[Dixielandjazz] Bruce Turner

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Humphrey Lyttelton, who knew, said that Bruce was like Tony Coe a Willie Smith man, but one of the odd things in Ruby Braff's magnificent and effing interview with Jim Godbolt was that Ruby said when John Hammond heard he was going to UK he told Ruby to go find Bruce, who was the real thing and not a European version of the real thing. Ruby quoted this with approval, but I do recall Bruce (the man who did not admire Charlie Parker) was quite insistent that he was an English musician and that French and other performers were rather French or whatever jazzmen and not simply jazzmen. 

There is this LP of Sandy Brown/ Brian Lemon recordings with various musicians, including Bruce on several reeds, on tenor sounding like Barney Bigard and some post-bop players -- which was described as Bruce's way on tenor. Humph however said in his radio tribute to Bruce that now and again Bruce would extend a solo with passages rendered very accurately as "now in the style of Coleman Hawkins" and "now in the style of .." and Pete Brown gets mentioned (Pete Brown on clarinet sounded remarkably like Pete Brown on alto, and like no other clarinetist. The London bandleader Graham Tayar told me of the evening when Sandy Brown on a full tank had a go at demonstrating the fatuity of bebop and Bruce parodied Sandy's parody. 

What happened to the BBC recordings of Bruce in duo with Yank Lawson, and in duo with George Masso? My efforts to tape these off the air long ago were frustrated by the machine -- lots of clarinet on them 


God bless Bruce!
Robert