Authors: Ben Watt
‘They’ve cut down that tree too.’
‘Which one?’ I said.
‘The little one by the porch. Pointless tree it was anyway.’
There was barely a breeze from outside. It felt so mild. The temperature gauge on the dashboard read thirteen degrees.
‘It doesn’t feel very Christmassy, does it?’ I said.
‘Why should it?’ he said, still looking at the house.
‘Because it’s Christmas Day, Dad!’
He turned and looked straight ahead through the windscreen and down the road. ‘Is it?’ He blinked a couple of times, then turned his head back to the house. ‘Was that garage always there?’
‘No, Dad. We only had a car-port, remember.’
‘Did we? Your mother was always tight-fisted.’
A man marched past us on the pavement in shirt-sleeves, walking an eager dog wearing a collar laced with tinsel. All the houses seemed so smart now: white louvred plantation shutters; German cars; clipped hedges; curtain swags.
‘Do you remember the porch, Dad . . . when you painted those moulded faces that sat at the top of the brick columns? I think they were originally meant to be cherubs or Greek gods or something.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes, don’t you remember? Most of the road painted them in a neutral colour to blend in with the brickwork, but one of them had its cheeks puffed out to represent the god of wind or something, and you painted it black, to look like Dizzy Gillespie?’
‘Did I? Was it a good likeness? Your mother never liked jazz. Pretended to.’
‘Mum was mortified; she thought someone would complain; but then one of the neighbours suggested we painted all four the same to make up his quartet.’
‘Oh, it was a very progressive road, you know,’ he said, whip-smart.
On the way back I took a different route – along Queen’s Ride and the Lower Richmond Road, past Putney Common, where the fair came every bank holiday weekend. I used to win goldfish and carry them home across the common in a plastic freezer bag half filled with water, then tip them into a bowl and top it up from the tap. I’d feed them with fish-flakes that left a carpet on the surface like tiny leaves after a storm. A few mornings later I’d come down and the fish would be dead, floating on the surface, with a bulging eye, or worse just lying on the bottom amid wet uneaten fish-food. No one ever told me what I did wrong. My dad used to shrug and ask me what I expected from a fairground.
‘Why did you stop playing?’ I asked after a few minutes of silence.
He said nothing for a moment and I thought he hadn’t heard me, but then he said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Jazz. What made you give up?’
He was looking out of the window. ‘I had nothing left to say.’
I had heard this answer for years. It was like a stock rebuff. A flat bat. Back down the track. ‘Didn’t you miss it?’
‘Lovely finish on this dashboard,’ he said, running his hand above the glove-box.
I tried again. ‘Didn’t you regret giving up?’
‘Nope.’
There was something in the way he said ‘Nope’ instead of ‘No’ that sounded defensive, a little irritated. I’d learned to accept the jazz big band sound had been his one and only voice; he’d always told me it was how he had wanted to express himself, and perhaps it was true . . . perhaps he honestly felt that he’d said everything he’d meant to say, which is why he stopped so early. But as I grew older I suspected there was something he had never admitted, because if he’d loved it so much he might have found a way to keep going, even on a small scale, even when his sound was driven on to the side-lines in the sixties. And that’s when I realised that was the problem right there: small-scale was not his style. He didn’t want to play with
any
jazz orchestra; it had to be
the
jazz orchestra; an orchestra with a stirring, irresistible contemporary sound of which he was the mastermind, leading dynamically from the piano.
That
was what he wanted. Which was exactly what he hadn’t been allowed to have since the early sixties. In fact, he had only had it for about five years. From 1957 to 1962. Five years. In a whole lifetime. Did that make his decision to give up a bit more shallow?
‘You never played at the Bull when I was growing up. Well, a bit maybe – after everyone had gone home – but never properly,’ I said.
‘That’s right.’
‘Why?’
‘They never asked me.’
I found it hard to believe. I sometimes wonder if it was because he’d seen himself as a writer and arranger, not a soloist or member of a trio or quartet, which meant he’d never pushed for it – even though his piano playing was often praised by his peers – or whether he’d made too many enemies along the way, or worse, his confidence had just deserted him. It happens in jazz; the courage goes. ‘Why did he stop?’ you can ask a jazz musician about another player. ‘Some do,’ is often the reply.
‘Not once?’ I asked.
‘A few times maybe. Sitting in for someone. I can’t bring it to mind any more.’
Maybe, in the end, it was because it lacked glamour, and only reminded him of something that was no longer there. An intimation of a lost past. Honest, grafting jazz was not for him. He didn’t need that side of it enough.
I remember being told by my mum that the death of Tubby Hayes hit him hard and wondered if that gave him a final chance to walk away. I was only ten, but I remember my dad telling me about it suddenly one evening a few years later when I was in my late teens, and turning away from me in the kitchen and wiping quickly at the corner of his eye with his back to me. They had been great friends. The event itself seemed to signal a particularly resonant death knell on the British scene at the time, and for my dad it came only two years after his own personal calamity at the Dorchester. Hayes (or just ‘Tubby’ as everyone called him) was only thirty-eight when he died in 1973. He was perhaps the greatest British jazz musician of his era in the fifties and early sixties, a true Titan to compete with the Americans. He played tenor on all of my dad’s early jazz orchestra sessions from the late fifties onwards. He used to share a flat in Barnes with the drummer Phil Seamen – another pioneer – and fell into a hard drug-fuelled hedonistic life in the mid-sixties as rock pushed British jazz aside. When Tubby sorted himself out and made his comeback in the early seventies following open-heart surgery, many wondered whether he would have modified his sound to compete with the vast changes that had gone on in jazz in the interim, but he returned with an approach that was something of a throwback to his heyday. In spite of the excitement that surrounded his return, perhaps it seemed to signal a fading of a light. Miles Davis had recorded
In a Silent Way
by then, and the world was transfixed by the cacophonous rule-breaking freedom of players like Ornette Coleman.
We crossed the river at Putney. Illuminated bunting was threaded between the lamp-posts. There was hardly any traffic. I saw the darkened floodlights of Fulham football ground where we used to stand when I was a boy on the windy open terrace overlooking Bishops Park. My dad was never a hardy football fan; there was nothing doughty about him when it came to the weather. If it was cold, we went home. If it was wet, we didn’t even leave the house. Neither of us were even Fulham fans – I was Chelsea as a boy (following in Roly’s footsteps) and my dad was Charlton from his days living in Blackheath after the war – but it was nearer and more easy-going at Fulham, and that was enough for my dad. We were there when Alan Mullery scored
Match of the Day’
s ‘Goal of the Season’ with an unstoppable volley from outside the penalty area against Leicester on a freezing winter afternoon in 1974, and as the crowd went crazy, my dad merely shrugged and said, ‘Not bad. Fancy a Wagon Wheel? And then we should think about getting back.’ I liked his company and the silly jokes he made on the way to the games, pointing out people’s quirks and mannerisms, but I sometimes wished we could make it last longer.
At World’s End we took the chicane into the heart of the King’s Road. Flurries of spray-can snow were trapped inside the corners of the shop windows. I saw an enormous suspended Christmas cracker, a reindeer in a space helmet, a red straw heart hanging from a front door, two snowmen in top hats, little birds wrapped in gold foil, pendant stars, silver pine cones and stacks of empty gift boxes. It was like snapshots and footage of wistfulness. We swung around Sloane Square and up towards Hyde Park Corner.
‘Heading towards civilisation,’ my dad said after a spell of silence.
As soon as he’d said it, I sensed the tug of a magnet, the flutter of anticipation, the suburbs giving way to the West End, and I could see myself very young standing next to him in a central London street reaching up and feeding sixpences into a parking meter, and then following him down some narrow basement steps, and in through a darkened door and along a narrow poorly lit corridor, and into a small smoky room with a bar and bottles and optics, where he was greeted warmly by other confident men and women, and his suit looked smart and his oiled hair shone in the low light; and then I was playing on the carpet in the corridor, making shapes with corks and beer mats, and the door swung open and hit me on the head and I burst into tears, and my dad came and picked me up and took me into the bar in his arms and people made a fuss of me. He introduced me to the woman who had opened the door. She wanted to apologise. She put her face near mine – an arresting black face with big eyes, and she smiled and cooed through big white teeth with conspicuous gaps – and I didn’t understand, and I burst into tears again. One night, a while later, I was watching
Top of the Pops
in the sitting room in our flat and the same face appeared on the TV screen and started singing into the camera, and my dad happened to come in and see her, and said she was the woman who was sorry for opening the door on to me at the Buckstone Club, and it confirmed in my mind that he went to interesting secret places and knew startling mysterious people.
The light was thickening. There were more cars, their brake-lights lush red in the gentle violet winter twilight. Along Piccadilly miniature Christmas trees twinkled in the windows of Korean Air and Aeroflot.
‘The Ritz!’ said my dad. ‘Now we’re talking.’ There was a twang of energy and approval in his voice.
‘Good times?’
‘The
best
times,’ he said crisply.
It was in 1955 that my dad walked into Levy’s Sound Studios on New Bond Street and recorded and conducted his first ever arrangement with a hand-picked jazz big band. Located above the Bunch of Grapes pub and built into a large old forty by forty foot art gallery, Levy’s was one of the few top independent recording facilities not run by any of the major record labels at the time. Aspiring artists could cut a professionally recorded demo straight to acetate disc using high quality equipment and walk out with it under their arm the same day.
The session was paid for and organised by the actor-manager Brian Rix. Brian was a big jazz fan and had made friends with my dad eleven years earlier on their first day in the RAF together, when they were called up as eighteen-year-old air cadets to the Air Crew Receiving Centre in Scarborough in 1944. The only two in the room with long hair, they hit it off right away, and were soon staging concerts in the hotel where they were stationed. ‘He was a tough little bugger,’ Brian told me recently over lunch, recalling their first meeting, ‘but a brilliant pianist.’
When they met up again in London in the early fifties, following the first of Brian’s string of comedy successes at the Whitehall Theatre, it was a perfect match: Brian had some spare money and had always wanted to produce his own big band; my dad, then still just the pianist with Harry Roy’s orchestra at the Café de Paris, had been sharpening his skills studying part-time at the Guildhall during the day, and had always been eager to write for one. ‘I saw Woody Herman’s band while on pilot officer training in Canada in 1945,’ he once told me. ‘I knew the sound I wanted. I just needed the chance.’
The version of ‘A Slow Boat to China’ that was recorded live that morning at Levy’s in 1955 was a key to a door at the BBC. Armed with the acetate, Brian set up a meeting with a couple of the station’s producers and within weeks the Tommy Watt Orchestra had elbowed its way on to radio with a crisp swinging sound and was broadcasting at lunchtimes from the Paris Theatre on Lower Regent Street. It was an audacious and auspicious beginning, but some of the bigger, more established bands objected. Who was this upstart who seemed to have come from nowhere? Competition for air-time was fierce. There were eighteen working big bands touring and appearing on radio at the time; everyone needed exposure; there were established musicians to pay, reputations to enhance. To make it worse, my dad was borrowing their best players but had none of the additional overheads of running a band on the road.
Forced off the air for a few months while the arguments raged, he and Brian simply turned to George Martin at Parlophone Records, an imprint of EMI, who promptly paid for a single to be recorded (‘Grasshopper Jump’) and offered my dad a two-album deal. When the single was picked up as a sound-bed for various American radio shows, word got back to London, and some British radio producers thought – from the impressive sound – that the band must be American.
‘That’s Quaglino’s down there,’ I said, passing the turning for Bury Street.