[Dixielandjazz] Haggis, Philology. Scottish Jazz

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

First of all I am not Mr. Punch, though the inaccuracies of a lady called Judy do currently concern me. They slipped in under my guard and indeed -- last week on this site -- under a typically tolerant little witticism of mine citing Stanley Dance and bagpipes. 

Now there is a legend of Englishfolk unaware and anxious to deny that any culture exists north of Watford,  a town whose motto is actually  AUDENTIOR.
   
There are even worse cases, like a man named something like Fosgene Chrudburne, who combines fact and fancy and disinformation in breezy bumptious entries to allmusic.com  --  into the texture of which generally reliable website he and an Uncle Dave have introduced flaws I shall not here enumerate: but beware of Uncle Dave on "Boogie Woogie".
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Protests that Fosgene has been in error have been in vain, and here we hit Haggis.  George Chisholm was a trombonist of international stature (the first European hornman individual and improvisationally on a par with the Americans, as Benny Carter recognised -- and Coleman Hawkins called him "Little Teagarden"). Fosgene would have it (ho-ho, ha-ha, isn't he a little devil!) that it was perhaps an extreme partiality for haggis (Native dish, gettit!) that Chisholm spent almost his entire career in his native city of Glasgow. 

Funny, most people thought Chisholm remained active for about half a century after he left Glasgow for London in the mid-1930s!  He did of course come north to play to raise funds to take the now leader of the Scottish Youth Jazz Orchestra, Tommy Smith, to his American college, Blue Note records, and back here. Mr. Smith plays in duo with Brian Kellock, one of the leading rising Europeans and a very ably striding Wallerian too.
But one must not be not too hard on Fosgene, who seems of late to have been playing piano with a multifingered Japanese pianiste on a project of ridiculing a wide range of Fats Waller compositions. 

Judy seems to have more serious musical concerns, and indeed she even made political comments on this site, to the effect that Scotland has a better government than England.  I couldn't possibly comment. I know that, as she said, Britain does have a Scottish prime minister.  I was a contemporary of his at university. Being unable to comment on him -- nice guy, though -- I shall mention another scholar contemporary with me (I attended two universities): Dick Lee. Judy seems to think Scotland null as a jazz place. Well, we get guests, like Angelo Debarre, very good Djangoguitarist, whose commendable performance in Edinburgh not long back was deemed by no means superior to the weekly performances of Mr. Lee's SWING 08 ensemble in a hostelry in the same city. I can't speak for the other Scottish ensemble favourably compared with M. Debarre, I have been out of the country a lot, but I did write an article for www.allaboutjazz.com about the Classic Jazz Orchestra of Ken Mathieson
 (not to be confused with Kenny Mathieson, a Scottish jazz critic of comparable musical intelligence) easily traced by way of Google. 
The no doubt gracious Judy's references to Scottish jazz festivals was a little short on detail (I query her transliteration of the pronunciation of Kircudbright -- KIRK not KERK) and when attending the 2006 Glasgow festival as a critic I not only heard the Mathieson Classic orch. I did a little interviewing.  The tenor player of one locally based Latin ensemble (there are others) was telling me how he valued jazz festivals, since they allowed him to hear English musicians live. It's not that there was is or ever has been anything special about English musicians qua English musicians, they are special because they are Wally Fawkes, Johnny Parker, Dave O'Higgins...  
The tenorist simply assured me that one disadvantage of the immense upsurge in Scottish jazz of recent vintage has been a crowding out of English musicians one might otherwise have heard performing live a little more frequently. As I recall. the Classic Jazz Orchestra was on particularly lively form that day, though due to emergency featuring a trombonist pretty well sight-reading after having come back overnight from a gig at Oxford with the Scottish band which closed the festival the following day. 
I still wish George Chisholm had spent more time in Glasgow.  
But I'm certainly not equating Judy with Fosgene. 






       
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