[Dixielandjazz] My debt to Kenny Ball

[Dick Baker]

Sorry for injecting a purely personal note, but the recent mentions of 
Kenny Ball struck a sympathetic chord in me.  At the start of the 1960s, I 
was a callow high-schooler, steeped in the rock & roll music of the 
1950s.  But then Kenny Ball's recording of "Midnight in Moscow" crossed 
over the the pop charts and was played on the Top 40 AM stations of the 
day.  I heard it and was intrigued.  I bought the "Midnight in Moscow" LP 
and liked it so much that I went back to the store for another stunning 
Ball LP of 1962, called "It's Trad."  I was hooked; have been ever since.

But wait, there's more.  The first live trad jazz band I ever heard was the 
Leningrad Dixieland Jazz Band, in Leningrad, in 1970, while I was studying 
Russian at LSU (Leningrad State University).  I was stunned to discover 
that they played just like Kenny Ball.  Later I learned why:  Ball was the 
first trad jazz band ever to visit the Soviet Union, in the late 
1950s.  His visits sparked the formation of a number of bands, most of 
which stayed amateur and unknown in the West (those of Grachev and Melkonov 
were especially notable), but the Leningraders copied the Kenny Ball sound 
perfectly and played it with great skill.  They were the only professional 
jazz band in the USSR for decades -- but were never allowed to travel to 
the West to strut their stuff, at least not until the relaxations of the 
Glasnost Era.

You want more?  I'll give you more.  At some point (in the 1980s?), one of 
our local Washington-area bands discovered that I knew all four verses of 
"Midnight in Moscow" in Russian and invited me up to sing it.  As a 
profoundly unmusical nonmusician, I'd never ventured on stage before, but I 
gave it my best.  Over the next few months, as friends in that first-night 
audience put bugs in the ears of other local bandleaders, I performed my 
act several more times.  Was this a career in the making?  Finally, though, 
as I left the stage after one of my command performances, Charlie and Doris 
Bitterli stuck a tape in my hand, explaining that they'd had their machine 
running and figured I'd like a souvenir of my triumph.

My God, it was awful.  I knew I couldn't sing, but I had *no idea* it was 
that bad.  Mortified, I retired the act.  But I still run through those 
lyrics every once in a while, just in case:

         Ne slyshny v sadu dazhe shorokhi,
         Vse zdes' zamerlo do utra.
         Esli b zali vy, kak mne dorogi,
         Podmoskovnye vechera . . .

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   Dick Baker - Falls Church, Virginia, USA
             box2 at twotonbaker.com