Les Muscutt

So what got you interested in New Orleans music in the first place?

 

Just like a lot of sort of college students at the time, we were starting to listen to Traditional Jazz from Ken Colyer, Chris Barber, people like that and we were, you know, first of all fans and then when I started playing it was half and half, half being a fan of the music and half trying to play it because I liked it.

 

How old are you Les?

 

I'm 72, I was born in ’41.

 

And is banjo your first instrument?

 

Actually no, the first two instruments I got, an uncle of mine gave me a banjo and a guitar at the same time so I played one for a few weeks, got disgusted, played the other one for a few weeks and got disgusted so I always actually played both. Just equally as badly, or equally as well!

 

So whereabouts in Essex are you from?

 

I was born in Barrow-in-Furness but my family moved back to East Ham when I was 5. So I grew up in East Ham, I went to senior school in East Ham and I did about a year in East Ham Technical College which was about the time I started playing.

 

What kind of clubs were around in those days, Jazz-wise?

 

Well they weren’t so much steady clubs as, say a lot of stuff was word of mouth, you know, “Ken Colyer's playing in Chigwell” or something like that and the word would get around and either it would be correct information and you'd have a good time and the band would show up or it wouldn’t be but they weren’t organised clubs as such, they were almost always pubs, you know, service men’s halls and things like that. There weren’t any organised clubs, the only ones that I knew of were in the West End.

 

So who did you play for to start with?

 

You know I can't remember the name of the first guy that I worked with, but one time, just before I went to technical college, I got a knock on the door and this young man said “I understand you play banjo” and I said “I understand I own one!” and he said “Well we're forming a rehearsal band and we’re not very good either, so you'll be right at home”. But I honestly can't remember his name, I wish I could because he was partly responsible for getting me started, but whatever the name of the band was – and it was more of a rehearsal band than anything – I followed Fred Eatherton into the band as I'd sort of inherited his chord book and stuff, so he would probably remember the name – or he might not either!

 

Oh I see, yes.

 

But anyway, that was my early connection with Fred is that he had just stopped rehearsing or playing with the band when I joined them. I think the whole time we used to rehearse once a week in a school in East Ham, you know we had one room in a school we rented in the evening and we did it once a week I think, and I think the whole time we had our little band formed I think we did one gig, in a church hall or something and I can't even remember whether we got paid or not. It didn’t last very long, but Johnny Beecham was also in that band on and off.

 

So where did you go from there?

 

From there I did lots of…see most of the bands we played with were kind of pick-up bands, someone would say “We need a band for Thursday night. Can you play, can you play...” and it would often be people you either knew or had never played with before. And these would be mostly a pub job or something like that, but nothing really organised and we were also doing a lot of Skiffley stuff at the time too, so almost all of the people that played guitar and banjo, bass that kind of thing also played in Skiffle groups, but again not many of them were that organised, it was just “Oh we've got a job at a pub” and it would last for 6 weeks or 6 months or something like that. But it would be strictly a one night a week thing, it wouldn’t be, you know, you wouldn’t be a professional band type deal. The first professional band that…I mean the first time I started getting paid to play at a club was the Cellar Club in Ilford, in Little Ilford Lane. And I played there with a band, lead by a piano player called George Perry and George had a fairly good band including me and I know Johnny Beecham was in the band and Mike Cotton was in the band too. I can't remember which way round it worked, but Mike Cotton played with that band for a while and so did a guy called Gerry Ingram. They both played trumpet so they wouldn’t have played at the same time, but I can't remember whether Gerry replaced Mike Cotton or vice-versa.

 

Can you remember what year it was when you first started playing with George Perry?

 

It would have to be sort of ’57, ’58, something like that, or around the time the Cellar opened. It hadn’t been open very long when we started playing there.

 

Yes, because I believe George Tidiman told me that he used to play there at some point as well with his…well I don’t know which band it would have been in those days, but…

 

Well the other band…we played a lot – when I say a lot it might have been twice a week or something – and the other band that played there was The Whitebridge Band.

 

Oh that was George Tidiman’s band, yes.

 

Okay, I knew one or two people in the Whitebridge Band but didn’t necessarily know their names or play with any of them. The only one I played with fairly often was Chris Marchant.

 

Oh yes, the drummer.

 

Yeah he was in the Whitebridge Band. There was also a club or pub down the street known as the Whitebridge Hotel or something and that’s where they got their name from, but they also played the Cellar Club.

 

And how long did you play with George Perry for?

 

Probably best part of a year and a half. I'm not absolutely sure. Sometimes it seems like a long time and it wasn’t and vice-versa. But it was a fairly good band. In those days the ideal band was one that sounded closes to George Lewis or Bunk Johnson and all the bands pretty much that were popular at the time were the same. So there wasn’t a great deal to choose between the bands stylistically, it was just a case of how far advanced they were.

 

Yes that’s right, because there were so many bands springing up all the way through the 50's.

 

Yeah I played with lots of them, at different times, but there was another guy – again I can't remember his name – there was a tall guy I played with a lot whose nickname was 'Kinklets', like the tune, and his name was Tony something, he was very tall, had a beard and tried to talk and play like Ken Colyer. We did a lot of gigs in Essex with him, but unless you can find somebody that knows, I've been racking my brain for years trying to remember his real name and I can't because everyone just called him Kinklets. Oh and he wore a deerstalker hat and being rather tall and with a beard he kind of stood out a bit! Kinklets – I think that was his favourite tune or something, I don't know.

 

Right, right. So while you were playing for George Perry were you doing any other bands at that time?

 

Yes I would have been but they wouldn’t have been sort of name bands, it would have been pick-up bands with people from bands like the Whitebridge and similar bands that would just have a gig or I'd be filling in if the banjo player was unavailable or sick or something, most of it was sort of pick-up bands, in fact George Perry’s band was the nearest thing I got to play with an organised band.

 

I see, so where did you go after leaving George Perry?

 

After that I got a job at Dobell’s Jazz Record shop in London. I worked there on and off and it was a great job because I could take off any time to do gigs, almost all the people that worked in Dobell's at that time were musicians, so even if I had a job that lasted two or three weeks or something I would have a job to go to when I came back so it was a very, very good job. I mean it was very handy to have, and the first really professional band I played with – I know I was working at Dobell’s at the time – was with Nat Gonella’s band. He had a 2 or 3 week tour and he had just reformed the band having not had one since just at the end of the 2nd World War kind of. I did a 2 or 3 week tour with him.

 

Oh did you? That was the Georgians was it?

 

Yeah. The only person I remember in the band, other than Nat was Bobby Mickleborough the trombone player. He was in the band and I think it was Ian Christie on clarinet, but I could be wrong. But anyway I played with that band for 2 or 3 weeks, so what happened was while I was based in Dobell’s I used to be able to fill in for people, like for instance a friend of mine, Tony Pitts, a guitar player was leaving Alex Welch and he had to give him 2 weeks notice before he joined Acker Bilk so I did 2 weeks with Acker Bilk until Tony could take the job over, and it was just the fact that I was always available that I did so many gigs with various bands. Ken Simms was another band I played with quite often, and then later on I joined the band more permanently, but this was about ’61, ’62, I joined Terry Pitts’ band and Terry Pitts had been…Cy Laurie had quit playing and sort of dissolved his band and Terry Pitts took over, so that was the leftovers of the Cy Laurie band. And I played with Terry for probably a year, year and a half. We did gigs in Germany and stuff as well so it was really big time. After that I played with the Clyde Valley Stompers for a year, but that was after – again it was lead by a guy called Roy Peller at the time where the original band had broken up and they just kept the name going. Like you can still go and hear a Glenn Miller band or something. We were a sort of fake Clyde Valley Band, but we did quite well, did radio broadcasts and things like that.

 

Where were Clyde Valley based?

 

When I worked with them we were based in London. Ian Menzies or whatever you want to call him had given the name to an agent called Lyn Dutton and all the bands worked for Lyn Dutton at one time or another.

 

So where did you go from Terry Pitts then?

 

Well a variety of bands, probably after that I worked with Clinton Ford, he had his own band for a while. I worked with him for about a year, maybe a little bit more but we did a lot of BBC work. We had a one day a week broadcast and that came out on a Wednesday or something and that would be…it wasn’t live but it was pre-taped live, Clinton would have a guest singer and we would back the guest singer and Clinton would do some of our own. The band was actually lead by a guy called Charlie Gall, he was the band leader. And then briefly the only other names I can think of were Bruce Turner I worked with for a few weeks and Mick Mulligan I worked with for a few weeks. What had happened was Mick Mulligan had an agent called Jim Godbolt and Jim was having a hard time booking his bands because they didn’t have banjo, so I was the designated banjo player for a couple of weeks. At the time I was living in Soho so I was living across the street from Mick Mulligan anyway. And then the same agent, I worked with Bruce Turner for a while because his piano player had left to do a steady job somewhere and I filled in on guitar for a couple of weeks, but it was rather nice because on the tour with Bruce Turner I got to play with Red Allen who was always one of my favourite trumpet players anyway, from New Orleans.

 

Classic, Red Allen, yes.

 

Well I was lucky to be with Bruce Turner at the right time.

 

So you didn’t do a stint with the Mike Cotton Sound then?

 

Yeah, again that was right before I came to the States so that would have been ’63, ’64.

 

Oh you left for the States as early as that did you?

 

Yes I left in December ’66 going into ’67.

 

Didn’t you play with – weren’t you in a band with Diz Dizley as well?

 

Yeah but again it was just one of those pick-up situations. I played with him a lot but they were generally little pub, restaurant and club jobs that he would organise and whoever was available at the time it would either be me or a good guitar player called Danny Purssford or another guitar player called Neville Scrimshire. And so it would be one of the three of us, or possibly Tony Pitt if he wasn’t working with Acker Bilk or someone. So the Diz Dizley thing was never an organised band, we pretended we were but it was a day-to-day type of thing, whoever was available. The other thing, I did a lot of the Ken Colyer all-nighters because it was supposed to be Diz Dizley and Ian Wheeler and Lenny Hastings on drums and half of the time Diz either got drunk or got trapped in Manchester or somewhere, and since I lived down the street I would end up playing the all-nighters at Colyer’s. I mean that happened fairly often.

 

When were they?

 

About the same time as the…it would be before the Mike Cotton stuff, so it would be…yeah ’62,’63,’64.

 

What an experience.

 

The biggest disappointment, we played the 51, we all called it the Colyer club, we played the 51 Club and everyone from the Louis Armstrong band that was in town came and sat in except Louis Armstrong because he was doing an interview thing at the BBC or something, and so although I'd seen the concert that night I was looking forward to hopefully him coming down and playing but he got delayed with some kind of interview thing, radio show.

 

So joining the Mike Cotton Sound, that must have been very unusual for you, because up until that point you'd been playing New Orleans Jazz hadn’t you?

 

Yes, but that was the same with all the Mike Cotton thing, the whole band had been Traditional Jazz players, it's just that the Traditional Jazz market was falling off, which was unfortunate because most of the traditional bands were just starting to get good and market started dropping off for that, although a lot of people get the wrong impression about the whole situation, you know, like in Essex and places like that. What actually happened was it was mostly dancers and if you stopped the dancers and asked them what band’s playing tonight they wouldn’t know. You know they went there to dance and a handful of us would be there to listen to the band. And so when people talk about the old days and Jazz it’s as though everyone went to see Ken Colyer or Chris Barber or whoever and it was actually 90% were dancers and the other 10% or whatever were Jazz fans. Which is what hurt when the Jazz clubs got smaller and you went to more pub situations you had people actually there listening to the music and no dancers any more because as musicians when we were playing we thought the dancers were the enemy! Because you had to watch out they didn’t hit your trombone and you know fall in the drum kit drunk or something, that was for us to do.

 

You must have fed off the energy of the dancers though, all the same.

 

Oh yeah, if they were in a good mood then they didn’t really care what you played, it was just getting the right tempos and things, and some band leaders were good at that and some weren’t. But the idea of everyone following around because it’s Humphrey Lyttelton or it's this band or that band – it was in large part fuelled by dancers, not if you would have been relying on Jazz fans we would have starved to death.

 

I mean that’s really the same case with all scenes that have dancers, and although it wouldn’t be a scene you would be familiar with, you know, even things like Salsa or the 40’s scene where people can Lindy Hop.

 

Yes, it’s the style of the music that the kids like to dance to and you know the name of the band leader or singer or whatever is not that important.

 

No as long as they’ve got the right tempo, yes.

 

We’d like to think we’re important but not always the case. Anyway when I came to the States I did mostly banjo clubs at first, there were a lot of banjo clubs that are hard to explain but they were sort of striped shirts and straw hats and peanuts on the floor and everyone doing sing-a-long tunes you know, Roll Out The Barrel and that type of stuff. And I did that for a couple of years before I came to New Orleans, I mean I'd played all over the States, mostly east coast and I'd got a 6 month contract to do the same thing in New Orleans playing with a beer & peanuts type band and when that folded up I started working with Preservation Hall-type bands and stuff, just sort of never looked back from there.

 

It’s incredible, from what I understand you have done an enormous amount for New Orleans Jazz out there and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth but I understand that you went searching out some of the original people and got them, got recording with those people and gigging.

 

Yes, well some of that’s true. It was more me sort of keeping working more than anything. One of the things in New Orleans, unlike a lot of other towns, is that the other musicians are very accepting of outsiders, so if you can play they just accept you, they don’t worry about where you came from or anything. I never had a problem with anybody, they would hire you for the job and you would play. There wasn’t any discrimination as far as, you know, “You were from out of town” or “You weren't from New Orleans”. It was never a problem – at least for me.

 

Were some of these old boys shocked that you knew who they were when you found them?

 

Almost all of them, yes. I mean almost all of them I'd heard of through the grapevine before I got to work with them, but we did some records in the ‘70s with 504 Records which was owned by Mike Dine and we did just about all the people that were playing at Preservation Hall at that time. We got most of them on record.

 

Can you think of any names off-hand?

 

Well Wendell Eugene who’s still around, I did his first record, I was partly involved in it, and there was saxophone player called Ernest Poree who I worked with a lot. Who else, Albert Walters, cornet player, Raymond Burt, clarinet player, Jeanette Kimble I worked with a lot, a really good piano player. Chester Zardis, Chester Jones, I just forget so many of the names now, you know, it was more like a working situation and there was another place that was very good other than Preservation Hall, Dixieland Hall was very good, they had two bands that played. It would either be Louis Cottrell’s band, who I recorded with, or it would be Papa French’s band, and so if I had a night off I would probably be at Dixieland Hall or at Preservation Hall, seeing, you know, just as a fan.

 

You've really lived the dream haven’t you?

 

Yes, I never really thought about it. It was just a sort of day-to-day thing you know.

 

So when you went to the States then you didn’t go over there on a mission as it were.

 

No, it was all being in the right place at the right time more than anything.

 

You had a feeling it was…that was you going to Mecca?

 

No I wasn’t a missionary, you know! I'm not knocking them, it just didn’t work that way for me. I just happened to get a 6 month contract in New Orleans and I thought that’ll be nice and then when I got here I started checking up on some musicians that I knew and within a short time I was working with most of them. I worked with Kid Sheik a lot, he was one of the people I worked with a lot.

 

You've just achieved an enormous amount haven’t you, it's quite incredible.

 

A lot of it was happenstance rather than “I'm on a mission, this is what I'm gonna do”.

 

Amazing, absolutely amazing.

 

I've worked with Doc Cheatham a lot, who’s not from New Orleans but worked a lot in New Orleans. And we ended up winning a Grammy with him, there was a record called ‘Doc and Nicholas’ – Nicholas Peyton who was a local trumpet player and Doc Cheatham and, you know, sort of 8-piece band and we got nominated for 2 Grammy’s and won one of them. That was sort of 1997, ’98 something like that.

 

That’s absolutely incredible. Were you around when the Frog Island Jazz Band came over there a few times?

 

Yes I was, and I managed to see them a couple of times.

 

How did that feel, seeing them come over?

 

Well there had been other bands that did essentially the same thing, a lot of bands from Germany and Holland and whatever. There’s a place called Fritzel’s on Bourbon Street where a lot of the bands can work when they’re visiting New Orleans and it’s one of the places I always hung out so that would be one of the places I saw the Frog Island. But I knew most of the Frog Island band just nodding acquaintance before I heard them because they’d all played with different bands when I was younger. I actually knew most of them. It’s at 700 block on Bourbon Street and they always have a trio or quartet in there, but during Jazz festival time and French Quarter festival time they have a lot of overseas bands playing there, bands like the Frog Island.

 

I see. I saw the front page of the New Orleans Times or something where Frog Island were on the front page of it. It was the day after one of the Apollo’s blew up and that ended up being on page 3 and Frog Island were on the front page! I've seen it!

 

It was a great band, I enjoyed it.

 

They are very serious about what they do aren’t they? So they care. Is there anything else we need to talk about Les?

 

Not that I can think of, the only thing as far as I’m concerned is that I was always more of a fan than a musician. I mean obviously I tried to play the best I could for whatever situation or whatever kind of band but it was the love of the music as a whole, you know, it was just nice to get paid to do what you would have been screwing around with anyway.

 

And are you still very busy now?

 

No, I haven’t played in 4 or 5 years. I had real problems with my fingers and my playing was getting worse and worse, medical problem you know, and about 4 or 5 years ago I just said “I'm going to do New Year’s Eve and that’s it, I quit”. Because it was getting painful to listen to, so I figured I'd quit while I could still play something and fool enough people. But I don’t really miss the playing side of things, just the comradery, whatever you want to call it, of other musicians.