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25
A
Time of Change
Orchestras
face increasing financial problems –
reduction in recording work. Classic
FM. Raymond Gubbay. ‘Classical-crossover’.
Jazz – dance bands – popular singers.
The arrival of pop and rock music. World
Music.
Gradually,
towards the mid-1970s, those of us who
had been playing in the London orchestras
during the 1940s, 50s and 60s and seen
the growth of audiences for symphony
concerts and recordings became aware
that all was not continuing as we would
have wished. When I was chairman of
the Philharmonia, during the second
half of the 1970s, somewhat exaggerated
reports of the poor audience attendance
figures for the concerts given by the
London orchestras began to appear in
the press. They were accompanied from
time to time by the recommendation that
a new ‘super orchestra’ should be created
by amalgamating at least two of the
London orchestras. This was not a new
idea. It had been around ever since
the Goodman report in 1965 and came
from those who wanted to save money.
Others believed it might be possible
by combining the best players from each
orchestra to create one that would be
better than any of those we already
had. The financial problems the orchestras
in Britain were grappling with were
not improved when in 1979 the Conservative
Party was elected with a mandate to
reduce taxation. It was not long before
there was a reduction in arts funding
in general. The Minister for the Arts
thought that the reduction in personal
taxation would leave more money for
patronage. The natural scepticism of
the members of the orchestras was in
the event justified: there was no increase
in patronage.
The
orchestras in London, used to their
schedule of concerts and tours being
financially supported by the many recording
sessions they had undertaken over the
past thirty years, were by the early
1980s just starting to feel the impact
of the reduction in the number of sessions
on offer. It was not only in Britain
that the audience for classical music
was declining, though it was to take
quite a while before it became as noticeable
in those countries where there had been
a tradition of permanent orchestras
and regular concert attendance. By the
beginning of the 21st century the programmes
of the major orchestras in France, Germany,
Italy and the Scandinavian countries
had become very similar to those in
Britain. The only orchestras that can
afford to play new music fairly regularly
– it is noticeable that more often than
not it is music by one of their own
national composers – remains the radio
orchestras. A good deal of contemporary
music for chamber ensemble and chamber
orchestra is performed but, of course,
the cost of the extra rehearsals required
is very much less than for a large symphony
orchestra and their concerts take place
in smaller venues and to relatively
small and rather specialist audiences.
In 1986
the lack of sufficient financial support
nearly everywhere around the world,
and the complaint by composers and critics
that the performance of contemporary
music was being neglected, led to the
Wheatland Foundation conference, about
which I have written in an earlier chapter.
The conference was concerned with the
decline in the audiences for symphony
orchestra concerts and whether the contemporary
orchestra was, as it had been called
‘an obsolescent instrument’. How might
it evolve and change to meet the new
needs of composers, performers and audiences?
The conference came to no conclusion
because, in my view, it was unwilling
to face two important facts: the symphony
orchestra, able to play the symphonic
repertoire from Haydn to Shostakovich,
was no longer the instrument contemporary
composers required and the mainstream
audience for classical music continued
to find (as twenty years later it still
does) most of the orchestral music written
since 1960 not to its taste. Neither
William Glock, when he was Controller
of Music at the BBC, with his declared
intention in 1959 to provide listeners
with ‘What they would like tomorrow’
nor Pierre Boulez at IRCAM in Paris,
nor the effort of others to bring about
what Glock had tried so hard to achieve
seem to have had any effect. Now nearly
fifty years later nothing has changed.
Nor did the Wheatland conference take
into account the increase in other forms
of entertainment that had become available
or the changes in social behaviour.
Today’s
audiences for symphony concerts, opera
and chamber music are very different
from those when the music was written
during the 18th and 19th centuries,
who mainly came from the middle and
upper-middle classes. They had servants
and the time to prepare themselves for
an evening’s entertainment and would
have changed out of the clothes they
had been wearing during the day. Those
in the stalls and boxes will have been
in formal evening dress, the dress imitated
by the members of the orchestra at that
time and which continues to be worn
by the orchestras today, though the
dress code for audiences now varies
from smart casual to unsuitably informal.
Until
the beginning of the 20th century and
to some extent as late as 1939 and the
start of the 2nd World War, a good deal
of the music played at concerts and
at the opera will have been by composers
whose chamber music quite a number of
the audience will have played themselves.
It was not at all unusual for families
and friends to play chamber music, trios,
quartets and piano quartets for their
own pleasure and sometimes to be joined
by one or more wind instrumentalists.
The chamber music of Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven and Schubert was already standard
fare and as chamber music by Mendelssohn,
Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak
and others was published throughout
the 19th century it soon became part
of the repertoire for many groups of
amateur musicians. Some of them will
have been very good players though no
doubt some will only have been of a
standard similar to that I have written
about in reporting my early experiences
of playing the Mozart Clarinet Quintet.
Until the early years of the 20th century
a lot of orchestral music and opera
was also published in piano arrangements
for four hands.
The
children of these families will have
heard this music from an early
age without even being aware of it.
There was no need for them to attend
children’s concerts at which they would
have to sit quietly and listen
to music that was unfamiliar and have
it explained to them. At the many children’s
concerts I have taken part in I am sure
there will have been some for whom this
will have been a wonderful experience
and the start of a lifetime love of
music. A rather larger number of the
young people were quite obviously bored
and often misbehaved. For them the concerts
were not a natural occasion for enjoyment
but part of the school curriculum. If
children are to develop a love of classical
music they need to have the opportunity
of hearing it from as
early an age as possible; not in a formal
way, but as part of their environment.
They should hear it from the radio and
CDs while having breakfast and at other
times when they will absorb it unconsciously.
But since the beginning of the 20th
century there has been very little chamber
music suitable for the average amateur
and gradually the opportunity for children
to hear music played within the home
environment virtually disappeared. In
fact it is an entirely different kind
of music that has for the past many
years been part of their aural background.
The
decline in patronage and subsidy, essential
if a symphony orchestra is to remain
solvent, already a cause for concern
in 1986, continued to decline until
by 2000 it was causing many orchestras
and opera houses to restrict their programmes
and in some cases to cease altogether.
It was not only in Britain that national
and local authorities responding to
increased demands on their funds and
not wishing to increase taxation began
to economise by making cuts where they
felt it would cause the least unfavourable
response. They recognised that symphony
orchestra concerts and operas were of
interest to only a minority of their
taxpayers and that this would be the
easiest place to start making economies.
In some places there were even demands
that support for something of interest
to so few should not be supported by
taxation from the many.
Why
is it that very little classical music
composed after the middle of the 20th
century is still only able to attract
a small audience? Though there had been
far fewer concerts and no recordings
or broadcasts during the one hundred
and twenty-five years between 1780 and
1902, the innovative compositions by
Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner
and all the major orchestral compositions
by Richard Strauss had been accepted
into the repertoire in their own lifetimes.
In contrast, in the first decade of
the 21st century symphony orchestra
concert programmes in Europe still remain
much as they have been for a hundred
years or more. With the exception of
Shostakovich, Messiaen and Britten,
there are hardly any other composers
who were born after 1905 whose works
have entered the repertoire to any extent.
A young musician joining an orchestra
in 1892, fifty years before I did and
having a career lasting forty years
would by 1932 have played a very similar
repertoire to that which I played and
which the orchestras are still playing
now. By 1950 the compositions by Richard
Strauss, Bartók, Stravinsky,
Prokofiev Hindemith, Walton and even
Alban Berg’s atonal Violin Concerto
had become accepted and regularly performed.
Many of the compositions first performed
between 1880 and 1930 that were new
in style and content soon became part
of the repertoire. Even The Rite
of Spring by Stravinsky, which had
been the cause of such an unprecedented
uproar and scandal in 1913, could be
played at the Queen’s Hall in musically
conservative Britain in 1931 without
comment. During my own time as an orchestral
musician I took part in the first performances
in Britain of a number of compositions
that are now part of the repertoire,
though there are hardly any new compositions
I first played after about 1965 that
have gained a place in the public’s
affection.
Though
the major symphony orchestras have continued
to have financial problems caused by
falling audiences and insufficient patronage
or subsidy, it is evident that there
is still a considerable audience for
the popular classical and romantic repertoire,
including music composed in the first
part of the 20th century. The Raymond
Gubbay concerts and the Classic FM broadcasts
still continue to attract very large
audiences.
The
concerts promoted by Raymond Gubbay
year after year, with virtually the
same programmes, fill the Royal Albert
and Barbican Halls. His ‘Classical Spectacular’
concerts, which have attracted audiences
for over 15 years – there have been
about 200 performances – not only take
place in London and other cities in
Britain, but are now successful throughout
Europe and in Australia. The programmes
for these extremely popular concerts
are much more like those we played when
I was in the London Philharmonic Orchestra
in the 1940s. There were usually between
four and seven items, in contrast to
the programmes of the major orchestras
in more recent years when they seldom
consist of more than three compositions,
two in the first half and one in the
second, usually a work lasting between
forty minutes to an hour – sometimes
longer.
At a
time when television and the computer
dominate so many of our lives it seems
that the eye has become more important
than the ear. Gubbay has responded by
making many of his presentations both
visually and musically attractive. The
‘Classical Spectacular’ concerts, which
nearly always include the 1812 Overture
‘with Thundering Cannons and Muskets
and Indoor Fireworks’, or his ‘Mozart
Festival’, ‘Johann Strauss’ Orchestra,
Mozart by Candlelight and Johann Strauss
Gala concerts, all have a visual element
absent from the regular symphony concerts.
Whilst the symphony orchestras agonised
about whether men should continue to
wear the traditional ‘tails’ and women
wear ‘long black’, or if they should
find some more contemporary dress, Gubbay
did not hesitate to advertise that for
his Mozart concerts the musicians would
be dressed in ‘authentic 18th century
costumes’ and for the Strauss and Viennese
programmes the orchestra would be ‘directed
from the violin in the traditional Viennese
manner’.
As well
as his own orchestra, the London Concert
Orchestra, made up of free-lance musicians,
Gubbay also regularly employs the London
Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Philharmonia
and English Chamber Orchestras, often
playing programmes that include Beethoven’s
Eroica or 9th symphonies
and the well known violin concertos,
piano concertos and overtures.
Gubbay
has also established a large audience
for ballet and opera by staging spectacular
arena productions of both genres at
the Royal Albert Hall. Over the last
decade his staged events together with
his concert runs, means that his company
is now the hall’s biggest annual tenant
after the Proms. In 2005 over Christmas
and the New Year he presented 150 Festive
Classical Concerts around Britain, including
18 at the Albert Hall and 15 at the
Barbican.. In all, the Gubbay organisation
presents some 600 opera, ballet and
concert performances at major concert
venues each year.
His
spectacular productions of opera or
ballet, staged ‘in the round’ in the
arena at the Royal Albert Hall are more
visually exciting than is possible in
an opera house. Though his concerts
have rarely received any attention in
the press, the operas have been given
enthusiastic notices by the critics.
And, in the same way that English National
Opera bridged the gap between opera
and musical theatre when it staged Bernstein’s
On the Town, Gubbay has presented
a massive in-the-round staging of Kern
and Hammerstein’s 1927 Broadway classic
Show Boat, directed by Francesca
Zambello, whose production for Gubbay
of La Bohéme at the Royal
Albert Hall was also so well received.
The
symphony orchestras and opera houses
everywhere, with various levels of subsidy,
have experienced financial difficulties,
frequently going into debt. But Raymond
Gubbay who has always attracted large
audiences, never employs expensive conductors
or soloists and has the minimum of rehearsals
– very rarely more than one for a concert
– has actually made a profit. Clearly
it is not whether there is a ‘big name’
conductor or soloist or which orchestra
is playing that attracts so many people
to attend these events: it is what music
is on the programme, what music they
will hear. Another important element
is that a Gubbay concert has for many
come to stand for an event that one
can trust to provide an enjoyable night
out, even if you don’t know the names
of the pieces on the programme. Simon
Rattle, when he was at Birmingham, built
up this degree of trust in his audience
so that he was able to put on programmes,
including contemporary compositions,
that in London would have played to
only a small audience.
When
Classic FM, the commercial radio station
playing recordings of classical music,
first started in 1992 it was ridiculed
because it was obvious that most of
their presenters were not conversant
with the classical music repertoire.
Musical gaffes and mispronunciations
abounded. But the informal, laid-back
style of the presentation met with approval.
Within quite a short time their presenters
became more expert and the criticism
disappeared. The station which claimed
to play ‘the world’s most beautiful
music’ had realised that what most listeners
wanted to hear was well-known and well-loved
music. There is no doubt that BBC Radio
3, however much it denies that the changes
in its programming have not been influenced
by this new upstart classical music
station, has introduced programmes that
have become increasingly more like those
of Classic FM in form, though the content
has as a rule remained more serious
and has been aimed at the more informed
listener. Now BBC Radio 3 broadcasts
much more ‘light music’ and jazz than
it did in the past.
Classic
FM has from its inception been the most
listened to classical music station
and has consistently attracted a larger
audience than BBC Radio 3. I have been
surprised that many of my friends and
other members of the audience I meet
at concerts at the Royal Festival Hall
and elsewhere tell me that they prefer
to listen to Classic FM, even with the
interminable adverts, than Radio 3,
which a number of them feel tends to
treat its listeners as if they were
music students and, in an effort to
avoid playing too many ‘favourites’,
seek out more recherché repertoire
that sometimes might be of interest
to a more specialist audience. At the
end of 2005 Classic FM was reported
as having 4.1% (5.3 million) of the
national weekly share of the radio audience
for classical music, as compared with
1.2% (2.1 million) for BBC Radio 3.
But, during the same period the figures
for BBC Radio1, broadcasting pop recordings
and BBC Radio 2 middle-of-the-road music,
were very much larger, 9.4% (10.3 million)
and 15.6% (12.9 million). The other
stations broadcasting music (virtually
all on recordings of pop music), the
commercial radio stations and BBC Local
Radio had over 50% of the listening
audience.
The
concerts promoted by Raymond Gubbay
and the success of the commercial radio
station Classic FM continue to prove
that there is a very large audience
for orchestral music composed before
about 1960. But it seems that what the
majority of listeners still want more
than anything else are good tunes. As
he so often did, Sir Thomas Beecham
put it most succinctly. In an interview,
printed in the New York Times when he
was living in the USA in 1942, he is
reported as saying ‘The only music that
lives does so because of its melodic
beauty and significance, which makes
it remembered.’ Compositions that stir
the emotions and are not too long tend
to be most popular, as do extracts from
longer works – one or two movements
from a symphony or concerto. It seems
that nothing has changed very much since
Sir Henry Wood started conducting the
Proms in 1895.
In September
1997 at the Klassik Komm Conference
in Hamburg, Peter Gelb, then the President
of Sony Classical, no doubt prompted
by the problems his company was experiencing
is reported as saying, ‘For the classical
record industry, the writing is already
on the wall’. All the major record labels
were suffering significant declines
in sales of standard repertoire recordings,
but were at first very reluctant to
admit or even to try to understand the
causes. By 1995 Sony had been obliged
to shut down its headquarters in Hamburg,
even though it had started two high
profile projects, one with Giulini and
another recording the Verdi operas at
the New York Metropolitan Opera House.
It had also acquired the video productions
of Herbert von Karajan. They had been
very expensive but found few sales.
Gelb went on to say, ‘had the record
labels been cultivating and encouraging
greater originality and creativity from
performers and composers in recent decades,
instead of passively and almost exclusively
recording standard works without consideration
of popular demand, but only at the whim
of a handful of maestros eager to see
their own performances permanently documented
on disc, the collapse wouldn’t have
been so sudden or dramatic. But, unlike
the pop sector of the record industry
where creativity is encouraged, classical
record executives long preferred to
solely play the role of curators … nothing
more. So, all they recorded were the
same pieces over and over again.’
Gelb,
not satisfied with lambasting his colleagues
in the record industry, then attacked
the critics who he said seemed to share
a common goal, ‘to confine all new classical
music to an elite intellectual exercise
with very limited audience appeal. By
their rules, any new classical composition
that enjoys commercial success is no
good. To become successful new music
must be heard in concert halls, on classical
radio stations and television so that
audiences have the opportunity to hear
the music – and to respond.’ He thought
that the way forward lay in encouraging
composers to write works for the widest
possible audience, sometimes by connecting
them to a prominent soloist or to a
feature film, and by more artists performing
and recording popular, less demanding
music. If the classical record industry
was to be revitalised it must develop
its marketing and recording strategies.
In recommending what by then was already
being called ‘classical crossover’ he
attracted some adverse criticism.
But
when Peter Gelb suggested that classical
artists should take part in recordings
of more popular compositions he was
only harking back to what had been commonplace
in the early days of recording. The
great operatic artists regularly recorded
much lighter, more popular music as
well as operas and the well-known operatic
arias. Enrico Caruso, as well as recording
arias from Rigoletto, Tosca, Otello
and many other operas, recorded drawing-room
ballads, Neapolitan songs, such as O
Sole Mio, and even lighter fare,
O’Hara’s ,’Your eyes have told me
what I did not know’ and the patriotic
first world war favourite ‘Over There’,
by the American super-star George M
Cohan, best known now for the song Yankee
Doodle Dandy. Amelia (often called
Amelita) Galli-Curci, the highest paid
singer of her day (she was paid even
more than Caruso), recorded Abide
with me, Mah Lindy Lou and Home
Sweet Home, as well as a wide-ranging
operatic repertoire that included Rossini,
Verdi, Puccini, Meyerbeer – The Shadow
Song, from his opera Dinorah,
was one of her favourites. The Irish
tenor John McCormack, another very fine
artist, was immensely popular with lovers
of opera and popular music alike. He
made recordings of Mozart, Donizetti,
Bizet and Puccini arias alongside Victor
Herbert’s I’m falling in love with
someone, many Irish songs – Mother
Machree, The Garden Where the
Praties Grow, Trottin’ to the
Fair, and his collaboration with
the great violinist Fritz Kreisler in
arrangements such as the Berceuse
from the opera Jocelyn by
Godard and Serenata by Moritz
Moszkowski
The
music that the great artists in the
first part of the 20th century were
performing was still part of a much
more integrated repertoire. But after
the middle of the century very little
classical music has been composed that
has become popular enough to carry on
this tradition. Until the beginning
of the 1900s there had only been folk
music and art or composed music. Composed
music included music for the church,
the concert hall and opera house, and
chamber music, originally played in
a domestic setting, as well as the music
played in the theatres, restaurants
and on bandstands and most importantly
for dancing. Composers from the time
of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven to Sibelius,
Elgar and Stravinsky composed music
for many kinds of occasions – religious
music, symphonies, sonatas and short
pieces of a much lighter character.
In the 18th century they were quite
happy to compose marches and, in the
time of the earlier composers, dances
and what was in effect ‘background’
music. The waltzes of the Strauss family,
Lanner and Waldteufel, the Savoy operettas
by Arthur Sullivan and the at one time
popular compositions by Albert Ketelbey
– In a Monastery Garden and In
a Persian Market, all inhabit the
same milieu.
The
Parting of the Ways
But
then, from about 1910 onwards a new
kind of music started to arrive from
America – ragtime, blues and jazz. This
was to be the beginning of an ever-increasing
divide between popular and classical
music that was to continue throughout
the rest of the century. This new music
originated in the southern states of
America at the turn of the century,
to a large extent in the mixed Negro
and Creole community in New Orleans,
where the many brass bands that led
the parades and celebration marches
would ‘rag’ or ‘jazz-up’ the music.
When these bands accompanied a funeral
cortege to the cemetery it was customary
to play a dirge, very slowly and mournfully,
or an old Negro spiritual such as Nearer
My God to Thee, but on returning
home the band would break into a fast
upbeat version of When the Saints
Go Marching In or a ragtime song
such as Didn’t He Ramble and
those following the procession, the
famous ‘second line’ would strut, dance
and sing. The ‘first line’ were the
family members of the deceased, the
hearse and the band. This tradition
still continued in New Orleans even
when the style of music changed with
the brass bands continuing to improvise
and ‘funk-up’ contemporary pop songs.
As well
as the numerous society dances that
required skilled musical ensembles at
which waltzes and quadrilles were played
– the music of the middle class – there
were also the many dance halls and brothels
in the Storyville District, where the
musicians played the new syncopated,
jazz music similar to that which they
played in the Parade bands.
New
Orleans was the home of many of the
early jazz musicians who can still be
heard on the recordings they made: the
trumpet players Joe ‘King’ Oliver and
his pupil, the great Louis Armstrong,
the trombonist Kid Ory, the clarinettists
– Johnny Dodds, Jimmy Noone and Sidney
Bechet – and the bass player ‘Pops’
Foster, to name only a few. The Dixieland
revival in the 1940s brought back some
of the musicians who had been obliged
to find other work during the long years
of the depression. It was some of these
musicians, now elderly, that I heard
when I visited New Orleans in 1950 with
the Royal Philharmonic. They were playing
in the Bunk Johnson band (though Johnson
had died just the previous year) and
Papa Celestin’s with Alphonse Picou,
by then seventy-eight, and still going
strong.
In 1919
Sidney Bechet had come to London with
the Southern Syncopated Orchestra where
he was heard by the Swiss conductor
Ernest Ansermet. Ansermet was enormously
enthusiastic about Bechet’s playing
and the music this group played. In
one of the first serious reviews of
this new style of music and playing
he wrote in Revue Romande, published
in Switzerland: They are so entirely
possessed by the music they play, that
they can’t stop themselves from dancing
inwardly to it in such a way that their
playing is a real show. When they indulge
in one of their favourite effects, which
is to take up the refrain of a dance
in a tempo suddenly twice as slow and
with redoubled intensity and figuration,
a truly gripping thing takes place:
it seems as if a great wind is passing
over a forest or as if a door is suddenly
opened on a wild orgy.
Not
only was the music new it also required
a new kind of musician. To play this
new syncopated music the musicians needed
to be more relaxed and respond to a
rhythm and style for which their training
and experience had not prepared them.
To begin with the new dances were played
by the same kind of bands as before
except that the wind instruments, in
particular the cornet or trumpet, were
given the melody more frequently. At
the same time as the arrival of this
new music the development of the improved
double-sided ten-inch record allowed
a few early recordings of ragtime, dixieland,
the blues and jazz, most often recorded
by military bands, to become available
in Britain. After 1918 as more recordings
became available and some of the returning
soldiers reported what they had heard
the US bands playing, ballroom dancers
wanted to have the new music played
more authentically.
The
Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB)
made what is reputed to be the first
Jazz record in 1917. Two years later
in 1919 as part of their tour in Europe
they played at the London Hippodrome.
Though British bands had made some recordings
of ragtime music from 1912 it was not
until after the ODJB’s visit that jazz-styled
dance bands really took off in Britain.
From 1920 more and more small British
bands were formed and by 1925 the bands
led by Jack Hylton, Henry Hall, Jack
Payne, Billy Cotton and Debroy Somers
and his Savoy Orpheans Orchestra were
playing in the best hotels in London
and elsewhere. The visits of several
American bands to Britain led to complaints
by British musicians and in the mid-
20s the Musicians’ Union was able to
get a ban imposed on visiting bands
that remained in force for over thirty
years. I remember how after the war
ended in 1945 my non-orchestral colleagues
had started complaining that they did
not have the opportunity to hear and
meet the outstanding American players.
It was in fact the British jazz musicians
complaints that played a major part
in the ban at last being rescinded in
1956.
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Click for larger picture |
However,
this ban did not preclude individual
American musicians from working in Britain.
One of the most outstanding was Adrian
Rollini, a wonderful player of the rarely
heard bass saxophone. The only British
player of renown who regularly played
this very large instrument was Harry
Gold, who had a group aptly called Harry
Gold and his Pieces of Eight. He
was a very small man, barely taller
than his saxophone. When I interviewed
him for Music Preserved’s Oral History
of Musicians in Britain he was already
in his nineties. At the end of the interview
he apologised for not being able to
offer me a cup of tea as he had to hurry
off to a session. When we left his flat
together I offered him a lift in my
car. He refused my offer saying it would
be easier by train, and to my astonishment
he hurried off to the nearby Underground
station carrying his large heavy instrument.
Rollini was noted for playing unusual
instruments and invented two: one was
the ‘goofus’, a sort of harmonica. Very
few were made, but a development, the
melodica can still occasionally be found.
He also invented a tiny clarinet, about
10 or 12 inches long, which the famous
music firm Keith Prowse offered for
sale. It was made of ebonite and called
‘The Hot Fountain Pen’. When I played
the Eb clarinet I remember that some
of the dance band musicians I worked
with called my small clarinet a Red
Hot Fountain Pen.
Adrian
Rollini was one of several white American
jazz musicians who came to Britain and
played at the Savoy Hotel with Fred
Elizalde, now largely forgotten but
who influenced many jazz musicians and
other band leaders. Other American musicians
that came to Britain were the saxophone/clarinettist
Danny Polo and Van Phillips. I met Van
Phillips at meetings of the Musicians’
Union in the 1940s when I was only eighteen
or nineteen, when he played an important
role in the Union’s development, and
to some extent mine, too. As well as
being a fine musician, by then he had
ceased playing and was a theatre conductor
for musicals. The Starita brothers,
Al and Ray, two more American musicians,
had bands in which some of the best
young British jazz musicians played
and who were later to have bands themselves.
At the same time as these musicians
were coming to Britain some British
bandleaders were visiting America: Ambrose,
Spike Hughes (his book Opening Bars
is worth reading by anyone interested
in the early days of jazz) and Ray Noble
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