John Petters

John you’ve been asked this a million times of course but I need to go right back to the beginning of when you first got into Jazz. What made you take up the drums, what that your first instrument?

Yes, actually I’d flirted with soprano saxophone but couldn’t do that, but not in any way seriously. Well it goes back to as long as I can remember, and it goes back to my Granddad’s house in Leyton and he had a radiogram and I was fascinated with watching 78 records and that sort of thing from probably 18 months old. Right back as early as you can get.

Because you’re 60 aren’t you?(Jan '14)

Yes, I’m 60. I was born in ’53. So they had a variety of different records, there were obviously some pop things there which were rock & roll thing, because my uncles lived with my grandparents still and so they had Elvis Presley and I heard Buddy Holly there and people like that. And other things, older styles of music that my granddad had had. But one of the 78’s they had was Louis’ mid-50’s recording of Basin Street Blues which was what they’d used in the Glenn Miller story and in the movie it was Gene Krupa on drums but on the recording I learned later it was Kenny John. I was always amazed by this drum solo, you played the first side of the 78 and then you got the drum break into the double tempo, so that was my earliest recollection of hearing any Jazz whatsoever, so that goes way way back. As I got older I used to – instead of having necessarily lots of toys, people would buy me old gramophones and 78 records! And I used to go round junk shops and everything as a kid and pick things up, so in amongst that I heard a recording by the Ted Lewis Band which I had on an old Columbia 78 which I think was Lewisada Blues, something like that, and I liked that because it sort of had some interesting sounds in it and I later discovered – much, much later – that it was Muggsy Spanier and George Brunies, so there was another early lead to Jazz. I suppose the sort of influence George Formby comes in there because I had George Formby 78's as well which are actually quite jazzy and I had a His Master’s Voice of Bunk Johnson’s New Orleans Band doing the Saints and Darktown Strutters Ball. So I was sort of getting fed this sort of stuff, there was a Kid Ory 78 on Good Time Jazz and there was the Firehouse Five and that sort of thing.

That must have been hard to get hold of in the UK in those days I would have thought.

Well I think a lot of these things were reissued because of the popularity and the revival, so for example, the Bunk thing was on His Masters Voice, it was commercially pressed probably because Ken Colyer and people like that were happening, they’d been recorded in '44 or '45 for Bill Russell who rediscovered Bunk and recorded him for his American music label, wanted to get the band wider known, so they did I dunno two sessions, one for Decca and one for Victor. Well Victor sessions came out over here on His Master’s Voice. So they were the early records I heard, and also of course I had a lot of Bing Crosby 78's, and Glenn Miller 78's which were around.  I remember probably going back to around 1960 when I lived in Barking, there was a record shop there – and this was just at the time when 78's were being stopped, and they were selling off their 78s – and I remember clearly going in and buying the 78 of Pennsylvania 65000 which was coupled with Rugcutter’s Swing. So that’s another sort of milestone. I moved to Harlow in 1962, by that time I was very much into Rock and Roll, going back to the influences I’d heard, Buddy Holly was a big thing for me and then gradually Little Richard and Elvis and that sort of thing. So I bought some of the Beatles records and I was sort of interested in what was going on, but the earlier stuff appealed more to me.

As the 60’s progressed and the popular music seemed to decline to my ears I started looking for something else and a couple of friends had also been playing Glenn Miller records – a young chap called Dave Bondy, who I was at school with, he was desperate to play and he played the saxophone, clarinet and drums, but he sort of didn’t have a great deal of success at it but he was a very good musical arranger and writer. We started investigating this sort of stuff, so we’re looking at getting towards the tail end of the 60’s. Then the next key thing, BBC1 ran a series of Crosby films on Sunday afternoons, one of them was called Rhythm on the River which had Wingy Manone’s Band in it and this was New Orleans music, or Dixieland music and I thought ‘wow’! And of course it was familiar because I’d heard it on my 78s, so next day I went up to the town centre in Harlow, I was in Smiths or whatever it was then and looked through the Jazz rack and I found this LP called New Orleans Jazz Men, Kid Ory, I recognised that name, George Lewis who I’d never heard of before and Papa Celestin who I’d never heard of before. I paid my 12’6d, took it home and played it and thought that’s it you know, I love this!

Your Eureka moment!

My Eureka moment! I forgot to mention that one of the 78's I had as a kid was Pee Wee Hunt’s 12th St Rag, so the next week I found that album on a Music For Pleasure album and I bought that, of course that was that. I found an album by Harry Roy with the early 30's recordings and I bought that and I just started buying anything that was in the Jazz rack. So over a period I got Stan Kenton and sort of various other more modern styles of Jazz. My friend Dave, who always had a much broader musical variety of stuff that he liked, was hearing all sorts of stuff so he was listening to Parker and Gillespie, Eric Dolphy and people like that, and Miles Davis started messing around with his electronic music then so he was buying all those albums. The other key thing there is that my Uncle Mick, when I was growing up, had a drum kit and this was at my grandparent’s house and he was buying Jazz records and I would listen to his Jazz records. So he had some Gene Krupa records and he had Buddy Rich King’s Of Percussion which was Krupa, Rich and Bellson. So I was familiar with all those names, he also had Art Blakey records, Sandy Nelson records, Let There Be Drums and all that sort of stuff, and so you know it was quite an odd sort of tie up and I used to sit at Mick’s drums and try and play them and not succeed and Mick had had lessons at the 'Talk Of The Town' but never did anything with it, he never played any gigs, it was purely a thing. He got married and that was more or less the end of his playing. So you know I got all these sort of roots, so getting along with Dave Bondy I started bashing his drum kit and my Uncle Mick had given my younger brother Stephen his old drum kit when he got a new one, so we had the drums in the house at Harlow, so I got them out and just started messing around with them and listening to the records and trying to work out what was going on. Dave Bondy got hold of Krupa’s Drumming Man album from the 56 Verve sessions, amazing stuff, and he also then along the way got the 1938 Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall Concert.

Now in about '71 we started going off to see concerts so I saw Benny Goodman with his British orchestra at the Albert Hall and the next year we saw it with a small group, I think Zoot Sims was with him on one occasion and Al Klink was with him on another and an Anglo-American rhythm section and I thought that was great and I bought the album Benny Goodman Today I think it was called and thought it was marvellous and then Dave said yeah but you wanna hear this and he played me the Carnegie Hall thing and I realised that Gene Krupa had resonances for me from way way back. And that really started me on that route.

Was Gene Krupa on the Benny Goodman session at Carnegie Hall?

The famous 1938 recording yes, where there’s the 12 minute long Sing Sing Sing. So what struck me about Gene’s playing was that it was drum-oriented, you know, he was playing the drums as opposed to playing the cymbals, so you know you’re got all these press rolls and that sort of thing, very exciting, lots of rimshots and that sort of thing, and of course I heard this in some of the New Orleans recordings that I’d by that time started to get so I’d heard Zutty Singleton and I’d got some of the, I’d bought a sampler Jazz in Black and White that had come out on RCA Victor in the early 70’s and it was a whole series they’d reissued – their back catalogue, but they had a sampler and on this sampler – again – was a Krupa swing band from about 35 doing I Hope Gabriel Likes My Music. Which was a wonderful all-star band with Roy Eldridge and Benny Goodman and Chu Berry as the front line. It was a classic track. Also Bix was on there and I think that was the first time I heard Bix on – what did they do – San, small group from the Whiteman band, there was a Bechet/Ladnier track from 1932 called Sweetie Dear which was absolutely incredible and various other things. But most importantly Jelly Roll Morton’s Black Bottom Stomp, so that was the first time I’d heard Jelly. So this was all a wonderful opening up experience to this mysterious world of early Jazz.

 I’d started to get the Louis Armstrong Hot Five’s, I bought the Django Reinhardt’s on Ace of Clubs LPs, I’d heard Humph play Bechet on Best of Jazz and I thought “Wow this is amazing”, so the next day I went to the local record shop and I said “What have you got by Sidney Bechet?”, and they said “Who?”! So they looked at their catalogue and they ordered specially for me his Jazz Classics’s on Blue Note, in it came and I took it home and that blew me away and there was one track on there called Weary Blues which was to have a bit of significance for a big event later on when I worked with Art Hodes. I was struck by this because the band – it was just the ensemble string of solos and then you got to this piano which started off reasonably sedately and then ended up as a rolling boogie, so that was the first time I heard Art Hodes play. So I was discovering all of this music, and by that time we’re talking about 73-ish or there abouts.

So you were 20 and you still hadn’t played drums at that point?

I starting messing around when I was 19.

Did you have lessons or anything?

No, didn’t want lessons, because I’d started reading the books. I don’t mean the drum books, I mean the books about the romantic notions of early Jazz men teaching themselves and not needing to have formal lessons, not learning to find out, you just make your own way, and I thought then - you know I came to regret that later on trying to undo all that - that that was the way forward. And I’d read a book about the original Dixieland Jazz Band and read some of the other classic books, Marshall Stern’s 'Story Of Jazz' and all of these things, so I was actually interested in the whole thing. We’d started going to local band gigs as well. What was the name of that place, above a pub called 'The Painted Lady', and they used to run a Jazz club there and we saw the Trad bands that were on the circuit. Of varying quality, now I saw a band called Johnny Bastable’s Chosen Six, which was the remnants of the Ken Colyer Band as was, and the drummer there was Malc Murphy who played a vintage kit, old-style drums, you know. And I thought “Wow, this is great”, you know, I like this. And then we saw Max Collie’s Rhythm Aces and this is quite key because Max’s band then were somewhat different to the other bands that were on the scene, Max played what you would call an aggressive form of New Orleans Jazz, the musicians were younger than most of the other bands that were around then and they were quite loud in actual fact which is a thing I don’t necessarily agree with these days. But again what struck me was the rhythm and the drummer was Ron Mackay, an amazing drummer, he’d got an incredible pedigree, he’d been on Acker’s records, you know, when Acker was having the hits and that sort of thing, and he had got this New Orleans feel to it – you know driving, lots of press rolls, block, rims and that, and when he played ride it sounded like the records that I’d heard, whereas a lot of the bands I heard the drummers sounded fairly stiff and fairly uninspiring in that respect. We saw Ken Colyer as well, and Ken Colyer had Colin Bowden with him and that was another eye-opener because again this was the authentic sound, and I think I formed the opinion then – and I still hold to that these days – that there were two outstanding drummers Europe produced playing the early styles who I would go to pay money to hear any time and that was Colin and Ron. Colin was much more based on the Baby Dodds style than Ron, both of them were very helpful to me as a nuisance shall we say, as someone that was young and plaguing them for information, you’ve seen it at your own gigs. Colin still is, you know, he’s 81 now and I book him to do my festivals and it’s always an education watching him and talking to him and that sort of thing. So that I heard, so I started sort of modelling my style on those New Orleans type of players, on that New Orleans record that I bought first of all – Papa Celestine’s Band – there was a drummer called Black Happy Goldston, no-one knows, except the die-hard New Orleans aficionados, but his tradition goes back to the brass bands in New Orleans so there were no cymbals at all, it was all press rolls on the snare drum and there was a lot of different things he would do, he would get sort of shuffle beats going and when he soloed they were wonderful melodic press roll statements. I learned later exactly what technique he was using lots of 5-stroke rolls and things like that, and then after the solo he would just whack the cymbal on the off-beat for the out chorus. You know, very rudimentary but rudimentary is right because the rudiments were quite right that he was playing. So that was all happening. Dave Bondy got the 1936 recordings of the original Dixieland Jazz Band which was recorded almost in Hi Fi, and I could hear what Tony Sbarbaro was doing, again very crisp press rolls and interesting things so he became one of my enthusiasms. So I was leaning towards playing that early style, very drum orientated. Early 1972/73 I went back to college, Harlow Tech, and Dave was there with me, and we found another trumpet player, a young student that was there, and I had another friend of mine, Keith Donald who’d just started to take up electric bass at that time and Keith was a natural musician. To this day he knows nothing about the techniques of music or anything like that, if you put a chord chart up in front of him he could probably work it out, but he’s just got such an uncanny natural ear, he can hear anything, play it through once and he’s got it. He was playing bass guitar at the time and I think there was a guitar player as well at the time that was there, and we started messing around in the music rooms at Harlow Tech at lunchtime, and then we started playing in the Refectory for the students and that sort of thing. I think we’ve got some recordings of it somewhere, I mean it sounds awful now, dreadful. As we became more proficient it started to sound better and Dave actually said to me, why are you wasting your time at college, go off and be a musician if that’s what you want to do, and that’s what I did. I can remember we were going to see the Original East Side Stompers regularly on Tuesday nights at the Three Rabbits and Manor Park and Bill Brunskill was playing trumpet with them and you know Bill is one of those figures that looms high in the Trad Jazz history in the UK but never really got international recognition. 

At that time I was competent enough to be allowed to sit in, and Bill said that he would help me out if I needed any help with musicians and I went pounding the streets of east London looking for a gig for this band that I hadn’t got. And I’d been playing in Harlow with some Jazz and dance band musicians and I’d been along to the Railway Hotel in Bishop’s Stortford – and this is the other key sort of thing that got both Keith and myself started – and Martin Taylor, the world famous guitarist – a chap called Bill Cornell, drummer, who is still playing now, he’s in his 80’s and he was at my gig in Harlow last night, he ran a jam session at the Railway Hotel once a month for all the Jazz musicians to come along and have blow. Keith and I went along, Dave Bondy, and we got to sit in and play, so there’s our first real experience of playing with live musicians. I’d also found a band called the New Eureka Stompers who came to Harlow and we went along to that and I met a drummer called Chris Hyde who let me sit in with them as well. I don’t know what happened to him, whether he’s active now or still about, but we did that. The Railway Hotel in Stortford, I met up with a sax player called Len Sparks, a piano player called John Boumphrey and Derek Winter I think was going along to that on Vibes occasionally and lots of other…Terry Morrison was the trumpet player from Northern Ireland and reed player called Dickie Bird who lived in Ongar. I got this little band together, we played, we just used to use it as a rehearsal at our parish hall at Holy Cross Church in Harlow. We did a couple of things in Harlow Market Place in that time, there’s some photographs of those that we’ve still got. But that wasn’t gonna go anywhere really, so I wanted to do something that was more New Orleans so eventually I found a pub called The Plough in Little Ilford Lane in Ilford and I got 28 quid for a Thursday night for a 7-piece band. Wonderful! And I asked Len Sparks to play on reeds and Bill Brunskill agreed to do it on trumpet and he brought a trombone player with him – Jim Gunton. And he knew a piano player who lived in Harlow who used to work with Bill’s band called Arthur Risk, so he did it and…who did we have on banjo..? Could have been Colin Dyer, a friend of mine who’d taken up the banjo as well. And I think Keith was on bass. So maybe not Keith by then because he’d possibly gone off to get married, it’s a bit vague but it doesn’t matter anyway. So we started and that was my first actual paid gig. We lasted for – I don't know – several weeks.

What did you call the band?

Oh, um, what did I call that band….The next band I had was called the New Dixie Syncopators. It might just have been under my name, I’d need to check that! I haven’t even thought about this for years, you know, sort of in the recesses of my memory. There is a recording of it somewhere, because I used to record it on an open reel tape just to see how awful it sounded. So that was that. Then next I found a pub called the Essex Skipper in Harlow, and that’s when things really started to take off really because Bill Brunskill couldn’t do it because he had a residency and for various reasons the other musicians couldn’t do it, or most of them couldn’t do it, and Bill had given me the phone number of a cornet player called Ken Sims, Ken had been a pro with Acker’s band in the late 50s when they were having the hit records and he agreed to come along and do it. So I had him – oh and that’s right, the first couple of gigs, I’d met the Savoy Jazz Band that Barry Palser ran in Cambridge and I’d sat in with them at the Railway Hotel in Cambridge and Dave Barrett was the trumpet player and Dave did the first couple, and I think he introduced me to a clarinet player called Dave Bailey who was then living in Cambridge. And then for some reason Dave couldn’t do it and Ken Sims came in and Ken and Dave hit it off, you know, it was like fireworks, they were both listening musicians and it just took off. We had a trombonist called Gordon McKay from Saffron Walden and by that time we’d found a banjo player called Doug Boyter from Hertford and I think Arthur Risk did the piano for the first bit, then Dave Arlette came in. And that was starting to develop into quite a tight New Orleans type sound and I was interested in playing the classic Jazz repertoire of Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, that sort of stuff. Ken at that time took me aside and he said that he thought I’d got some talent, and he said “You’re too loud and too busy!” And he said “Go and listen to recordings of the black bands, Oliver, Louis, Jelly, Fats Waller, Count Basie and all that. Don’t listen to any white Jazz, just listen to the black bands” and to a degree I took that advice, but I’d also of course discovered Krupa and that was where I really wanted to be at that time, so I was taking all of this in and so-on but the Essex Skipper lasted for a while and then came to a grinding halt. Then we got a gig in Guernsey, I can't remember how that occurred, it might have been through an agent or something like that, it was a place called White Woods, and they put Jazz bands on for a week. I’d met a young Ragtime player called John Gill who was a phenomenal technician, he wasn’t particularly good in a band context, like a lot of the Ragtime players you know, they were great soloists but their actual timekeeping wasn’t wonderful from an ensemble point of view. So he started working with me and we had a residency at the Wake Arms in Epping, just south of Epping, and with lots of different people in and out of that band you know, work commitments and that sort of thing, so I found a trumpet player called Vic Roberts, who was quite elderly, he was from the Essex area, I think Southend way, and I would assume he’s probably gone now, he’s probably in his late 50’s then, which was years ago. I met my wife there because they’d been out on a trip and her father had broken down and found this pub and the music, so she came along and she took up bass and again like Keith was quite a natural musician. Keith, by the time, had gone off and got married and was doing dance band stuff and that sort of thing so she came in to the band on bass eventually.

What is your wife’s name?

Tessa. And in late '77 we did the first recording which was called Red Hot Jazz which was recorded in Ted Taylor’s studio in Mottingham. For that - Ken Sims, Len Baldwin on trombone, Eddie Brockwell on clarinet, John Gill on piano and Doug Boyter on banjo and my brother-in-law Neil, we had to overdub a couple of the tracks because John Gil insisted that he wanted to record his three solo pieces first and then polished off a bottle of scotch! And you know some of the stuff we did after that was just unusable! And I always remember we did Snake Rag and there are three different parts to Snake Rag and John went into the wrong sequence, he didn’t realise this until we went back to mix it the following week or whatever. And Ted Taylor said “Don’t worry about that, I’ll dub in the chords”, so Ted dubbed in that bit, and when I played the final thing back to John I said “What do you think of your playing there?” and he said “Brilliant as ever!”. So that was that, and we pressed that privately and sold that, then we went off and did Guernsey again, this time just John Gill Tessa and I and various other things, and then Ken Sims got a residency at the 100 Club with his Dixie Kings and I went off and did that and Dave Bailey was in the band and you know there were some great sessions there. I remember we got £11 for a Saturday night at the 100 Club and we would normally play first and third sets and the so-called main band would be on after, so that lasted for a couple of years and then that was around the time that I’d got married and we’d bought, because I’d always been into electronics and radio and that sort of thing, and we bought a shop, a service bay in Harlow to do TV and audio repairs so I sort of became less busy with music for a couple of years and that wasn’t gonna go anywhere because technically all of my friends, my other radio amateur friends were far more skilled at the technical side of it than I was and really music is where I was heading. 

I got a call to go out to Munich in 1982 to play in a big beer garden called the Waldwirtschaft and we were playing to 5000 people, and by that time I’d developed enough technique to be able to do reasonable solos you know and that sort of thing. And I always found that regardless of how well the band played – and this is still true, you see it everywhere today – when the drummer does a solo, it doesn’t matter how bad it is, it will always get the people, and I discovered that Gene’s tom-tom things, like he did on Sing Sing Sing, that was always a crowd pleaser and the single triplet, fast roll triplet, because it’s visual you know. And I discovered also if I went round and played on the tables, round the glasses and ashtrays and that sort of thing, and if I stirred their beer with the stick the Germans used to go mad, yeah, they would send rounds of Apfelschnapps up, trays of Weissbeir and all that sort of thing! So that was good, and we did that for three weeks and that was a hell of an experience, because Monday to Friday we did 5.00 in the evening to 10.00, 20 mins on, 20 mins off, and you got a litre of beer each set and free food. Saturday you did 2pm until 10pm, same deal, and Sunday you did 11am until 10pm! So you can imagine! I came back with calluses where I’d been holding the sticks for so long, but it was such a great playing experience, I mean that’s what you need as a musician, you need that constant physical exercise on the limbs, well you will know that from playing yourself. So that was a big useful thing, we went back the year after, by this time - you’re looking at 1983- I’d decided that I wanted to go back to the sort of Swing Era. I’d come through the New Orleans thing and I’d got bored with it. I was knocked out by the whole Krupa thing and we found some young musicians, Julian Stringle and Pete Neighbour, and Derek Winter who was up sort of Bishop Stortford area played vibes, John Boumphrey on piano and we put together the first edition of the John Petters Swing Band, which I think first of all was Julian, Derek, John and my wife Tessa. And Peter Neighbour used to come in and we would have two reeds as well at times. We were doing the sort of Benny Goodman things, all that sort of Running Wild and all of that. So I was sort of specialising in the Krupa sort of thing, without the technique really to do it effectively. I could fake it – you know – which is what it was. So we got a break if you like, with Essex radio, Eddie Blackwell, and Eddie you know was a Jazz fan and he was Chief Exec of Essex radio, and used to put on broadcasts and sponsor concerts and we did the Towngate Theatre at Basildon which we recorded, and I think Maxine Daniels was on the bill then although we didn’t work with Maxine at that time. And we issued that as the second album, called Stealin’ Apples, which Derek did, it was just in a brown paper sleeve, a white unmarked label and that sort of thing and the swing band started to pick up gigs. Julian had played at Le Caveau de la Huchette in France and had an ‘in’ there, and we got a gig out there and we went out to France with the swing band and then we had the problems that some of them had day jobs and couldn’t do it, and all of this problem. But by that time my wife was expecting our first son, so she’d stopped playing by then, so Keith came back in on bass and we used various bass players because he had a day job, so we did Le Caveau de la Huchette some times and the Slow Club out there as well. So this is Benny Goodman music, hot swing, 1930’s, 1940’s, we played in the town park at Harlow, they used to have free concerts, and we did a festival there, amazing amount of people, there’s some photographs of that, I think I recorded that as well. We started playing at the Playhouse in Harlow, at Ted’s Wine Bar, and this was the first sort of, I would say, regular venue that I got involved in sort of promoting, although we got paid a fee, and it was up in the gods in the Playhouse, and that was with the swing band and that was quite successful to start with. Julian knew – or had played with Wild Bill Davison, and we got Wild Bill there and he played with the swing band.

He’d been over hadn’t he.

He’d been over, yeah. So that was the first time I’d met Bill and playing with someone of that calibre was another mind-blowing experience. Now the thing about Bill is that some of those early Blue Note records that I’d thought of Bechet with Art Hodes on them, Vol 2 of the album had the sessions with Wild Bill, Bechet and Hodes and these had been part of my Jazz formation so just sort of bear that in mind and that becomes relevant later. So that happened and then we started to – I met a lady called Gwen Main who again was a pivotal help in me organising and promoting Jazz, she’d recently retired and so had lots of time, and we were living in a one bedroom flat in a tower block in Harlow at the time and I was trying to sort of hussle gigs and we’d got a one year old, sort of yeah, it was around the time that David was born, and Gwen said well I’ve got a spare room in my house, you can use it as an office, and that’s all I thought that was going to be, and she’d found me – we were playing a place called the Poplar Kitten in Harlow, she’d seen it advertised in the paper and gone along and we had various other places that didn’t work either and wherever we turned up Gwen loved swing music and that sort of thing so she would attend. Anyway I though that’s great, got somewhere to work, but what I discovered about Gwen is that she’d got very good sales experience, and I’d already had some sales experience when I worked for another friend of mine, Jeff Harris, who had run his own business and I’d seen how business could work but Gwen took me that next step forward and she could actually sell sand to the Arabs basically! So we started doing that, then we found a venue called The Square which is an Essex County Council run youth venue in Harlow and I started to do – well they were weekly Jazz sessions which they had a budget for, and I was given a budget and I could book who I liked, so I started booking any visiting Americans that were over, and the named British Jazz musicians that were around.

Any form of Jazz?

Well I knew what I wanted to put on and I’d always had the view that if you were going to attract an audience you couldn’t mix the styles because the people that were into Modern Jazz would hate Trad and the Traddies would hate the Modern! So I always had a sort-of…it was always pre be-bop as far as I was concerned. I was still very much into the swing stuff then, but I realised that I wasn’t gonna be able to put that on every week so I started to put the more traditional players and realised that I’d been rather stupid to sort of move out of that area and just concentrate on the one thing. The one that I was least interested in really was playing with Ken Colyer, and I thought well, this is going to be boring because there won't be any drum solos and I used to like soloing and everything, and it’s all sit-down New Orleans music and that, so I wonder if I ought to book another drummer to do it, then I realised I needed the money! A great incentive! So anyway, I went along and met Ken.

Did you play with all the bands then?

I was the regular drummer there, I was putting musicians together.

Oh I see, so there was a resident band there?

Well, no, it was usually Keith, Donald and I that were the residents, we’d have all the rest of it would be put together to back them up, which is still how I work these days for the festivals and my Harlow gig. I booked Colyer and Dave Bailey the clarinet player and Les Handscombe and Tim Phillips, a young musician from Cambridge played banjo who also doubles on bass and drums, I still work with him now, and he was there, and I said to Ken, what sort of drums do you want behind you, expecting him to say, oh press rolls and that sort of thing, and he said “Swinging drums man”, he spoke with this sort of Norfolk/American accent! And that was fine, I thought wow, we played it and we actually recorded that gig, which came out on a CD later, and you know, I’m the weak link in that now because you know, I’m not that experienced in playing that style to that degree that I could now, but it still stood up and that was in interesting gig. We had people like Beryl Bryden that came along, and Beryl was completely over the top, she…I think the press release she sent me was something along the lines of ‘she’s fat, fortyish and about as glamorous as a slap with a wet haddock’ and I thought anyone that can allow that has got to be value for money! Beryl was a great entertainer, she wasn’t a Jazz singer.

Did she bring her washboard with her?

Yeah, yeah. She wasn’t a Blues singer, what Beryl was, was Music Hall. You know if you think about the Music Hall artists singing Jazz. So she became a regular visitor. Martin Litton I first worked with around that time, someone had told me about him, he was a young…Martin’s what…about 5 years younger than me, so in his early 20’s then. He was rooming with a chap called James Asman who ran James Asman’s records in London. And James had been a writer for the Record Mirror and had authored various books and he went back to the Nottingham Rhythm Club in the early days of the revival and knew George Webb and all this, so he was quite an influential character. He used to come with Martin on these gigs, so I got to know Jimmy quite well. So we had – they were regulars there – so we had George Chisholm, Monty Sunshine Terry Lightfoot, Ken Colyer, those were the sort of famous Brits if you like, Cy Laurie of course who lived in Essex and I did a lot of work with Cy and would do later as well. Eggy Ley came along and guested as well, Ron Weatherburn was on piano, who I’d met with Ken Sims’ band, Ron was from Dagenham, so there’s lots of Essex connections and that sort of thing. And then of course started to bring in the Americans. So we had Slim Gaillard and that was incredible.

He was living in London at that point wasn’t he.

Yeah, he was living in London. I don’t know how I got the first contact for him, I don’t remember that, anyway I remember we’d arranged to pick him up at Harlow Town Station and I went down there and there he was with his guitar, he was a huge man, great big beard and he wore a beret and everything. He could never remember names so I was his little drum buddy, Keith was his little bass buddy and all that. Wonderful entertainer and a great soloist, there was no slouching, he’d got this sort of charisma, most of it a web of lies, he claimed he was a bomber pilot in WWII and born somewhere obscure and, you know, just absolute nonsense! So anyway, that was that. Kenny Davern came over and we recorded with Kenny at The Square. Now Kenny was one of the real great American virtuoso Traditional Jazz clarinettists, younger than the first generation, so Kenny would have been in this 50s then and he was also very loud, didn’t like amplifiers or anything like that and when we had him at The Square he insisted that the PA be turned off. Essex Radio recorded which we issued, Eddie Blackwell gave me the Betamax master, it was recorded digitally, and we issued that on the album Live and Swinging and the second part of it was on Making Whoopee I think, it was on two CDs. I had Roger Nobes on vibes who been the drummer with Alex Welch, he’d been a very fine vibes player, Martin Litton and Keith was on that. At that same time in '85 I’d arranged to do some trio gigs with Kenny, with Martin Litton. We did the Festival Hall that used to put on Free Jazz there, oh what was the place at Greenwich – The Tramshed? We did about 7 or 8 gigs and they all went very well, because the other thing about Kenny, I’d not known of his name until I bought an album called Jazz At The New School which was the last recording that Eddie Condon did which had Wild Bill Davison and Kenny playing soprano then, Dick Welstood on piano and Gene Krupa on drums. This was recorded in 72 and it was a year before Krupa’s death and his drumming on it was still phenomenal, there was a track called Shimmy- Sha Wabble which was just a trio which just went mad – so anyway I knew what sort of thing Kenny was expecting, so the trio with Martin worked very well and I was playing my usual press roll stuff and all that sort of thing and James Asman said we ought to record it and we might be able to sell it to George Buck (Jazzology Records) in New Orleans if not we’ll just put it out as a cassette. So we arranged to go into the Pizza Express in Dean Street and did the recording. There was a thing about Kenny, I think he was always on edge when he was recording and the first thing he said was “You can cut that press roll crap out”, didn’t want any of that, just wanted me to play ride cymbal so my drumming on that isn't characteristic of what I would have normally sounded like. And he turned to Martin and he said “You can cut that lumpy Jelly-Roll shit as well”! So you can imagine the two young musicians with someone like that – that was rather, sort of a downer. When we did the live recording with the bigger band at Harlow which was, I think, the following week, or it might have been the other way round, we were playing our natural styles and it worked very very well. Well as it was Kenny was quite happy with the session, we got the money and that was that. So that was Kenny, and we did quite a few things with him after that. The next day after the recording at Pizza Express we’d had trouble with – we were doing Sometimes I’m Happy and there was a part, the penultimate chorus of the song, where Kenny and Martin were swapping twos and fours, and every time it got there something went wrong, and Dave Bennett who was recording it in Dean Street, he was wearing his headphones and he heard the door open upstairs and someone start to walk downstairs. Now we were in Take 7 so you can imagine how hard this was becoming and it was all going fine, so Dave Bennett got up to get them out and as he got up he tripped over his headphone lead, pulled the headphone jack out, there’s a howl of feedback and Kenny put his clarinet down and said “That sure as hell got all fucked up”. Next day we were back at the Royal Festival Hall and it was back to how it had been before, we were playing what we were playing and Kenny turned around to me and he says “Where’s goddamn numb nuts with his microphones now?”! So he had a total disrespect for anyone with a microphone! I brought Kenny – so we’re looking at 1985 – there was a lady that had got in touch, either Gwen had got in touch, or somehow we’d got in touch, I’ve forgotten her surname, her Christian name was Verna. She was involved in the shopping precinct in Basildon that had just been built and they wanted a programme of music on there, Jazz, and I got the job of organising it, and I ran a gig in one of the pubs in the area. So I brought Kenny to that pub and Cy Laurie did the gig with him as well, they’d not played together before. But the shopping precinct gigs were quite interesting because I brought Humph there, Terry Lightfoot, Monty Sunshine and George Chisholm and Ken Colyer, so we had a complete mix of styles. Alan Barnes did one and Alan did The Square a few times, because he’d been to music college with Martin Litton, that’s how I got to know Alan. Alan came and did one of the gigs there and I can remember also Dave Bailey was to do a trio with Martin Litton and myself and Martin managed to get himself on the wrong train and ended up in a siding at Tilbury! So we did the first set with just clarinet and drums! You can imagine what that sounded like! Along the line as well, you know, when we were at the Square, a little while before then when we were running the swing band we had a group of young dancers that used to follow us around and we did a programme, Eddie Blackwell, talking about various themes, music and dancing and that sort of thing and those dancers became the Jive Aces who are now doing lots of good things. So that’s where they started, they started listening to my swing band and they turned up at Harlow when I got Pete Neighbour and Julian back together last year, some of them came along to the gig and sat in with us, so that was great fun!

I used to see them jamming down Southend High Street.

That’s right because they’re all from Essex. And Pete the drummer used to come and talk to me, and they’ve done very well for themselves and they do a great job. So The Square went on for about 18 months, maybe two years, we had an outdoor festival there on I think June or July ’86 and we put it on at the outdoor pursuits centre which was out by the Moorhen in Harlow, and by the station and it absolutely tipped with rain, it poured, and we had to abandon it down there and move it into the square in the evening otherwise it would have got washed out, but we had George Webb and George at this time had retired from music and was running a pub at Stansted, Kings Arms, and he used to put on a monthly session there and I used to go and play drums, not every month, but certainly reasonably regularly.

And was it weekly?

No, monthly. So I got George to come along as a guest and he was a guest at The Square as well a number of times, at The Square we were getting quite a young audience, if you think in the middle 80’s Jazz wasn’t popular, if ever, but we were getting quite a few young people in and we had people as diverse as say Ken Colyer and Monty Sunshine and as I say George Chisholm. Humph came down a number of times and lots of other people, Terry Lightfoot and so on, and we had a festival in 1986, we were to take the outdoor pursuit centre in the town, on a Sunday, and put on a whole day of Jazz, a whole day and evening, and I got a pretty impressive line-up. George Webb came down, and we had Ben Cohen there and it was a hot little band we’d put on with George, a little bit later we had Al Casey and we had Slim Gaillard, and we had Georgie Fame and Terry Lightfoot, Ken Sims and Pete Neighbour and a whole host of people – there’s some photographs of that that have only recently surfaced of that date. We ended up having to move because it poured with rain the whole day, so we ended up shifting the whole lot back up to The Square. That was heaving in there, Ken Colyer was there that day as well, a real sort of all-star Traditional Jazz and swing festival. We had some great nights there, we had Billy Butterfield there and Yank Lawson. Yank was playing very very well, he was then about 74 years old and still at the peak of his powers, a very good trumpet player, sadly Billy wasn’t, Billy had been ill and it was the last tour he did and he really couldn’t do it anymore, the intonation was bad and his lip was not good and you could tell that he was quite ill, he passed away not that long afterward in actual fact. He did a broadcast for BBC Jazz Club, I think with the Lightfoot band, and it was embarrassingly bad, they didn’t use many of the tracks with Billy on it.  So that was The Square, that went on into 86. There was this guy called Dave Dennis who was a trombone player, who I think worked for Essex County Council, and he wanted Modern Jazz to be put on there. A chap called Tony Poole started putting on Modern Jazz at the same time as we were running the Traditional Jazz upstairs and it just didn’t work. We were getting quite large audiences and there was some, I had a disagreement with the management over something and said well that’s it, you know, I don’t want to know really.

It wasn’t a bad idea though, because it could have worked.

It split the audience because there were a few people that we lost and we were getting quite a few young people up there as well at the time, so that ended. We moved to various different places in the town. We went to Great Parndon Community Centre and we put on a couple of concerts there, one of which was with Lonnie Donegan and that was a very memorable occasion because at the time Donegan was working with…he’d come back to England and was working with Monty Sunshine’s band, they did the thing called ‘Donegans’ Dancing Sunshine Band’ and for various reasons he’d fallen out with Monty and wanted to work with a different band. And Martin Ross who was my agent who was at the time managing Max Collie’s band and he was trying to put Lonnie with Max, but Lonnie didn’t like Max’s band so we were in the frame and to try that out we did an audition for Lonnie somewhere in West London and it seemed to go down quite well and he agreed he would do a Jazz club appearance in Harlow at Great Parndon and I think I agreed a fee of £500, so we’re looking 86/87 period, that sort of time which was still quite a lot of money, that was just for him. He’d been doing his sort of rock/skiffle band and he wanted to bring that along, and we didn’t want that at all, we just wanted him singing with the Jazz band and doing his skiffle things which is what people remembered him for. When he turned up at the venue it was heaving, we had 250 people there, it was sold out, and he accused me of ripping him off! He said he’d only agreed to come to the Jazz club, and I said “Well this is the Jazz club”! But he said it’s a concert, and I said “How do you expect we’re going to pay you your fee and all the others if we don’t sell that amount of tickets?” And he refused to go on with the Jazz band, but as soon as he went on the stage his demeanour changed, again I think it was the old stage-fright, prima donna-ish thing. He them came on with the Jazz band and it brought the house down, people wanted that, so that was Lonnie. We were going to do a tour with Lonnie and I had a backer, a friend of mine called Terry Maton who ended up co-promoting the Wild Bill Davison and Hodes tour with me and we looked at doing a show with Lonnie, and Lonnie had decided he was going to re-launch his career and decided to have a party in a pub in Islington to get the press on board, and hardly anyone turned up. Terry and I looked at it and said “Well, you know, if he can't fill the average London pub that was it”. Terry decided it wasn’t a good idea to put money in to it and that was really the end, we didn’t pursue the Lonnie Donegan thing any further. The great tragedy is that Lonnie had million selling records, you know, more than anyone else, and he’s a major figure on the popular music scene and really could have done a great deal, he should have been doing Chris Barber, Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball were doing and maintaining, and so that was the end of that really.

So I shared an office with Martin Ross and at that time Martin was selling, he’d been selling Keith Smith’s Hefty Jazz, doing staged Jazz theatre shows and quite successfully and they’d got good colour posters and the idea of packaging Traditional Jazz into a concept format that you could sell to civic venues and get joe public into. So he’d had an altercation with Keith Smith and Martin had put together a show called New Orleans Mardi Gras with Max Collie’s Rhythm Aces and various other guest artists and so on which was very successful, it was one of the bestselling Traditional Jazz packages around and we were talking about where to go with me. 86 was also the time that…well '85 I’d recorded with Kenny Deavern, '85 I also recorded with Al Casey and I’d gone to pick up Al from the Pizza Express to bring him to Harlow to do a gig at The Square and he was doing a recording for Humph’s Calligraph label with Wally Fawkes and Ian Christie and Jack Fallon and Stan Greig, and Stan was gonna double on drums and piano and I’d worked with Wally before and Wally said, well would you like to play on a couple of numbers, I can't pay you, but we’ll come and do a gig for you”, and Humph was there so he got his trumpet out and we did the album October Song, which you know, was the second, yeah I did three vinyl LPs and that was the second.

So that was quite exciting. James Asman sold the idea of doing an album with a band put together by me for George Buck’s Jazzology label in the States, in New Orleans. And we did one session which is more or less my regular band with Ken Sims, Len Baldwin, Dave Bailey, Tim Phillips, Martin Litton and I think Keith Donald may have been on that, I don’t quite remember, but James didn’t like it. It wasn’t what he wanted, so that didn’t get issued, although it should have been, and we did another session with a different line up, James wanted to use Ben Cohen on trumpet and we got Wally Fawkes in, Len Baldwin I think did it again and we got Paul Sealey on acoustic guitar, Martin Litton on piano and Annie Hawkins on slap bass and that became the 'Mixed Salad' and we did quite a few of the Armstrong, New Orleans Wanderers classic Jazz things and Mixed Salad was one of those. And we did two sessions actually, we recorded the band and we did another session to do a couple of small group tracks with Wally at the Bulls Head in Barnes, and that came out as the CD 'Mixed Salad' which was the first release I had on Jazzology which was quite a big thing because, you know, it’s all very well British musicians recording here and putting out CD's but to actually have it out and released in New Orleans was actually quite good. And it got very good reviews in the Mississippi Rag in the States which was the Traditional Jazz paper, and they were particularly complimentary about my drumming so I was quite happy about that.

And it was under your name?

Yes, it was under my band name, yeah, we called it the Red Hot Seven. Martin Ross was looking for a show vehicle for me to do and we came up with the idea in 1987, tail end of 86, to do a tribute to Bessie Smith, as it was her 50th anniversary of her passing in 87, so came up with a show called Queens and Blues and I’d worked with Beryl Bryden at The Square and Beryl was up for it and we also used a singer called Rusty Tailor who I’d done some things with, and we wanted a third singer and there was a very good looking young singer from Cambridge called Helen Gould, not a blues singer but she sang standards quite nicely and everything, so we had three singers, and a 7-piece band, Denny Ilett was on that as well, and you know a good punchy band, and we started touring that around civic theatres and some of the better Jazz clubs and that sort of thing. We’d found Helen, she used to sing with the Cambridge Riverside Band, so she was from up that way. And we did that for about a year, and then I was looking for a follow up show to that and of course by this time I’d worked with George Chisholm and we’d got an idea of doing something with George because he was a household name, and George was open to that because he was freelancing most of the time and he’d had a period of quite serious illness, he’d had heart bypass surgery which had given him a completely new lease of life because he was suffering quite badly prior to that, so 1988 we sorted out a date at the Fairfield Hall in Croydon and we put together a sort of swing band and we had George there and Maxine Daniels. I’d known Maxine for quite a number of years, again she was a regular visitor to The Square. She was quite keen to work with the band and all that sort of thing. Now Maxine was a lovely, warm human being, she I think was quite naïve, she was unusual in the fact that she was a black person growing up in the East end of London in the 30's and she had come up against quite a lot of discrimination and actually did some fairly what you would call ridiculous things, she’d seen Oswald Moseley’s fascists marching and she thought it was a parade so as a young girl she went out and started marching with the fascists, a wonderful story! So she’s had an awful lot of real put-downs on the colour thing, she had been a very successful popular singer in the 50's, you know recording with various orchestras, she’d made records and that sort of thing, and then as I understand it she had a breakdown of some sort and she just disappeared off the Jazz scene for probably 20 years. And there was a local guy called John Graham lived down Grays area, who used to sell records at a lot of the gigs, and John was pretty good at selling and he took Maxine on and started rebuilding her career and I think sadly he took his own life a few years after, very sad. And Maxine had started to be picked up by Humph and they did a couple of albums, I think for his label, so naturally when I was looking at George Chisholm to do a show of American Songbook essentially, 1940s stuff, the logical person to have as the vocalist was Maxine. And Maxine was a very shy person, she did not cope with audiences well, and I think this was one of the problems she had, because she had a wonderful voice, she knew nothing at all about Jazz. When for example in the show George was playing a solo we used a thing called Happiness Is Just A Thing Called Joe which is a Harold Arlen song, and when George took his trombone solo the only way that she knew where to come back in in the right place was if she sang it to herself, so she didn’t have a natural feel for Jazz, but she used to sing way, way, behind the beat, you know if as a drummer you started listening to her you’re in trouble, and would slow down – so you had to disregard anything she was doing and just keep time, rather like Billie Holliday in that respect although she hated Billie Holliday, didn’t like her at all, thought she had a chip on her shoulder. And Maxine. to listen to. sounded very similar in ways to Rosemary Clooney, but she was a great fan of Ella and that sort of thing. So anyway we had Maxine and we did this show called The Fabulous 40’s at Croydon, Pete Neighbour and Trevor Whiting were with us, Martin Litton and Keith Donald again and we had Kenny Baker guesting, and I think that was the only time I worked with Kenny Baker. And we had a good crowd and we called it the Fabulous 40's show that was 1988.

In 1989…well 1987 my band was playing in the Soho Jazz Festival, we had a marching band playing around Soho and the City of London, a little bit earlier as well, and the day that they opened the festival Art Hodes was there, and of course I’d known Art Hodes through the Blue Note records that I’d grown up listening to with Sidney Bechet and Wild Bill Davison and he was one of my heroes, and we were asked…they’d got him in Soho Square and Dave Bennett was the agent that had brought him over and apparently Peter Boizot who ran Pizza Express and who was the director of the Soho Festival asked Dave if Art Hodes open the festival, do a photo call, for £20! And Dave Bennett apparently told him if you wanna ask Art Hodes that ask him yourself! Anyway, Art ended up there and there was a photograph of us playing around the square where the bandstand was, with Art, in one of the national papers, with some Earl or something that had opened it as well. So I got to meet Art Hodes and I said to him would he be interested in doing a trio recording, because I’d done the one with Kenny Davern a year or so earlier and he said yeah and he wanted $1,000 for it, which was a lot of money for those days, but you know. I’d been working with Trevor Whiting, Trevor had also been a great enthusiast for the Wild Bill Davison, Bechet, Hodes Blue Notes and he’d grown up listening to them the same as I had, so we decided we were going to do this trio, Dave Bennett recorded it and went to a tiny studio in Chiswick where they had a wonderful Steinway piano and we did the album that was called Sensation in an afternoon/early evening I think and we recorded things like Sensation Rag, and Cake Walking Babies and Wolverine Blues and a few odd things like Hoagy Carmichael’s Snowball, some quite nice things. And Art turned to Dave and said “I want you to book these guys when I’m over here next time”, well that didn’t happen because the way that it worked was that we were johnny-come-latelys and all the gigs came to the established musicians that were already doing the Pizzas, you know. In early '88 I got a call to do a gig with Wild Bill Davison and I played with Bill in 83 at the Playhouse and I did a recording session in '86 at the Pizza which I co-produced with Dave Bennett with a fine French reed player called Jean-Francois Bonnel and Martin Litton and we had Jim Bray on bass on that and I wasn’t very happy with the recording, the bass didn’t sound very good and Bill’s lip was bad and the session just wasn’t very happy. We did another recording around the same time with an entirely different line up which I think was Dave’s idea, to have Bill with a larger band, with John RT Davis, John Barnes on bass saxophone and Jean-Francois Bonnel and Keith Nichols on trombone, Paul Sealey on guitar and Martin Litton. But of course when you’ve got that many horns it needs orchestrating and sorting out, so that session I wasn’t happy with, it sounded quite messy in places and we put that out on a cassette but it’s never appeared elsewhere, so I’d known Bill and I got a call to do somewhere down near Slough, anyway the gig, to play with Wild Bill Davison, Andre Bleeson was on that as well, anyway we did the session and I was talking to Bill and Anne Davison and Anne said to me that Bill would like to play the Cork Festival, and I had played it the year before with my Roaring 20’s show, we’d been out there to do the Bessie Smith thing as well I believe, so I said “I know who runs Cork, so if you’re interested I’ll have a word and see if we can sort something out. And it would be nice to get Art Hodes over so that we can put the two of you together again like you did on the Blue Note recordings in the 40’s”. So Jack McGourhan was up for that so we booked that so I decided to do a CD which we called Together Again, which we recorded at the Bulls Head at Barnes and this time Terry Maton and I had just bought the Sony F1 recording system and we’d got two condenser PZM mics which had been recommended and this was the first time we’d used these, but as a backup we had Dave Bennett there with his open-reel 8-track machine so it was recorded on both mediums. Knowing what Bill’s lip had been like I thought we might get away with getting him on maybe one or two usable tracks and the rest of it we would do with the smaller group. We had Jackie Free on trombone, wonderful player, Keith Donald again. But Jack had been ill, he’d had problems with angina and was waiting to have bypass surgery and he wasn’t on as good a form as he’d been slightly earlier with the Yank Lawson session which I skipped but I’ll come back to that. So we did the album Together Again and Bill was fine on pretty well all the tracks, he was outstanding. I did a trio session after that, at Bletchingley, with Art and Trevor Whiting, we used one of the tracks that we recorded for that on the album as well. And I said to Bill and Art would they be interested in coming back the following year to do a tour in theatres with a proper package because they were used to coming over and working with various rhythm sections up and down the country so there’s no continuity. They agreed to do that and we went off and did Cork in the October and played to a full house, a wonderful experience, and at the same festival I played with George Chisholm, so I had two high profile gigs at the Cork Opera House in the festival. So we came back and that was that.

We recorded the album Making Whoopee with Yank in the space of about 4-5 hours, just like that, and he was in marvellous form. Jackie Free told me that he’d stopped smoking at that time, but he was so nervous of working with Yank he had to smoke! I think I’m remembering that right! Andre Beeson was the reed player, Keith Donald again and Martin Litton – more or less my regular line up on that. Also in that period (1986 /7)Martin Ross had the idea of putting together a small group with Denny Ilett, Dave Bailey and a piano player called Pete Gresham who lives in Essex these days I think, which we called the World’s Greatest Dixie Band, just a quartet, we wanted to prove that we could play hot Jazz with, you know, that small a band, and it worked very well. I started because Pete Gresham had got an ‘in’ at the Casa Bar in Zurich, I started to go out to Zurich in August and January each year. It was a tiny little club in the red light district in Zurich, so it was used as a sort of pick up joint, you got a different audience every set, so we just did 4 shows basically, and I’d go round the tables playing on ash trays and beer glasses and that sort of thing, and my band broke bonus there, I think if we did more than 50,000 Swiss Francs you got a bonus of 5% and we continually did that because we used to go out and put on a show and it was the days when everyone smoked in bars and I used to come back – because we would play 31 nights on the trot, you know, 8 til midnight, I used to come back with a racking cough, horrendous, I did that until 1990. 

Wild Bill Davison and Art Hodes were keen to do a structured show and Gwen Main said that she would try and sell it, and we’d come up with an idea – and I think at that time Martin Ross had moved, so I moved my office back to Gwen’s house, we were sort of working quite close together she was doing a lot of the selling and admin for me. We came up with 'The Legends of American Dixieland' as a concept. Jackie Free should have been on trombone but Jack had been ill – as I mentioned – and was awaiting his bypass op so Jack was able to do the ones that were local to Harlow, so he did Norwich and the 100 Club and Harlow Playhouse. Campbell Burlap did the rest of the tour, but he couldn’t do the two dates we had in Northern Ireland so Mike Pointon did them, so we had that more of less a stable band. We did – well the first thing we came up against was the problem that no-one had any idea who Wild Bill Davison and Art Hodes were! Because you’re talking about theatre people and they’re not household names like Kenny Ball or Acker was. So Gwen said we need to find a unique selling point, so I said right, how about this then, they both played for Al Capone in the speakeasies in the 20's – and that was it – that was our ‘in’. Terry Maton co-promoted it with me, we had good houses at most of the places. Bournemouth International Centre advertised the show with the wrong date and we bombed because you know, people didn’t turn up! So more or less the profit we made out of the tour was almost wiped out by the losses we made at that, I think we made about £500 the right side whereas we should have done better than that! So we took the opportunity of recording nearly all the concerts and one of those was subsequently released on the album Coalition by George Buck on Jazzology Records. And Bill’s playing on the whole – I mean bear in mind he was 83 – Art was 85, they were playing wonderfully well. We had Maxine Daniels in for the concert we did at Falmouth and there were some great experiences on the road with those musicians, it was a learning process. I was a bit worried, for a start when we started selling this at the tail end of 88 we were looking at the tour in May 89, would these octogenarians first of all still be alive, secondly still be able to play! I was a bit worried when we saw Wild Bill Davison being wheeled through Heathrow airport in a wheelch air but that was fine and we got on with it. The show was extremely happy until probably the third date from the end when we were playing at the Brewhouse in Oxford. Bill – we used to open the show with him and Art brought in a tempo and Bill missed the first note and turned around and glared at Art “Goddamn piano players trying kill me”, and we’d laid on a fast car to get them from Oxford down to the Somerset/Devon borders because we were playing Falmouth the next night and then up to Bolton for the final date. So Art had taken offence and refused to go in the car with Bill, so I went in the car with Bill and Anne and I said to Anne I think Bill’s upset Art, and she always used to call him Wilhelm when she was annoyed with him and she said “You hear that Wilhelm, you’ve upset Art and he’s a sick old man” and Bill said “Yeah, sick in the goddamn brain and besides which he’s a goddamn communist”! I was intrigued about this – so I said “What do you mean Bill?” So he said “He put me on a goddamn parade in 1941 for the goddamn reds and I haven’t forgiven him for it”. We were in Falmouth the following night, that went very well, and we concluded the tour with the Albert Halls in Bolton and unfortunately it was a very good performance but on the recording there was a buzz on the theatre lights which has made it unissuable really. And that was that, and Bill and Art went, within – this was the middle to end of May – Bill flew off to Japan I think and by the November of that year he’d gone. So we probably got the last recordings. Art lived on for another couple of years but had kidney problems and needed dialysis and we did look at getting him over here but it was going to be too difficult to arrange. So that was a big experience.

So 1989 we’d already – again – started selling a new show with George Chisholm and Maxine Daniels which this time we’d hit on the right title 'Swinging Down Memory Lane' and that was very successful, I don’t know how many dates we did but we played it literally all over the country and George was wonderful, there was no big-time about George at all, he was very amiable and so-on. Maxine was good fun, we used to do Alexander’s Ragtime Band in the show as it was a Berlin thing, and Maxine said – you know how she spoke, lovely east end accent – “I bleedin’ ‘ate that tune” and I used to play rims behind blocks and she used to say “Don’t give me them bleedin’ chopsticks, ain’t you got no bleedin’ brushes’?”! George picked up that she hated the tune and he used to announce it as her favourite tune! She’d come back on for the encore and she’s have her slippers on! There was a lovely lady that used to accompany her to a lot of gigs who sadly passed away just a few weeks ago, Glad Baldwin, who used to turn up and often used to drive Maxine and she became a regular fixture at a lot of the gigs we did and was very well known in the Essex area. She’d been a singer herself in the early days as well, so Maxine and Glad would often turn up together or Maxine would get picked up by the bass player that used in that particular show Peter York. So that was a happy period and Swinging Down Memory Lane lasted until about 91, and George he was doing other things as well of course, but George, his wife had cancer sadly and he went through all the usual problems with that. Eventually she passed away and we had to get a dep for George around that time, Terry Lightfoot did a couple of the shows with us. George came back and he was fine up until the Christmas that year when you know, he’d been very busy, when the loss of his wife really hit him hard and he became ill, he lost the ability to produce saliva, to play and we did a broadcast for Radio 2 from the Hertfordshire Jazz Festival which was really very sad, because this great musician who had been one of the original voices in British Jazz had just sort of….not able to do it anymore, and that was really the end of Swinging Down Memory Lane and we…George ended up in a home and ended up I think with dementia after that. He died about 1998, somewhere around that.

So it was the shock of his wife really that…

Yeah, and George had been as sharp as a tack up until then, and right on top of his game musically as well, you’d get 100%. And when you think about what he’d achieved, you know, he’d recorded with Fats Waller and people like that when they were over here, and Coleman Hawkins and so on. 

The next show I did was a thing called 'The Legends Of British Trad', which we’d put together with Alan Elsdon and Campbell Burnap, Dick Charlesworth’s another name from the Trad era, Neville Dickie on piano, Tim Phillips on bass and we started doing that, but of course it didn’t sound like British Trad, it sounded more like a Chicago thing because I hated British Trad and so did the people that were in the band, they wanted to play more American stuff, but that’s how we labelled it. I mean it wasn’t a greatly successful show, we did some dates and so on, but the recession was starting to bite by '92 and I’d moved up to Cambridgeshire by this time, so I’d left Essex.

Why did you do that?

We were living in Harlow and we wanted to move somewhere out in to the country, we were living on an estate in Harlow. And we saw an advert for an exchange for a Victorian cottage on the Cambs/Lincs borders in exchange for anything in Harlow. We were buying the house we lived in in Harlow, so we did a swap, and it didn’t matter where I lived then because most of my work was in theatres, literally all over the place! And it was a cheap place to live, so we exchanged this end of terrace house in Harlow on a not particularly nice estate for this old cottage almost in the middle of nowhere in a place Tydd Gote, so we were commuting, travelling all over the place and so on, so the recession had started to bite and the legends sort of run its course and I wanted something that was going to be more popular so 1993 was going to be the anniversary of the death of Fats Waller – 50th anniversary – so I hit upon the idea of This Joint is Jumping and got a nice bright poster done, cartoon poster of Fats and we started touring that, and just slightly different line up, Cuff Billet on trumpet, Goff Dubber on clarinet and saxes, Goff lives up Colchester way nowadays so he’s now an Essex musician, Mickey Ashman on bass on this one and Neville again on piano, and that was quite a successful show. Although the theatres were starting to be pinched financially by the recession, so we were faced with doing either a lot of hires or percentages and some of them worked and some of them didn’t and normally when they didn’t work it was because the venues didn’t advertise properly. So that was an uneven period, but we toured that show successfully and recorded the CD with it. I got the idea of doing another album and another show called 'Boogie Woogie And All That Jazz', which again was just with that rhythm section, and that was quite successful. Unfortunately there was a problem with both Neville and Mickey and it just packed up, we got Duncan Swift in.

What, personality wise?

Yep, yeah. Duncan Swift came in on piano and Tim Phillips came in on bass and we carried on doing the Waller show with that line up and the Boogie Woogie show with that line up as well and that was very successful. We had a great working relationship with Duncan who was a phenomenal piano player. So that carried on, we had a couple of years with that. Duncan sadly got cancer and eventually we lost him in '97.

I did a thing called 'Drum Crazy' with Graeme Culham and we decided we would do a drum show where we would do a workshop before the show and the show in the evening and it was a great idea. Commercially it didn’t work particularly well unfortunately. I would deal with all the early styles of drumming and Graham would deal with all the Buddy Rich and beyond, that sort of stuff. So as a show it worked well as a concept, it was very good. So we did quite a few dates with that.

In the meanwhile I had started looking at – because the theatres were starting to go – I’d looked for another outlet and we started looking at doing Jazz weekend breaks. Gwen found this place called Mundesley Holiday Village up on the Norfolk coast and I went up and talked to them and they agreed to put on a festival in the November, which has got to be 95 or 96, and we put together a group of musicians doing various themed shows like we did in the theatres, over a weekend. And we did Saturday and Sunday, went home Monday I think the first few of those. That started to work quite well. Martin Ross has been doing Pontins at Pakefield and had fallen out with them and he told me to get in touch and take it over. Which I duly did. But the first one we did was Blackpool and I was brought in because I think John Long who promoted Ken Colyer-ish festivals, strict New Orleans festivals, he’d been running the Blackpool one and it was failing and they wanted to bring someone else in to give it a shot in the arm. So they brought me in and we filled the place up, it was very, very successful but Gwen had heard this young musician, piano player, singer and clarinettist, playing with Jackie Free’s band in a pub in Epping – his name was Nick Dawson. She said you gotta hear him. So I went down and heard Nick and he must have been in his early 20’s then, and she was absolutely right about him, he was a phenomenal singer, pianist and clarinettist and Nick came up and did Blackpool with us, I think that was probably the first time we worked together, so we did that. Other festivals followed on from that, so I got the Pontins at Pakefield festival which I ran for many years until 2011 was the last one, new owners came in and that killed that. We were doing probably a dozen or so festivals a year, you know up and down the country, and I’d decided that I could make more money if I hired the venues, so we found this hotel called The Grand Ocean Hotel at Saltdean near Brighton which was the old Butlins Hotel and we had 600 bedrooms in there and I put a real big event on, spent a lot of money on musicians – people like Bob Kerr’s Whoopee Band and the Swedish Jazz Kings, a lot of named bands and so on. We sold it out, and on the strength of that I booked several of their other hotels for later in the year, however that was a complete pig’s ear because they couldn’t cope with the number of guests, there were problems with cockroaches in the rooms. Awful. So I pulled all of those festivals that I’d booked and we looked for alternate venues and eventually we found one at Scarborough, so we did that and it was a regular thing for a number of years, and we found Bracklesham Bay where we still are these days, it was taken over by Richardsons from Pontins. So we will now be doing that – it will be our 15th year this year, the Louis Armstrong Festival.

What are Richardsons to do with Pontins?

They’re not – Richardson’s took over.

They took over Hemsby didn't they?

Yeah, same company. When Pontins were selling off some of their properties they bought them and took them over. So we started doing those and the festivals are still working quite well – I only do three now, which is Stratford, Mundesley and Bracklesham.

And you hire the venues?

Yes hire the venues and promote the whole lot – we do the whole thing. They’ve been successful, it’s tailing off now because of the age of the audience, so, you know, but when I started doing them I said to my wife I expect we might get five years out of this, and that was in the mid 90's and here we are I 2014 still doing it. So Nick Dawson came on board and 1998 was the centenary of Gershwin so I said to Nick would you like to do a show called ;S’Wonderful' and we put the show together, did a recording, and we used Nick primarily as a clarinet and sax player along with John Wurr, Mike Kemp on piano and Roger Curphy on bass. And that was a good band, and Nick would do some on piano and some you know clarinet and do a lot of the singing and promoting. We did that for a couple of years which was very successful, and then 1999 was the Hoagy Carmichael centenary and Nick had originally said he’d do the show and then he had second thoughts about it because he didn’t really see his image as singing songs about old men in rocking chairs! I’d already sold a load of dates and this again was with a different band, I’d got Ken Sims and Dave Bailey, Mike Kemp again and we were gonna have Nick singing but he pulled out. I was looking for a singer, and someone had spotted a young lad who was very good looking, great voice, he was into the Sinatra stuff but he’d never sung in front of the public before and he bottled out. So I was stuck with this show and no singer! So then I figured that Hoagy wasn’t a very good singer and neither was I so I might as well do the singing myself. So I went along and got some singing lessons because my intonation and pitching was appalling and I’d never had to worry about it just playing drums. So I found out how to do it and we did the show, that again was quite a successful presentation. That takes us to about – that was 1999/2000. Then we did the Bing Crosby centenary which I did find a challenge because I ended up doing the vocals for that – that was hard.

I bet that was hard, talk about intonation, there’s a man…

Absolutely! So we did a thing called ‘Bing, The Road to Rhythm and Romance’, which was in 2003. Martin Litton did the arrangements for that which he lifted off some of the early Crosby recordings and we had Trevor Whiting and James Evans on reeds, John Day on bass and Martin, and that was – you know we did quite a number of shows with that which was quite good fun. And then we decided we were going to do a revival of Swinging Down Memory Lane which had always been a good seller. But of course George had gone by that time, Maxine had gone, but Nick was around and he came in and did the vocals. This is gonna be about 2004ish, and we did a CD and I got Val Wiseman in to do the vocals on that and that was a very successful show. James Evans was my regular reed man at that time and we did that. On the strength of that, with Val, we decided we were gonna revive 'S’Wonderful'. Nick had gone on to do other things then so we did a complete new album with Val singing some of the songs and we did some of those shows which was good fun. Various other things. So 'Swinging Down Memory Lane' has kept going and is still going.

Nick decided he was going to do a Sinatra show with me so we did a thing called 'Simply Sinatra' and we did about a year of that, and then Nick went off into the West End which is where he still is doing things, so that was really the end of that line. 'Memory Lane' has been the mainstay of my shows over the years, but we haven’t done very many of those recently because of the festivals take up most of my time. In addition to that we’ve been doing 'Walking With The King', the gospel show with the New Orleans Jazz Band which still carries on all around the churches and so on which is very successful. We had £4,500 box office at the St Luke’s church in Cranham for our second visit which was amazing! So you know that keeps me busy, also I’ve kept recording things going and we’ve done various recording projects over the years. Something over 30 CDs that are around, we did one with George Webb which we recorded up at Harlow which he told me was the first time he’d been on record since 1951! And I don’t think he did anything commercially after that as well. We did a Kid Ory project which was fun and we did a Johnny Dodds project and all of these things, so I tend to put these little focusses, these little theme shows in the variety of festivals that we do. And that really brings us up to date. I gig around, I do various private functions when and as, I did a whole series of riverboat shuffles through the 90's up and down the country. And then we stopped that for a while, but recently last year we took the Dixie Queen on the Thames and we filled that up, and we’re doing that again this year. And bang up to date we’ve been doing some swing dances for young people with the swing band, usually with Karl Hird on reeds and Julian Stringle, Jonathan Vinton on piano and Keith on bass playing to young people, who are there to dance. And as a spin-off of that I’m working with an outfit called jiveswing.com, we’ve started doing some Gatsby themed events where they’ll go along and teach the Charleston at corporate events and that sort of thing and they want an authentic 20’s band. So we put together a quintet with Sean Moyses on banjo and vocals, Allen Beechey on cornet, Karl Hird and a brass bass player called Clive Payne and literally last Saturday we recorded the CD to go with that. I’ve done a variety of writing about Jazz, I did a series on jazz drumming from New Orleans to Be-Bop for Jazz Journal back in the 80’s and I also contribute various things to Just Jazz magazine over the years on various topics and I got a call last year from the BBC, they had been on my website and they were making a film called 'Trad Jazz Britannia', so I ended up going up and doing some filming for them and giving them some information. So they’ve sort of labelled me as a Jazz historian which I’m quite happy with! That really brings it up to date.

Although business for you of course, naturally with all the weekenders, but you’ve done the most incredible amount for Jazz, it’s not just….I mean ok it’s earning you a living, but to get that amount of people to these different events for 3-4 days each time, all over the country, that’s an incredible achievement as well. Regardless of the other things you’ve achieved.

It’s a nightmare to organise it!

I know, I do a small weekender in Torquay, 30's and 40's weekender, and when you know how much it means to people and how much they enjoy the experience then you realise that this is something they will always remember and it’s something they will learn, they will discover different types…

That’s right, people will remember them for years. The way that we’ve been able to do this is because about 15 years ago we decided that we needed to harvest the names and addresses of the people that came to our concerts so we formed the National Traditional Jazz and Swing Mailing List, so we’ve got a huge database of names and addresses and they are the people that come to our shows, so when I’m out doing gigs I’ll be out putting leaflets around the table because you need to put peoples things in people’s hands. In recent years I’ve played drums in other bands, they’ve always given me permission to promote the festivals. So that’s been successful.

The other thing I should say about the last 12 or so years, I’ve kept my contact with Essex via my Harlow venue, St John’s Arts Centre in the old town. We’ve been doing that now must be for 12 years and that continues to be quite successful on a Thursday evening, we do 10 concerts there a year. We get between 70-120 people there. It’s a wonderful thing, and again I’m doing what I did 30 years ago at The Square, I book who I want to play with, I don’t want to be pigeon-holed into saying I’m running a Trad club, so some weeks you will get a New Orleans style band, other weeks you might get a Dixieland band or last night you got Pete Neighbour, Jim Douglas, Martin Litton, Keith and myself playing sort of Goodman-ish swing! So you get a mixture you know – it’s good fun.

Outside of yourself no-one seems to be to give me an answer – do you know when George opened his pub in Stansted – do you know anything about it? Why he did it?

George had been a promoter, he’d had a fairly sort of chequered career, after Humph took over the Dixielanders in the 40s George played piano with them until about 1951, he then went to work for various London agencies as a booker. He was involved in the pop scene in the early 60s and had the option of booking the Beatles on their first London gig and had negotiated it and when he paid – Epstein I think wanted a huge deposit – and when the cheque was sent to him by the agency it bounced, so George lost out on being the one to present the Beatles. He had another bit of bad luck because he had the idea of bringing Presley over to do concerts in football stadiums in the summer, outside the season, because he reasoned that these places were not being used and they were big enough and had car parking and everything. But apparently Presley’s manager wanted a £1m deposit and they just couldn’t raise the cash.

That was in the 60's?

That was in the 60's, yeah. So Presley never played here. So George carried on doing promotions and he was involved in a big festival in the Isle of Man in – now that must have been the 70s or 80s – and he booked Duke Ellington and I think the MJQ, you know masses of real huge American acts – and the venue burned down. A lot of people died, not at the festival, this was before the festival, so he was left with no venue and it ruined him financially, so he ended up getting out of the business and going to Stansted and running the pub. And that – from what he told me – was the way that it worked. What you might be interested in – because Stansted is in Essex – I have an interview that we did with George, I think Mike Pointon did it, at one of the festivals where he actually tells this story in detail which you’re quite welcome to have. And then I met George because we used to do gigs there. Then he sold up the pub and moved and his wife became ill and eventually died, and then he came back after she passed away and formed the Band of Brothers, and I got asked to play drums down in Erith in Kent. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have done it, it was a £40 gig and travelling from Lincolnshire it cost me more than that but because it was George you know, yes. Mike Daniels was playing with him on trumpet and Charlie Connor and Roy James and people like that so it was good fun.