John Lancaster

What instrument to do you play, John?

 

I play clarinet and alto sax, well two clarinets. I’ve got a bass clarinet, oh three clarinets, I’ve got a bass clarinet, an ordinary clarinet and an E flat and I’ve also got a soprano sax, an alto and tenor.

 

So its 2013, how old are you?

 

That’s not a fair question! I’m 74 later this month.

 

Wow that’s incredible, brilliant, well done. Are you Essex born and bred John?

 

I was born in London, born in East Ham.

 

Which, once upon a time, was Essex funnily enough.

 

In my life time it was always E6, but we moved, my parents moved up to Wanstead and that was Essex in those days when I was about 16/17 I think, but then I went into National Service. I got married while I was in National Service and we lived in Leighton and we moved out into Benfleet in 1964.

 

When did you actually take up an instrument?

 

My parents bought me a clarinet for my 15th birthday. I had three lessons at school. Without going into too much detail as this is being recorded, I didn’t like the teacher very much and I had three lessons then packed it in. It was that period, 1955, Jazz was very popular, Humph and Chris Barber and King Colyer and all the gang. I was in the same school, in fact I was in the same class, as Pete Strange, who ended up playing trombone for Humph for about 20 years. We used to go and see the Humph concerts together and also in the same school was Johnny Beecham who played with Monty Sunshine’s band later on. Jazz was all the rage, we formed a band. I played with Pete Strange for a little while but he was streets ahead of me so I then formed another band with Johnny Beecham on trombone and played in Forest Gate until I went into the forces.

 

What was that band called?

 

The Climax Jazz Band. There’s been thousands of those but that was in the Forest Gate area.

 

The Climax Jazz Band.

 

You wouldn’t have heard of us. Ha ha.

 

So, did you do any playing in the National Service?

 

No, I was living in for about 10 months. I was in the last batch to go into National Service and it was so delayed that I was nearly 21 when I went in. You’re supposed to be 18, the first batch. So we were all caught up in plans to get married and then I did do some playing at home. Once I’d started to live at home, once we’d got married, we lived at home in Leyton and we played at The Bell in Walthamstow, which I understand is still a Jazz pub. I believe there is still Jazz going on there, but we used to play there every Friday night. We’d rush home from Croydon, where I was stationed, and play Friday night for about 30 bob. The trumpet player was Jerry Ingram who gave up trumpet and then started playing bass. He was playing bass firstly with Steve Lane’s band and then Harry Gold’s Pieces of Eight. Until Harry died I think. Jerry’s still around, still playing. I can name drop, that’s all I can do.

 

Name drop, that’s OK. Yes that’s great. Carry on from there.

 

I came out of the forces in 1962. I played with a band in Enfield, I answered one of their ads in the dear old Melody Maker and I played over there. That was Stuart Carter’s Jazz Men, I don’t know what happened to Stu but Alan Thomas was on piano, who again used to play with Sandy Brown, I think he was on Sandy Brown’s first LP. I was in touch with him fairly recently, he’s in Spain now. But that folded up and then I got really caught up in the marriage. 1964 we moved down to Benfleet and I lost all my contacts. We were sort of 30-35 miles away from where I used to play, and I didn’t drive in those days either. Things went dry, we brought up the family and it wasn’t until 1970 that I found that the bunch of guys I was drinking with every Friday night, down the local Labour club, one played bass, one played guitar, another one played drums, another one played trombone and we said “What are we doing?” So we formed a band and that was the John Lancaster Jazz Band, well it started as the Benfleet Jazz Men and then they called it the John Lancaster Jazz Band. That lasted 10 years.

 

Were you solely doing that band or were you playing with other people?

 

Then I started, gradually started playing with other people. In the mid 70’s our trumpet player. Who was with Reuters, and had to go to Hong Kong for a 2 year stint, so we got Hugh Rainey, do you know Hugh Rainey?

 

I know Hugh yes.

 

He had, at that time he was obviously a brilliant banjo player, but he just decided he was going to take up trumpet. So I said “Hugh, we want a trumpet player”. So he said “Oh great”. So he came in for those 2 years and we had a lovely time with him, he’s just a terrific character. I’m still in touch, whenever I go up to Essex I make sure it’s a Tuesday night so that I can go over and sit in with the band in Rettendon. And then it was in 1978, going back a little bit – in 1976 I met Ted Blackshaw. He was a trumpet player, I sat in with his band for a little while. He asked me to join him so then I was in two bands.

 

Where was it you met him? Did he have a residency somewhere?

 

He was playing at the good old Red Lion at Margaretting. Lovely, lovely. It was run by Gordon someone or other. He put Jazz on every Friday night, various bands. Ted was playing there and our band played there occasionally as well. Ted had asked me to dep with his band as we had 2 clarinets, 2 reeds I remember, that’s right. He’d already got Dave Petty basically on tenor, he asked me to come in on clarinet and we did that on a fairly regular basis, and Martin Litten......you remember Martin Litten?

 

Yes.

 

I see him occasionally now. He’s quite a big name on the Jazz scene, but he was at Essex University then and he used to come in, as you did when you were 18 or 19 years old, he used to come in his striped blazer with his lads on a Friday night and his mates would say “Martin plays piano, can he sit in?”, “Well not with us but he can do the interval” and he used to thrash all hell out of the upright piano that was up against the wall and play Jelly Roll Morton Rags and just about everything. I mean, he was absolutely brilliant at 18/19 and obviously went on to great things. Whenever I see Martin we have a joke because when we finished the session for Gordon we got a pound each. Everybody had a pound note and a piece of gala pie and a cup of coffee. But he poured the cup of coffee out about half an hour before we’d finished. A cup of cold coffee and a gala pie. But the walls were bedecked with photographs. I can remember Ben Webster and there was Louis Armstrong and all sorts of people. “Best wishes to Gordon, love from Ben Webster”, you know. So I really never got to the bottom of what his connections where but he obviously loved Jazz. Don’t think he loved Jazz musicians too much, paying them a pound for the evening! It was great, we had a lovely time. So I was playing with them but then with my own band in 1978/79.

 

Was it still called the Benfleet Jazz Men?

 

No, the John Lancaster Band by then.

 

Oh OK, when and why did you?

 

I can’t remember. Someone said “I don’t like the name”. I was leading it and someone suggested “You call it after you John”, I said OK and so that is what happened. There was a girl called Diana who lived locally in Benfleet and she was secretary for the local branch of Unicef, and she and her husband liked Jazz, used to come along to the various sessions we did, and she said “I’d like to put on a fund raising evening”. So I said “OK, yes the band would love to do it”. And she said “I’ll get a celebrity in to sit in with you”. So I said “OK, fine”. Now I know this is being recorded and you may not necessarily want to include this: She wrote to Cleo Lane and John Dankworth and invited them to come along and play with the band, but she didn’t even get a reply. Then she said “I didn’t get a reply, but I was thinking of Humphrey Lyttelton”. So I was just gobsmacked because Humph and Wally Fawkes were my heroes and I followed them since school time. And I said you can try. Anyway he was absolutely wonderful. He came down to Canvey Island, did a concert, I’ve got the tape here, did a concert in 1979, March 1979 at the Paddocks in Canvey. He drove down, brought his manager with him and he didn’t even claim petrol money. He played all evening. We had an absolutely wonderful time and he was just terrific. And he went away and we did the same the following year in the Kings Club in Canvey and involved other bands, mainly other bands I’d played with, so I invited them along as well so we had a multi evening. Do you remember Maxine Daniels?

 

Oh yes, I knew Maxine, lovely. What a lovely woman.

 

Well, there’s another story there. Around about this time, must have been the late 70’s, I was playing with Ron Spack, who was secretary of the local Musicians Union branch. He had a swing band which was piano, bass and drums. He played bass and myself and the trombone player from the John Lancaster Jazz Band, Brian White, who now lives in Poole in Dorset. And we were playing in the old Queen’s Hotel in Westcliff – that’s been demolished?

 

Yes that’s right.

 

It’s a block of flats now. It was quite a posh place, they really upgraded it. We used to play in the main bar and they had various celebrities in the function room at the back. I remember Johnny Ray sitting in the audience listening to us at one stage. We played there whatever night it was, I can’t remember now, probably a Friday, and Ron said “I’ve heard there’s someone who works at the VAT office over the road and she used to be a singer. I’ve heard she used to be good so we’re going to ask her to come over. She was the tea lady, used to push the trolley round in the VAT office”, which is where my son now works, and we met Gladys and she said her professional name was Maxine Daniels. I’d never heard of her but as a youngster she was top of the bill at the London Paladium apparently. Well there were tears in my eyes, she was absolutely glorious. She was such a lovely, lovely person and really warm, and when she sang, she sang perfect diction and it was English diction, she never compromised. And we got to know her very well. She used to come along every week, sing a few numbers and then, this is the essence of the story, because the second Humph concert we did I invited her to come along and sing with Ron’s backing band. I was playing with them and she sang a few numbers, and Humph walked on stage and he said “Maxine!”. They hadn’t seen each other for, I don’t know, umpteen years, and as a result of that she got back on to the scene and she was doing all the Jazz festivals. She was singing with Humph and various other bands and made records, tapes and all sorts of things. And she was on the scene then until, well her husband died, and then not long later she died unfortunately. She did actually come down to Cornwall in the mid 90’s I suppose. We moved down here in '93 and one of the local promoters brought her down with Digby and a band, probably Digby’s Half Dozen or whatever, and when I heard she was there I wandered in, went backstage and just tapped on the dressing room door and she opened the door and, big hug, and “Oh John”. You know it was lovely. Lovely, lovely person. So that was early 1979 that concert. 1980 the band had been going 10 years and I was doing things with Ted Blackshaw’s band. We decided to call it, well he decided to call it the Blackshaw Lancaster Band as I was helping him out. He died about 3 or 4 years ago. That was a nice Condon-style, Chicago style band. We had great fun in that band.

 

Did you have a leaning to more Chicago rather than New Orleans, or did you just slip between the two?

 

J: The history briefly I suppose is my parents and all my family loved the big band stuff because that was their youth in the 1930’s, and I tried to find where I got the Jazz bug from and I just can’t solve it, but I think subliminally I must have picked up all the big bang Swing. I used to go round to my Uncle's on a Sunday, I used to go down to Plaistow and we used to have winkles for Sunday tea and he’d put Harry James records on, you know. I remember those days quite clearly. When we started playing in 1955/56/57 I based myself really on Wally Fawkes, who was a guy I loved, and then John Beecham joined the band and he loved the George Lewis-style. We then started to move towards the New Orleans style, and lots of those guys stayed purist and still are today. But at the back of my mind there was always this big band Swing thing.

 

Well it seems to me that Artie Shaw seemed to be a big influence on all, whether you are into Chicago or New Orleans, by the sound of things.

 

Yeah, and Benny Goodman, I mean you couldn’t ignore them. And even, there is another little tiny story, I was listening to.... I knew the George Lewis repertoire quite well and there is one particular tune he plays, St Philip Street Breakdown, and I never play it, well I rarely play it. I know it so well, and one day I was listening to Benny Goodman and Charlie Christian session, in 1939 they made an LP, and I was listening to that, and in one of the12 bars there were these two choruses and I thought “Bloody hell, that’s what George Lewis plays”. Well I wrote to Just Jazz magazine about it and set up a series of correspondence over it, and one of the guys who replied to me when I said I’d discovered this said, “There is no doubt that Benny Goodman didn’t listen to George Lewis, it was clearly Lewis was influenced by Benny Goodman”. He liked those two choruses so he lifted them from, I think it was Gone With The Wind, or whatever the tune was, and incorporated them and always played them in St Philip Street Breakdown. I wrote to Humph about that, sent him a copy of the tape, although he knew the tunes, and he said “Oh yeah wow” and he said there was a bit of soft wind in there if you listen to it, and whenever I met him he always said to me “That was really interesting, picking up that point about Lewis and Goodman”. Goodman and Shaw were tremendous influences. And also, I liked the freedom and the Swing of Condon, the Chicagoans rather than the New Orleans. The New Orleans guys tended to copy, I mean note for note. They felt that they had to copy everything that the New Orleans guys did whereas I liked the freedom to express myself. I always said “I’ll play rubbish, but at least it’s my rubbish”.

 

Well you know, one of them is preservation which kind of keeps it all in an archive in a sense.

 

It does, but then you know to my mind, I always say Jazz is self-expression.

 

Of course it is.

 

Everything that we play has been played before anyway, but at least we try to do it our way; well I do and I don’t like copying things. Obviously I play phrases other people have played before, but that’s Jazz.

 

That’s how you learn.

 

And then we did a third concert with Humph in 1982, this is all for Unicef, and this was in the Seevic College in Thundersley. And that was just the Blackshaw Lancaster Band, a 7 piece band, because we befriended another guy who lived up in Essex, a Goan Indian from Goa. His name is Emancio Da Silva, I don’t know whether you know that name?

 

No.

 

Absolutely superb guitar player. Very very modern in style, very progressive in style. I googled him the other day on Wikipedia and I found that he died about 4/5 years ago. I didn’t know. We lost touch with him. But he was tremendous, and again when Humph walked on stage there at Seevic he said “Emancio, I haven’t seen you for, how long is it? 10 years, 20 years?” That was another nice little moment. So we had a 7 piece with Humph and we recorded all these.

 

Amazing.

 

Only on cassette, the last one was put onto a CD cause that was really good, we enjoyed that. Then the Blackshaw Lancaster Band was essentially the one I was with, although I was depping with the Washboard Synchopaters. Do you know them?

 

Yep.

 

Old Humph Weston, who died, and that was very much a 1920’s/1930’s style band and played lots of the early Fats Waller stuff, the early Louis (Armstrong) stuff and that was a 4 piece front line. Dave Petty and I joined with the Blackshaw Band originally, he left and joined the Syncopaters and I found myself back with him, and whole bunch of guys. It was a washboard based band so it was quite stilted, it’s still going today. It was fun. I did enjoy it. The guys I played with were great fun and I did a lot of depping work for them. I think it was about the mid 80’s that Ted Blackshaw, strangely said “I’ve had enough, I want to do other things” and just gave up. I’ve met a couple down here in Cornwall who’ve done that just recently and just said “I’m getting bored with it”. I will never give up until I just fall off the stand. He packed up. I tried to keep the band going, tried to get a trumpet player, couldn’t find one for about a year and packed that up. Then it sort of went into a bit of the doldrums. I was then depping really with various bands, including, I think I mentioned to you, the Brian Giles Band. He’s still playing around, and Bill Jenkins who was my trumpet player back in the mid 70’s, he’s still playing in a band called the Down Home Jazz Band and I’ll play with him occasionally. That all added up I suppose to a) I was not enjoying work very much, I worked in the city and in the early 80’s we bought this cottage down here as a holiday home but within 6 months this is where we’re coming and worked towards it. In 1993 we moved down here, but by that time we had been coming down here for about 10 years or more and got to know the Jazz scene down here, so it was like coming home to move down here. And then 6 or 7 years ago I got together with several other guys down here and formed a band The Great Western Jazz Company and that’s where my love of the big band Swing has come out, because although it’s a 6 piece we do lots of the old Swing numbers, Opus1 and all that stuff from the 40’s.

 

Oh, do you?

 

We arrange those for a 6 piece band. So that’s going very well at the moment, extremely well.

 

Is it all 40’s music you play in that band?

 

No, no, well in fact, we’re gradually getting younger in our repertoire. We do Moon Dance and we are just working on The Fix, do you know Elbow, the group Elbow?

 

Oh Elbow, yes.

 

Well they do a number called The Fix which our trumpet player heard and fancied so we are working on it, we worked on it last night and are just about to start playing it publicly. I think that is the first 21st century number we’ve got in our repertoire. We range from obviously early Louis, Fats Waller, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and then some of the big band stuff from the Woody Herman days. Anyway that doesn’t relate to your Jazz in Essex.

 

No, sounds amazing though.

 

It’s great fun and am thoroughly, thoroughly enjoying it.

 

What’s the band called again?

 

The band is the Great Western Jazz Company. We’ve got quite a decent website, we’ve made 4 CD’s. If you google the Great Western Jazzco.uk you’ll get our website, and on Youtube as well.

 

Amazing, good stuff. So that’s where you are right now.

 

Yes, that’s where we are right now. We lost our trumpet player last year, he died, but we luckily found a replacement and he’s fitted in beautifully. He does our singing as our previous guy did, plays a nice lead and it’s a fun band. After 7 and a half years we’re still laughing and joking on the stand and it’s good, we don’t grate on each other and it’s smashing.

 

Do you know Alex Revell, lives down in Cornwall?

 

Yes, he’s not doing so much these days, but yes he often drops by and pops his clarinet down by the side of the bandstand and says “Can I do a couple of numbers later on?”. He’s been around for so bloody long hasn’t he? He was a name in the 50’s. He must have been playing 60 years, mind you I’ve been playing 55.

 

He was in Chris Barber’s original band.

 

That’s right. Before Chris went professional. Have you interviewed him?

 

Yes. In this very seat. Ha ha.

 

Alex is an amazing guy. He doesn’t like microphones and when you listen to him you know why. He’s only a little fellow but the volume he gets out of his clarinet is superb. He plays it immaculately, he’s a very, very good instrumentalist.