Post by Admin on May 21, 2013 19:51:05 GMT -5
British Bebop: Johnny Dankworth and Ronnie Scott
But while the New Orleans revival captured the public imagination, a new generation of young professional musicians in London, who gathered around London’s Archer Street (the employment centre of the music business) were excited by American jazz recordings brought back by musicians who played in “Geraldo’s Navy,” named after bandleader and employment contractor Geraldo, who supplied musicians for the Cunard line whose trans-Atlantic liners travelled from Southampton to New York and back.
Records by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were giving voice to an exciting new musical development in America called bebop. Almost immediately Britain’s most advanced young musicians came under its spell. So when the Queen Mary made her maiden post-war journey to New York in 1947, she carried with her, as members of the ship’s orchestra, saxophonists Johnny Dankworth and Ronnie Scott. “Within hours of arriving in New York we found ourselves listening to Charlie Parker on 52nd Street,” recalled Dankworth. “We would be listening to Parker on Thursday, and playing his latest licks in London jazz clubs on Monday! We wanted to impart the truth to others!”
Soon bands such as The Dankworth Seven, the Ronnie Scott Quintet, the Tito Burns Sextet, the Norman Burns Quintet, the Vic Feldman Quintet and the Vic Lewis Orchestra was spreading the new musical language to fans up and down Britain, with Kenny Graham’s Afro Cubists taking inspiration from the fusion of jazz and Cuban music at the hands of Machito. Dankworth went on to form his own big band, which had the distinction of playing at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island and supporting Duke Ellington and his Famous Orchestra at the Lambertville Musical Circus in July 1959.
Dankworth’s Orchestra was a forcing house of British jazz talent during the 1950s and 1960s, featuring musicians such as Don Rendell, Jimmy Deuchar, Ronnie Ross, Alan Ganley, Kenny Clare, Eddie Harvey, Stan Sulzman, Duncan Lamont, Dave Holland, Peter King, Dudley Moore and Kenny Wheeler. Indeed, a series of Wheeler arrangements for Dankworth’s band were later released under Wheeler’s name as Windmill Tilter, widely recognised as a classic of British jazz of the period along with Dankworth’s own What the Dickens (1963), Zodiac Variations (1964), The Million Dollar Collection (1967) and Lifeline (1973) that often featured his wife, singer Cleo Laine.
The double act of Dankworth and Laine would go on to take concert halls around the world by storm from the 1970s on. Featuring Laine’s dazzling vocals and Dankworth, as her musical director contributing exciting saxophone and clarinet solos, they sold out and continue to sell out venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and Sydney Opera House regularly.
One Dankworth graduate, alto saxophonist Peter King became widely recognised as a musician in the bebop style of Charlie Parker, a fact acknowledged by Parker’s widow Chan, who wrote, “Peter is the keeper of the flame, one of the best alto players in the world, and a talented composer and arranger.” He has performed alongside British greats such as Tubby Hayes, Stan Tracey and Dankworth, and American greats such as Zoot Sims, Red Rodney, Nat Adderley, Ray Charles and Anita O’Day. In 1966 he featured in a band called “The Bebop Preservation Society,” at a time when the music had become unfashionable and in more recent times he formed a quintet with trumpeter Gerard Presencer.
Meanwhile, a gulf had opened up between fans of Modern Jazz and fans of Trad jazz during the early 1950s that proved impossible to bridge and their mutual antipathy often erupted in violence, most famously on BBC television during a live broadcast from the Beaulieu Jazz Festival on August Bank Holiday 1960. However, some musicians sought the middle ground, such as the Alex Welsh Band featuring musicians such as Roy Crimmins, Roy Williams, John Barnes, Al Gay and Lennie Hastings.
