‘Jiver’ Hutchinson asked the audience at the end of concert: did you enjoy the music? And they all said ‘Yes.’ Then he said ‘Well, these musicians, they haven’t got anywhere to stay. Would you be kind enough to give them a room for the night? And everybody got a place to stay. This was in the provinces, either in the north or the Midlands.
— Frank Holder, singer/percussionist/dancer, born Guyana, arrived in London, England, 1944.
I hired the Digbeth Hall for the night when the Basie band finished playing, we had a good session ’til six in the morning.
— Andy Hamilton, born Port Maria, Jamaica, 1918, arrived in Birmingham, England, 1949.
Enter the Music Press
By the outbreak of the Second World War, the weekly music magazine Melody Maker could look back on a substantial history. It was founded in 1926, the year that John Logie Baird switched on the first television set, and the year of the British general strike. Melody Maker covered frontline events in popular music. Jazz dominated. It featured reviews of the latest recordings as well as news stories and profiles of those who made them. As such it was a significant contributor to what is now known as “pop culture”, primarily because it acknowledged that the work of musicians, both in the studio and on stage, fed into a body of opinion. The magazine later had a supplement called “Rhythm”, the name of the clubs formed by record buyers, or “gramophone enthusiasts” who shared knowledge of must-have discs.
If people not only danced to but discussed the latest sides cut by Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington, then editorials and reviews, praising or denouncing them, recognised that this public interest constituted a target market. Listeners were consumers. The purchase of a shellac disc that was written about in Melody Maker connected with the purchase of music-playing equipment advertised in the Radio Times. The Western Electric Company announced that it “made over half the world’s telephones”1 while it advertised “loud speakers” with a scene of neatly-attired dancing couples.
Late 1920’s editions of Melody Maker give an invaluable insight into the way that the music industry was being shaped by its conjunction with mass media. The magazine was a platform for debate and a source of practical information for anybody interested in new sounds.
Over the following two decades Melody Maker included longer features and news items as well as columns dedicated to current events in jazz and dance music in both Britain and America. Such reports fuelled consumer desire for the products of named musicians, and the use of terms such as “famous”, perhaps not yet as tiresomely trivial as it has become in the internet age, evidently carried some weight. The death of a celebrity in the dance world was bound to make the front page.
Costing three pence, the 15 March 1941 edition of Melody Maker carried one of its most dramatic headlines ever: “The Profession mourns… Ken Johnson killed in Blitz: Ace Tenor Dies: M. Poulsen a Victim: Dancemen Injured.” Startling as this headline is, the bolded line of the first paragraph vividly captures both the indignation and tendency of any nation at war to view events through the lens of potential propaganda. In highly emotive language, the editorial denounces “The Nazi murder raids on civilians.” Citizens living in terraced streets in Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol or London who had to seek refuge in bunkers while the Luftwaffe’s bombs laid waste to residential and business areas would have been able to relate.
How people felt about music at the time of a world war involving such large-scale losses of life is a complex subject. Whilst songs might be seen as frivolous and superficial when the prospect of the street where you live being reduced to rubble was very real, the news of the death of a bandleader who provided solace when the night skies were being lit up by enemy fighter planes was poignant. The image chimes with one the most beguiling photographs of the Blitz: people huddled around the curled horn of a gramophone in an air raid shelter, looking at the bulky machine as if it were a blessed altar.
Habitués of West End nightclubs would have felt the news as an emotional blow. Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson was the leader of what Melody Maker described as “one of the smartest swing outfits” in London. His West Indian Orchestra was something of a hot ticket. The lethal bomb that reduced the suave upmarket setting of the Café De Paris to rubble and buried such a dapper artist as Johnson brought the war too close to home.
The Melody Maker report makes for thought-provoking reading. Also killed in the air raid was a West End promoter called Martinus Poulsen who had instigated the policy of paying well for top talent and was part of the management of five-star haunts such as the Paris as well as the Cafe Anglais, the Embassy and the London Casino. He was a naturalised Dane. Another victim of the bomb, the Trinidadian saxophonist Dave Williams was described as a “coloured boy”.2
Interestingly, there is no mention of the race of the other injured band members, guitarist Joe Deniz and Yorke De Souza, in the report, but the editorial presents Carl Barriteau as “the coloured sax star”. At a time when terms such as West Indian Band and All Coloured Orchestra were interchangeable, it is not surprising that such epithets as “coloured boy” were used, with its deeply patronizing refusal of adult status to black males. Indeed, the tone of the reporting highlights a central contradiction in the life of black British musicians in the 40s, namely the way the genuine respect for talent merged with the language of racism. “Coloured boy” was part of a range of epithets that appeared in the Melody Maker. The respected editor, Edgar Jackson, described some artists as “darkies” and referred to “nigger bands”.
Black Music in War Time
Parallel to the death of Johnson and Williams were the deaths and injuries suffered by numerous West Indians who saw active service during the war. Driven by patriotism and loyalty to the Queen, men and women from right across the region rushed to sign up. The War Department contains no official records of recruitment, but a reliable estimate places the figure of those who enlisted from the West Indies at somewhere between 16,000 and 18,000. How many died is disputed by military historians.
Musicians associated with Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson could have been amongst the number who served. The trumpeters Leslie Thompson and Leslie ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson had formerly been in the armed services, but were civilians before the outbreak of the war in 1939. Johnson’s band, in any case, did entertain the troops when it was sent on morale-boosting tours of territory held by the Allies. If the popular memory of the power of wartime songs is occupied by voices welling with emotion, singing along to Vera Lynn, then the thought of troops tapping their feet to the sparky horns of a West Indian orchestra full of “coloured boys” is really no less meaningful. Recently there have been documentaries and books on the lives of these soldiers, but whether they genuinely form part of mainstream British historical consciousness is doubtful.3
The fate of Colonial servicemen in the postwar period is important in understanding how the Black British community was developing from the 1940s onwards. Although many servicemen returned to the West Indies, some elected to remain in England and Wales in the belief that they would have better employment opportunities. Furthermore, the Army and Air Force operated a scheme offering college courses to prepare demobbed servicemen for the challenges of life during peacetime, though it turned out that those who ran this scheme had specific jobs for Black ex-servicemen in mind. Whilst many of these men aspired to become accountants, bookkeepers or engineers, numerous veterans have recalled that they were instead offered places on training courses for manual work such as cabinet-making or machine operating. Evidently, black ex-servicemen were not suited to any form of white-collar employment.
With Army and Airforce bases located throughout the country, the Black presence was nationwide because many men sought work in the areas where they had been stationed, though they would also go to places where they heard on the grapevine that employment might be had: to cities such as Birmingham, Nottingham, Derby, Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester. Swelling the ranks of the demobbed black soldiers in Britain were former military colleagues who had gone back to the Caribbean, but found they were joining the already swollen ranks of the unemployed. A good many came back to England in the hope of reviving their fortunes.
Significantly, the 492 West Indians (predominantly Jamaicans, but also from Trinidad and the Eastern Caribbean) who sailed to Tilbury, Southampton on the SS Empire Windrush on 22nd June 1948 included many such ex-servicemen. Although that event is held up as a watershed moment in Black British and indeed British history, it has an equally notable resonance as part of an extensive West Indian “military” presence in British music. West Indian musicians who were former servicemen, such as Leslie Thompson, Joe Appleton and Leslie ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson were joined by other younger musicians who were taking a similar path.4
One was Frank Holder, a young Guyanese with aspirations to be a singer, an all-round showman who was just as happy dancing or “hoofing” a whole range of steps that included the splits, as he was crooning a slow ballad or a higher tempo swing number. Hailing from Georgetown, Holder joined up in 1944, and after training, or “square bashing” at the Royal Air Force base in Cranwell, he was later stationed at in Melksham, a very pretty spa town in Wiltshire. Holder went on to work with several significant names in British jazz and at the age of 88 was still gigging at the time of writing. When I visited him at his home in Wallington, in the south London suburbs, I found a sprightly, energetic man who looked fondly on his days in the RAF and had no trouble recalling that much of his time was spent on stage in the mess hall.
In this way we were able to keep everybody happy. Those of us who could do something did and everybody who could get into the billet would see us get up and do our thing.
The troops liked different types of things. Because there were a lot of West Indians there I did calypsos, but I was mainly singing swing, all the ballads and so forth because that was the way I was brought up.
I combined that with calypsos and my dancing, so I was trying to become a complete entertainer. I just took this as my opportunity.5
For the most part, the band had a piano, bass and drums and occasionally horns and, as Holder recalls, the opportunity to perform was there for people with a mind to take it. “You just got up and sang standards. The musicians – some of them were trained to a degree, and being in the RAF it did give us an opportunity to develop more and more. For that matter it helped us not to have to drill so much. We were entertaining.”6
Holder’s popularity in the RAF was high, and post-demob, he was represented by the Mecca agency, which had a large national network of dance halls, the most prestigious of which was London’s Paramount, and he also worked on the Northern club circuit. In 1948 he was asked by Leslie ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson to join his band after impressing him at a gig where, on Holder’s insistence, the Jamaican trumpeter allowed him to sing. As a permanent member of the 12-piece orchestra, which also had three other vocalists, Holder went on regular tours, though some nights on the road were memorable for the wrong reasons. The band members found that many hotels refused to accommodate them. Holder lamented:
Many a time I turned up in a town and it was difficult to get a place to stay. The reason being that everybody in those days was afraid at what people were gonna say, and that kind of thing. They saw the stereotypes, so people were a bit… “slow”. ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson asked the audience at the end of concert: Did you enjoy the music? And they all said, ‘Yes.’ Then he said, ‘Well, these musicians, they haven’t got anywhere to stay. Would you be kind enough to give them a room for the night? And everybody got a place to stay. This was in the provinces, either in the north or the Midlands.”7
Holder also had the chance to meet other people of colour who were living outside of London, several of whom were musicians. He told me that, “When I toured regionally, I was rather surprised because I didn’t realize that there were so many black musicians in and around these cities, all playing in bands. It was strange at first, but then you found things were changing. It became easier to get a place to stay.”
Holder’s recollections are important in tracing how in the late 1940s and early 1950s “Black quarters” developed in British cities where musicians were both playing regularly and laying down roots. Butetown in Cardiff and Toxteth in Liverpool had been well established since the early 19th century, but other cities should also be noted. Birmingham had been an important part of the war effort with its munitions factories. These attracted Caribbean workers who turned their hands to packing cartridge cases.
Birmingham, Jazz and Andy Hamilton
Postwar Birmingham, like other parts of the country, underwent reconstruction and gradually a black community grew up in the area of Handsworth, which had been a bustling township with extensive accommodation for factory workers since the mid 19th century. By the early 1960s, the West Indian population in Birmingham numbered around 17,000, with the vast majority employed in public transport, construction and heavy industry.
Pianist Ron Daley, a Jamaican ex-serviceman who was also known as Sam Brown, was part of a coterie of West Indian musicians who came to Birmingham either during the war or in the immediate postwar period. With others he developed a local jazz scene. The most significant amongst these others was the tenor saxophonist, Andy Hamilton. Born in Port Maria, Jamaica in 1918, Hamilton learned his trade during long residencies at hotels in the 1930s, as was the norm at the time. Much of the island’s socializing was centred around establishments like the Tichfield where orchestras with horns and rhythm section played swing for moneyed patrons in evening wear.
Inspired by legendary American saxophone players, Hamilton made his way to Buffalo, New York State, during the Second World War, where he was able to develop as a player after landing a residency with a trio in a small club in the city. Furthermore, many of the leading big bands of the day passed through and Hamilton took part in their lengthy after-hours jam sessions. This gave him the priceless experience of playing with and learning from some of the dazzling soloists and section players in orchestras such as Count Basie’s, who made a particularly big impression on the young Jamaican saxophonist.8
Basie wore his aristocratic name well, gracing the covers of many magazines the world over, one of the most quaintly named being Jazzology, a British title which cost one shilling, and was billed as “the monthly magazine for the jazz enthusiast”. This publication was another sign of the depth of interest in African-American music in the UK. It was largely feature-led with the bulk of the articles being devoted to the biggest names of the era. Thus while Basie graced the cover of the July 1946 edition, there were several pieces on other legendary musicians like pianist-vocalist, Nat ‘King’ Cole,9 who was a major influence on British-based West Indian singers like Frank Holder and a favourite of Hamilton himself.
Following his return to Jamaica from Buffalo, Hamilton landed the kind of gig that cemented the image of Jamaica as a rich man’s playground to which the likes of British cultural icons such as Noel Coward and Ian Fleming were irresistibly drawn. After hearing the saxophonist play at the Tichfield hotel, screen idol Errol Flynn asked Hamilton to be the on-board entertainer for his yacht Zaka and for the next two years they sailed the Caribbean docking at various islands and hosting social gatherings of the great but not necessarily the good. During this engagement Hamilton wrote a calypso for Flynn, “Silvershine”, which became his signature tune. But when the economy declined and unemployment soared in post-war Jamaica, and after work on the Zaka dried up, times were tough. Short of money, Hamilton came to England in 1949, stowing away to Southampton where he was detained, before he subsequently made his way to London.
ANDY HAMILTON
COURTESY BIRMINGHAM MUSIC ARCHIVE
Post-war Britain could not have been reconstructed if labour had been solely concentrated on the capital. Major regional cities such as Liverpool had large swathes of both their centre and suburbs reduced to rubble at the height of the Blitzkrieg.
In addition to looking for work, West Indians went to cities other than London for emotional and psychological reasons. There are town and country and social class divides on every island in the Caribbean, just as marked as they are in England, and there are Jamaicans, Trinidadians and Bajans borne in a wide range of environments, both sociocultural and geographical, who do not feel at home in certain places. According to those who knew him well, Andy Hamilton simply did not like London. It is sometimes assumed that all immigrants dream of a new life in a bustling capital. This is a misconception. Immigrants have as wide a range of desires as any group of people. The other emotional factor was finding security amongst people from their island of origin. In a real sense, people from Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados or any of the other islands (and Guyana) did not become West Indians until they arrived in Britain, and even then, those island roots often meant more than any regional identity. One can be as Jamaican in Leeds as one can be in London.
Accompanied by a Jamaican friend, Hamilton travelled to Manchester, but on hearing that other musicians from his homeland were living in Birmingham, he headed to the Midlands. Eager to secure a gig at the earliest opportunity, he sat in at a popular venue in the Handsworth area of the city, Club 60, and was said to have blown down the house, galvanized no doubt by both his desire to make an impression and his artistic talent and maturity. Hamilton was already thirty-one, and could draw on his experience of playing countless hotel engagements in Jamaica and having jammed with leading jazz musicians in America, something few British musicians had done. He was anything but a novice.
Sadly, Hamilton found the door closed to him when he returned the following week and he soon realised that he would have to be self-sufficient, put his own band together and stage his own gigs. He formed a group, The Blue Notes, featuring the pianist Ron Daley aka Sam Brown, and they appeared in school halls, at the Odeon in Birmingham city centre and at the Digbeth Civic Hall, and also made inroads into the West Indian community’s lively functions circuit, which could encompass anything from a wedding reception at the Methodist Church in Handsworth to a birthday party in a pub in Aston. During leans spells, Hamilton supported himself and his growing family by working as a machine operator in a factory.
Musicians survived by promoting their own gigs, by talking them up or handing out flyers in public places such as the central post office. It was on one of these bouts of direct marketing that Hamilton met his wife. What also anchored the band firmly in the affections of Birmingham’s Black community were the many dances that they played for the West Indian cricket team at St. John’s restaurant in the 1950s. Legend has it that some of the sessions went on so deep into the night that they affected the fitness of the players the morning after.
A historic photograph of Andy Hamilton’s group in the 1950s gives an idea of what audiences were offered. Members of his sextet – trumpet, piano, bass, drums, vocals and the leader on tenor saxophone – are immaculately turned out in matching evening wear, with band-name placards in front of them, as was the case with the classic swing big bands of the 1940s. Resting on the floor next to Hamilton is a clarinet, an instrument associated with big bands and New Orleans jazz. The image suggests how deeply rooted the Jamaican was in these older forms of African-American music.
Yet, firmly committed as he was to calypso and the swing style of his idol Count Basie, Hamilton was aware that jazz was undergoing significant changes. Bebop, the new music of young players such as drummer Max Roach,10 trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker came to represent something altogether more idiosyncratic than swing, fashioning an aesthetic in which intricate music that set formidable technical challenges. This was paralleled by a recondite “insider” language and unconventional modes of dress, like Dizzy’s beret. Some saw this as studied pretentiousness, others as the peak of “hip” individuality. These musicians saw jazz as an art in its own right, not just a background to dancing. This was a generation of highly urbanised African Americans in the cities of the north, determined to break all connections with minstrel entertainment for Whites.
Bebop had a different sound to swing. While the latter was big band music, the former was mostly played by small groups, usually quartets or quintets in which players wrote new, circuitous themes, often over the chord sequences of known Broadway show tunes, and launched into extended, challenging solos. Swing had a straight, steady, leisurely, mostly mid-tempo beat with smooth vibrato-laden timbres, whereas bebop had a fragmented, nervy, faster pulse, and more dissonant, spikier textures. Some older musicians described Parker’s music as “harsh”.
Bebop musicians had to be very alert to play the long, exploratory variations over a greater number of chords, which almost seemed to be the result of deliberate puzzle-setting, to catch out those who could not keep up once Diz ‘n’ Bird started to shuttle through the changes. Musicians had to think laterally and play explosively. The dot-dash introduction of Parker’s “Bebop”11 epitomizes this. The horns punch out two stuttering staccato phrases that then give way to sharply ascending, swirling lines that push the energy towards frenzy. The music somersaults into life. It is a remarkably aggressive, confrontational, way to start a piece. Even so, swing and bebop are both connected by the blues, which was a touchstone, above all, for Parker, a player whose soaring improvisations were always matched by an immense depth of feeling.
Bebop was resisted by some but not all older jazz musicians. As a man who had worshipped at the altar of big bands, Hamilton belonged to the school of thought that still viewed jazz through the prism of the dance hall where players had a responsibility to entertain as well as impress audiences. He could not relate to the new music. “Bebop was very strong, some people were doing well,” he once said. “Some were playing too technical. You can’t swing.” That statement distils a key debate that has framed jazz for decades: in short, had the music become so complex and esoteric that it is now impenetrable and forbidding?
For Hamilton’s appraisal of “too technical” one can read “too difficult”, abstract and anti-melodic, though Bebop as bedevilment and alienation and swing as engagement and inclusion is too crude a polarization. Many of the iconic bebop performances such as “Now’s The Time”, “Hothouse” and “Ornithology” have survived because audiences were able to hum the themes, regardless of their tantalizingly mazy nature.
However, Hamilton did not embrace bebop but kept faith in swing style saxophone, as patented by one of his idols, Coleman Hawkins (though Hawkins himself later updated his style). Throughout the 1950s and beyond, Hamilton remained something of an unknown quantity outside Birmingham, playing local gigs, but not gaining the profile of the rising stars of the British school of bebop who were featured in publications such as Melody Maker and playing a form of music that could be presented as new and exciting. Hamilton, committed to swing, was effectively sidelined from this world and had to struggle on as best as he could.
It wasn’t until 1988 that Hamilton made his studio debut (Silvershine) but the time was not wasted, because he went about developing a highly personal composite of calypso and jazz that remained true to his core principle of making songs to which people could dance and romance. On Silvershine and the follow-up (1994’s Jamaica By Night) Hamilton sounds wonderfully self-possessed, even when he is attacking a theme with vigour. He has poise, if not a languid stance, that leads him to slip behind the beat on occasion, and this can be engrossingly seductive. As clichéd as it may be, the epithet “lilting” nonetheless captures something essential about the folk music of Trinidad, Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. Or as the singer as Frank Holder put it, “It was that kind of pushing thing in calypso that got people.” Rhythm was a striking feature of calypso, and the constant drive of the cowbell, often constructed as a ringing 2 or 3-beat, acting as a metronome, caught the ear of alert musicians who realized that pulse strongly implied a form of dance.
Hamilton’s passion for American jazz legends was matched by his love of Jamaican and Trinidadian calypso singers. Although jazz standards were a key part of his repertoire, he also played calypso songs and, inevitably, his compositions reflected an intermingling of forms. Here, when he blended calypso with swing jazz, he was building on developments in calypso in Trinidad itself, particularly the increasing sophistication of the accompaniments to the vocals. The earliest kaisos tended to use makeshift percussion instruments in accompaniment; later this grew to small group backings, but it was still essentially a folk music because many of these early players had no formal training. As the excellent Jamaican trumpeter Leslie Thompson argued, they had “limited technical skills”, though that didn’t mean that calypso could not be an interesting raw material for competent arrangers, and by the 1940s, in Trinidad, clarinettist Freddie Grant was writing adventurous scores for calypso songs while in Jamaica there were players, such as the revered Sonny Bradshaw, a trumpeter and early mentor to Andy Hamilton, who were also bringing more sophistication to the genre. Some arrangers not only used brass but also European string instruments.
Giving Hamilton his due as an effective blender of styles who achieved a distinctively individual sound tells one side of his story. He was more than just a first rate musician, and his case points to how little attention is paid to the non-performance work that many artists have done over the years. Players who have started their own record labels and run their own clubs are important because they provide opportunities for other musicians as well as themselves, and the existence of the self-starter or “facilitator” has been an absolutely integral part of jazz history.12
In Birmingham, Hamilton became something of an after-hours “fixer” for visiting Americans. In his own words he would “put on a bit of recreation” which invariably meant providing food and drink in a venue other than the concert hall where they had been booked to play. At these events Hamilton’s band would perform, and inevitably end up jamming with its illustrious guests. Of all the gigs that stuck in Hamilton’s mind it was the night that the great Count Basie Orchestra came to town. “I hired the Digbeth hall for the night when the Basie band finished playing, we had a good session ’til six in the morning.”
Musicians, so holds received wisdom, don’t just play at night, but through it, until the sharp whiteness of natural light replaces the glow of a yellow filament. The image of Hamilton and the Basie band blowing until Birmingham stirred into morning life is something that connects the Jamaican saxophonist to blues and jazz history in America, from New Orleans to Memphis, Chicago to Detroit, Los Angeles to Florida, Kansas to New York.
Hamilton became, during the 1950s and beyond, an essential element in Birmingham’s jazz scene, though at that time a commercial breakthrough on a national level eluded him. It was in the latter stages of his life (he died in 2012) that his profile rose and there came some belated appreciation of what a unique stylist in jazz he was.
Silvershine was born on the ocean, but it stayed in the Midlands. Sailing on the choppy seas of the music industry was hardly a pleasure cruise.
1. Catherine Parsonage, The Evolution of Jazz In Britain, 1880-1935 (London: Ashgate, 2005) p. 70.
2. These papers are located in the National Jazz Archive, Traps Hill, Loughton.
3. British military sources have little definitive information on the subject. Books which deal with Black involvement in war service include: Stephen Bourne, The Motherland Calls: Britain’s Black Service Men and Women (The History Press, 2012) and Marika Sherwood, Many Struggles: West Indian Workers and Service Personnel in Britain, 1939-1945 (Karia Press, 2009).
4. See Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (HarperCollins, 1998).
5. Interview with the author, Wallington, south London, 2013.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. The material on Andy Hamilton is derived from an interview conducted by Carl Chinn in 2012. Some of this can be found on https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/local-news/the-amazing-life-of-brum-jazzman-andy-182403.
9. Nat ‘King Cole’ is perhaps known as a great pop “crooner” but his ability as a jazz pianist was quite phenomenal. See a fine compilation Just Call Him King (Chant Du Monde), 2014.
10. Max Roach was a committed and outspoken Civil Rights activist as well as an innovative musician. See We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (Candid, 1960).
11. Charlie Parker, Bebop (Verve, 1946)
12. I’m thinking of the legendary Gil Evans’ flat in New York in the 40s.