come in behind me with the tray of tea and she was grinning too.
That evening, after I’d done my homework, he took me to the Ship Inn at Mortlake to celebrate, though what we were celebrating I wasn’t quite sure. The pub sat right on the river’s edge in the shadow of the vast, brick, eight-storey Victorian maltings of the Watney’s brewery. The maltings scared me. It loomed like a blank hulk above the towpath, featureless and threatening. I wondered how much grain must be piled high inside, soaking in the monstrous vats of water. When the tide was out, the foreshore was an oozing mud-pit of stones and washed-up plastic debris, and if a mist had dropped low on to the water’s surface, as it often did in the cold dusk of an approaching winter night, I half expected to see a lighterman – or another river character I’d picked up from Dickens read aloud at school – sculling gently towards me, the rudder lines of his darkened boat slack in the turbid shallows. And yet, in spite of this, I got a thrill from being there, and loved the moment of expectation as we made the final turn in the car down Ship Lane, not knowing if the tide would be out, or in, and lapping at the very end of the road where we had to park, like a filthy tongue.
Looking back now, I know what it all meant. It was 1970. Work had been drying up for my dad since the mid-sixties; the work for modern composer-arrangers was in TV and pop, not in the thing he lived for – live ensemble jazz – and yet, just when it looked like it would never return, he had been offered the chance to revive the sound with his own new nine-piece band in nightly residency at the Dorchester in London. Everything seemed glamorous and important again.
In the fifties there were perhaps a hundred jazz big bands touring up and down the country, each sporting up to sixteen members – eight brass, five saxophones and a rhythm section; it was a unique and rich composite sound. But by the late fifties ballroom owners had realised that booking four or five young amateurs with electric guitars and amplification was a lot cheaper, and what’s more it brought the new sound with it – the sound of rock ’n’ roll. The big band age was dying. After a meteoric rise in the late fifties, the last notable event of any size that my dad had been involved with was a European Broadcasting Union concert at the Playhouse on Northumberland Avenue in London in 1966, where he’d directed an All-Star European big band including Albert Mangelsdorff on trombone and the Spanish tenor player Pedro Iturralde. The poster for it hung in the hallway at home when I was young. The names seemed exotic, weighty and serious, but my dad had wrinkled his nose when I’d asked him about it. It was as though it signified something disappointing.
In their heyday the big bands created a finishing school for young emerging players and acted as a bedrock for working jazz musicians. Before getting his break as a composer and arranger, my dad had cut his teeth playing piano with a whole list of them after moving to London following the Second World War, starting with Ronnie Munro’s band in 1948 running through to Harry Roy’s at the Café de Paris in 1953. Apart from the high quality of musicianship, the bands also brought a huge camaraderie, and for a generation of young men still used to the rigours of wartime deployment, the ballsy convivial communal effort of jazz orchestras must have felt like second nature. Archer Street in Soho was a magnet for any jazz musician looking for work. Crowds of them gathered during the day exchanging stories, picking up bookings. If the police were diverted by one of the frequent break-ins at one of the jeweller’s in nearby Burlington Arcade, it would be accompanied by the sound of two hundred musicians whooping and whistling. ‘I never wanted to go to bed,’ my dad once said. ‘You’d play until the small hours, go back to someone’s flat, play cards until dawn, and
That evening, after I’d done my homework, he took me to the Ship Inn at Mortlake to celebrate, though what we were celebrating I wasn’t quite sure. The pub sat right on the river’s edge in the shadow of the vast, brick, eight-storey Victorian maltings of the Watney’s brewery. The maltings scared me. It loomed like a blank hulk above the towpath, featureless and threatening. I wondered how much grain must be piled high inside, soaking in the monstrous vats of water. When the tide was out, the foreshore was an oozing mud-pit of stones and washed-up plastic debris, and if a mist had dropped low on to the water’s surface, as it often did in the cold dusk of an approaching winter night, I half expected to see a lighterman – or another river character I’d picked up from Dickens read aloud at school – sculling gently towards me, the rudder lines of his darkened boat slack in the turbid shallows. And yet, in spite of this, I got a thrill from being there, and loved the moment of expectation as we made the final turn in the car down Ship Lane, not knowing if the tide would be out, or in, and lapping at the very end of the road where we had to park, like a filthy tongue.
Looking back now, I know what it all meant. It was 1970. Work had been drying up for my dad since the mid-sixties; the work for modern composer-arrangers was in TV and pop, not in the thing he lived for – live ensemble jazz – and yet, just when it looked like it would never return, he had been offered the chance to revive the sound with his own new nine-piece band in nightly residency at the Dorchester in London. Everything seemed glamorous and important again.
In the fifties there were perhaps a hundred jazz big bands touring up and down the country, each sporting up to sixteen members – eight brass, five saxophones and a rhythm section; it was a unique and rich composite sound. But by the late fifties ballroom owners had realised that booking four or five young amateurs with electric guitars and amplification was a lot cheaper, and what’s more it brought the new sound with it – the sound of rock ’n’ roll. The big band age was dying. After a meteoric rise in the late fifties, the last notable event of any size that my dad had been involved with was a European Broadcasting Union concert at the Playhouse on Northumberland Avenue in London in 1966, where he’d directed an All-Star European big band including Albert Mangelsdorff on trombone and the Spanish tenor player Pedro Iturralde. The poster for it hung in the hallway at home when I was young. The names seemed exotic, weighty and serious, but my dad had wrinkled his nose when I’d asked him about it. It was as though it signified something disappointing.
In their heyday the big bands created a finishing school for young emerging players and acted as a bedrock for working jazz musicians. Before getting his break as a composer and arranger, my dad had cut his teeth playing piano with a whole list of them after moving to London following the Second World War, starting with Ronnie Munro’s band in 1948 running through to Harry Roy’s at the Café de Paris in 1953. Apart from the high quality of musicianship, the bands also brought a huge camaraderie, and for a generation of young men still used to the rigours of wartime deployment, the ballsy convivial communal effort of jazz orchestras must have felt like second nature. Archer Street in Soho was a magnet for any jazz musician looking for work. Crowds of them gathered during the day exchanging stories, picking up bookings. If the police were diverted by one of the frequent break-ins at one of the jeweller’s in nearby Burlington Arcade, it would be accompanied by the sound of two hundred musicians whooping and whistling. ‘I never wanted to go to bed,’ my dad once said. ‘You’d play until the small hours, go back to someone’s flat, play cards until dawn, and
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