Bill Colyer was the Godfather of Skiffle. He was present at its birth and presided at the christening, naming this purely British phenomenon after a distant American relative of whom he was very fond. This role fell to him due to his deep knowledge of American roots music, stretching back to when he began collecting jazz records as a teenager.
His interest began in the 1930s, when he lived with his family in Soho, then the most multicultural district of London, where jazz had taken hold following the British debut of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919. In Madness at Midnight, his salacious memoir of London low life, Jack Glicco describes the multitude of clubs that sprang up in Soho between the wars: jazz was played until 4 a.m. in tiny rooms, most no more than twenty-five feet square and crammed with smoke, noise and people. A few tables were scattered around the walls and, on a small rostrum in an alcove at the far end of the room, a band played ‘like men possessed’.
Too young to enter such places, Bill often loitered with his friends by the grating of a club called Jigs in an alleyway between Dean Street and Wardour Street, listening to the hot music rising up from basement sessions. Once a month, he’d cycle down to Levy’s music store in Whitechapel to spend whatever money he’d saved from his job as a trainee electrician on a 78 rpm jazz record.
In 1938, when the Colyer family moved out of Soho to a housing estate in Cranford, west of London, Bill, then aged sixteen, had a collection of thirty or so records, which he kept in an old orange box lined with oilcloth. Every evening after work, he had a set time in which he was allowed to listen to jazz on his HMV wind-up gramophone, changing the Songster needle after every play, carefully wiping each record clean before it went back in the box. His younger siblings, Bob, Ken and Valerie, were all under strict instructions to never, ever touch any of Bill’s records.
The Colyer children had endured a chaotic upbringing. Their father had drifted in and out of their lives, while their mother had suffered from bouts of ill health. At one point in the early 1930s, the boys were left to fend for themselves while their mother was in hospital with kidney failure, the three brothers, two of them under the age of ten, living rough in a disused railway carriage in the rural backwater of the Laindon plotlands in Essex.
Moving to leafy Cranford offered the Colyers comparative stability even as events elsewhere were drifting towards conflict. Around the time the family arrived in the area, the plane carrying British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain home from Munich after negotiations with Adolf Hitler landed at nearby Heston Aerodrome. Chamberlain emerged waving an accord signed by the German Chancellor, proclaiming it would guarantee ‘peace in our time’. The crowds at Heston cheered, unaware that Hitler had other intentions.
When war broke out in September 1939, Bill Colyer soon got his call-up papers, his brother Bob following shortly after. With their father again absent, youngest brother Ken was left to be the man of the house, looking after his infirm mother and younger sister.
Ken Colyer was born in 1928 in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, at the home of his maternal uncle, William Ehrhardt. His mother, unable to cope on her own, had put his two elder brothers into children’s homes at the time of his birth. Eleven years old when war broke out, Ken was quick to adapt to the new realities. With his mother preferring to remain in the house during air raids – some householders feared blackout burglars more than bombs – Ken took ownership of the air-raid shelter at the bottom of the garden, using it as a gang hut for his pals in the village.
It was here that Ken discovered his musical ability. A neighbour gave him an old harmonica, which he quickly mastered. Then, with money earned from a paper round, he bought himself a second-hand guitar from Shepherd’s Bush market. Being left-handed, he had to restring the instrument so he could play the chords, but he was soon whiling away the time in the bomb shelter learning to strum tunes.
By the time Ken left school aged fifteen in 1943, Hendon Aerodrome was home to squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes. But instead of the RAF, he attempted to join the Merchant Navy, despite being underage. His deception was discovered and he saw out the war as a milkman, doing a horse-and-cart round for the Co-op.
In 1944, Bill Colyer took part in the Normandy landings, fighting inland as far as Brussels. Due some leave, he wrote to his mother to tell her he was coming home.
‘Now don’t be angry,’ she wrote back, ‘but Ken’s been playing your records.’
Bill was seething. He’d survived D-Day, the house in Cranford had made it through the Blitz, but this was one bombshell that he was not prepared for. That little toerag had been playing his precious records!
‘He’s been treating them with great respect,’ she continued, ‘wiping them clean and using new needles.’ Any sense of calm reflection that these details may have brought was shattered by his mother’s further shocking revelation: ‘But also, your brother Bob took your racing bike out from the shed and has had a little accident and buckled the front wheel.’
Clearly, on getting home to Cranford, the first thing Bill Colyer needed to do after kissing his mother was give his two little brothers a clip round the ear. However, by the time he arrived back, the wheel had been repaired, and once Bill saw that his record collection had been shown the same level of respect that he himself had lavished on it, he calmed down.
Talking to Ken, he was intrigued to discover which records he had been playing. From the age of twelve, the youngster had been imbibing the country blues of Sleepy John Estes, the guitar-driven gospel of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the boogie-woogie piano blues of Champion Jack Dupree. Not only was he listening to Bill’s records, he was learning to play along with them too. By the time Bill came home on leave, Ken had acquired a second-hand trumpet and was trying to make it sing. To encourage the lad, Bill bought him Nat Gonella’s tutorial Modern Style Trumpet Playing, but Ken never learned to read music, preferring instead to play by ear.
The two brothers didn’t have much time to discuss their common interest in jazz and blues. As soon as Bill and Bob returned from the war, Ken was finally accepted into the Merchant Navy, joining his first boat as a cabin boy on VE Day. He had just turned seventeen.
The British Hussar was a rickety old oil tanker built in 1923, and for the first year he was aboard Ken saw the canals of Venice, the Old City of Trieste, the troubled port of Haifa – restless under the British Mandate – Port Said, gateway to the Suez Canal, and the Arabian Gulf ports of Abadan and Aden. Merchant seamen don’t get to pick and choose which ships they work on. They sign up to the ‘pool’, are given the next available job and have to take it, no matter where the voyage may be headed. Frustratingly for a young man who longed for the jazz clubs of Chicago and New Orleans, the old bucket only seemed capable of sailing eastward.
On returning home to Blighty, Ken enrolled himself in the Merchant Navy’s cookery school in the hope of escaping the lowly position of cabin boy. He managed to get a job as a galley lackey on the Waimana, a cargo ship that had been roaming the seas since before the First World War. Again his hopes of seeing America were thwarted when the ship headed south around the Cape of Good Hope to Australia.
Ken had taken his guitar and trumpet to sea, and when he wasn’t strumming the blues on one, he was trying to find his tone on the other, studiously learning his craft seven days a week.
Finally, he was able to find a boat to take him west. The Port Sydney was a refrigerated meat carrier, thirty years on the high seas and somewhat worse for wear. Ken didn’t mind at all, because this baby was going to take him across the Atlantic. The Port Sydney’s first destination was Montreal, where Ken witnessed a teenage Oscar Peterson pounding out boogie-woogie at the Café St Michel.
Now elevated to the role of second cook, Ken’s dreams came true when he learned that the Port Sydney would next be heading for New York. In the years after the Second World War, New York became not only the biggest city on earth but also the most vibrant. While the European capitals struggled to piece their cultural life back together after the chaos and destruction of the war years, the Five Boroughs were busy creating the sounds of a new world.
Swing music and jump jive kept the Manhattan ballrooms jammed with dancers, and modern jazz was emerging from after-hours clubs in Harlem. Frank Sinatra crossed the river from Hoboken to win the hearts of young girls everywhere, and Woody Guthrie blew in from California to ride the subways, his guitar emblazoned with the slogan ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’. Guthrie was a merchant seaman himself during the Second World War, working in the galley just like Ken. Had Colyer arrived a few years earlier, he might have heard the Dust Bowl Balladeer performing in one of the seamen’s bars near the 14th Street Pier where the Port Sydney was docked.
When the twenty-year-old Ken Colyer arrived in the spring of 1948, Woody Guthrie was still living with his wife and kids in the flat on Mermaid Avenue in Brooklyn. He could have looked him up in the New York area phone book. Instead, he went to the first phone box he saw, opened the directory and looked for Mr Edward Condon – the simplest way to find the address of his club.
Condon was synonymous with the switch from Chicago to New York that jazz made in the late 1930s. Born in 1905, he played guitar and specialised in a sophisticated version of the Dixieland style that harked back to the early days of jazz in New Orleans. Ken knew of him thanks to a series of concerts that Condon recorded at the New York Town Hall, broadcast in England by the BBC. In 1945, he opened his own jazz club on West 3rd Street in Greenwich Village. Heading to the venue Ken discovered he was in luck – Eddie Condon was hosting one of his jam sessions that very night. Managing to get a seat close to the band, Ken had a night he would never forget.
‘Within a couple of numbers, the band were playing with a power, swing and tonal quality that I would not have believed possible. It struck me for the first time that the gramophone record is badly misleading when it comes to jazz. No recording could ever capture the greatness of this music.
‘As each number got rocking, I seemed to be suspended, just sitting on air. And when the music finished, I just flopped back on my chair as though physically exhausted. The sensation I got from hearing Wild Bill Davison for the first time was a sort of numb joy that such a man lived and played.’
Three years at sea had inured Ken to the effects of strong drink, but after nursing a few expensive beers for the whole night at Condon’s, he left dizzy from the emotional high.
Ken became a fixture at the club, only wandering further into Manhattan when he learned that Eddie Condon always played a show at Town Hall on the first day of the month. To his delight he arrived to find a placard outside announcing that Condon’s special guest was Lead Belly, the acclaimed blues and ballad singer from Louisiana.
His euphoria was short-lived, however: the concert was already over. Jazz musicians tended to work nights in bars and clubs. If they gave concerts, they’d happen during the day. For the rest of his life, Ken would regret the fact that he’d missed seeing Lead Belly, one of the greatest blues singers of all time, by just a few hours. He was, though, able to pick up one of the albums that Lead Belly recorded for Moe Asch, as well as a first edition of the jazz hipster’s bible, Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow.
Milton ‘Mezz’ Mesirow was the middle-class son of Russian Jewish immigrants, born in Chicago in 1899. A fairly proficient jazz clarinettist, he founded one of the first interracial jazz bands and financed recording sessions for New Orleans jazz men Tommy Ladnier and Sidney Bechet. His greatest claim to fame, however, is as the author of Really the Blues, his autobiographical exploration of urban African American culture, heavily focused on the jazz scene. Like Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, it fired the imagination of a generation of readers who, in the stuffy atmosphere of the late 1940s and early 50s, yearned to find an exciting life beyond the four walls of their boring adolescent bedrooms.
In his book, the hippest of the hip are always seeking Mezz out, conversing with him in jive. A quick look in the glossary will reveal that they’re mostly enquiring if Mezz has any marijuana to sell them: he’s a dealer in ‘hay’. Published just a few years before Ken Colyer visited New York, the jive section may have given Ken some new slang words to use aboard ship, but the deep appreciation of New Orleans jazz that runs through the book would have given him greater insight into the music he loved.
When Bill Colyer read his brother’s letters from New York, with their excited accounts of spending nights enthralled by the most scintillating jazz he had ever heard, he too resolved to sign up for the Merchant Navy as soon as possible. After what he later referred to as ‘a lot of argy-bargy’, Bill was able to join Ken on the Port Sydney as a stoker, shovelling coal in the bowels of the ship, four hours on, eight hours off, every day.
On the ‘corned beef run’ to South America, Ken and Bill teamed up with another shipmate, second cook Les Mullocks, for jam sessions below deck – Ken on trumpet, Les on banjo and Bill keeping the rhythm on a suitcase using wire brushes. Month after month they jammed, night after night, until Ken could play any song he heard by ear after just a couple of listens. Impressed by his brother’s talents, Bill began to wonder – with all the connections he had in the nascent London jazz scene, maybe the two of them could get a few gigs.
Back in England, the first tentative stirrings of what would become the trad jazz boom were being made by pianist George Webb. He and his band began playing in a Dixieland style during 1943, eschewing the swing sound that was popular at the time, taking inspiration instead from the New Orleans revival. After seeing Webb’s Dixielanders perform at King George’s Hall, just off Great Russell Street in central London, while on shore leave in late October 1948, Ken decided to quit the Merch and look for work in a band playing New Orleans jazz.
Despite the fact that a National Federation of Jazz Organisations of Great Britain had been formed just a few months previously, there were very few active bands looking for new members. Most outfits were little more than a bunch of jazz-loving pals who got together to jam wherever they could.
For Ken, unable to read music and with no experience of blowing with other brass musicians, ensemble playing presented a considerable challenge. Offered the chance to try out for a band called the Jelly Roll Kings, Ken failed the audition. After years of playing to be heard above the thrum of a ship’s engine, he was simply too loud, and when he improvised he changed key without realising. But it wasn’t just his playing that put the Jelly Roll Kings off – there was also the matter of Ken’s temperament. For Dave Stevens, pianist with the band, the problem was really lack of communication. ‘Ken said very little to us, and we responded the same way.’
By the end of 1948, Ken was living back in Cranford, working as a carriage cleaner on the London Underground. At the time, Cranford, although just fifteen miles from central London, was little more than a village on the main trunk road to the west. Other than the traffic rattling along the A4, there wasn’t much happening. Three pubs provided the nightlife, and there was the Continental Café for the teenagers to hang out in, but if you wanted to see a movie or visit a dancehall, it was a Green Bus ride away.
Like all such communities, everyone of a certain age was just a few degrees of separation away from each other, and for someone with the advanced social skills of Bill Colyer, those networks were likely to be large. Bill liked to chat, especially about jazz, and as a consequence he knew most of the players in the area. His vast knowledge of styles and genres, coupled with his now formidable record collection, meant that he could often introduce other jazz buffs to rare 78 cuts that they would never hear on the radio. When he found out that one of his local contacts had a younger brother who played a bit of jazz, he suggested Ken go round and get acquainted.
One Saturday afternoon, Ben Marshall answered a knock at the door to find a young man with a trumpet case and slicked-back hair. ‘My brother knows your brother and he tells me that you play guitar.’ Ben invited the stranger in and soon the two of them were jamming a twelve-bar on trumpet and piano.
‘We chatted and got along quite well,’ Marshall said of his first encounter with Ken Colyer. ‘Very enthusiastic he was. A little bit introverted, as he always is – he couldn’t really open up to you. Lived in this world that he’d created for himself. He was telling me he wanted to get a band together to play New Orleans music, which meant nothing to me at that point, really.’
That soon changed. Ben had been playing with a group of friends, who had up to then been trying to master a mixture of swing and modern jazz. Ken introduced them to the music of the Crescent City. Playing along with 78s on Bill Colyer’s portable Dansette record player, the band was soon brought round to the Colyers’ way of thinking.
Looking to escape the confines of their parents’ back rooms, they began to search for a rehearsal space where they could really let rip. In early March 1949, they secured the use of the British Legion hut next to the White Hart pub in Cranford, for a regular Tuesday-night get-together.
Initially there were just four of them: Ben Marshall on banjo, Ron Bowden playing drums and Sonny Morris and Ken on trumpet. For such a small jazz band, it was unusual to have two horns, but Ben and Ron were insistent that Sonny should stay, and Ken, for once, acquiesced. What else could he do? He just wanted to play New Orleans jazz and these guys seemed willing.
In May, Ken heard that John R. T. Davies, a multi-instrumentalist member of Mick Mulligan’s Magnolia Jazz Band, lived a few miles up the road in Longford. Ken paid him a visit, and within a week Davies had left Mulligan and was rehearsing with the lads in the White Hart hut, with his younger brother Julian in tow.
John R. T. was just what the band needed. A privately educated, classically trained musician, he pointed out, ever so politely, their beginner’s mistakes. ‘There’s no key change in that tune,’ he told Ken at their first rehearsal. ‘What key change?’ Ken replied. Lacking any formal knowledge of music, the lads had been inadvertently breaking the rules, playing free-form jazz long before it became fashionable.
The arrival of the Davies brothers had the effect of gelling this bunch of players into a viable unit. All they needed now was a name. On the summer nights when they couldn’t get access to the hut, they would take their instruments into the fields, walking down to the banks of the Crane River that had given Cranford its name. This minor tributary of the Thames, more of a stream than a river, now marks the eastern boundary of Heathrow Airport, but in 1949 it ran through a wooded vale on open heath land.
Although Ken was clearly the leader of the band, in the spirit of democracy they decided against naming it for him and instead settled on the Crane River Jazz Band, adopting the old spiritual ‘Down by the Riverside’ as their theme tune. The locals, hearing them playing to the cows on the heath, thought they were mad, but on the Tuesday nights when they rehearsed in the hut behind the White Hart, drinkers would wander in with their pints and listen to the band. One night, a clarinet player by the name of Monty Sunshine came along to check them out and was invited to sit in. By the end of the evening, he was a member of the band.
Eventually, so many people were wandering in – mostly teenagers unable to enter the pub – that someone suggested they charge a door fee, and so the Crane River Jazz Club was founded. To begin with, punters just watched the band rehearse, but slowly one or two began to dance to their tunes. If, while trying to master a number, they had to stop and start again, the dancers didn’t seem to mind. They just waited while the band discussed what was wrong, then carried on dancing once the music resumed.
Now they had an audience, the Cranes’ playing took on a new dynamic, as they were able to see the effect their music had on the crowd. But pushing their performance to the next level put a huge strain on tired lips so, to give the band a break, Bill Colyer was drafted in to provide a record recital based on his extensive collection of jazz 78s.
Record recitals were a familiar aspect of the late-40s revivalist jazz scene in Britain. Fans eager to hear music that they had hitherto only read about would attend lectures by respected jazz critics such as Sinclair Traill, James Asman and Albert McCarthy, who played records from their personal collections to a seated audience. Between platters, they would discuss the different styles and genres and examine the lives of the great jazz musicians. These were well attended, stand-alone events: one man with a gramophone and a love of jazz.
While the Cranes headed into the White Hart to refresh themselves ahead of their second set, Bill Colyer would offer the audience the benefit of his knowledge, playing his cherished records on a portable Colaro electric turntable.
‘We’re talking about kids – fifteen, sixteen, seventeen,’ Bill said of the crowd who gathered round to hear his recitals. ‘I would be playing 78s in the interval, entertaining if you like, but teaching too. I played the music I liked; it made me happy and it made other people happy and it always used to go down well. I’d do my thirty minutes, or whatever, then the band would come on again.’
When drummer Ron Bowden left the Cranes to play a more modern jazz, Bill Colyer was drafted in as a stopgap, playing washboard in the rhythm section. Reminded of the days when they used to jam together in the Merchant Navy, Bill suggested to his brother that, instead of playing the records during the interval, the two of them could perform some American roots music on guitar and washboard, and if Julian Davies wanted to join in on stand-up bass, they’d have a great little breakdown group.
It made a lot of sense to Ken. Not only would he get to rest his lips, he would also be introducing material to an audience that would have only previously heard the songs on record, if at all. And with Bill giving some background to each number, the process of enlightening the young jazz club members would continue.
The breakdown sessions mostly featured Lead Belly songs like ‘Midnight Special’, ‘Take This Hammer’ and ‘John Henry’. Big Bill Broonzy was another favourite, as were Brownie McGhee and Lonnie Johnson. The breakdown group was the first of its kind in the UK and, from October 1949, it became a regular feature of the Crane River Jazz Band. Though no one was calling it skiffle back then, Bill and Ken Colyer, through their urge to spread the gospel of the roots of jazz, had planted the seeds of a movement that would one day inspire a generation of British kids to pick up a guitar and play rock ’n’ roll.
As the new decade opened, the Crane River Jazz Band took to the road, playing various halls and clubs across west London as well as the occasional art school dance. Eventually they took up residency in the cellar of 11 Great Newport Street in Covent Garden. Appearing every Monday night for a year, they finally came to the attention of the jazz establishment.
James Asman, founder of the Jazz Appreciation Society, loved their spirit but wrote that they were ‘rough and incredibly crude’. James Berman of Melody Maker dismissed their ‘primordial sense of jazz’. But the Cranes didn’t care, they were insurrectionists, a revolutionary cadre come to save jazz from commercialism by taking it back to basics, recreating the sound of the rowdy clubs of Storyville in turn-of-the-century New Orleans.
An invitation to perform at the prestigious Royal Festival Hall in 1951 in the presence of two royal princesses did nothing to dent Ken Colyer’s outsider persona. ‘The Cranes were grudgingly allowed to play,’ he later wrote, ‘although there was strong opposition from some quarters. We were a bunch of roughnecks playing a purposefully primitive music. We might dirty up the place and offend the ears of Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth.’ In the event, a photographer was able to capture an image of a tieless Colyer and a fur-wrapped Princess Elizabeth smiling at one another during introductions at the after-show reception. A little over six months later, she would be queen and he would be back in the Merchant Navy.
The Crane River Jazz Band, c.1950
That gig was part of the Festival of Britain, a year-long celebration of British culture and ingenuity that sought to draw a line under the war years, encouraging its audiences to look to the future. But for Ken Colyer and the Crane River Jazz Band, there was to be no future. The Festival Hall gig was the last time the friends from Cranford performed together. Earlier in the year, Ken, Ben Marshall and pianist Pat Hawes from the Cranes had done some recordings with members of Humphrey Lyttelton’s jazz band. The records were very well received, and when two of Lyttelton’s musicians, brothers Keith and Ian Christie, approached the Crane boys with a view to forming a permanent group, Colyer jumped at the chance, taking Hawes and Marshall with him.
The Christie Brothers Stompers were formed in July 1951, and the money they were offered to play a residency at the 100 Club on London’s Oxford Street meant that the former Cranes could afford to give up their day jobs. And Bill Colyer came along too, playing the occasional washboard on recordings. They based their style on that of Kid Ory’s Original Creole Jazz Band, who featured one of Ken’s heroes, Mutt Carey, on trumpet.
The Crane River Jazz Band open for Big Bill Broonzy, February 1952
The Crane River Jazz Band had tried to stay true to their ideals, relying on collective improvisation around a theme to produce peaks of excitement without solos. ‘A good New Orleans band has no stars,’ Ken told the Cranes. ‘It’s the ensemble sound that is important.’ And while he was initially at home in the Christie Brothers Stompers, he was ever watchful for deviations from the traditional New Orleans style. When Keith Christie began introducing other elements into their sound, Ken knew it was time to move on.
But where? Nobody in Britain was performing the kind of music that Colyer wanted to play. The most successful bandleader from the revivalist scene was Humphrey Lyttelton. An old Etonian and former officer in the Grenadier Guards, Humph was all the things that Colyer was not: suave, sociable and blessed with the boundless self-confidence that comes from a public-school education. George Melly, in his autobiography Owning Up, described Lyttelton’s relationship with Colyer in a telling passage: ‘Even Humph, although he always denied it, was affected by Ken’s ideas. For a month or two he stopped to look over his shoulder. The ghost of Mutt Carey whispered in his ear. Then he turned away, and swam slowly and deliberately into the mainstream.’
In Colyer’s eyes, Lyttelton was an apostate, someone who believed that leaving New Orleans for the bright lights of Chicago was the best thing Louis Armstrong had ever done.* Unfortunately for Ken, almost everybody in the UK revivalist movement agreed with Humph.
Ken Colyer’s biggest hero was Bunk Johnson, a jazz trumpeter born in 1879 and active in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. In 1910, Johnson left the Crescent City to tour with minstrel shows and circuses, never to return. In the decades that followed, he became a legendary figure among the fans of New Orleans jazz.
In the late 1930s, two American jazz buffs, Frederic Ramsey and Charles Edward Smith, set out to write the first comprehensive history of the genre. Their book, Jazzmen: The Story of Hot Jazz Told in the Lives of the Men Who Created It, published in 1939, sealed the reputation of New Orleans as the home of jazz. As they conducted interviews with the old-timers who had been playing in the early days, one name kept coming up – Bunk Johnson. But nobody knew what happened to him.
Then, one night in 1937, Louis Armstrong was playing a show with Luis Russell’s Orchestra in New Iberia, a rural town about ninety miles west of New Orleans. A thin old man with no teeth came close to the bandstand to listen and during the interval called out to Armstrong. It was Bunk Johnson. Having lost his front teeth in a barroom brawl, he’d been unable to play and was making a living driving sugar cane trucks for local farmers.
With his re-emergence, the authors of Jazzmen had access to a gold mine of memories from the dawn of jazz. Johnson brought first-hand experience to their narrative. His assertion that Buddy Bolden was the first person in New Orleans to play what we now know as jazz, and that he, Bunk Johnson, was right there playing second trumpet when it happened, ensured his legendary status.†
The jazz buffs who had rediscovered Johnson raised the money to buy him a new set of false teeth and a serviceable trumpet and, to their delight, they found his playing still had enough tone and drive to lead a band. He played in an archaic, almost primitive style that allowed the young enthusiasts to believe that this was how jazz must have sounded before Armstrong went north. Excitedly, they began making plans to record their rediscovered legend.
The musicians assembled to work with Johnson were chosen from among those who had never left New Orleans, middle-aged men who held down menial day jobs while playing for a dollar a night in hole-in-the-wall joints in the city’s rougher districts: George Lewis on clarinet, Jim Robinson on trombone, Lawrence Marrero on banjo, Warren ‘Baby’ Dodds on drums, Alcide ‘Slow Drag’ Pavageau on bass and Alton Purnell on piano.
Bunk Johnson and Lead Belly with (in background) George Lewis (left) and Alcide Pavageau, Stuyvesant Casino, New York, c.June 1946
The initial recordings that Bunk made were greatly appreciated by the small clique of New Orleans jazz fans, but it was only after he appeared in New York City that the revival really got under way. In September 1944, Bunk Johnson and His New Orleans Band created a sensation, playing four nights a week at the disused Stuyvesant Casino on the lower east side.
Shortly before their New York engagement, most of these players had backed Bunk at the San Jacinto Hall in New Orleans on sessions later released on the American Music label. It was these recordings that caught the ear of the young Ken Colyer. Ken listened closely to Bunk’s playing, trying to translate the tone and feel of what he heard into sounds on his own trumpet. It was a frustrating process. There were no handy guides on how to play New Orleans-style. The best education was to watch someone actually playing.‡
Sadly, Ken never had the chance to see Bunk Johnson perform. The veteran trumpet player died in July 1949, and, despite telling one gullible journalist that he’d once toured England with a circus led by a famous Russian strongman and made the sour-faced Queen Victoria smile with his parlour tricks, Bunk never graced our shores.
Even if he had been inclined to take a trip to Britain, he wouldn’t have been able to perform. Since its creation in 1921, the Musicians’ Union had worked hard to protect its members from foreign competition. In the early 1920s this competition had mostly come from European orchestras, but as the decade wore on and jazz became increasingly popular, audiences in the UK began to clamour for American bands. In March 1923, the MU met with Sir Montague Barlow, Minister for Labour in Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government, to argue that foreign musicians should only be admitted under strict conditions.
A new policy was developed, aimed specifically at American musicians, stipulating that work permits should be issued for eight weeks only; any American band performing at a particular venue had to return home before they could be replaced by another band from the US; where an American band was employed in a ballroom or nightclub, a British band had also to be employed; where any American musicians were to be employed in an otherwise British band, there should be an equal number of British players.
While the key aim was to protect the livelihood of MU members – which is the whole point of forming a union – there is evidence that the policy was used to keep out a certain type of music. A later Tory Minister for Labour, Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland, explained the permit system to Parliament in February 1929 thus: ‘If the employer desires to bring in a complete band to play for dancing, he is required to engage, or to continue to engage, a British band equal in size to the alien band … Complete bands to play symphony or national music are admitted on assurance that no British band or British player is being displaced and that the alien band will not play for dancing.’
The emphasis on dancing suggests that the MU was seeking to resist the tide of modernity that swept through the Roaring Twenties. Such a policy, however, whether by design or by accident, carried a racial dimension. Symphony orchestras and national bands were exclusively made up of white musicians, playing music from the classical canon. Popular dance bands from the US, however, would be playing music either written or inspired by African American musicians and might even include some among their number. The discriminatory nature of this policy is brought sharply into focus by the fact that, during the 1920s, the MU had no British dance bands among its membership.
The situation was not helped by the attitude of the American Federation of Musicians, the US equivalent of the MU, who sought to block any application for a foreign band to tour the US. It was a tactic that proved remarkably successful. In the 1920s, over fifty American bands toured the UK, yet not a single British band worked in America during the same period.
While the US Department of Labor appeared willing to issue work permits, the threat of strike action by the AFM made the granting of visas almost impossible. One British bandleader who performed in the US in 1934, Ray Noble, was not permitted to take his own musicians with him and had to use American players. A further stipulation was that he take American citizenship.
Things came to a head in June 1933, when Duke Ellington brought his band to the UK. The British press made much of the fact that Jack Hylton, the UK’s top bandleader, had recently been denied a work permit to tour the US. Despite the public outcry about the lack of reciprocity, the AFM refused to budge, and when another British tour was proposed for Ellington in 1934, the MU put pressure on the Ministry of Labour to get tough.
While ministers had so far resisted an embargo on American bands, news from across the Atlantic forced their hand. In late 1934, the US Labor Department announced that it would no longer consider any work permit applications from British bands. In January 1935, the British government responded by announcing that it would oppose any applications from American musicians.
So began the AFM/MU ban, lasting two decades during which British audiences were forced to go to Paris if they wanted to hear American artists. Some performers were brought in under an exemption for variety acts, which at the time included solo performers – a fact that enabled Fats Waller to visit Britain in 1938, a rare treat witnessed in Soho by a teenage Bill Colyer. In 1949, Sidney Bechet appeared unannounced on stage in London with British artists the Wilcox Brothers. The crowd of over 1,700 were ecstatic (and clearly all in on the plot), but the promoter was found guilty of contravening the 1920 Aliens Order and heavily fined.
For Ken Colyer, this was doubly frustrating. It was hard enough to bear the knowledge that he would never see the musicians he loved playing a gig in England. Harder to deal with was the thought that they were still out there, playing two or three times a week, in the US.
Bunk was dead, but his band, now led by clarinettist George Lewis, were back in New Orleans, gigging in those same old joints they’d always performed in. These weren’t young men: Alcide ‘Slow Drag’ Pavageau was born in 1888. Soon they’d be gone and the way they played would be lost for ever. In order to fulfil his artistic potential, Ken realised he needed to see these guys playing their chops, up close; to talk to them; maybe even sit in with them.
But how to get to New Orleans? A visa for travel to the US cost a small fortune, and even if by some piece of luck he was granted permission, where was he going to find the money to pay his fare?
Whereas young Americans take to the road when they want to discover their destiny, young Britons have traditionally taken to the sea. In November 1951, having quit the Christie Brothers Stompers, Ken Colyer packed his trumpet into his kit bag, went down to the Victoria Docks and signed back on for another spell in the Merchant Navy. He later explained his reasoning to Melody Maker: ‘In England, owing to the unfortunate restrictions, the jazz musician has no teachers to go to for the necessary tricks-of-the-trade. Records and articles gave me something, but I believed that only by mixing and playing with American musicians would I be able to round out my jazz education. With so much to learn, I felt I had to go to the only authorities I recognise.’
* Armstrong was the first great jazz soloist, stepping out of the ensemble and into the spotlight, undermining what Colyer believed to be the original ethos of jazz – that all are equal on the bandstand.
† Over time, Johnson’s claims have been contested. What scant evidence has since come to light suggests that Bunk was actually born in 1889, ten years later than he claimed. If true, this seriously undermines his claim to have been playing jazz in Buddy Bolden’s band in 1895. On hearing of his elaborations, clarinettist Wade Whaley, who worked with Johnson in the early years of the twentieth century, was heard to comment, ‘In New Orleans, we didn’t call him “Bunk” for nothing.’
‡ Years later, Ken recalled the night he saw Oscar Peterson playing piano at the Café St Michel in Montreal. ‘You see those fellows standing behind him?’ someone at the bar had asked him. ‘They’re all pianists trying to watch his hands.’