[Dixielandjazz] It's that song, aaaaaaaargh!

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Mourners at the funeral of the late Peter Sellers discovered that he had not 
been just kidding when he said he'd grown to hate IN THE MOOD so intensely as a 
young musician that he would have it played at his funeral.

In my own past performing career I was once asked to do a song and obliged, and 
not until later did I realise that the request had been made in order to annoy 
someone present at the event. Not my fondest memory (it was not a jazz gig, 
either). Almost enough to put me off doing the same tume again. 


There is another version of the "it's that song" which crops up in connection 
with the recently departed and in my personal experience very friendly Jack 
Parnell.  Jack alternated with Oliver Jackson at the dry run of the Carnegie 
Hall fiftieth anniversary concert masterminded by Bob Wilber in Edinburgh. I 
remarked to him later on the delight of watching Oliver dance with Mrs. Wilber 
on-stage as an enhancement of the music -- seeing Oliver, who had begun as a 
dancer, enhanced the swing being imparted overall. Jack said lovely things about 
Oliver, and Oliver said lovely things about Jack later the same day. 

The concert was not however appreciated by a press reviewer -- who seemed to 
have expected a different order of swing from that which the band onstage 
produced -- whose sound was 1938 rather than the later period and brassier sort 
of thing he might have supposed he'd be hearing.  He was also highly critical of 
the programming of the same standards by the various jamming ensembles -- which 
was some sort of a point -- and he went on to say that if he heard "In a Mellow 
Tone" again he would head for the hills. 

In respect of the unhappy review of the concert Humphrey Lyttelton on his radio 
show subsequently dedicated a lengthy performance of the number to the reviewer, 
in the hope that he would take that route . . .