It may just be me, but in these days of relative affluence, with jazz music readily available not only on LP and CD, but also on mp3 and various newer formats, I feel that some of the thrill has gone out of record collecting. I frequently hanker for the days when I would put one of my half-dozen or so precious 78s on the Dansette and play it over and over until the shellac turned grey. Mind you, I was 16 then and perhaps that has something to do with the nostalgia.
It was no easy matter building up a jazz collection when I was 16. I was still a schoolboy in the extreme North of Scotland and I can't recall having any sort of regular pocket money. The nearest town (population 3000) was a ten mile bus journey away and the only retail outlet for records was Murray Hawk's Cycle shop. It smelled of oil and rubber and there were wheels tyres and bicycle frames hanging from the ceiling. The counter was cluttered with boxes of French chalk, cotter pins and rubber solution, but at one end were two cardboard boxes, twelve inches square and about four inches deep. This was the record stock and my fingers still tingle in anticipation as I recall leafing through the precious disks, never quite knowing when a treasure might appear......Jimmy Shand, Will Starr, Glasgow Orpheus Choir....no thanks....Harry Lauder...mm-mmm....Jimmy Young...you must be joking....Bill Haley...maybe if nothing else appears...Bobby McLeod, Bunk Johnson.....BUNK JOHNSON!!! Yes Indeed. Goodness knows how the HMV rep persuaded Murray Hawk to add them to his stock but I clearly remember turning up The Saints, Darktown Strutters Ball, High Society and Just a Closer Walk. This would be in 1955, only ten years after they were recorded in New York....hot off the press by North of Scotland standards. Like finding an early Oasis CD today. At different times there were also some of the Muggsy Spanier Great Sixteen, Louis' Hot 5 and 7, the occasional Ellington. There were even some more exotic finds within the regular heap of Scottish dance music and 50s pop records. On one occasion I took home a wonderful gospel record of I'm So Glad Jesus Lifted Me. Stirring stuff, complete with a manic preacher and full congregation. I'd love to hear that one again. Another discovery, also on a black label Vocalion, was Lonesome Day Blues by some obscure blues singer whose name I have forgotten. I later read somewhere that he just appeared one day in the recording studio, cut two sides and disappeared forever. How did such rarities come to be in a brown cardboard box in a cycle shop in the North of Scotland? I'd part with several of my current CDs just to hear those two wonderful obscurities again but, sadly, none of my 78s survived a rather lively teenage party in the late 50s.
At some stage, around the same time, I discovered in the small ads of Melody Maker a retailer who sold second-hand records by mail. From his catalogue I chose several interesting looking items, sent off my postal order and waited for the postman to call. Sure enough, a cardboard box, twelve inches square and about four inches deep, the twin of those in Murray Hawks cycle shop, arrived a few days later and I added to my collection Duke Ellington's Black Beauty, Eddie Lang's Freeze and Melt and a marvelous coupling of Wild Goose Chase and White Lightning by a band which might have been Madame Tussaud's Orchestra working under a pseudonym. Sadly, they too joined my other 78s in shellac heaven at the aforementioned teenage party and I have never heard these tracks since.
When I was 18 I went to college in Edinburgh and my education really took off. I discovered junk shops. The best ones were in Cowgate, hemmed in by Working Men's Hotels which was Edinburgh's polite term for doss houses. There were also some good ones in Grassmarket which at that time had not yet suffered the regeneration which has recently gentrified it. All of the junk shops seemed identical. There was a pervasive smell of unwashed clothing often with an added piquancy suggesting cat. After negotiating a route through rickety prams, hatstands, china chamber pots and mounds of clothing, one usually came to an area where everything was arranged in teetering piles; dinner plates, mouldering books, copies of Picture Post and Punch dating back to Edwardian times and, at last, the records. There was magic in the labels; Durium, Supertone, Winner, Vocalion, Zonophone, Beltona. There was often more than just the lingering fragrance of cat in the record pile and one fingered one's way through the pile with caution.
Junk shops added some rare gems to my collection. There was a marvelous Stevedore Stomp by a band going under the name of Dansorkest. Perhaps a Teutonic pseudonym for Duke Ellington but, if so, I have never again heard that particular version of the tune. Pseudonyms were everywhere. The Roseland Orchestra could hide the identity of Fletcher Henderson, The Original Memphis Five, Califorrnia Ramblers or a dozen other bands. The bands themselves added to the confusion by recording the same tunes for half a dozen different labels under different pseudonyms in order to avoid contractual problems. Sometimes the confusion was my own. One non-jazz item sticks in my memory. A vivid green label announced Hear Dem Bells by Carson Robison. Surely an Ellington tune, I thought, when I dug it out of the pile. But when I took it home it turned out to be some sort of Hillbilly gospel number but with the most wonderful banjo picking I had ever heard. Almost enough to convert me to Country and Western music. As with many of my doomed 78s collection, I have not heard it for almost 50 years, but I can still clearly remember every note.
By the time I had spent a year in Edinburgh I had discovered a fresh source of recorded jazz without the discomforts of junk shop research. By then LPs were in and 78s were rapidly on the way out. Indeed LPs had been around for long enough for some people to discard their unwanted ones. I discovered the marvellous Record Exchange in Clerk Street. By skipping lunches and even going easy on beers at the Student Union I was able to make regular visits and pick up some great LPs. One of these prompted me to begin this essay. I started with the intention of writing about the great pianist, composer, bandleader and self-publicist, Jelly Roll Morton, having recently bought a five-CD boxed set of all the Red Hot Pepper recordings. This reminded me of the ten inch LPs I bought in Edinburgh almost half a century ago and, after a dusty trip to the loft, here they are in front of me. The covers are tattered but they still proudly show Jelly in meditative pose the piano. And the music is still the same – sublime; every note indelibly burned into my memory cells so that no Dansette, no Hi-fi, no mp3 player is required to recall each nuance of every performance. That is how it was in those early days of my musical development. Bunk Johnson, Fats Waller, Johnny Dodds, Duke Ellington, Errol Garner – all garnered from among the inner tubes and oilcans in Murray Hawk's cycle shop. Will Starr, Jimmy Shand, The Glasgow Orpheus Choir, Deep River Boys, Bill Haley, Jimmy Young – Oh yes, I bought The Man From Laramie too when no Bix or Bunk was available. All of these combined into a bubbling musical stew which has nourished me through the last forty years.
Jelly Roll Morton is worthy of a Musing all his own. This one has been, unashamedly, about me.
Yarl River Jazz Band
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