Owning Up: The Trilogy (79 page)

I wasn’t at the London Jazz Club the night Louis sat in with whatever band was playing, but somebody who was there stood next to Ken Colyer during the session and was naturally interested to hear what Ken, for whom Louis Armstrong was
the
enemy, the traitor who had left New Orleans and changed the course of the music, would have to say when he’d finished.

Armstrong blew his final coda, and stepped off the stage to a roar of applause and a flutter of autograph hunters. Ken turned to make his way back to the ‘Blue Posts’.

‘He’ll do,’ Colyer said laconically.

One of the band myths, relating in this case to Ian Christie, was that if at a party he asked: ‘Who’s that hurray cunt by the mantelpiece?’ and then discovered it was a literary or artistic figure of some eminence, he would scarcely allow time to mutter ‘Oh, really?’ before scampering across the room to engage him in conversation. This story which Ian always emphatically denied, and which in consequence the rest of us produced at every possible occasion, may have been true or untrue, or as is most likely, a gross exaggeration of the truth, but Ian was no more a lion hunter than the rest of us. Like most people, we were all keen to meet someone we admired for one reason or another. It was just that most of the band only wanted to meet jazzmen, who were seldom if ever hurrays. We were all inclined to concentrate on approaching those who played the same instrument, or in my case, sang. This was natural enough, as not only were we most likely to admire someone who could do magnificently what we did less well, but also we had a ready-made subject for conversation. It was therefore quite understandable that Mick should have gone to some trouble to meet Louis Armstrong, the man he had most admired since his adolescence, and during Louis’ London engagement, he spent a fair amount of time in his hotel suite. There he had the childish but none the less real satisfaction of answering, at Louis’ request, the telephone, and recognising the excited stutter of Chris Barber, already the most successful British bandleader and well aware of it too, asking deferentially if he might speak to Mr Armstrong.

‘Oh, hello, Chris,’ said Mick, ‘Mick Mulligan here. I’ll just ask Louis. Hang on, cock.’

The rest of the band followed the pattern. Ian saw most of Edmond Hall, Frank of Trummy Young, and as for Pete, he actually moved in on Barrett Deems for a day or two, where, drummers being what they are the whole world over, I’ve no doubt that they enjoyed an entirely satisfactory relationship based on the technical intricacies of the drum kit and a willingness to listen to each other boasting about their percussive abilities. When Louis went on tour in the provinces, the organisers sent the rest of the bill home and employed local jazz bands. This, although by no means an ideal solution, was certainly an improvement and no doubt helped to draw in, on the grounds of local patriotism, many of the audience who might otherwise have been put off by the exorbitant, but no doubt necessary, price of seats,

Having a night off in Grimsby when Louis was playing in Newcastle upon Tyne, we drove up to hear him, and went to both concerts. Between the shows, using Mick’s prior acquaintanceship, Ian, Frank and I accompanied him back stage and spent a long time in Louis’ dressing-room. He was kind and friendly and accepted a token whisky from the bottle we’d taken round, but I felt we weren’t really there. This is by no means a criticism; travelling year in and year out all over the world and meeting hundreds of admirers daily how could it be otherwise? What was so surprising was the number of people here he
did
remember, but what was significant was that he had known them all before the war when interest in jazz was still a comparatively minority affair. Sinclair, for instance – ‘my man, Sinclair’ as he called him – and Nat Gonella. From his post-war visits I wonder if he remembered more than a handful of people – Humph and Chris certainly, Mick perhaps, and almost without doubt due to their continuous attendance on the band, Diz and Beryl Bryden. Beryl in fact was so devoted in her pursuit that she . would be there to wave off the coach when it left London for the provinces and be waiting to welcome it when it arrived at the other end.

Louis’ dressing-room manner was an extension of his stage personality. He was willing to talk about the early days – ‘King Oliver, he was my man’ – and more than keen to impress on us, as he did on everybody, the importance of inner cleanliness, and the efficaciousness to this end of a product called ‘Swiss Kriss’. It was all, however, in my view, on the surface, and it was only when he discovered that one of his entourage had neglected to book a seat on a plane for his wife, Lucille, to go to London to get her hair ‘fixed’, and for a moment lost his temper, that the real man showed through. Within a few seconds he had recovered himself, the ‘red beans and rice’ mask was back in place, and he was telling Mick, as he rubbed white ointment all over his astounding lips, pitted and cratered like a photograph of the moon, how essential it was for him, as a trumpet player, to ‘look after your chops heh heh heh!’ I met Louis several times over the next six years, but never tried to remind him that we’d met before.

In the years that followed most of the great American bands and a great many solo performers came over under the new arrangement. We met those of them we particularly wanted to, worked with some of them, listened to most of them. After a time, although we admired their work and envied their ability much as ever, we gradually lost that sense of awe, the feeling that the gods had come down to walk the earth. Respect replaced idolatry, and in the case of the Condon band visit in 1956, imitation resulted in temporary disaster.

The Condon band were famous for their tough, hot jazz, and equally for the amount they drank. It was, I suppose, natural that Mick should be over-excited by their visit. Not only did he admire their music but, in Eddie Condon’s ability to swallow the hard stuff and yet continue to run a band over so many years, he saw the justification of his own periodic excesses.

The day these drunken, middle-aged delinquents arrived, Eddie’s first official engagement was to sign copies of his famous autobiography and drinking-primer
We Called It Music
at a jazz book and record shop in Charing Cross Road. A great deal of whisky was provided by the thoughtful management. Mick, Ian and Frank were among the guests. After the official junketing, during the course of which Mr Condon signed such copies of his memoirs as was necessary with a wide selection of names including on occasion his own, the whole party moved to a nearby drinking club called ‘The Cottage’.

Here the photographer from the
Melody Maker
took several shots of Mick and Eddie with their arms round each other’s shoulders, a gesture which could be interpreted as affectionate respect or mutual physical support. An article in the same paper had recently crowned Mick ‘King of the Ravers’, and it was felt that a record of this, his first meeting with his American counterpart, was worthy of publication. Eventually Condon, Wild Bill Davison, George Wettling and company retired to their hotel, and Mick, Frank and Ian, far too late to arrive in time, set out for Barnet where the band had an evening engagement.

I forget now why I hadn’t been at the afternoon’s séance; perhaps I hadn’t been asked, but I was in consequence completely sober. This meant I had the difficult and indeed hopeless job of attempting to divert the promoter’s attention from how late it was getting before they arrived, and the painful recognition, acquired from a single glance at Mick’s swimming eyeballs, Frank’s manic grin, and Ian’s puppet-like animation, that it was going to be a bumpy evening.

Barnet Jazz Club, which held its weekly meetings in a Trade Union hut, was typical of the suburban and dormitory town clubs which had begun to open within a thirty-mile radius of the Charing Cross Road, in order to cater for the growing interest in traditional jazz, which the success of the Chris Barber band had sparked off. What usually happened was that a promoter would examine a map, settle for an area as yet virgin territory, and open two or three clubs with common membership on different nights of the week about ten miles apart. During the height of the trad boom in 1960–61 these clubs sprang up and proliferated like weeds on a bomb site, but Barnet, and its sister club in St Albans, were in advance of the trend. They were founded by Ken Lindsay, an old-time jazz enthusiast from the Asman–George Webb era.

It was the Alex Welsh band who christened these new-style clubs ‘The Milk Round’. Although they didn’t pay very well they provided regular work during the early part of the week. The official definition of ‘The Milk Round’ was, that to qualify, a club had to be near enough for the band to get back in time for a drink at The Cottage which closed at midnight.

The difference between these clubs and the older places like Cook’s Ferry and Wood Green, was that the audience were not jazz fans who liked a drink and a little live jazz. They were much younger, knew nothing about the history of jazz, wanted ‘the trad sound’ as a background to jiving and that was all.

The Mulligan band was not very popular on this circuit. It had no banjo for a start, and was inclined to stretch its intervals. Its appearance on the stand that evening, three quarters of an hour late and with the whole front line obviously extremely drunk, was calculated to displease the new puritans who had paid to come in. Their irritation mounted when Ian fell asleep on a chair during a trombone solo, nor were they in any way placated when Mick launched into a long apology, almost incomprehensible even to me, who at least knew what he was on about, but pure gibberish to the audience who had certainly never heard of Eddie Condon, the main justification of his argument. There were a great many complaints, several demands for money back and, despite Ken Lindsay’s affection for Mick, it was some time before we worked for him again.

There were several equal disasters during the Condon Band’s British stay. Quite often the conductor didn’t appear at all, and in some ways this was better as we could tell the promoter that we knew he’d been complaining of imminent ‘flu, but more often he
did
appear, late and drunk, with no greater excuse than a favourite sentence of his in these circumstances:

‘There comes a time when you say “fuck it”.’

A lunch-time drink with Wild Bill Davison, Condon’s trumpet player, was where the eggs of these dreadful evenings were laid, and the Cottage Club the incubator in which they were hatched. The Cottage had taken over from The Mandrake as the trad-world club. It justified its name by a thatched roof over the bar, a false window on one of the walls, through which a naïve but sentimental picture of a country lane failed to achieve the intended
trompe
I’oeil
, and a large number of horse brasses. The afternoon clientele was made up of those jazzmen who had got ‘the taste’, in Mick’s phrase, in a lunch-time pub, and a small but regular coterie of elderly music-hall artistes who appeared to be permanently ‘resting’, but at night it was entirely taken over by trad-jazz musicians, and to burst in there just before midnight after a milk-round job was to discover our whole world crammed into one room.

In the basement, for the main bar was on street level, there was a piano available for rehearsal during the day, much to the rage of the music hall clique, and for impromptu sessions at night. The manager we called ‘Cottage Al’, and there were, among the regulars, several of those kind, plump, promiscuous girls who occupy an underrated and therapeutic position in this frequently lonely and often desperate life.

During the visit of the Condon Band, ‘The Cottage’ really came into its own as a falling-about centre. Professionally, however, the tour was not a success. Like Mick, Eddie was inclined to launch into the stream of consciousness in front of an audience, a large proportion of which would have preferred to hear more music. I only saw them perform once, a late-night concert at the Festival Hall. The organiser had conceived the idea of arranging a series of tables round the edge of the platform to produce an intimate club atmosphere. I was amused to see the conductor as one of the extras. Although I was sitting in the circle, I could tell without any bother at all that he was in the same condition as the band.

Finally the Condon mob, to the grief of ‘Cottage Al’, returned to the States, and Mick to comparative sobriety. Wild Bill and Condon from their end and Mick from his took to ringing each other up in the small hours when the mood took them, an operation complicated by the difference in time between the two continents. The telephone has always proved a temptation to Mick in his cups. He once took a great liking to the bandleader Joe Loss, when we played a dance with him at Leeds University. After it was over, and we’d travelled back to London in the band-wagon, I went up to Mick’s flat to finish off a bottle of whisky. He was going on about what a ‘good nut’ Joe Loss was, and it was all I could do to prevent him ringing him up for a chat there and then at five fifteen in the morning.

The Kansas City Blues singer Jimmy Rushing became my own particular mate among the regular visitors. Jimmy, the original ‘Mr Five by Five’, had influenced my style for some time before he actually came over to sing with Humph, and I very much wanted to meet him. When I did we became immediate friends. He was, as the song says, ‘five foot high and five feet wide’, but Jimmy’s bulk, and its attendant problems – getting in and out of cars for example – appeared irrelevant except to give his movements a deliberation, an almost balletic adjustment of weight in relation to gravity, which suggested his inner calm. His slow smile, the controlled lyricism of his singing, his anecdotal ability, every story built like a blues with repeated lines, are all more evocative of Jimmy Rushing than his twenty stone.

Jimmy doesn’t drink much, but he loves parties, and it was a pleasure to watch him sitting there taking in, with sardonic yet kindly amusement, the mounting absurdity washing up against him like the sea against a rock. At one party I gave for him at Tregunter Road I’d asked all the band except for Frank Parr, not out of nastiness but because Simon, who was in town, had just bought a new carpet, and it is Frank’s habit when drunk to stub out his cigarettes under foot. In the end, of course, I relented, but warned him about the new carpet. Inevitably he forgot and Simon threw him out. Half an hour later he was back to apologise. Simon declared himself bored and indifferent to what he had to say, but was on the point of giving in when Frank, in the very middle of his tearful repentance, took the cigarette out of his mouth and ground it into the carpet with his heel. I shall never forget the expression of mock pain which spread over the face of Jimmy Rushing at that moment.