Discovering Jazz by Tony Barnett
Post date: 19-Apr-2020 16:51:03
Jazz
As you grow older, you can look back on your life and note turning points, marked by new experiences which lead you to widen your views. Adolescence is the most fertile time for this to happen and Hampstead was definitely the place to be.
I had been brought up in the Garden Suburb. Pretty good; the Heath, dog, Hendon County School but then we moved up the hill and I changed schools. William Ellis was a whole new ball game and sat next to Parliament Hill Girls School. I had come from a mixed school but watching the " Parly" girls from the physics lab was a wonderfully illicit joy and all the boys would ogle them and not without reason. Obviously both head teachers were at pains to ensure there was no fraternisation and so it was a joy to discover they were also denizens of the newly discovered, for me, Witches Cauldron.
These long haired, leggy and confident girls were different to the ones I had known in my last school. They had an openness and didn't play silly mind games. Still I was a bit in awe of them but really pleased when Jane Whitman invited me over for tea one afternoon. At that age girls hold all the power and there were three of them. Clare Swingler and Anya Coper.
They were beautiful and this callow youth wondered at his luck.
Jane had been playing records and I found we all enjoyed some of the same music. Ray Charles, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry but then she put on something I'd never heard. A saxophone and trumpet playing things that sort of got me in the gut and my head at the same time.
I was bowled over. Jane told me it was the Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker and the music was called Modern Jazz. The only time I'd heard jazz before this was Acker Bilk or Ken Collyer. This modern stuff was a quantum leap above that "trad".That afternoon marked a musical turning point for me and I knew I had to hear more of it.
The first person I had to share this discovery with was my cousin Richard Gates. I got hold of a copy of Mulligan Meets Monk and he loved it. From then on we were both hooked and began haunting Dobell's jazz record shop in the Charing Cross road, a mecca for jazz lovers. Here we met other aficionados and heard and purchased some of the "greats", Coltrane, Davis, Mingus et al.
As I met more people from school, Young Socialists, CND etc. I realized I was not alone in loving this music. Just a latecomer. If you knew anything about jazz when you were fifteen you'd probably been listening to your parents old Charlie Parker records.
When I was a lad there none in my house.
The music was not always universally liked. I remember several parties where us jazz warriors managed to sneak on some bebop after the Helen Shapiro had finished playing.
Actually we were lucky if we got two minutes before an angry hostess would come over and demand that we stop fucking about with the music, then change it back to Freddie and the Dreamers. The logic was unassailable. For a party, dancing trumps listening.
My love of jazz still continues sixty years later, but I'll never forget that afternoon in Howitt road where I first heard it. Thanks Jane, Clare and Anya.
Tony Barnett
Original LP (1957)
Side One
"'Round Midnight" (Monk, Cootie Williams, Bernie Hanighen) – 8:29
"Rhythm-a-Ning" (Monk) – 5:19
"Sweet and Lovely" (Gus Arnheim, Jules LeMare, Harry Tobias) – 7:17
Side Two
"Decidedly" (Gerry Mulligan) – 5:54
"Straight, No Chaser" (Monk) – 7:00
"I Mean You" (Monk, Coleman Hawkins) – 6:53