very successful. And then they decided to renovate the property so we didn’t go back after that for a year or so. And it needed renovating, it was like Stalag 13, horrible place, barbed wire all over the place and windows with holes in them. Not very nice. So I got in with Pontins and started to do festivals at Prestatyn Sands. We did one at Bracklesham Bay, which was a Pontins site then, and the big one at Pakefield in Suffolk. And gradually over the years they sold the smaller venues off. So Prestatyn was sold, Bracklesham Bay was sold, and I’m still doing Bracklesham now. But I stayed doing the Pontins/Pakefield places. But you know, I’d seen how this was working and that there was potential for a reasonable amount of money to be made out of this. As purely an agent, if you like, or booker and performer, I was getting a reasonable fee. But I could see that there was a lot more money that could be potentially made if I took a risk and booked a venue and promoted the whole lot. So Tessa and I discussed this, and Gwen was helping out as well, and we decided that we were going to look for a venue. We found the Brighton… the Grand Hotel, not actually at Brighton itself but just along the coast from Brighton, it had been the old Butlins hotel. It had been built in the 20s, so it was an Art Deco place, very nice, but it was run-down and seedy. It had 600 bedrooms, huge place. I spent a fortune on bands and musicians. We thought that we would sell all the bargain rooms, the cheap rooms, and be left with the most expensive rooms. The reverse was true. The ones that we were left with were a few of the cheapie-cheapies, because people were happier spending on the better quality, so that was a lesson learned. It was very successful from a musical point of view and from a financial point of view, except that the hotel was inadequate. They failed in a big way. By that time I’d booked several hotels up and down the country. We ended up having to refund quite a few customers’ money because of the cockroaches in the kitchen – it was a nightmare. It was Fawlty Towers, only times about five. So we could’ve become really unstuck over that, but we didn’t – it was okay. So I started to look at doing other promotions. We did a couple at Woolacombe in Devon and several up in Scarborough at the Hotel St. Nicholas, and that went into receivership, which was a real headache. I carried on… I ended up promoting the Pontins Pakefield festival, and then got so fed up with their ineptness that I said, “Right, you can pay me. I’ll book the bands. I’m not going to do this.” And then they went bust, and I was one of the lucky ones that got paid. There were quite a few bands that didn’t. They resurrected themselves under Britannia Hotels, who are also useless, and we did one festival there – I think it might have been two festivals – and I said, “I’ve had enough dealing with this. We’re just going to go, you know, upmarket.” Mundesley came back onto the scene, and we went back to Mundesley for a few years to do that. We’d been promoting the William Shakespeare Jazz and Swing Festival at Stratford-on-Avon, and that was going well and still is. I’d stayed with South Downs Holiday Village in Bracklesham Bay. But obviously I could see that the market was contracting because of the age of the jazz fans, by and large. You know, it’s largely a 70-plus age group that are coming to traditional jazz and swing. Although in the swing-era stuff now, there’s a lot of young people that are going to dances and that sort of thing. So I now run Bracklesham, Stratford and… because Mundesley was sold, we moved to Hemsby for the first year. That worked, but we weren’t happy about the venue, so this year we took the Holiday Inn at Norwich North and did the festival there and we’re going back there next year. So that was quite successful. I’ve got three festivals, we do a riverboat shuffle on the Thames… I started doing gigs at St. John’s Art Centre in Old Harlow in about the year 2000, and that’s still going, that goes once a month. Another thing that we found, that started in the 90s was concerts in churches. On the basis that you don’t get many jazz musicians going into church, and you quite often don’t get many church people coming to jazz concerts. So I thought, “If I can find a hook that will kill two birds with one stone, it’s gonna be a winner.” So we came up with the idea of doing a New Orleans gospel and spiritual show. So we take things like, obviously, When the Saints Go Marching In, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Just the Closer Walk, and all those things, and put with it some of the hymns like Old Rugged Cross and Abide with Me, and that sort of thing, and do a concert in churches. And we recorded a CD called Walkin’ with the King, which we sold completely out of and has had two pressings, and it’s now gone again, so it’s been quite a successful thing. And we found that my idea did actually work, because it’s had a spin-off, we’d had a lot of people who have seen the band at churches come out and join us at jazz weekends and riverboat shuffle and that sort of thing, so that’s been a good spin-off and we’re still doing that. I did tours in between with people like Sammy Rimington, and we recorded with Sammy and done quite a few things. I’ve now got about I think 38 CDs and a couple of DVDs. We did a Gene Krupa/Benny Goodman tribute in 2009 to mark their centenaries, and that we did as a DVD and CD box set. We’ve got a Ragtime Revisited that I’m doing with Martin Litton and a clarinet player that’s David Horniblow. We were using James Evans, but he’s gone to New Orleans – now he lives and plays out there. So that’s a current project that’s fun, that’s mostly Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton and that sort of stuff and so on. That’s current. I did, again, a Gershwin centenary in 1998 to mark George’s centenary, and we did that with a wonderful young piano player called Nick Dawson, who’s now in the West End, I think, MD-ing the ABBA show, for heaven’s sake. And then we revived that with Val Wiseman, a very fine singer who was also in the revived version of Swinging Down Memory Lane, which we brought back in the early… about 2002 maybe, somewhere around there, which is still a current, ongoing thing we do occasionally. Nineteen-ninety-nine was the Hoagy Carmichael centenary, and I’ve always loved Hoagy’s music, and Nick had decided – he’d first of all said he would do it, and then decided that he couldn’t see himself as a 20-odd year-old bloke singing about old men in rocking chairs. So he decided he didn’t want to do the show and I was left without a singer. Gwen found this young lad who had had no live experience, but had been singing along with backing tracks and so on, and he came to see me. He was very good looking, had a good voice but needed coaching on timing, but when it came to it he just hadn’t got the confidence to do it. So I’d already sold a whole load of dates for this Hoagy: The Old Music Master, we called it, and I had no singer to do the songs. So oh, what the hell, Hoagy wasn’t a very good singer, I’m not a very good singer – in fact, I’m an awful singer. I decided that I would do it, but I would go and get some vocal training lessons. I found a teacher in Spalding, not far from here, and he had me singing Italian method singing, sort of opera type stuff, and I had to learn all of it by ear because I don’t read music, and I found that within, say, six months of going to him it had sharpened my ear up, so I could hear when other singers weren’t singing in tune as well. And it got me enough confidence to be able to do that show, which we did, and then I did a centenary tribute to Bing Crosby in 2003. So it’s quite a variety of different things, all of them jazz. I’ve never ever wanted to do anything other than that, and that’s where we are. I’m regarded now as a jazz historian by the BBC, apparently, because when they did the programme called Trad Jazz Britannia, which was on BBC 4 in 2013, they phoned me up to consult me about history and got me on the programme, and I’m on it for 17 seconds or something like that, but I’d given them a lot of leads to different people to interview and that sort of thing, so that was quite a nice experience. I’ll settle for jazz historian. [laughs] I’ve done a number of articles, I did a series on jazz drumming for Jazz Journal International back in the 80s. Also I’ve done articles for Just Jazz on various things over the years. I’ve had to be a sort of jack of all trade, really, and I’ve succeeded in not having to have a day job for probably the last 30 years. I came to the conclusion that I’m basically unemployable and anyone that would give me a job isn’t worth working for.

Interviewer [1:04:06]: I’ll just move on and just to ask you about what motivated you to invest in your activities – you’ve said they’re quite varied, but were there different motivations at different times, or was it always the same?

Petters: Good question.… When we were married and had the family, then of course you’re always thinking that you’ve got to pay the mortgage, and I didn’t want to do anything other than play jazz. I either had to make it work or go off and do something else, and that’s what I did. I learned a lot about selling. Going way back when I was very young, another friend of mine through amateur radio, Jeff Harris, I worked for his small business when I was about 17 or 18, and I’d listen to him on the phone selling stuff, and I picked up a lot of his techniques. Now, of course, mixing with Gwen and mixing with Martin Ross, I learned an awful lot about sales techniques from them, and I read some books on it as well, so I can sell. Actually selling jazz shows on the phone to theatres is a real hard job, and you’ve got to be prepared to have a strike rate that’s, in terms of percentage, very low. But you’ve just got to be stubborn enough and thick-skinned enough to go ahead and do it, and I suppose that’s what I am, you know, I’ll stick at something and go with it. So yeah… I haven’t really contemplated doing anything else for many years. I have got an electronics background, but to be honest, most of my friends were streets ahead of me as far as that was concerned, so if I did anything it would have be something that’s arts orientated. I’m not practical at all, really.

Interviewer [1:06:14]: Was there a particular reason it was jazz that you were motivated to go into?

Petters: It goes back to 1968. I’d always liked music, see, because I’d always collected these old records. I was very much into rock and roll as a teenager, but I saw a series of Bing Crosby movies on BBC in 1968, they were on on Sunday afternoons. And I’d had Bing Crosby 78s, that was a name that was familiar to me as well. And one of them was Rhythm on the River, which had Wingy Manone’s jazz band in it. Of course, I’d realised… I knew what this music was from having heard it, you know, sort of years back and it always being there, and I thought, “Yeah, I like that. That’s what I want to do.” When I was a little bit older I started going to concerts with David Bondy, and we saw Benny Goodman at the Albert Hall, we saw Duke Ellington at Finsbury Park, and Stephane Grappelli, and Buddy Rich, and all of these people, so I’d decided that jazz was what I wanted to do, and that was it. You could say it was a romantic notion, because it was… I always kick against the stream. I hate football, for example. Most of my friends at school loved football, I hated it. It’s almost like Groucho Marx – whatever it is, I’m against it. And I suppose it was strange, because there was I as a 16-year-old in 1969 listening to records that were made 50, 60, 70 years earlier. And my contemporaries were listening to Hendrix.

Interviewer [1:08:17]: Just to talk a little bit about your investment in music now, so… you have gone into quite a lot of detail already, but could you talk just a little bit about the organisation and coordination of your jazz activities?

Petters: Me. [laughs] And Tessa. We do this between us. I do a fair amount of the work now, because looking after this place takes a fair bit of doing. As far as promotions, let’s say a typical festival – the one I’m working on at the moment is Stratford because we’ve got that coming up in November. So, I’ll start with the date from the hotel. I have to book the musicians, so I’ve got to plan the different slots, who’s going to play in what line-ups, who’s most suited to those particular styles. I want a balance of young musicians and older musicians so that we’re bringing the young blood in as well, that’s a policy I’ve got, because a lot of the young new players – people like Amy Roberts and Ben Holder and people like that are doing the festivals, which is great, alongside veterans. So I have to put the programme together, and then I’ve got to try and put a variation on what we’ve done the year before, so they’re not just getting the same old, same old. Having got the programme together, I then design the flyer, and I normally rely on Tessa to help me with that because she’s got a more artistic eye than I have. So I put the flyer together and the booking form. There’s a fair amount of legal stuff, I’ve had to get involved in a lot of the legalities, contracts and all that, so I’ve had to teach myself a lot of things about law and that sort of stuff. So the flyer’s done, goes off to the printers, comes back from the printers. And about 20-odd years ago we started the National Traditional Jazz mailing list with Chez Chesterman and Max Collie, and the idea was that we would put out forms on tables and on seats of venues we played and collect names and addresses. Latterly, email addresses and that sort of thing. So we’ve got a customer base and this got to about, I don’t know, 14 000 or so people at its peak. Gradually, as people have died off, it’s got smaller and smaller. And a lot of it’s electronic. I’ve got a vast email list that I do a lot of marketing with, and I’ve got the Facebook group and the Twitter account and that sort of stuff. So we get the brochure back from the printers. We have to print the labels to go on the envelopes, they have to be stuck on, the stuff needs to go in the envelopes, they need to be franked, and sent off to the post. So then the phone starts to go and you start getting the bookings, so you’ve then got to – they’ll either send in cheques or they’re do it on credit card or debit card. So I have to process all of those, send out the confirmation, then when the balances are due I have to send out reminders for the balances, allocate the rooms in the case of Bracklesham Bay, but I give the name and addresses to Stratford and they sort that out. I’m mindful that all the way through the year I’ve got my flyers, so every gig I do, they get put out on the tables. You can’t afford to be complacent. I send out flyers to the musicians that are performing. Some of them put them out, others don’t. Trying to get musicians to do anything is actually quite hard work. Some are very very good, I have to say, and will make the effort. Musicians as a general rule – a lot of them don’t have any marketing savvy. They’re pure artists and they can’t see beyond the art, which is why few of them can sell shows, which is what makes me a little bit unusual. There’s a few bandleaders, musicians that have been able to do it successfully. Keith Smith, who was around a few years ago, he’s gone now, he was very successful cause he’d just get on the phone and book dates, tours, serious tours in theatres and things. There are one or two others that can do it. But most bandleaders, I mean, I used to get dates for Terry Lightfoot, for example, because Terry couldn’t sell. So you’ve got to have that, you know, ability to do it. I’ve always said that I hate that part of the business, I don’t want to do the administration, I’m a drummer primarily and I want to be up there playing drums. I don’t want to be stuck out at the office shoving bits of paper around, but that’s the way it is, really, I can’t see it changing.

Interviewer [1:13:51]: So are there any particular – because you sort of said it’s you and Tess, but are there any structures in place to support your activities other than that, that you’ve had?

Petters: What, you mean grants and support?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Petters: No. [laughs] No, I mean by and large, the Arts Council’s not in the remotest part interested in the type of jazz that I play. Kenny Davern described modern jazz, or some modern jazz, as fire in a pet shop music. To a degree, I subscribe to that. We get no support from the media, there is virtually no traditional jazz in the media. You get the token records in jazz record requests. Jamie Cullum’s programme on Radio 2 is not what Humph’s programme was. So there’s very little in there, in national radio there’s very little. There’s very good jazz programmes, as I mentioned Paul Barnes before, the bias it towards swing-era music – big bands and that sort of stuff, not really old-style, although he does cover that. Walter Love on BBC Ulster does a good job, and there are one or two others around the country. We’ve had no financial support. It sinks or swims on its commercial viability, really.

Interviewer [1:15:34]: Again, you’ve kind of talked a bit about communication regarding your activities – about the flyers used and a bit about social media. Could you expand upon that? Has that changed over the years, how you communicate about your jazz activities?

Petters: We’re less dependent on the postal mailing list now. It’s still accounts for, I would say, the bulk of our business, so when we’ve done a mail-out we will get the orders flowing in from there. The email list is quite good in that I will normally send out a bulletin every week or every couple of weeks. The website, obviously, is a focal point for people. They can buy the CDs there. We don’t shift much in terms of CD sales via the website. I put a couple of the CDs on CD Baby so they’re available as digital downloads, but they’re not selling in vast numbers either. That’s partly due to the fact that I can’t split myself in millions of ways. I have to go with what’s bringing in the bulk of the money. If I spent some time promoting it, the sales would go up on those, I’m sure. The product is good. Whenever we’ve had reviews, we’ve had good reviews, so it’s not a case of the product not being up to scratch. So Facebook I find is quite useful. I’ve got a traditional jazz and swing group on there, and I post videos, and I’ve got quite a few videos on YouTube. I’m not convinced that they’re altogether a good idea, because there is then the fact that you’re giving your product away, but you have to have a presence to be there these days. I tie in the whole lot. If I do a gig, I will use a video to promote the gig, and I’ll do a video for each festival – I’ve got to do one for Stratford – and promote that quite heavily both on the email list and on Facebook and on Twitter. I’m aware that I need to spend more time developing that side, but again it’s hours in the day.

Interviewer [1:18:10]: And just finally on this topic, then, are there or have there been any particular obstacles to your activities?

Petters: Money. [laughs] Well, depends what you’d call obstacles, really. I think… I would say the general arts set-up in this country is not friendly towards traditional jazz. Again, the media, the BBC – I got involved in an argument with the head of station at Radio 2 back in 2009 because their license says that they’re supposed to provide music in their mainstream daytime programming for people over 35. Well I take the view that that includes people that might be 110. So you should have during the day, as it always used to be, a wide variety of music on the national station. I can remember when Radio 2 was… up until about 1980 probably, when they changed policy, and they did that deliberately and they said they were going to cut off anything before I think it was about 1955 or 1960. So you immediately chop off a whole load of music, from half a century of excellence, for music you’re saying is better just because of its recording date. They wouldn’t have it, because they were saying that they do cater for traditional jazz and they’ve got special programmes they put on occasionally, but we pointed out that the argument is that these should be not in ghettoized slots late at night when people are not usually listening to them, but they should be part of the general mix of music that people hear accidentally. Now you would’ve in the 70s if you’d listened to Radio 2, you’d have heard Ella, you’d have heard Louis Armstrong, you’d have heard Crosby, you’d have heard some jazz, you’d have heard some brass band music, you’d have heard organs, you’d have heard country, you’d have heard rock and roll, and just a general mix of everything. Where now you don’t get that, now you get pop. The only difference between – and we actually spent some time studying the playlists between Radio 1 and Radio 2, and there were a lot of commonality between the two of them. Now that to me doesn’t sound like responsible national broadcasting, public service broadcasting. They’re saying they’re after numbers, but it isn’t a numbers game, so in as far as that’s concerned, yes, we don’t get a fair crack of the whip with the media. TV’s worse, of course, but then again it’s more difficult for TV to make a traditional jazz band look interesting. But when you’re looking at the sound radio, even Jazz FM – and Jazz FM isn’t a jazz station at all, it’s a… whatever it decides it’s going to be, it never has been a jazz station. So those are the sort of obstacles.

Interviewer [1:21:52]: So moving then on to talking about cultural impact and different sorts of jazz, then, have you had any particular association that you want to discuss about British jazz or American jazz? Obviously you’ve touched upon this, but just expand on that…

Petters: Okay, right, what I would say about that is that jazz is an American music. That’s the first thing. I think that however you look at it, when we play it over here, it will be different to how it was played over there. Now in the very early days of jazz, you could discriminate between the music that was played by black bands and white bands, but there would be a much closer sound between white and black bands from New Orleans than a white band from New Orleans and a black band from, say, New York. And that’s to do with the rhythmic development of it, because for some reason – well, there are many reasons for it – Dr Marshall Stearns pointed out that they were sociological reasons why Louisiana became the cradle of jazz, and it was because, one of the arguments he put forward was that Louisiana was run by the French and the Spanish. And the religion was Roman Catholic, and that most of the other states were run by the Brits and was Protestant, various. And the slaves, when they were brought over of the Vodun religion, had a hierarchy of spirits in their religion, and they assimilated into Catholic Louisiana a lot easier than they did in Protestant other places, where, you know, Protestant religion doesn’t have the hierarchy of angels and saints that Catholics do. And also it seems that the slave owners were more liberal in those states to allowing dancing and singing, whereas the Protestant states seemed to be a bit more puritanical, if you like. So for example you would hear Celestine’s Tuxedo Band in 1923 from New Orleans alongside Fletcher Henderson’s band, who was from the east coast, and there’s… it’s a different music. The New Orleans beat is much looser and swings. The New York style is much stiffer. It’s syncopated music, but it’s got a rigidness to it. And it took Fletcher Henderson probably about 10 years to learn how to lose that. And one of the key things was bringing Louis Armstrong into his band in 1924, because that taught Coleman Hawkins how to phrase, and he never lost in total the sort of lumpiness that he’d got in the 20s. So you’ve got that sort of thing going on. When we had jazz come over here, the two early examples were the arrival of Sidney Bechet in about 1918, and that was quite a revelation, but the biggest influence was the residency here for I think over a year, maybe two years, of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who stayed here and recorded here and toured here. So they brought authentic, albeit white, but authentic New Orleans jazz to these shores and influenced the first generation, shall we say, of British musicians. But again, you’ve got to think that the musicians that were learning from – those who didn’t hear it live were learning from acoustic recordings, and the heartbeat of jazz is obviously the beat from the drum, doesn’t mean to say you’ve got to have a drummer in every jazz band, but it’s certainly a big thing. So because the acoustic recordings couldn’t record the drums very well, British players I would suggest got a very poor idea of what the rhythmic thing is about. So you get people like George Chisholm starting playing in about 1930 who were then listening to American records by Bix Beiderbecke and Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and reacting to them. You got in the 40s the first traditional jazz revivalists, like George Webb I’ve worked with quite a lot. They had sort of a few scratchy old 78s to try and get the sound of, say, the King Oliver Band in the 20s. And they didn’t get very close to it, and they couldn’t get closer than they did because their source material wasn’t there. So then you get Ken Colyer, who was a real key figure in the jazz revival, going to New Orleans in the early 50s and actually playing and recording with real New Orleans musicians. Ken had a really good ear. I did a couple of CDs with him as well and quite a few gigs, and Ken knew what New Orleans music was, or knew what his idea of New Orleans music was, and when he was deported after he’d made some records with New Orleans players, they made a big welcome when he returned and he formed the band with Chris Barber, the first Colyer band and they did Isle of Capri and Goin’ Home and so on, but Ken hated the rhythm section. And he hated the rhythm section because it wasn’t a jazz rhythm section, and there was a fundamental difference between him and Barber, because Barber when he did the Trad Jazz Britannia interview was almost in tears about the fact that that rhythm section had broken up. Yet when you listen to the recordings that Ken did, and when they – Mike Pointon and Ray Smith – wrote the book on Colyer a few years ago, they produced a CD of the early recordings and they put right next to the New Orleans recordings that Ken did the Decca recording of Isle of Capri, and you can instantly hear what’s wrong with the Isle of Capri, because you’ve got all this looseness in the New Orleans guys, and suddenly you’ve got this very rigid, stiff British rhythm sound. Now I would suggest most British jazz in the 50s was like the Barber stuff – rigid, unswinging, relentless, bearing very little relationship to what you would call real, original American jazz. An exception to that was Colyer’s later band, which he had the drummer Colin Bowden – Colin’s now 84, and he studied Baby Dodds and the early New Orleans drummers, and he got closer to it, that rhythmic pulse, than anyone else. And he’s still, even at the age that he is, he’s able to create that sound that eludes so many. So yeah, there is a fundamental difference. There are some musicians that can capture it and others that can’t. There is the bigger possibility for young musicians now to get it. I had a young drummer called Jack Amblin come to see me, oh, two years ago. He’s in his early 20s, and I think went to Leeds College of Music or whatever it is, so he’s a studied player, but he wanted to come and see me about finding out how to play the old styles. And I said to him it’s mostly about listening to records, you know, and finding out, and I was able to show him some things that I do that pointed him in the right direction, but with his technique that he’s got, which is better than mine because he’s properly studied and everything, and with his ears and with the availability of so much recording material in better fidelity than it’s ever been before, mostly, that next generation if they wish to do it will be able to get closer to the American sound than my generation could and certainly the generation before. Because I was lucky, I had records of most of the stuff on vinyl LPs so I could hear what was there. And now we’ve got the YouTube generation and you can see archived films, so I could actually go on there now and I can watch Gene Krupa play, I can watch Baby Dodds play, and in 1973 or thereabouts, there were no video recorders. My one friend had a Phillips machine and there was one piece of Gene Krupa that he had on there, and that was all. So you had to use these and work it out.

Interviewer [1:32:14]: You’ve talked actually about white Dixieland jazz and African American jazz, um, but just looking at your association with that and traditional modern jazz, how important were they in your music, in your activities?

Petters: Okay… this is where we’re getting into labels again. I don’t like particularly bebop and beyond. I know it’s all jazz, and I know that’s what everyone says, and everyone says you should like it. What I tend to like is jazz that is melodic, and I find that the bebop revolution with Charlie Parker and Gillespie, and drummers Max Roach and Blakey and so on – was fundamentally different to either New Orleans traditional jazz or the swing era. The emphasis of all those early styles is melodic to a large degree and it’s also rhythmic, and you’ve got a relentless rhythm. You’ve normally got a four-beat bass drum, talking about it from a drummer’s point of view, or it’s a two-beat bass drum. Bebop changed all that. You’ve got harmonies in the older styles of jazz which the layman can hear without having to have any arts degree or advanced musical development. It’s music that appeals to the general listener. Now when you look at Parker and Co., you’re then looking at different harmonies, so the harmonic structure’s changed. And the rhythm has changed, the rhythm that has become very fragmented. So you hear drummers dropping bombs in different places, the time has moved from the snare drum up to the top cymbal, and the snare drum is just used for putting accents and that sort of thing, so to me it was a fundamentally different music. As it progressed, I tend to be with Philip Larkin – Larkin didn’t like anything that was after about 1945. But, you know, there are different things that came after that which I quite like. I mean, the west coast style – Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and that sort of stuff – is very melodic, and I don’t have a problem with that. but I don’t like Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and I don’t like Coltrane because I find it ugly. I do like the MJQ and I do like Brubeck and I do like Getz, so, you know, and Art Pepper and things like that. It’s a subjective thing, I realise that, but that’s where I am.

Interviewer [1:35:10]: No, that’s fine, thank you. And just then if you could just say a little about what you would see the effect of rock and roll and the Beatles on your activities?

Petters: [laughs] In terms of the Beatles, I’d say none. Except to push me back towards jazz. No, that’s unkind. What I recognise… generally, my view of music is that in the first half of the last century, it was a very creative, developing, explosive energy. For example, in 1933 you could get Louis Armstrong recording Dinah, and singing Dinah, and moving so far away from where the beat was that you thought he was going to get lost. You could get Billie Holiday in 1935 with a very limited vocal range, doing all sorts of things with timing and phrasing, laying right back on the beat as though she’s not going to do it and then doing it. And you get pop stars today who have lost all of that, and are singing right smack on the beat, so to me something has been lost. It’s been dumbed down. And what you have in pop music today is nothing like as creative as that earlier flavour. So where we’ve got the innovators like, obviously, Louis who defined jazz singing and defined popular singing, because without Louis you wouldn’t have had Crosby, Sinatra, Bennett, Presley, or the Beatles because they just couldn’t have happened without any of that. You’re looking now at people that are not hearing that stuff, and they’re taking as their yardstick of old music something that’s only 30 years old. And by then it wasn’t very good, so it’s difficult to see how they can move on from that unless they go back mining these roots. I think what happened… the swing era had to blow itself out because the war had taken the musicians into the services and so on, and there was a recording ban in America and all of that stuff, and vocalists came to the fore. So that’s when you had Sinatra really being made and so on. And he got given some appalling material by Columbia Records and stuff like that. And jazz because it had developed into bebop, and that’s where all the intelligensia if you like were going, it lost its popularity, but you always had a basic blues thing that was going on, which people like Louis Jordan took and they called it rhythm and blues, and that is rock and roll, that became rock and roll. Rock and roll is only boogie woogie. I played to someone sometime ago the recording of… it was Joe Turner and Pete Johnson recorded at the Spirituals to Swing concert in 1939 doing Roll ‘Em Pete, and I said, “What’s that music?” “Rock and roll.” “No, it’s not, it’s boogie woogie.” I said, “When do you think it is?” “Oh, 1950 or so. It’s Jerry Lee Lewis.” “No, it’s 1939 – it predates Jerry Lee Lewis.” And rock and roll, really, that’s what that was. Black rock and roll like Little Richard and Fats Domino and all those people, there’s more jazz in that than there is anything else. When you sort of mixed it with more country-type styles, people like Buddy Holly for example, you’ve got something different happening there. And in early rock and roll, the rhythm is still there, you know, that [makes rhythm sounds] sort of stuff. As you go through the 50s, it starts to get flattened out into that pronounced rock beat which doesn’t swing, and to my ear it locks you in. If you’ve got this [clap clap clap] relentless thing going on like that, you’ve got no sense of a dynamic. You listen to Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert recording, the famous Sing Sing Sing, and you’ll hear they’re playing right up here one minute and right down there the next minute. Tempo hasn’t changed, but the whole volume and everything has come down. Most pop records don’t have any sense of dynamics, they are just full pelt... Now, the Beatles I think were primarily… you’ve got the other thing called skiffle that comes in, which was very much an important part of the jazz scene in the 50s. Lonnie Donegan – everyone says Donegan invented skiffle, he didn’t. The one that brought it back was Colyer – it was the Ken Colyer skiffle group first. And that’s really only blues that was played by the jug bands and the novelty bands in Chicago and Memphis and that sort of stuff back in the 20s. Lonnie Donegan took his name after Lonnie Johnson, the guitar player, and Leadbelly was a big influence and that sort of stuff. So you’ve got skiffle happening in the 50s, you’ve got the trad boom happening in the 50s, and you’ve got the rock and roll thing. And of course the commercial interests will go with the stuff that’s easiest to produce and easiest to market, so dumb it down, and you get Lennon and McCartney coming up in the skiffle groups. They’re playing opposite jazz bands in The Cavern, ‘cause Ken Sims used to play in The Cavern when he lived in Liverpool, and they’re not liking what the jazz is doing because it’s old fashioned, so they’re trying to do something different. And, you know, they’ve not got those roots, they’ve not gone back to the black roots. They’ve gone back as far as Chuck Berry, but you see you couldn’t have Chuck Berry unless you’ve got all the stuff that came before that. So my argument with jazz, and this is my real big argument with some of these people who put on jazz courses who bring people into Coltrane – they don’t tell them about Sidney Bechet, because without Sidney Bechet you wouldn’t have Coltrane. So my view has always been, you go back to the source and you listen to as much of the source as you can and then you react to it. And of course what happened in the 50s with the trad people is that their sources were not very good because there were not that many records. Now we’ve got all the records, so as I say, young people now can go back, they can listen to Piron’s New Orleans band, Oliver’s band in as good of sound as it’s ever likely to be in, and you can get that appreciation for it. The pop thing just… so I would say the Beatles were no influence on me whatsoever. Rock and roll yes, because it was very much part of my growing up, and I still enjoy listening to rock and roll records. I don’t mind listening to Beatles records occasionally either, and I’ll listen to the odd Hendrix thing that people send me on Facebook if he’s playing the blues. And again, I’m aware also that you can change over a period of years, and what you thought was rubbish when you were 16 won’t necessarily be rubbish when you’re 60. So I watched a documentary on Ginger Baker on… I think it was on 4, a few months ago to see if I’d changed my opinions on what I thought of that psychedelic rock stuff that was around in the 70s, and I haven’t. And I saw the programme on Hendrix and I haven’t changed my view about that either. So I’m still of the view that, to me, Ellington was right. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. [laughs]

Interviewer [1:44:26]: So then if… just moving on, whether or not you would say that jazz activities, your jazz activities even, had an effect on attitudes regarding immigration or race?

Petters: My jazz activities?

Interviewer: Yes.

Petters: Ha ha… now, that’s an interesting one because our audiences are, I would say, 99.99% white British. We have the odd – there are a few black people on my mailing list, and I’ve seen them come, but you’re looking at maybe one. There are so few of them that come to any of the music that we play. So I don’t think there’s any effect.

Interviewer [1:45:28]: Yep, thank you. Just talking about political implications a bit then, were your jazz activities ever associated with any particular political views at any point?

Petters: No. [laughs]

Interviewer: No? Were you ever engaged with trade unions, CND or anything through jazz?

Petters: Right, I was in the MU. I was active in the MU for a number of years, and this was mostly over a justice situation because the MU generally takes the side of side men against bandleaders where there was an issue. And I had a dispute with a musician over a breach of contract, who I’d had to fire, and the Musicians’ Union misbehaved in that they had a legal officer that claimed that he was the legal officer of the union, and he wasn’t. He was the legal officer of the central London branch, where this member was a member. And he copied documents I’d sent to him believing him to be an honest broker to this other person’s wife, who wasn’t even a member of the union. So I got actively involved in the union because I’d been personally done down. And when they elected a general secretary who went against what the will of the – rather like the Corbyn situation now, they elected an outsider and they contrived to ensure that he couldn’t take office. I got very involved there, because it was an injustice, and I actually took it as far as the Trade Unions Certification Officer, and we won the case and the chairman of the union had to go. The general secretary, who had already gone, had had to go as well. But that’s as far as my… politically… and I stayed in the local organisation because I thought that I’d generally like to help musicians, but I found that the whole system was beyond belief and wasn’t worth doing so I left. It came up the time we moved here and I just couldn’t be bothered with the aggravation, and that was that. I’m not particularly political. I’ve voted for all parties in my time, and I tend to vote for the individual candidate rather than the party.

Interviewer [1:48:03]: So, if we move on then to social implications of jazz here. So, just to start off here, what was the reaction of the older generation, your parents’ generation, to your jazz activities?

Petters: My dad said that I needed to get a proper job. [laughs] My dad liked what I was doing, but he couldn’t see it being viable at all. He didn’t really understand jazz, he’d not come from that background. My mum was supportive and she used to come to concerts. She’s got dementia now, unfortunately, so she can’t, but until she became ill she was quite enthusiastic and would come to gigs and enjoy them a lot. So from that point of view, there would have been support there.

Interviewer [1:49:03]: Okay, so what about the reaction of your peer group to your jazz activities?

Petters: [laughs] Odd. … I was continually at odds with my friends over taste in music when I was growing up. Because with the exception of Keith Donald, who’s my bass player, and Dave Bondy who was the other guy that we were with, and one or two others, they just couldn’t understand why we were listening to all of this old men’s music. They certainly couldn’t understand it, and they wanted to hear Radio 1 or whatever it was at the time. And I actually, in the days before I was a musician, I had a series of day jobs which generally lasted about six months if I was lucky. One of them was for Cossor Electronics in Harlow servicing oscilloscopes, and I didn’t mind the job. What I absolutely hated was the fact that Radio 1 was piped round the workshop. I mean, it just annoys me and I do not like hearing that stuff. Lovely little anecdote: when we were on tour with Wild Bill and Art Hodes in 1989, we were having a pizza in a restaurant in Acton, I think, or Ealing or somewhere down in west London. As usual in pizza restaurants, you’ve got this loud music playing in your ear. We were just trying to have a conversation and Bill was getting agitated, and I said to the waiter, “Would you mind turning the music down please?” And he came up and he gave it a very slight nudge, and I said, “It’s still too loud. Would you turn it down a bit more please?” And he said, “It’s down as far as it could go”, and I said, “There is one more position and that is off.” [laughs] So yeah, it gets on my nerves. I think as they’ve got older my friends from those days have learned to appreciate it, and some of them come to gigs.

Interviewer [1:51:16]: In that case then, what would you say the status of your activities are, have been, because I guess they might have changed over the years – amateur, semi-professional or professional?

Petters: Started as an amateur, obviously. Semi-pro for a while, but for the last 35 years probably, certainly pro. Yeah.

Interviewer [1:51:41]: And so, finally then, just talking about long-term contributions, really, so could you pinpoint any particular achievements of your activities?

Petters: Hm. I suppose… yeah… well, several, actually. The recordings I’ve done with the Americans, I think they’re the things that I’m probably most satisfied with. The fact that I’ve taken the music to the general public rather than just stuck in jazz ghettos, which is what… by playing in theatres, you’re playing to the general public. By playing the churches, you’re doing that as well, so I suppose that’s the level. I seldom listen to my own recordings, but I occasionally have to if I’ve got to do a CDR for someone of something that we’ve sold out of, and I’ll listen to that to check and make sure it’s okay. I quite often surprise myself with some of the recordings that we’ve done. I think it’s always dangerous to listen to your own stuff, because you can become obsessed with the – and now that you’ve got digital technology where you can go from the beginning of the track to the end instantly and reverse. You can tell when it’s speeding up and slowing down, for example, whereas before you’d have to listen to the whole recording. And I think you get to realise that jazz isn’t a perfect art.

Interviewer [1:53:23]: Thank you. And what about the effect on British culture of jazz generally and maybe even your own activities and the sort of things you’re involved in?

Petters: I wouldn’t think that my activities have had any effect on it. I think the influence of jazz certainly, because it’s affected the whole culture of popular music. If you take jazz out of the 20th century, it’s difficult to see what you could get after 1920 in terms of popular music at all. I suppose you might still have country music, but without jazz… I mean, it is just so vast because so much of our background, if you think about the 1940s for example, you’re looking at the popular music of, say, Glenn Miller and you’re looking at, say, Sinatra and you’re at Crosby and people like that. And they’re all jazz people, so if you take those away, what have you got left?

Interviewer [1:54:32]: And finally, then, how do you see the future of your jazz activities?

Petters: [laughs] Well, like everyone that’s playing traditional jazz, I see the audience shrinking. And that’s a demographic problem because… the bulk of the audience for this music has come from people that were around in the 50s or the early 60s, and it is partly nostalgia. Now the fact that they can come to my concerts and enjoy the music doesn’t mean that they’re there because they’re nostalgic about what I’m doing, but they’re there because they’re nostalgic for the sound of jazz. Now if you think now that we’re in 2016, so we’re 53 years since the Beatles, and the Beatles was effectively the end of the trad boom, because once that happened, well, it took a couple of years to die, but the boom years had gone. So anyone that was 20 in 1963 is now 73, so that’s the young end of the audience, and obviously if you say that the trad boom began let’s say for argument’s sake in 53 when Colyer came back, that audience is now 83. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing in the demographic of people that come to our festivals. Now we get a younger audience, they’re come on the riverboat shuffles when we do them, because there’s the novelty of the boat trip, so that the selling point isn’t just the jazz, it’s a sideshow if you like. We get younger people in the churches because that’s a different thing. And when I play some of the swing dances with the swing band, we’re getting all young people to that, and that is a different thing. But my festivals tend to be, and jazz clubs that I do tend to be, for people that have come to listen rather than people that have come to dance. But when I play the swing dances, it’s the dance that’s the thing. They’re into the dressing up, the dancing, and that whole atmosphere, and the music if you like is the sideshow. So there’s a different emphases. So I think in the future… I thought the future would be the swing dances, but there seems to be on the ordinary circuit as little money in that as there is in playing jazz clubs because they’re not interested mostly in paying sensible fees for bands. And I’m not interested in going out unless I’m going to get the right fee these days. I’ve done it long enough and I don’t need to do it anymore. I’d rather do my festivals and do that. Although it’s a big kick playing to a young audience and seeing them all dancing. So yeah, I think… it may… you may get people coming out of that swing dancing thing that are going to be devotees of the music, but I can’t see that happening at the moment. I think there’s a young jazz scene in London, you know, quite a few young musicians playing around there, but I don’t think any of them are making any sensible money from it. Not from what I know, anyway.

Interviewer [1:58:30]: Thank you very much then.

Petters: Okay.