[Dixielandjazz] Non-native performers

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Bruce Turner used to maintain that he was not a jazz musician like North American jazz musicians but an English etc. etc. one......
 
According to Ruby Braff, when he was coming to England for the first time long ago, he was advised in advance by John Hammond that he should look out for Bruce, who was an utterly non-British non-European sort of jazz musician and played just as if he was one of the best Americans. 
 
Musicians are if any good individual, at the centre of performing well a crucial element is to a large extent doing the same thing as other people but in one's own way. This usually involves doing a number of different things, too. There's no general rule, but some people have no feeling for idiom, and others have more or less feeling and more or less experience.  I do remember being assured by someone in a crowded Edinburgh Jazz festival venue about 25 years ago that Brian Lemon could never play with all the qualities of the American we were listening to. I found this hilarious, because I knew that when the crowd standing in front of the bandstand moved we would see Brian at the piano. 
In 1995 Brian was one of numerous pianists to play three numbers in the second half of a satisfyingly lengthy programme whose first half was Dick Hyman doing his history of the jazz piano (with a Milt Buckner-shaped hole in it). Dick studied with Teddy Wilson, but for a really classy individual take on the Wilson style the man to hear was Brian. 
Native musical idioms can also contribute to being not unidiomatic. Sandy Brown and George Chisholm had Scottish things going for them -- and so indeed have Scottish opera singers had similar things, and Italian jazz musicians, and Louis Armstrong might even have picked something up from Nick LaRocca, though not much and certainly not the sort of thing some uninformed people have tried to refer to in supposing as some have done that Louis pinched his schtick from Nick. 
 
I am afraid that whereas Americans brought jazz into being these same Americans differ from current Europeans in not being able to play jazz at all, because they're dead. Unidiomatic playing can in innumerable cases be attributed to the musicians being American, and actually starved of jazz experience or just from an alien musical culture, There is the statement from Dickie Wells that he never heard Dixieland until it began to become popular in the 1940s. He didn't even try to play anything of the sort.  It's all so beautifully complicated,