How I stayed uncool and met my hero
I was a teenage jazzman in rural 1980s England
I was a semi-pro jazz musician in my teens. I gigged at least one night a week in a swing big band, and we were deeply uncool. Four saxes, trumpets, trombones, piano, playing Glen Miller, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington to old people in village halls and community centres round Norfolk. We wore the coloured blazers swing bands used to wear. In public. On stage.
We were, as I say, not cool.
But we did get paid.
Cool via the medium of jazz would’ve been possible in the 1980s because pop producers had half-rediscovered jazz. They had sanded down any edginess until it could be slotted into a CD tray. Bryan Ferry, Sade and ABC picked up on the visuals and the outfits that looked good in shallow depth of field on MTV.
We band nerds knew about real jazz, and real British jazzmen, like Humphrey Lyttelton.
He had last been even slightly cool in the 1950s, when he was trying to revive the New Orleans jazz from 1920s. A former Royal Guardsman and Eton schoolboy — read, extremely posh — he became a Soho-based miscreant and cartoonist, and played jazz when jazz was about as respectable as grind. In the 1980s he was still playing, but respectably, in provincial theatres and for the Queen at Royal Variety Performances. He had a jazz show on BBC Radio Two, the most risible of radio stations. I listened to it religiously.
I learned to differentiate Bix from Louis, Coleman from Young and I sneered down on the pop imposters from the heights of nerdery, smirking at the deep bodied guitars, the lack of improvisation, the simplistic harmonies, and the failure to swing. They couldn’t fool me or the other nerds. I preferred my regular cycle of vinyl LPs from the local record library.
I had a tiny record collection of my own, bought with money from the gigs from the weird tiny jazz record shop a couple of miles away. It was nowhere near any other shops and I must have been the only customer under 50 but it felt safe.
As a living anachronism, it was comforting to find another anachronism so near.
I bought records on the basis of what was said about them in a book I’d stolen from the school library: The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History by James Lincoln Collier.
I had no real idea what I was buying till I got it home.
It mostly turned out to be junk, because that was all I could afford, but occasionally I accidentally picked up a classic like Miles Davies and Tadd Dameron playing in live in Paris in 1949. It was hard bop, apparently recorded complete with French radio announcers and terrible quality, with at a hundred miles an hour. The Frenchness just added to the coolness.
The records were scratched and battered and sounded terrible through my stereo, which had a blown speaker cone and the music blotted out the sound of arguing parents downstairs.
I listened to them repeatedly as I pretended to revise for my O levels. We nerds also played in our school wind bands, where I played trombone, astonishingly badly, but they needed trombone players, so they never chucked me out. And on Saturday mornings, we’d go to the back room of a pub, dragging at least one parent, to rehearse music from 40 years ago, because to us this was more fun. At fourteen, we could sight read pretty complicated music. We discussed Miles Davies jazz at breaks. We were mostly teenagers, though with the odd old amateur jazzer around too. They were local teachers and office staff who liked jazz and weren’t in any way actual jazz musicians.
I played guitar, avoiding the limelight by sitting in the general environment of the piano and bass, and almost never taking a solo. Guitar in a swing band is about keeping a tight rhythm going, locking in with the drums and bass, pushing the horns along and keep it swinging. Freddie Green, Count Basie’s guitarist was the man for this. I had no time for Hendrix, Jimmy Page, or Slash. I pointed out that French gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt was clearly more rock n’roll than any of them, still playing scorching solos despite having two fingers burnt into paralysis when he saved his guitar from his burning caravan.
My own guitar was bought secondhand through the newspaper classifieds. Cello-topped semi-acoustics looked cool enough for the New Romantics, but that also made them too expensive so I had an Ibanez Roadster. Black, stratocaster shaped, no pick guard, but with the pickup selector in the bridge position, it played and sounded pretty good even though it too was an anachronism.
I learned chords from the Mickey Baker’s Jazz Guitar book, which was the jazz equivalent of Bert Weedon’s book. So much nerdy theory, so many chord substitutions, so many chords with long names, and so many licks to learn.
I’d soothe myself to sleep thinking of workable chord inversions.
I didn’t use them though. Even I couldn’t really hear the difference when I played a minor seventh and a minor seventh/ninth, so I knew nobody else was going to. All anyone wanted was that steady chug-chug-chug-chug downward strum, relentless, just a tiny tiny bit ahead of the beat, to push things forward, like Django and Freddie. Plus, I knew that there was a good chance the weirder notes in those chords might clash with what the saxes and brass were doing. Most nerdily of all, I knew those weird chords didn’t pop up in jazz till ten years after the stuff we were playing, when bop pushed swing off the cramped brownstone stages of New York. I knew this because of The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History by James Lincoln Collier, which I had largely memorised. It would be musically and historically wrong to play those chords.
I’d built my own guitar amp. I made the cab from plywood, three feet square and a foot deep, painted it sky blue and cut four holes for the four as-new Celestion speakers I’d found in the classified ads in the back of the paper.
I made the front grill from plastic garden fence which rattled if you turned it up much.
But the head was a Vox AC50 (bought secondhand, they now sell for £1300) and since we never played Shea Stadium, the volume never needed to go over three or four. Regardless, every gig, it got crammed in the back of my father’s car, and lugged up steps, through cramped doorways, onto dusty unglamorous stages, and I set up like a Marshall stack, and I plugged my guitar through it.
After one of the gigs, the bandleader (a dimension nerdier than me, and a year younger, but somehow with the ability to run a swing band) announced that Humphrey Lyttelton was going to be playing at the local theatre, and we’d be supporting him. He had some mystical ability to bag things like this.
Although — ‘supporting’ might be an exaggeration. The big band had a six piece small band which did the lesser gigs — sax, trumpet, trombone, drums, guitar, bass. Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw and the others had done this too. This small band would be playing in the foyer before, after and during the intermission. But still. It was kind of with him, anyway.
At this point, there should really be the musical equivalent of a training montage. Jazzers call it ‘woodshedding’: going into the woodshed and practising till you bleed. It’s what Miles Davies did after he got rejected from bands the first time round. But we were actually pretty together already, since we played a lot. So we just rolled up and played. And watched Humph from the back of the theatre, feeling like peers and musicians, the coming generation listening to their idols. Next in line.
We played, and we played okay, and got applause.
Humph came over and had a chat, and was gracious and charming and signed the LPs we’d all bought.
Mine says ‘a fine little band’.
It’s not the coolest of stories, I admit. But then, we weren’t the coolest of people.
