A recurring theme in my thinking since I passed the first threescore of my allotted threescore and ten, has been the passage of time and the inevitability of aging. More specifically that, while policemen are getting younger, jazz musicians are getting older. A further thought is that time appears to shrink as I get older. I’m sure Einstein is somehow to blame. When I was 16 the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band recordings of 1923 were just over thirty years old, but they appeared to me to come from a different era of history. I try desperately to recall musical gems being recorded thirty years ago from now and what do I come up with? Hit recordings by T Rex and The Plastic Ono Band still sound scarily modern to me. Or more fairly, in the jazz world, Miles Davis had completed Bitches Brew and other current jazz idols included Charles Lloyd and Cecil Taylor. They’e still considered to be Avant Garde, aren’t they? I remember clearly at the end of the seventies hearing the youthful Scott Hamilton and Warren Vache astounding the jazz world by playing accessible swinging music while barely out of the cradle. It’s chastening to realise that these Young Turks are already 48 and 50 respectively. Even the rage-provoking young upstart, Kenny G, is 43 For Heavens Sake! And James ‘Blood’ Ulmer, the bad boy of Avant Garde guitar, is 60.
So, if modern jazz musicians are beginning to think seriously of their free bus passes, what of the perpetually youthful individuals who carry on playing trad jazz and Dixieland, as if nothing else had ever really happened in the world of improvised music. It’s sad, but the average age in my own seven-piece band is over sixty, and, looking around me at some of the other traddies out there I often get the impression that we are the youngsters in this field.
What a pleasant surprise then to go along recently to the Whitewater Hotel in Backbarrow and hear Allen Beechey’s Bright Stars of Jazz. It’s not going to be my practice to use these Musings to write about contemporary British jazz bands. Let’s face it, why praise the competition! But I must confess, I was completely bowled over by this band. They play in the tradition of Alex Welsh, Freddy Randall and Mick Mulligan, all emerging from the Chicago school of Condon, Pee Wee, Wettling et al. Even listening with your eyes closed you know that they are a very talented and experienced group of musicians. Open your eyes and you realise with a sickening shock that they are also very young. Their average age is something like 27! But this is a band who defy age and defy eras. They are obviously steeped in the Chicago-style jazz of the Condon mob and the Nicksieland era, but this is not the whole story. Listnening to an evening with the Bright Stars of Jazz puts one into a time-warp when it is possible to hear Randy Sandke, Roy Williams, Ed Hall (or is it Pete Brown) Jess Stacey, the magnaholic Eddie C, Pops Foster and George Wettling, all together on one stage. This must be one of the best Dixieland/Mainstream bands working in the UK today and I congratulate “Jazzy Joan” Lawton for bringing them to the Whitewater. Such impeccable taste! I bought their CD, something I have seldom been known to do in the past, as a canny Scot, and I find that on record, they are just as exciting as they are live. A rare achievement. I look forward to their next recording.
Most of Don’s Musical Musings will continue to discuss long-dead musicians. But for once let’s celebrate the living, and most of all, let’s celebrate the future. And, while bands like Alan Beechey’s Bright Stars of Jazz are playing, the future of our kind of music is in safe hands.
Yarl River Jazz Band
Home | MP3s | Links | Band
Members