Owning Up: The Trilogy (75 page)

For six months we had no permanent trombonist and Mick’s block against doing anything until the last possible moment meant that he never tried to fix a temporary until the morning of a job. When, as quite often happened, he couldn’t find one at all, he substituted a different front-line instrument, usually Paul Simpson on baritone sax.

He did try out two trombone players as possible fixtures but neither stayed very long.

The first was Harry Brown who, although ex-Lyttelton band, was a convinced modernist by this time and very unhappy playing Dixieland so eventually he had to go.

It was Harry, however, who found Mick his nickname. Apparently, he had been waiting for the last tube one night, and had been drawn into conversation by one of those near-tramps who haunt platforms and bus-shelters late at night. He asked Harry what he did. Harry admitted he was a musician. The man said that was a very rewarding profession as long as you had a good conductor. That was what made all the difference, a good conductor. He asked Harry what his conductor was like. Harry told him he was all right. Next day he told us about this encounter, and the name stuck. From then on Mick was ‘the conductor’.

The other try-out was another Scotsman called Davie Keir. Like Pat Malloy, the Irish-Scottish bass player, he too came from Dun-fermline. He shared with Miff an interest in Scottish nationalism which he tried to synthesise with certain Communist ideas. He was also drawn towards fascism, but as he was a kind person whom I cannot imagine performing a physical act of cruelty, the attraction was based on naive and credulous premises. In fact, Davie’s fascism had a Nietzschean origin. He believed in the superman and he believed he was a superman.

He could believe anything, and the more impossible the easier he found it. He reminded me of the White Queen who told Alice that she could sometimes believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. The last time I saw him he was on the edge of a conversion to Catholicism based, as far as I could make out, on a book by Group Captain Cheshire about Christ’s shroud.

When Davie had saved up a few pounds he left us, as he left every band he played with, to form a band of his own.

Eventually Mick found his trombonist. He came from Liverpool and his name was Frank Parr. We had known him for a long time. He had played for many years with his local, semi-pro band, the Merseysippi, and used to come round the back of the Picton Hall to see us in the days when we’d played concerts there.

He was a professional cricketer, and although this meant nothing to me – I have had a block against all team games since my preparatory school – Mick was very impressed.

The summer before he joined us, Frank kept wicket for Lancashire and quite often going round to Lisle Street I would find Mick slumped immovably in a chair in front of his newly acquired television set, watching a tiny grey Frank crouched behind the stumps. Mick told me he was brilliant and would probably play for England the next season.

It might therefore appear extraordinary that, far from playing cricket for England, the following summer found Frank touring with a jazz band. The reason had nothing to do with Frank’s wicket-keeping, but it had a lot to do with Frank. From what I can gather, although the ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’ labels have disappeared, the attitude of the cricketing establishment remains firmly entrenched. The professional cricketer is not just a man who plays cricket for money. He has a social role. He is expected to behave within certain defined limits. He can be a ‘rough diamond’, even ‘a bit of a character’, but he must know his place. If he smells of sweat, it must be fresh sweat. He must dress neatly and acceptably. His drinking habits must be under control. He must know when to say ‘sir’.

Frank, we were soon to discover, had none of these qualifications. He was an extreme social risk, a complicated rebel whose world swarmed with demons and Jack O’Lanterns, and was treacherous with bogs and quicksands. He concealed a formidable and well-read intelligence behind a stylised oafishness. He used every weapon to alienate acceptance. Even within the jazz world, that natural refuge for the anti-social, Frank stood out as an exception. We never knew the reason for his quarrel with the Captain of Lancashire, but after a month or two in his company we realised it must have been inevitable.

Frank had a rather fine head set on a long but muscular neck. In repose his face resembled one of Nevinson’s pastels of gallant NCOs which achieved such popularity during the last war, but it was seldom in repose. A family of grimaces and ticks were usually in residence, the most spectacular of which was a gum-baring similar to the rictus of a sudden and painful death.

Frank used to go through his repertoire of ‘mushes’ as Mick called them at any time, but it was catching the sight of himself in a mirror which inevitably provoked the whole series. Dressing-room, boarding-house bedroom, Victorian public house, the staircases of dance halls, wherever a sheet of glass threw back his image, Frank’s urge to play Caliban took over.

He had the hard, spare, useful body of the professional athlete. Its only failing proportionately was that the legs were a little short in relation to the length of the waist. This would have been unnoticeable if he’d had his clothes made or even altered, but what clothes he did buy were off the peg; the legs of the trousers were an inch too long, and the excess material gathered below the buttocks in a series of sagging folds like the backside of an elephant.

Frank’s attitude to clothes, like his attitude to so much else, was to use them to make his personality less easy to accept, as yet another barrier between himself and the others. He would, of course, deny this, and make out that he didn’t care, but this simply wasn’t true. His clothes were not just shabby or old – they were anti-clothes.

His mac was famous, but personally I always found his sweaters more extraordinary. Under the arms, the perspiration had eaten into the dye in such a way as to produce a series of rainbow-like rings, the darker colours at the centre nearest the glands. Frank’s sweat was in any case unique and he was very proud of it. It didn’t smell of sweat at all for a start. The nearest I can get to it is the smell in the hallway of a cat-infested slum. Somebody once discovered written in the lavatory of a Soho drinking club the words, ‘It’s always summer under the armpits’, and Frank, whose obsession with formalised linguistic concepts remained constant, always used the word ‘summer’ to describe the state of his armpits. Several times a day, with the stylised gestures of a Japanese actor, Frank would lean slightly backwards, bring his arm round in a wide curve in front of his body, and plunge the hand through his shirt opening and under his arm. There would then be a pause during which you could count four slowly. Then the hand was withdrawn with the same hieratic deliberation, and carried up to the nose where Frank would sniff it, emit an ‘ah’ of great satisfaction, and announce ‘Going a bit!’ in the voice of a man at peace.

The same phrase he applied to his socks on hot days, but there was nothing unique about the smell of his feet, and in this department Mick ran him close. To be fair Mick wasn’t very keen on washing either in those days and, in justification, used to say that too much soap and water destroyed the natural juices, but the point was that Mick didn’t bath much out of indolence, Frank
because
it made him smell.

Frank never washed any of his clothing. He used to save it up, wearing anything in rotation, until we did a job in Liverpool when he took it all home for his mother. This was not laziness. It was part of his Liverpool mania. Liverpool was for Frank the Golden City and the Good Place. Towards the end of the band’s history he began to accept London as a possible town to live, but for the first few years he went about as though he had just been expelled from the Garden of Eden. If we drove along behind a lorry with the word ‘Liverpool’ written on its tailboard, Frank would shout it aloud. The sight of a Liverpool face galvanised him as though he had touched a live wire. Everything in London – tea, people, the air itself – was compared to its detriment with the Liverpool equivalent. It’s true that all ex-Liverpudlians are hysterical patriots – one day I found myself calling the town ‘home’ and I hadn’t lived there for seventeen years – but Frank was exceptional in his fervour.

Food and drink were the other weapons in Frank’s armoury. He was extremely limited in what he would eat for a start. Fried food, especially bacon and eggs, headed the list; then came cold meat and salad, and that was about the lot. Any other food, soup for instance or cheese, came under the heading of ‘pretentious bollocks’, but even in the case of the food he
did
like, his attitude was decidedly odd. He would crouch over his plate, knife and fork at the ready in his clenched fists, and glare down at the harmless egg and inoffensive bacon enunciating, as though it were part of some barbarous and sadistic ritual, the words ‘I’ll murder it.’ What followed, a mixture of jabbing, tearing, stuffing, grinding and gulping, was a distressing spectacle.

In relation to drink he was more victim than murderer. He drank either gin and tonic or whisky and, once past the point of no return, would throw doubles into himself with astonishing rapidity, banging the empty glass down on the counter and immediately ordering another with a prolonged hiss on the word ‘please’. He passed through the classic stages of drunkenness in record time, wild humour, self-pity, and unconsciousness, all well-seasoned with the famous Parr grimaces. His actual fall had a monumental simplicity. One moment he was perpendicular, the next horizontal. The only warning we had of his collapse was that, just before it happened, Frank announced that he was ‘only fit for the human scrap heap’ and this allowed us time to move any glasses, tables, chairs or instruments out of the way.

Frank’s spectacular raves didn’t stop him looking censorious when anyone else was ‘going a bit’ – he used the same phrase for socks or drunkenness – but then we were all like that.

If I think of him I can see certain gestures; his habit of rapidly shifting his cigarette around between his fingers, his slow tiger-like pacing, his manner of playing feet apart, body leaning stiffly backwards to balance the weight of his instrument.

His music was aimed beyond his technique. Sometimes a very beautiful idea came off, more often you were aware of a beautiful idea which existed in Frank’s head. In an article on Mick in the
Sunday Times
, Frank was quoted as saying: ‘All jazzmen are kicking against something, and it comes out when they blow.’

This was a remarkably open statement for Frank who, during a wagon discussion on our personal mental quirks and peculiarities, had once told us that he was the only normal person in the band.

This gained him his nickname, ‘Mr Norm’, and any exceptionally Parr-like behaviour would provoke the conductor into saying: ‘Hello Frank. Feeling normal then?’

11

He’ll Have Us All in the Bread Line

Once the band had re-formed, once the days of deps and fill-ins were behind us, touring continued much as before. Such changes as took place in the kind of jobs available or the popularity of the music were due to other, more ambitious spirits than the conductor’s. In one way, it was more difficult for a band on the road to know what was going on than for the most cloth-eared member of a provincial jazz club who could at least hear a different group each week. Except for the occasional big concert or jazz festival we hardly got a chance to listen to other bands, and only Frank Parr, who neither knew nor wished to know anybody outside the jazz world, was prepared to spend a rare night off cruising round the London clubs to remedy this. Even so we were aware of the radical change taking place. It was just that Mick, the least commercial of men if it meant hard work, had decided to ignore it.

He theorised that it was better to stay in the second rank. You could be sure then, he argued, of a modest but steady living. You didn’t price yourself out of the clubs and smaller dance halls during your hey-day only to discover that during your decline you could get no work at all. You went on, fatter in the booms, leaner in the slumps, but at least available for what jobs there were. In consequence the rise of Chris Barber during 1954–5, and tne resulting swing away from revivalist jazz towards traditional, made no difference to the Mulligan band whatsoever.

Mick was not alone in his failure or refusal to jump on this particular band-wagon. Humph played mainstream from reasons of conviction. Alex Welsh remained faithful to Dixieland. Sandy Brown and Al Fairweather, both recently down from Edinburgh, moved against the current with strict historical logic, from their early championship of the most uncompromising traditionalism towards a brilliant and individual paraphrase of the Armstrong Hot Five.

Mick continued to play a loose approximation to the later Armstrong-cum-Condon sound, not from any burning integrity, although it is certainly true that he preferred this sort of music, but because to have changed would have meant a lot of sweat and many hours of rehearsal.

What was the difference between revivalist and traditional jazz? Revivalist jazz was based on the Negro jazz of the twenties as it can be heard on recordings of that period. It was played (the original, not the revival) by musicians who, for the most part, had come from New Orleans and had been in at the birth of jazz in the brothels and cabarets, in the street parades and funerals during the early years of the century; they had moved north after the naval authorities closed down Storyville in 1917, and had developed the music further (ruined it according to the traditionalists) during the next decade.

What the revivalists thought of as ‘New Orleans Jazz’ was the music of Armstrong, Morton and Oliver – New Orleans musicians but based on, and recorded in, Chicago during the Prohibition era.

What the traditionalists meant by New Orleans Jazz – for both schools claimed the same name – was the music played by musicians who had never left the city, and whose style was presumed to have remained unaltered since the first decade of the century. The basic difference between the two sounds is that revivalist jazz includes arranged passages, solos, and considerable emphasis on the individual musician, whereas traditional jazz is all ensemble. There are of course many other differences, but this is the most obvious.