[Dixielandjazz] Bruce Turner

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I have a pain-making tape from a Bruce and Yank broadcast -- one of the two cassettes made on that long-ago junked contraption which got its fast dub function confused. The announcements -- I recall well Bruce's goonish announcements from broadcasts I heard in my schooldays -- sound like the bottom end of a Russian choir, and the speed is about five bars a minute.  But at least I heard it once!  I missed most of the Masso, but there was some exquisite subtle playing. 


Wally is wonderful, I remember well the gig at King's Cross when after a customer departed the premises he observed "it's tough at the bottom" the attendance figures having become Band 4 Audience 3I would have stayed for the second half of the programme even if he hadn't bought me a pint. 
Come to think of it, I'd buy him a couple of barrels for another such second half!
There is a lovely interview somewhere with Bud Shank which indicates a contempt for the flute unexcelled since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. One gathers he thought he had been tuned into mass-production of a sub-genre.

My dear friend GDM came out of the Shorty Rogers et al gig from the same date as that interview asking what was COOL in what we had heard? Around the same time, Rogers said his early ambition had just been to emulate Basie.

At the same hot Rogers concert we had also had the experience of sitting very near Bill Perkins, who tended to dance energetically as he soloed, and had only the small space between chair and music stand in which to move, playing baritone; and at the beginning of one up-tempo solo he was wearing a pair of spectacles which kept sliding on his nose, and for a considerable subsequent portion of his solo his dancing was restricted by the fact that his spectacles were at his feet ... and he couldn't stop dancing 
But he too improvised undeterred; and the spectacles survived! 
A case of not seeing things through

I wish Wol well!
Robert 









>________________________________
> From: Steve Voce <stevevoce at virginmedia.com>
>To: ROBERT R. CALDER <serapion at btinternet.com> 
>Cc: Dixieland Jazz Mailing List <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com> 
>Sent: Friday, 20 January 2012, 9:44
>Subject: Re: [Dixielandjazz] Bruce Turner
> 
>Bruce, who was a genuine eccentric, was a friend of mine. I set up many Humphrey Lyttelton Jam Sessions for the BBC and Bruce played on several of them.
>  I have a CD of an hour long interview we did on air for the BBC two days before he died.
>Another pal, still going strong, is Wally Fawkes. We speak on the phone two or three times a week. He's currently into West Coast jazz and particularly early Bud Shank.
>Wally recorded a lot of tpt/clt duets with Yank. Are you sure it's not those that you mean?
>
>Steve Voce
>
>On 19/01/2012 21:40, ROBERT R. CALDER wrote:
>
>> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> To unsubscribe or change your e-mail preferences for the Dixieland Jazz Mailing list, or to find the online archives, please visit:
>>
>> http://ml.islandnet.com/mailman/listinfo/dixielandjazz
>>
>>
>>
>> Dixielandjazz mailing list
>> Dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com
>>
>
>
>
>