[Dixielandjazz] Kenneth Mathieson / Swing 2012

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I'm glad Ken Mathieson knows who he is, and I know him as a

splendid man and musician. Very good friend!

Kenny Matheson the critic I have never met.  

The Ernest Nazareth connection with TAKE YOUR PICK and other tunes is interesting, as is much that Ken says, and I do remember that one pianist still I believe very much with us (the name slips my memory) has explored the common ground between ragtime and the music from south of the Gulf Coast, what Dizzy Gillespie referred to as African music not subjected to -- in effect -- especially Protestant European tendencies (given where Dizzy grew up, and also given his Scottish surname). The James P. Johnson connection seems to have referred to dancers from nearer Dizzy's Carolina home, though there were presumably Caribbeans being rhythmically startling in James P's New York.  
Of course with the (I gather also still active) Chico Hamilton on drums Yank Lawson did a very good Latinamericanised Dixieland LP long ago, and when Little Brother Montgomery performed a number he said came from Bob Morton (Englishmen kept mishearing the name as Bob Martin, name of a proprietary tonic for dogs) it was Dippermouth Blues (as he said) but at a more lilting tempo and with a rhythm nearer to Brazil than to the Brazos. 


As regards more domestic matters. 

The ever admirable Swing 2012 only became a four digit band in the year 2000
After a year of SWING 99 it seemed a bad idea to risk being called Swing oo or Swing goo  --- 
or so a mutual friend of the hornman told me 

-- and since Swing 01 could have been misread as Swing oi, pronounced oy,
there was the question that the former Swing Goo could have been expected to play Klezmer. 

At a time when there was no shortage of people actually doing that. 


This isn't to say that Dick Lee can't and doesn't play Klezmer. 

Or that the other members of Swing 2012, Ken's ensemble, or both,can't do other things as well as they play jazz. 
I might even at one stage in my reviewing past have referred to Tom Finlay  
of Ken's band as a sort of Edinburgh Hank Jones.  

I might have been the only critic Ken ever thanked for having written about a concert 

he didn't attend. Actually I had mentioned in an article that because of the timetabling of the 

festival concerned I regretted having been unable to attend his gig given other events occurring at the same time or during the time it would have taken to get from one venue to another. 
 I later discovered something of what I had missed when Ken sent me a recording of it. 



Blush on, blush on, Ken Mathieson!
all the best 

(from a writer who once had a frosty time from an elderly lady acquaintance, 
until she discovered that I'm only the namesake of a guy who wrote a 
book about her least favourite author) 




Robert